Why plays?
Around age six I ruled out Sports. In grade school (Williamstown, MA), I ruled out Math as a career choice. In high school I ruled out Beauty Queen and Quiet Good Girl Who Keeps Her Mouth Shut. In high school I was editor of the school newspaper and conducted ongoing battles with the English teacher who had the imagination of a slug. I took art and architecture classes at Williams College. I was house manager for the fledgling Williamstown Summer Theatre for three summers - sucking the magic into my beatnik, black-turtle-necked, black-eye-liner-rimmed-eye self like a hungry leach. I began college (Antioch, in Ohio) as an art major, but that just seemed like too much fun and hey, it was the 60s. Activism was living art. I switched to political science, joined S.N.C.C. and A.C.L.U., went on sit ins and protests, and learned to folk dance. After a brief stint in the Peace Corps, a side-trip into entomology and marriage, a degree from the University of Massachusetts, and two babies, I was a newspaper reporter (Amherst Record in Massachusetts). During that time I also joined N.O.W., wrote radio commercials, got back to painting, and was part of the start of Leverett Craftsmen and Artists. Divorce, second marriage and move to New Jersey. No decent newspaper to write for in northern NJ, so I went back to school for another degree and segued into my second negative-income-generating career as a fine art printmaker. I got involved in original community musicals (in Ridgewood, NJ), first designing sets and performing (can't sing on key, but apparently I was funny). Soon I began helping to write scripts for these shows and performing, writing and directing for another musical review group. I was good at this. Good and obsessed. But uptight Bergen County was stifling. I got a master's degree in playwriting and moved my base of operations to New York City. Okay, it's a third negative-income-generating career, but plays don't lay still on a page or flat on a canvas on a wall. They are color and light, words and movement, real and unreal. They are vehicles for transportation, realization and speaking out. This is my home.
Have you met a lot of famous people in the business?
A lot of good it does. I'd trade them all for one agent.
Where do you get your ideas?
Not from people who come up to me and say: Have I got a great idea for you!
Seriously.
Of my eight full length plays, the one I'm finishing draft 19 on now, FRONTIER, was inspired by (1) my concerns for the environment and (2) visiting Alaska for the Last Frontier Theatre Conference twice. The vastness and insane beauty of that place gets under your skin. PLAY NICE! was inspired by Jean Genet's play THE MAIDS. HUMANS REMAIN was an attempt to work out some questions that lingered after my involvement with the Civil Rights movement. EMBRACING THE UNDERTOAD was a case of forcing myself to look at some family problems and work them out. LOLA AND THE PLANET OF GLORIOUS DIVERSITY is the most visual of the plays. It was inspired by "The Little Prince" (my favorite book), Rousseau's painting "The Sleeping Gypsy," and all the terrible things happening in the world which are risking an end of innocence for children. NECESSARY GEOGRAPHY began as a one-act in response to a request from The Drilling Company for a play about "honor." I immediately wanted to write about honoring the earth. My family lived briefly in Florida when I was very young, but memories of the feel of the place are still strong and the Everglades have always fascinated me. In searching around for Everglades information I ran across Ms. Douglas and the incredible work she did to save the Everglades. So I wrote about her. WOMEN WITHOUT WALLS was inspired by something I saw on tv long ago. It was about people being terrorized in a subway car by a gang of teenage boys. (If you know the title, please email me!) After I started writing I realized that my train was headed toward Death. One of my younger sisters had recently died. She is Pamela in the play, though I had to give her a flute because my sister's French Horn was too awkward. HARMONY wasn't consciously inspired by anything, but looking at it now it clearly was reflecting my own struggle to combine motherhood with an artistic life.
Many of my one-act plays are about sculptors or sculptures. In FRONTIER, Aurora is a painter. HARMONY and WOMEN WITHOUT WALLS have protagonists who are musicians. EMBRACING THE UNDERTOAD's Madeline is a writer. EVENING PRIMROSE IN OHIO takes place in a laundromat in Yellow Springs, Ohio, that I once knew well. QUEEN FOR A DAY takes place in the first house we lived in in Williamstown when I was in 2nd grade. GRANNIE BIRD takes place in Williamstown too. The boy in SAINT ANTHONY AND THE APPENDIX who finds himself in a Roman Catholic hospital to have his appendix removed started out reliving my experience as a co-op student in Washington, D.C. Of course he ends up involved in some pretty weird stuff that came totally out of my imagination. That's the fun part of playwriting!
You used to have at least three plays onstage at any one time and others coming up. What happened?
Those were mosly one-act and ten-minute plays. This year I started writing full-lengths only. It's a huge investment in time and money for a theater to put up a full-length play. (And theaters are innundated with scripts. There's that aspect too.) For the rest of the answer, ask our government which has cut N.E.A. funding off at the knees. If I send out 20 query letters to theaters, I can guarantee that two or three will be returned by the Post Office because the theaters have gone belly up. Programs for new plays are dying left and right. Theaters think they have to do old standards in order to attract audiences and stay afloat. ASK for new plays. BEG for new plays. The ball's in your court!
What is your biggest gripe?
What our government is doing to the arts in this country. (What our government is doing period.)
What is the biggest misconception about writing plays?
That the hard part is writing good dialogue. That's the easy part!
What's the hard part?
Structure.
