 Hey guys, welcome to the first National Conference of the Drama and the Skill of America. We are so happy that you are here, and I know it took a lot for some of you to get here. There was bad weather in Chicago, rooms that weren't quite ready, but we're just happy that you're sitting in this house right now, and so thrilled that you came to join us here in Fairfax, Virginia. You know, people always remember their firsts. So, you have the distinguished honor to know that you were always here at the first National Conference of the Drama and the Skill. That's a pretty cool thing. So I think we should celebrate you all in a room full of theatrical trailblazers for being first. So thank you. Thank you very much. In case you don't know, my name is Gary Garrison. I'm the Executive Director of Creative Affairs for the Drama and the Skill of America, and I will be your tour guide over the next two or three days. So when you see me, just know that I usually have an introduction to make or to share some information with you. Like right now, for example, between these... Let me give you a little piece of information. Between these sessions, between the Quistering session and the Molly Smith session, if you're hungry, if you're a little nosh, if you're a little something to drink, you'll have time to go back into the lobby, and there'll be a cash bar and there'll be some food floating around, and you can have a little something so that you don't pass out in the Middle East seas. Okay. Because time is short, while we're together, I'll always keep my introductions short and brief. Almost five years ago, when I came to the Guild, one of the things that I was charged with was helping the Guild to realize its national potential. So to that end, we've done a lot of different things, and I hope you see some of that work. But there are two things that I'm actually the proudest of. At this point, I might add, the first is that we regionalized the country. And in doing so, we came up with 22 regional reps that represent you. 22, you guys. And that is Atlanta and Boston and Miami and Houston, and the list goes on and on and on and on. These are folks that are in your area to help build your communities, to listen to you, to guide you, to advise you, to help you out through programming, to offer you events, ticket discounts that report to you in the magazines. They are an extraordinary group of people that do this absolutely for free and for the love of doing it. So if you are a regional rep, would you please stand up and let us recognize you. Actually after the Molly Smith session, we're going to have everybody out into the foyer, and I'm going to introduce you to them one by one so you get to see their faces. Because part of what we want you to do is we want you to talk to folks, and we want you to know who's in your area and to meet one another. The second thing that I'm particularly proud of is this national conference. It just made sense to me that we should come together as a group of people. It made sense to me that you would be under one roof talking about your hopes and your dreams, your desires, sometimes our frustrations, our war stories, looking for wisdom, looking for advice, looking for help, shaking hands, and meeting the people that you hear about, see about, talk about one-on-one conversation. This is a really important thing. It could be the person right next to you, or it could be a council member, it could be a publisher, it could be these glorious folks from the theater of the First Amendment, theater for the First Amendment, who have graciously allowed us to come into their home this weekend. And the great thing about the council of the drama and the skill is you will find them approachable, easy to talk to, and ready to talk to you. And I just encourage you to do that. Just go up and stick your hand out. Introduce yourself and tell them who you are. If there's anything that you have to say, say it. If there's anything that you want to talk about, you come talk to me about it. You come talk to anybody who's got this little black pen on because they want to hear what you have to say. These are the regional reps, the members of theater for the First Amendment. These are staff of the drama and the skill. And so here's my invitation to you. Please don't let the next few days go by that you don't come shake my hand and say hi and tell me who you are. And tell me something you want me to know, or something you're angry about, something we've let you down with, or something that you want to tell us that you thought we did particularly well. Talk to me, talk to the staff of the drama and skill, talk to your regional reps, talk to your, talk you guys, talk. They're writers and notorious. They love nothing better than to disappear in the dark. So here's your chance to kind of step forward, get into the light and talk to each other, to us, and hopefully at the end of this time together we will all walk away enriched, inspired, happy, hot. That's why we put those water bottles in your bags. Those water bottles are going to come in handy. I'm telling y'all that now. Anyway, I just want you to talk and talk and listen. Listen to each other. Listen to what these gorgeous panelists have to say. And so with that in mind, I'd like to bring to the stage our Southwest Taxis Regional Rep Jim Price and one of the most extraordinary men in the American theater, Christopher Durey. Wonderful, disturbed, and painfully funny characters in his plays. Plays like, Beyond Therapy, Baby with a Bathwater, Sister Mary Ignatius explains it all for you for what you received and Obi-Wan. The actor's nightmare, laughing while, deadly crisis, the Vietnamization of New Jersey. To more Obi-Waners, the marriage of Bet and Boo at Betty Summer Vacation, Mrs. Bob Cratchett's Wild Christmas Binge, Miss Witherspoon, which was a Pulitzer finalist in 2006, and Why Torture is Wrong and the People Who Love Them. Christopher also wrote the book for the musical Adrift in Macau and received a Tony nomination for Best Book of a Musical for a History of the American Film. Many of us have also enjoyed the Solaris collection of one of the plays entitled Drawing Durang, which includes my favorite for Whom the Sun, for Whom the Sun's Metal and the Sydney Kingsley Playwriting Award. When I first met Chris years ago, I didn't know what to expect based on the wild characters from his play, and frankly, I was pretty nervous, and I had no reason to be. He's a deep-finger who likes to laugh. He's a kind soul who, like most of his characters, I think is just trying to make sense of the world in which he lives. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me again in welcoming Christopher Durang. It's said much long ago that you are easily our most serious playwright. And it complies to make us laugh until we cry. David Hyde Pierce says the greatest thing about Chris's plays are that they embody the sublime and the ridiculous. Where do you think that comes from? Is it worldview? Is it your upbringing? Have you just always been that way? Well, I'm going to take the question to mean where my style of comedy came from. And, you know, especially when I younger, I don't know where it came from exactly. I definitely had a troubled family, although they were charming too sometimes. But that influenced me. But I grew up in New Jersey and I was lucky enough to be brought in to see musical comedies. And I think the second one I saw was how to succeed in business without really trying. I was like 12 or 10 or something, starting with the wonderful Robert Morse. And I don't know if you know that musical, but it is kind of a comic book style of comedy. And the characters are exaggerated and funny. And I think unconsciously I went, oh, I like that style. Also, I was asked growing up sometimes or rather in my 20s whether I thought television influenced me. And I first thought it was an annoying question. I didn't know I had an answer. I thought, well, we all, I've been a child in the 50s and early 60s. So we all grew up with that particular television. I do think that early sitcoms, like I love Lucy, which is probably the best, but other good ones too, that they were quick-paced. And I found myself, as much as I enjoy a lot of the plays of the 50s, I didn't myself want to write something that wasn't drawn to it that was said in real time. Or you're in the kitchen and you go, hi, how'd you sleep? Oh, I slept okay. Or you have a breakfast. Oh, no, no, no. Get to it, get to it. So anyway, so that's my answer to where I think it came from. And also, I don't know what makes you the laugh. I am one of those people who laugh at not funny things, but I mean pain. I don't mean that I'm sadistic, but you know, if you watch the adults around you make the same mistake 20 times in a row. At a certain point, you want to jump out the window or you laugh. And I was one of the ones who laughed. My mother actually also laughed sometimes. That was a very good sense of humor. Great. So I read somewhere that you wrote your first play at age eight. What was it about? Well, I just mentioned I love Lucy. I wrote my own version two pages long of the episode in which Lucy has a baby. And I was particularly taken with the episode and I was eight. And where they practiced, Desi and Ethel and Fred practiced what they would do when Lucy said it's time to go to the hospital. Of course, they practiced it beautifully. And as soon as she said it's time, they all ran into each other and blah, blah, blah. And I found that very funny as a child. And my mother, actually both sides of my family were very open to the arts. I did not have a family that discouraged me. My mother's family had a lot of musicians. My mother loved the theater and talked to me about the theater a lot and read to me a lot, too. My father's family was mostly architects, but back in time they came from Actors in the 1700s. There's a book in some libraries called The Memoir of John Durang. I'm a direct descendant. He was an actor in Philadelphia in 17 something or other. So when I was young, they said to me, oh, I wonder if you'll be interested in architecture or theater. So they, you know, that gave me a lot of freedom. So anyway, the thing about, I know as a child and still sometimes in life, I couldn't be very shy. So I did announce that I was going to write a play. And of course it was only two pages. But as I kept writing over the years and each time the next one was ten and it took me a long time before I got up to full length. But my mother told my second grade teacher that I'd written a play and I went to our Lady of Peace School, obviously a Catholic school. That particular year I didn't have a nun. It was a lay person. It was such an odd phrase, but a male teacher. And I didn't like for some reason. But in any case, he decided to have us put on the play and we took off the afternoon. And I guess my fellow second graders memorized it a short. And I sort of sat in the chair being the director and it was fun. That was your first production. Later, you attended Del Barton School in Morristown, New Jersey. Apparently you and a friend wrote two musicals, Band in Boston, and Business Band's Holiday. I'd love to hear a little bit about those early musicals and who was the collaborator? Well, oddly, I was just describing when I was watching my play in second grade and I was sitting in the chair as the author and sort of the director. This friend that I had no, who I wrote the shows with was a composer and musician who's still in the business named Kevin Farrell. And he sang the game with me. And for some reason during this play, he sat next to me the whole time. I don't remember meeting him before, but he actually acted like he was the producer. But my mother's two sisters were musicians and they were professional and been to Manhattan School of Music and Stuff, but they also then went into teaching. And Kevin was my anthillist's prize piano student. He also loved musicals, so after a while we went to musicals together. And I don't know, when we were 12 and 13, we decided to write a show together. And I did the book and lyrics and he did the music and it was called Band in Boston. And again, I was too shy to tell. This school went from seventh grade to twelfth grade, taught by Benedictine monks who, whatever my issues with Catholicism, they were terrific, I liked them a lot and they were very smart. But I was too shy to tell anyone in the school that we'd written this, but my mother again, for my 13th birthday I was taken to see the movie of Gypsy. And my mother was greatly amused at the sign that said, Gypsy Rosalie's mother is not a lab backstage. And so she said, oh I'm like Gypsy's mother because I keep going telling people about your writing. And so she told the priest who was head of the drama class or something, club I mean. And so they put it on when we were in eighth grade, but the thing that was very heavy about it was that it was performed by the juniors and seniors. And we were in the eighth grade. And we also, it was an old place called, and we auditioned girls from a nearby Catholic school. And these were the first auditions I was a part of. And I still remember them rather distinctly. And there was this one girl I found rather touching who I wanted to cast in the lead, but the director cast somebody who was probably better for the part. But the other thing that was funny about it was that I mentioned Gypsy. And it was a very strange, well not a strange, it was a very, very innocent play. Clara and her brother, I guess, Edmund, who I played, oh I later played in another production. They looked with their maiden aunts who were very conservative. And by the way, I wasn't thinking about politics at all at the time, but they in a reverent decided that a local show that was going to be done was offensive for some reason. I don't know why I wrote about that. So in any case, they tried to shut this play down. And there's a section where you see the musical they want to shut down. It's not very shocking. A girl sings a song called, I Love Monkey. I'm sorry, I Love Money. And at the end of it, she dropped her shoulder strap, which I had seen Natalie Wood do in the movie of Gypsy. I sat in her zest with Gypsy. Anyway, the priest thought it was great fun. It went really well, and it was exciting for me because some lines seem to be funny, but I didn't know we're funny. But the nuns who loaned the girls were not pleased. And they announced that never again would they let Del Barton borrow girls from St. Elizabeth. And it was really very upsetting. It ended with four marriages, very Shakespearean. But the next one, I wrote in 10th grade with Kevin, quote, Businessman's Holiday. And it wasn't a copy of How to Succeed, but it was set in the world of business. And so we borrowed girls now from the Oak Nose School. And the nuns, well, there wasn't any dropping the shoulder strap, so then they were fine with that one. Let's talk about your time at the Yale School of Government. Actually, let's go back. Let's talk first. You went to Harvard for your undergraduate degree. Yes, yes, I did. I was a good student, but I left out that Del Barton was from 7th grade to 12th grade. In 8th grade, my parents separated, and then they later divorced. And when they separated, they couldn't afford to send me to Del Barton anymore. So I left that school and went to another Catholic school that was just starting up. And it was taught by, well, I'm not going to say the kind of brothers who taught it, but I hated them. And they were very stupid. I'm sorry, they were. And well, actually, the example I usually give is that Del Barton in 8th grade, they had assigned Gallagheros Travels and Candide. And in this school, they assigned cheaper by the dozen, and God is my copilot. I like cheaper by the dozen, but I don't want to study in school. So oddly, I wrote this play with Kevin, and they put it on when I wasn't a student there. But they somehow got me to... I don't remember how we did it, because it was a good half hour away. After school, at the one school, I'd be taking to the rehearsals from the other school. But I realized I had to leave the school. It's actually one of the... I feel I've had some decision-making that has been healthy in my life, and I realized I had to leave the school, regardless. We had a very good public school where I lived, and I've been in summer school there, so I said to my mother, I either wanted to go to public school, or I wanted to apply to North Carolina School of the Arts, which had just opened. And my uncle came and told me I couldn't go there because he lied to his aunt as a communist. But my mother didn't want me to go away to school, so we agreed that I would go to the public school when, all of a sudden, the other school showed up and gave me a scholarship. And I was thrilled. But I did have to get all A's to keep the sudden... I was a good student, but I wasn't great at math, and so I had to get all A's, and I did, and I probably worked the hardest in those two years than I did at all. But that actually isn't why I got into Harvard. I never would have applied, and it was not the worldly school of Del Barton. The same teacher who my mother told me about the eighth grade play was a college guidance counselor, and he didn't recommend one Catholic school to me. I don't think he was looking ahead at Sister Mary either, but he suggested all these very fancy schools, and I said, well, I know my grades have been good in junior and were still in senior, but I didn't have that good grades in freshman and sophomore at the other school, and I don't know if this is still true, but he said, oh, you know what? The schools really want to find individuals. They don't want just somebody who's all-rounded. I know this was just a quirk of the times. So he said, you've written plays and it's unusual, and so you should push that in your applications and so on. And I applied to all these schools except Harvard, except my mother's divorce lawyer, she was in the process of getting the divorce, said, oh, why didn't he apply to Harvard? Because he went to Harvard. And because of my mother's divorce lawyer, I applied, and I did not expect to get in. I thought Yale had more theater stuff, and I applied to some excellent point year schools like Swarthmore and Pavafrit. But when I got into Harvard, I was so surprised that I just thought, well, I guess I'll go there. I knew they didn't have a theater major, but I thought since I wanted to be a writer and think that well-rounded would be a good idea. However, I then went into a deep depression, a very serious depression, end of freshman year until really the summer after junior year. It was a very difficult time. And I would have probably gone through it anywhere. It wasn't Harvard's fault at all. But that leads me to the question that I almost asked. By the time I applied, and again, I was surprised to get into Yale School of Drama, because I was mostly through this rather bad depression, and I had not been doing that much theater. So the idea of going to Yale and being surrounded by these talented people and working on theater what felt like 24 hours was fabulous. I loved it. Good. You just mentioned this to me back there, that while you were at Harvard, you wrote the greatest musical ever sung and Al Franken was in it? Yes, he was. You're talking to me, I think. At Harvard, I assumed I was going to keep writing, and I didn't. I was just in this crazy depression. And in the summer, I'd been in a production of Annie, Get Your Gun, and rehearsed a lot. I don't want to tell this story too long. The greatest musical ever sung, I'd been writing just to amuse myself. It was a little bit like things Mad Magazine did where they took famous songs and did funny lyrics. And I decided, I'm still a believing Catholic at the time so it wasn't sacrilegious or anything. I just thought it would be amusing to tell the Gospels in musical comedy terms as if it was a musical. So in my version, the songs include Everything's Coming Up Moses, The Dove That Done Me Wrong, The Mother's Things. And I used to sing some of these songs to people at dinner at the house I moved in at Harvard, which was Dunster House. And someone, it's very odd because I was shy and also I thought the thing was funny, but I didn't. I felt shy at Harvard. Somebody went to the Dunster House drama thing and said, oh, you should get Chris Durant to put this play on. And they came to me and offered it to me. I put, you know, the world of the little house you're living in. I mean, it was three 300 people and Al Gore was there but I didn't know it. And so was Tommy Lee Jones and I did know it because I'd seen him on stage. Anyway, so my putting it on was actually a big mental step forward because I almost said no because I thought what if I become depressed and non-functional and I can't show up as the director of the show. No, go ahead and do it. So it was great fun. I auditioned various people. In my version, we couldn't get 12 apostles. We had about 9 and about 5 little women. My freshman year roommate though made a great Jesus because he really looked very handsome and he looked sort of like a more strapping James Taylor. And anyway, it was a lot of fun to do but weirdly it created a bit of controversy. It only ran for two weekends and it got a good review in the Harvard newspaper. But then as the weeks went on it started to be, there started to be some letters saying this play was offensive to Catholics. And this is in 1970. So it was surprising because the sort of culture wars were not as pronounced at that point. And then I remember the professor wrote back and said, are you crazy? Haven't you heard of satire? That made me feel good. But then there were more letters. And then the final one was that there was a teaching fellow and the teaching fellows did a lot of the if you had a big lecture class you often ended small sections taught by teaching fellows. There was one who was apparently a Jesuit priest and he wrote a thing saying that my play had been very offensive and that the critic who liked it had been derang our pigs trampling in the sanctuary you know, it's surprising to read these things about yourself. But what I felt both naughty about but I included that in my Yale application. But it was a very healthy thing for me to do. It was a lot of fun. Oh and I found Al Franken in a in an audition. He was very good. Well that leads us to Yale. You were there during the first teen years and I believe Howard Stein was the head of the playing program for his part of your work at the time. During that time you and Albert in your auto co-wrote the idiots Karmas off. I don't normally like poetry but have you read Trees and jipped the real life story of Mitzi Gainer in which you played Mitzi Gainer. So how did that collaboration work? According to Albert you almost had kicked out of school twice. Where did you hear that? That was on the tribute tape. Ah yes. Albert thinks we were almost kicked out. We weren't. I don't know why he thinks we weren't. Anyway, um and just so you know I also ended up collaborating with Wendy Wasserstein who came a little bit later and and later collaborated with Sigourney who was in Albert in my year for but she was in a whole bunch of my plays and we were in plays together so that was fun. Albert and I were in the same playgroup class and he came from Philadelphia in the Catholic background and I came from New Jersey in the Catholic background and we both looked at each other with suspicion like is there enough room for two writers who bring up nuns a lot. And um and we we sort of looked trying to figure out if we were going to hate each other or not and then um he's a very witty and funny fellow and he said something he would say things and then I would laugh and then of course people always like when you laugh at what they say so we started indeed to be friends and um among other things I often say just getting to know him it seems like the Italian nuns who he was brought up were very violent and he told one child who she put between her legs that didn't happen in my schools but I always felt that I came from Irish repressive nuns and I think I did so anyway we got to be friends and um the Yale Cabaret was the best place to get a show on it couldn't be longer than an hour and it needed to be well anyway of course it was better if it was a comedy or some music but occasionally they'd put on a serious play but not that often but it was a different show every single week so um Albert Knight ended up doing this very odd Cabaret called I don't generally like poetry but V-Ray Trees we were asked to do something for the Yale Art Gallery this is where he thinks we almost got kicked out the Yale Art Gallery was horrified Howard Stony and the Dean of Playwright thought it was fabulous and then they put this in the Cabaret they were doing something about William Blake the poet and also the poet and artist Thomas Gray and they had done paintings of each other's poems or something like that in the beginning but they asked us, they asked somebody from the drama school to come and do 40 minutes about Thomas Blake and I'm sorry William Blake and Thomas Gray and Howard Stony asked us to do it knowing we were kind of crackpot in our comedy and so Albert Knight didn't think for a second of being serious and so we came out initially doing a serious poetry reading and Albert is much larger than I am and he was very over the top and we didn't, we read a couple poems badly and then we said we had a woman working with us too Barbara Haubin and we said maybe she said Thomas Gray and William Blake met each other in a touring company of the Glass Menagerie at which point Albert and I had exited and we never dressed as women instead we dressed as priests so Albert played Amanda but he was dressed in a white high mass and I played Laura dressed in a black monk's robe that I got from Del Barton actually when I made a short movie of the Brothers Count Muzzle before anyway so anyway then later on we appeared again dressed as priests but this time we were Eleanor Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt and Roosevelt and at one point after we did that all of a sudden Franklin said come let's say mass and then we sang something about, oh we took the words of the ill common and turned it into mass and after we finished that number someone stood up to the audience and said I don't know about you but I find that offensive come Edith so so if the L Art Gallery didn't have the power to throw us out I think they would have but instead Howard brought up the L Cabaret and said oh it's hilarious we should put it on and actually we played for two weekends oh this is the weirdest thing to tell it's so obscure usually the play just, the Cabaret only did one weekend but we did really well and they decided to give a second weekend so they wanted somebody to write a review of it for the local graduate newspaper that people looked at when they went to the Cabaret and the person running the Cabaret said to anybody who saw it would you write a review under a suit and and we'll edit and print it and so I came across it recently in an old box and I didn't give us a raid that's what's a raid I hope that I made it seem funny but that last line was something like that the entire evening was definitely of interest if funny made more sense in the context but in any case then to jump ahead I can't remember it was the same year or the next year I think it was the same year we decided to try to do it again and we did the life story of Mitzi Gaynor I don't know why I didn't dress as a woman I just was myself as Mitzi Gaynor and Albert we came up with the crazy thing that Mitzi Gaynor's mother was horrifying and Albert played her and at some point we also turned into Gloria Steinem who I was and Ella Abdul not Abdul who Albert was anyway the brothers Karamazov the idiots Karamazov was in a full length play that Albert and I wrote and I wrote the lyrics and we found a composer and it was done Albert got a job directing an undergraduate drama thing in high school but again Howard Stein came to it and liked it and it got moved to the to the second year actors project which in the world of Yale was a big deal and that was the class that had Meryl Streep in it and Meryl played the lead you wouldn't recognize through many of the pictures it's very disappointing when I show the pictures because she played an 80 year old woman she looked like a wicked witch in a wheelchair but she was brilliant in it very very funny very that was a good experience except the acting teacher very difficult man someone knows him Albert and I went back to rehearsal and he had cut every single laugh line every single one because he wanted it to be darker and so Albert and I just the students had have a meeting and we said I'm sorry our names are on it not yours but they did put it back so you have to stand up for yourself a lot but and then I'll shut up about Yale but I did feel that Albert and I won the lottery in the history of Yale Yale Repertory Theater was the professional theater Bruce Lee hardly ever ever chose a theater a playwright project to be there but he chose this one and Meryl was still the lead because she is now the third and final year she had to work at the Rep and I got my equity card by being playing the Monk Alyosha who I played also in the little film I made before and that was very exciting although when it was over I had no money but other than that it was very exciting speaking of having no money so when you went to New York in the early years you were doing showcases or your group were doing showcases you did but you had an early success with the Lusitania song shield which you performed with your fellow Yale alumna Sigourney Weaver now John, I love this quote from John Cander he once said that at the end of the performance of that show he was laughing and applauding so loudly that he hit the lady next to him I forgot that word how did that evolve and how did it change things for you I know it was quite successful I'm going to jump back slightly because it's so hard to make a living and I've been really lucky but what happened when I finished my acting job I didn't have anything I didn't have much money in the bank so I had to find different jobs for a year at Yale even though it wasn't there because I already had an apartment it wasn't that expensive I was going to be friends with Wendy Wasserstein so I hung around with her a lot but I worked as an acting teacher even though I never had an acting class but they weren't going to go into a profession anyway so it was fine but my favorite job was that I found I got a typing job a good type is that at Yale Medical School and my job was to write to send out letters to people who had donated said they were donating their bodies to Yale after death to write and say that Yale had a glut of bodies who had to make alternative plans and I also spent some time going through the files which I wasn't supposed to because some of the people's stories were very peculiar but anyway and I was trying to get Bruce Dean to do a history of the American film which I had been writing and he was very tempted but then he chose a play by Yale Dr. Rowe famous author so just as I was not sure what to do next he did though give me a grant which was $8,000 from CBS Playwriting Prize and with that money I went to New York because I was a little phobic about New York even though I loved going in and I was founded too intense I mean I loved going in to see shows when I was young blah blah blah and back then one could live on $8,000 I don't know if you could now I don't know but nonetheless I was very, very lucky and so it was during that period that I had a couple of workshops in the city and one of them was a play called Titanic which had been done at Yale and Sigourney and Sigourney was in it and she had just come to New York too and because the Idiots Karamazov had gotten a good review from the New York Times bad local reviews but a good Times one and it early showed the power of the Times anyway Titanic then moved off Broadway but it was only an hour and ten minutes and we needed a curtain raiser so Sigourney and I had been talking about doing an act together because we had been in a singing class together and we had had to do a show and we did a number together that had gone well so we decided because the play was called Titanic we decided to what's another ship that sank it was sort of Lusitania and they had always done Breton Vile of the Yale often very, very well and I love Breton Vile but we did this Breton Vile parody in the Assange Vile and it was done as a curtain raiser and then the play Titanic got gas-way reviews it got a medium good off-off but off-border it was awful and mostly they didn't like Lusitania but they sort of dismissed it except for Edith Oliver in the New Yorker who liked it so that cheered me up but then a couple of years later I wrote Sister Married Nations and Sister Married Nations was happening at the same time that our second version of Lusitania was happening and it was the second version it was a big success the play Vanities was off-border way and the producers offered Sigourney and me an 11 p.m. slot for free and we each got 5 p.m. and we had to go to Broadway and it was thrilling but then it closed fast and it was free and we each got 5 dollars per performance that was all and we decided to update this make it an hour write it a little more carefully she co-wrote it with me and it's just the two of us and we pretended to be experts of vile and Brecht but had all our facts wrong purposely and so forth and it was a very exciting thing at the same time where we said that Brecht had written a play called Eva Perone The Demon First Lady of the Wayness of Aries and it combined Sweeney Todd and Davida and one night the sound of mine came and the parent was laughing and the son was thrilled with that and at the same time Sister Married Nations which only ran for three weeks and the ensemble studio got great reviews so my money situation didn't change but suddenly it was very encouraging we hit that point that we were talking about oh right so let's just talk we could talk all night about wonderful stories to tell but just in terms of what's going on in the business today we had talked briefly about development versus production and how the paradigm has changed since those days even if you want to talk a little bit about that yes well I'm not I'm not always a great analyst of what's going on today and all that kind of stuff but I've been teaching at Juilliard with co-teaching with Marcia Norman for a year later tomorrow or the next day and we've been doing it since 1994 and it's been a wonderful part of my life it's not a degree program we only meet every Wednesday and then two Tuesdays a month where the Juilliard actors read things but I have a whole slew now of young playwrights some of them no longer as young and knowing some of their experiences and one of the things that does seem very troublesome and I don't quite know what to do about it but when I was coming out of PL which was like 75 76 it seemed like there was a lot of money for productions of new American plays and now there seems like way less money but also it's geared toward workshops and that's very hard on the new on the young not even young just still trying to establish themselves as playwrights because it makes for less opportunity also if you've never had a production of anything and you get a workshop that's great but I just mean if that's all the theaters are offering to them and then something else that happens with my students and again it's not anything I went through like if the theater did a reading of mine they did a reading of mine and we'd see how it went but lately it seems like if there's interest in a writer five different theaters offer them readings they have readings at all five theaters dramaturgs come and each one gives a different interpretation of what you should do to quote quote fix your play and authors can lose their play that way as well as not beginning the production and you have to be trying to figure out how it's not like you never want to listen to something people say but you have to just to give you something that was indelible in my brain before Sister Mary Maceus was done it's one act of like an hour or two minutes my agent sent it to a few places in Rochester or something like that and the dramaturg wrote back and said well Chris is definitely talented but we all know you can't open a play with a 30 minute monologue there aren't rules there really aren't rules and plus also how can you save that after back it wrote happy days which is almost all monologue not to mention other things so maybe because of the encouragement of my parents I didn't believe that dramaturg for one second not for one but I know different personalities who go like oh you know I guess the audience can't stand it anyway I don't quite know how to protect yourself from that although I didn't think maybe one way to do it and I think I did this unconsciously is if you see plays and movies that you love say I love this and then try to try to think what it is that play does and if you do something similar and then they say well that can't ever be done just trust yourself a bit and you never listen to anybody and I've also had some good experiences with dramaturgs although when I was describing to Gary before we came out I think you're very good Morgan Janice and Janice Parran I worked with them to public but I felt that both of them were trying to give me feedback to help me write the play I wanted to write and not trying to change my play into something that they thought would be better but the play you write isn't so good I think it should be the play you want to write which leads us to something we were talking about earlier that interests me a great deal and it's how you deal with your students at Juilliard and helping them find their voice as a writer you had this wonderful phrase that you said you and Marcia have them write from their own stuff talk a little bit about that and the challenges for young writers well the to be fair our third year of teaching was Jessica Goldberg a very talented writer and she at some point said that a lot of the writers in the room the best play seemed to come from your stuff meaning the stuff that you know about the world yourself and the weird dysfunction in my family there was a lot of imposing will on one another you know sister Mary imposes your will on things and anyway we started to remind our students about that because sometimes if you either because you think this might be commercial or you're trying to please somebody that what ended up being successful about sister Mary Ignatius was that I wrote from some feeling I was having I had no idea it would be successful none at all and one story I often tell is that I thought that was going to be successful did get to Broadway but it only ran a little while and then I went from being very hot to being cold and I went into depression and I remember saying to my age and Helen you know I'm just having trouble writing how long can I be without putting something out before people will forget me she said two years and since I was only about six months into it I thought oh okay I like the clarity of it and my mother was also ill and dying of cancer during it which is another reason why it was hard and sometime when she was still ill I had this impulse to write a play about this woman a nun who comes out and explains everything in the world so explains it all for you was a big part of it because looking back I had stopped believing in the Catholic teaching I'd been taught but not within it I just sort of didn't work for me anymore so when I looked back on all the things we've been told sent you to hell you know like on Friday when I was little it struck me as really peculiar so I was writing from that and anyway I then put it aside and after my mother died I was on a train to Washington actually as I was today I was writing the rest of the play and I thought oh my god it's finishing too soon it's gonna be a one act like Titanic and I thought oh you can't make any money with a one act and I thought I should just put this aside and come up with a commercial full length play and I only thought that for about ten minutes because then I thought psychologically that is so unhealthy you've been in a two year writing block whatever this is you must finish it so I finished it and the success of that play ultimately well I mean it bumped my career from here to here it really did didn't happen immediately with great reviews from a three year production then some people tried to produce it off board and couldn't then when I wrote a companion piece where the actor is not in there so it could be double cast I'm very vicious at playwrights horizons decided to present it again and I thought oh god well the critics like it the same way and they did but in any case it also just shows it's tricky another thing because I do sometimes say this to my students that I thought history of American film was going to be have me move forward and it's important not to hold on to just one play be prolific because you never know what one will help you get forward or will get a production and so forth right shall we take some questions yes anybody have any questions yes sir yeah I was recently reading sister Mary and there was some certain parts of it that I stopped and I thought to myself wow somebody walked out then I'd go to another page and I'd say yeah but they got up and walked out then and my question to you was did it bother you at the end of your mind that you should go hold back or think maybe this is too much and take it out or did you pretty much let it go well you know it's a strange thing I find myself more mad at the Catholic Church now than I wasn't mad when I wrote the play I understand I guess it comes off as mad I was mad about the dogma but I wasn't miscreated by nuns actually I didn't have any really bad nuns I just didn't like the mind games they're not games they're sincerely mad but babies who die and aren't baptized have to go to limbo because God is such a bureaucrat except when they're at baptism you don't have a nonsense of that my mother also had three stillbirths so I think she got them all baptized but I mean it's stupid but when I wrote the play I honestly thought everyone would agree with me because I wasn't actually I wasn't saying God didn't insist I wasn't saying Jesus wasn't God I was just saying gee these rules don't make sense to me like limbo and eating meat on Friday and then a lot about sexuality because the Catholic church basically says everyone should be celibate or married and if you have sex you must be open to having a baby so no better where is that in the bible so you know and I also had no idea that audiences would find the play funny she would you know in my place in general but he gave a moderately good review of Sister Mary and he said he actually says the dogma correctly but it was odd that you know it made but yes it came as a big surprise to me and I'll tell you the one place I would change it and it's actually you found more but but when I decided the students were coming back I I thought it was an interesting idea because Sister had already talked about her favorite student had written this pageant that they all did and I thought okay adults doing something that a children wrote may come out funny and so and I also wanted to sort of remind people what the teachings of that Christianity was about virgin birth and all that kind of stuff and so with the conceit that the children have written this years ago but the adults are now doing it Jesus is nailed to the cross and Jesus is played by a little doll which I think children might have done but when adults put a little doll with a surfer blonde hair cut on the crucifix it looks crazy and the original sister Mary who's so brilliant Elizabeth Franz she helped that moment by just looking at it so disturbed she knew something bothered her but she couldn't quite place it and that I love that but a lot of actresses didn't do that and it's before I as an author looked at all my state's directions when the printed thing is it says he's nailed to the cross in our version we ended up doing it with Velcro and just doing a fake hammer on the ground but when you actually put nails into the doll ooh it creeps the audience out and furthermore there are some people who just are very disturbed and put out so they really leave there and it felt like there were audiences who hadn't totally checked out yet so you know I would change that somehow maybe not do the cross thing but I actually wouldn't change any girls anyone else yes I think that what's been the most challenging project since then and why gee you know I don't know that I have I have one answer sex and longing was the most painful thing it was so badly received I haven't read the reviews actually but I got how much it was hated and I do think what I think about it is I think I wrote a three act play thinking it could be an epic and I think the first two acts are good I think the third act isn't good and so that was sort of painful the act was quite wonderful so that was painful but I don't know quite what else to say that was more painful than difficult it's difficult because it's I haven't been so supportive of you along the way do you think you would have continued on as a playwright in case you didn't hear I was asking if Howard Stein hadn't been supportive do you think I would continue as a playwright I really agree and value that question because when I went into such a self doubting period at Harvard I just thought maybe I wasn't meant to be a writer at all I kept applying to these expository writing classes that take 200 people I could never get in and I just thought I mustn't be very good and then actually through helpful therapists just making me feel better I started to write again and it was odd because I definitely wrote differently after that three years I was a little more mature and I was darker and I wrote two plays right away the second one was The Nature and Purpose of the Universe and I sent that into Yale School of Drama and it's interesting I went to this one English professor who liked me but almost had to flunk me because I kept not doing the papers but then finally I did and I asked him if he would write me a recommendation and he said oh yes I would and he said gee that's awfully hard to get into but I knew that they were basing it on the play and not on your grades so because I couldn't have gotten in on grades and I also like to tell people that I didn't get into Brandeis playwriting at the same time I did get into Yale School of Drama and also it wasn't just Howard Stein who chose that the other major person was Richard Gilman the critic and teacher and as I got to know Mr. Gilman better he was very quirky individual with his choices so I just feel I was very lucky that I got chosen but I could just as easily not have been but I didn't feel brave enough to go to New York on my own and it still felt like going to New York was what you were supposed to do and I did go to Yale thinking I'm going to see if I get encouragement or not so I do think the fact that the teachers were encouraging was very significant you know I think teachers are wonderful by the way all this terrible stuff going on in media they're great I just I hear a lot of you saying I was thinking about this and I decided I have to finish this or I was doing this and I ended up doing it or whatever it was and I just wonder if there's something that you say to yourself that I need this structure or some sort of schedule that you make yourself to say these are the ones I need to finish like the gentleman saying change this with Mr. Mary if you ever go back and say this is not the word there's some sort of schedule to it is that clear? I'm not sure about the rewriting part but let me try to answer what I think I did understand about schedule maybe and deciding something because I had a well I had a couple of writers from my college years and then after the American film so after I wrote Sister Mary Ignatius and I got a commission from the Phoenix Theater it was very small money but it was for production though not a workshop to write a play and I said I was going to write something about therapy but because I had this writer's block I got worried about myself and so I like to write intuitively and spur of the moment and then the mood and that's mostly how I'm written but when I was younger that was the hardest part so beyond therapy I did put myself on a schedule my rule it's hard to give yourself rules but I said it has to be you have to do it five days a week at least two to three hours that sounded short to people but I can't write for five hours and two to three hours and the most important thing is I couldn't stop if I didn't like what I was doing that was the hardest part and so some days I would feel very depressed because I think all right I stuck to it but I think it's awful but in the next day when I looked at it either I would go in a different mood and go oh this isn't as bad as I thought and then the other thing I would feel with a fresher brain I'd go oh well this is good but then it goes off here and I don't have to go there let's not send them to Nebraska because they're Wisconsin so and then the latest thing I've done because now that I'm older it's more the busyness of life and laziness that keeps me from writing I'm not as driven to write as I was young girl I still want to keep going but I found that if I've written that one and been feeling stuff this happened at Betty's summer vacation I had and by the way why shouldn't I bring my class and so we get feedback too and I brought act one in and Marsha and a playwright named Daniel Goldfarb who just had a very nice play at my hand theater club really gave me some lovely feedback about Betty's summer vacation and it stuck with me and somebody offered me a reading of it and I said well I only had act one and they said it was a month and a half away and they said well you've been either just a reading of act one and I said well read that so once I get thinking about actors I get excited so I started thinking about casting it and basically I wrote the act two for this reading and I did that again with why torture is wrong and I just did it again with a new play I'm having right at my car this Monday so that's my new trick which is to get a reading schedule and the no the genesis of Betty's summer vacation and what you originally intended to do in setting up to write that play well after the bad critical response to sex and longing which was dark and very sexual anyway I thought beyond therapy is one of my best most produced plays and it is one of my friendliest ones even though the therapists are crazy and male therapists in particular but in any case the audience goes home feeling happy usually so I thought I want to write another play like that also hoping to do a sell and so both with my parents and later with my mother when she was divorced and her girlfriends we used to go to the New Jersey shore for like two weeks vacation and they're mostly very happy memories so I decided I was going to write about the New Jersey shore and then I decided I was going to do something like draw from Baywatch and make them all be young people in bathing suits and there you have a selfie case too so my idea was to write something sort of fond and playful and what again I write intuitively and so Trudy and Betty come and they're talking about that and then they don't know who the people are who are coming to stay with them and Keith comes in and he's a serial killer and I didn't say he's going to be a serial killer I seem to when I'm in a good mood write improvisationally so sometimes the people say things that I don't know are there so obviously a play with a serial killer probably is not going to be like Beyond Therapy so anyway I did end up enjoying writing that play but I've yet to write as friendly a play as Beyond Therapy yes back there you mentioned a little bit about your experience that in any way you've informed the writing of Laughing Wild you seem like somewhat of a critique of self-help culture no no no that's a good question did you all hear it? asking about depression and wondering if that had affected the writing of Laughing Wild which also seemed like a bit of a send up of self-help stuff I had gato because Beyond Therapy made some people I didn't like therapy I actually think therapy is really valuable and I've had some very valuable ones I've had a couple that were not great but one friend who had it wasn't seduced by her therapist but they had a bad relationship they were unfriendly with one another in a weird way but I know it sounds mysterious but therapy particularly it was for free at Harmon somebody really funny he was a therapist in training I was probably 24 and he was probably 29 but he was so helpful to me really helpful and but you know once I sort of got out in the world you know I found it depressing not to believe what I was taught as a Catholic child so that was part of my depression I think and then I don't know somewhere in my late 30s I started renting a house in Connecticut and I had a lot of friends who were in sort of new age kind of things why I giggled because I actually found a lot of those comforting at the same time I do make fun of them in laughing wild although I guess inwardly I don't totally make fun of them for instance affirmations just everything is fine in my life I do find it calming but the other thing is that there is that thing called cognitive therapy which is actually a science and not new age and it is about changing your thoughts and if you keep thinking I'm worthless I'm worthless I'm worthless you're not going to get better you know if you say I am worthwhile I mean I've actually told this to my students the ones who are too perfectionist and also I don't try to play any way try to really write a good one but I will say that laughing wild what preceded it was my playing Marjorabette and Boo which was rather unabashedly about my parents' marriage and the surrounding families although there are at least five more alcoholics I didn't write about because it seemed like bad writing it seemed overwritten but it was the last time I specifically wrote about my family laughing wild was the first one where really the parents are not talked about it was more like people my age and what they're doing to survive I was also finding New York kind of intensive at that time and also they've released a lot of mental patients thanks to Reagan in New York really