Product Description

The third installment in the Modern Library's Paris Review "Writers at Work" series, this is an all-new gathering of interviews with the most important and compelling playwrights of our time. Their singular takes on their craft, their influences, their lives, the state of contemporary theater, and the tricks of the trade create an illuminating and unparalleled record of the life of the theater itself.

"At its best,  theater is an antidote to the whiff of barbarity in the millennial air. 'My feeling is that people in a group, en masse, watching something, react differently, and perhaps more profoundly, than they do when they're alone in their living rooms,' Arthur Miller says here. In the dark, facing the stage, surrounded by others, the paying customer can let himself go; he is emboldened. The theatrical encounter allows a member of the public to think against received opinions. He can submerge himself in the extraordinary, admit his darkest, most infantile wishes, feel the pulse of the contemporary, hear the sludge of street talk turned into poetry. This enterprise can be joyous and dangerous; when the theater's game is good and tense, it is both."
--from the Introduction by John Lahr

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #228047 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05-30
• Released on: 2000-05-30
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .1 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

From Library Journal
This, the third in a series of reprints from the Paris Review (after Best Writers at Work and Women Writers at Work), is an intriguing primary-source collection of interviews with 16 renowned playwrights. The pieces start with a Thornton Wilder interview in 1956 and continue with Lillian Hellman (1965), Samuel Beckett (1987), Tennessee Williams (1981), Eugene Ionesco (1984), Arthur Miller (1966 and 1999), Neil Simon (1992), Edward Albee (1966), Harold Pinter (1966), Tom Stoppard (1988), John Guare (1992), Sam Shepard (1997), August Wilson (1999), David Mamet (1997), and Wendy Wasserstein (1997). The resulting essays are varied owing to the different approaches of both interviewer and playwright, but, overall, this is an excellent gathering of brilliant minds in the theater, and these interviews provide significant insight into the works of the writers. A great addition to literature and theater collections.DJ. Sara Paulk, Coastal Plain Regional Lib., Tifton, GA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
The most famous feature of George Plimpton's Paris Review is the interview with an author that graces nearly every issue. The latest collection of these colloquies showcases 16 dramatists' remarks about their art and their practice of it. In the opening interview, Thornton Wilder makes an observation that resonates in his successors' comments: "On the stage it is always now." A play is written out of the belief that what happens is more interesting than describing or analyzing what happens. For Samuel Beckett, of course, it was what failed to happen that was interesting, as he attests not directly--he declined to be interviewed--but through Lawrence Shainberg's superb memoir of him at work. Besides the Beckett piece, the Eugene Ionesco interview is the most intellectually intriguing. Arthur Miller proves the most concerned with historic dramatic form, Neil Simon the most absorbed in stagecraft (save for Beckett), and Tennessee Williams the most gossipy. Some other subjects in this treasure trove for theater lovers are Edward Albee, John Guare, David Mamet, August Wilson, and Wendy Wasserstein. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION

by John Lahr

We need stories; but, as the twenty-first century begins, most of the stories we're told on television and in film are corporate creations, calculated to pick the pockets of the public. The theater's charm and its power is that it is the last bastion of the individual voice, where the secrets of the psyche and the sins of the society can be explored in community with others. "I regard the theater as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being," Thornton Wilder tells The Paris Review in this volume. He goes on: "This supremacy of the theater derives from the fact that it is always 'now' on the stage." Ours is an age of perpetual distraction, a virtual reality which Wilder didn't live to see; "the now" is what a large part of the video-addicted public will pay anything to avoid. Entertainment has become atomized, inevitably, the cross-fertilization that is implied in the word civilization (whose root is the Latin for city) has been eroded by the new technology. The public has become habituated to its solitude; it has also grown increasingly uncomfortable in large groups. The onslaught of technological escape, which tickles the society to death, has weakened the appetite for active play. When all is provided, nothing need be sought. In the republic the result is a palpable psychic mutation--a passive, credulous, restless mass at once overexcited and underinformed. At its best, theater is an antidote to the whiff of barbarity in the millennial air. "My feeling is that people in a group, en masse, watching something, react differently, and perhaps more profoundly, than they do when they're alone in their living rooms," Arthur Miller says here. In the dark, facing the stage, surrounded by others, the paying customer can let himself go; he is emboldened. The theatrical encounter allows a member of the public to think against received opinions. He can submerge himself in the extraordinary, admit his darkest, most infantile wishes, feel the pulse of the contemporary, hear the sludge of street talk turned into poetry. This enterprise can be joyous and dangerous; when the theater's game is good and tense, it is both. "We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it," Thornton Wilder says. "Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it." The playwright has to call the story out of himself; the audience has to call the energy out of the actors. This responsibility has its excitements and its disappointments. Whether you talk, eat, make out, or leave a film, the performances remain the same; the movie happens without a public. The play needs an audience. So the paying customer enters the theater on his mettle; he has a certain unstated but real emotional responsibility to the group. He has to rouse himself from his inveterate entropy and to be alert. "The theater made everybody in the audience behave better, as if they were all in on the same secret," John Guare says in these Paris Review interviews, recalling the empowering magic of his childhood theatergoing. "I found it amazing that what was up on that stage could make these people who didn't know each other laugh, respond, gasp in exactly the same way at the same time."

A playwright is an altogether different literary species from a novelist, who marshals words merely onto the page. "What is so different about the stage is that you're just there, stuck--there are your characters stuck on the stage, you've got to live with them and deal with them," Harold Pinter says. The novelist never sees the reader walk out of his book. He is not writing in space and time; he doesn't have to coax a character he's created to speak the words as written. Consequently, a playwright is a raffish hybrid, a kind of cross between a recluse, a roughneck, and a con man. He lives both in his head and in the world. To ensure the life of his work, he has to be both a charmer and a killer. "You must keep people happy backstage because that affects what's onstage," John Guare says, describing what he privately refers to as "Diva Watch." "During a run, the playwright feels like the mayor of a small town filled with noble creatures who have to get out there and make it brand-new every night. When a production works, it's unlike any other joy in the world."

And when it falls, no failure is so public, so humiliating, and so instant. "Mr. William Randolph Hearst caused a little excitement by getting up in the middle of the first act and leaving with his party of ten," Lillian Hellman says, recalling the floperoo Days to Come. "I vomited in the back aisle. I did. I had to go home and change my clothes. I was drunk." The playwright learns quickly to develop a thick carcass, or at least to fake one. To succeed, the play has to surmount all sorts of obstacles--hurdles of money, casting, directing, rewriting--before it reaches the public. Because of this ferocious struggle, playwrights are a nervy, bumptious, competitive, often outrageous lot. As the reader will discover in these pages, they are also good, high-spirited company. For instance, speaking of The Sisters Rosensweig and aspects of herself in one of her characters, Wendy Wasserstein includes "the ability to get involved with a bisexual." She adds: "Hey--when's the mixer!" Eugene Ionesco describes the first night of The Bald Soprano, when members from the dadaist College de 'Pataphysique, to which he was a satrap, turned up at his opening wearing its highest decoration, La Gidouille, "which was a large turd to be pinned on your lapel.... The audience was shocked at the sight of so many big turds, and thought they were members of a secret cult." Sam Shepard recalls his contentious, alcoholic father going to see one of his plays for the first time, a New Mexico production of Buried Child, which was loosely based on the father's family. "In the second act he stood up and started to carry on with the actors, and then yelled, 'What a bunch of shit this is!'" Shepard explains. "The ushers tried to throw him out. He resisted, and in the end they allowed him to stay because he was the father of the playwright."



In a sense playwrights are masters of their own ceremonies--rituals whose style of provocation the public in time learns to follow and to enjoy. In The Bald Soprano and The Lesson Ionesco mounted a theatrical attack on bourgeois assumptions about psychology and language. "We achieved it above all by the dislocation of language," he tells The Paris Review. "Beckett destroys by language with silence. I do it with too much language, with characters talking at random, and by inventing words." The sense of unlearning---of making new paths in the public imagination--is part of theater's job description. "To have a play draw you in with humor and then make you crazy and send you out mixed up!" John Guare says, speaking of playwrights who influenced his ambition for mischief "When I got to Feydeau, to Strindberg, Pinter, Joe Orton, and the 'dis-ease' they created, I was home." It is Samuel Beckett who has taken theater to the outer limits of uncertainty--a revelation which occurred when Beckett returned to Dublin after World War II and found his mother almost unrecognizable from Parkinson's disease. In Lawrence Sheinberg's account of his meetings with Beckett, the playwright describes his intellectual volte-face. "The whole attempt at knowledge, it seemed to me, had come to nothing," Beckett tells him. "It was all haywire. What I had to do was investigate not-knowing, not-perceiving, the whole world of incompleteness."

Although the playwrights assembled here talk about the physical circumstances of playwriting, about the history of their plays and their influences, about their lives, none of them can quite answer the question every interviewer wants to know: how does the play happen? There is no truthful way to answer such a question. "A play just seems to materialize; like an apparition it gets clearer and clearer and clearer," Tennessee Williams says. About his masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire, he continues: "I simply had the vision of a woman in her late youth. She was sitting in a chair all alone by a window with the moonlight streaming in on her desolate face, and she'd been stood up by the man she planned to marry." A play is a piece of happy synchronicity where the writer's ideas, his collaborators, and his luck cohere into a narrative which is a kind of gossamer mystery. "Good plays are a mystery," Neil Simon says here. "You don't know what it is that the playwright did right." He adds: "If the miracle happens, you come out at the very place you wanted to."

A play is for every playwright a journey into the unknown, a trip for which each has his own idiosyncratic method and mission. For instance, Tennessee Williams, who spent eight hours a day for thirty years at his craft, says he writes plays as a kind of "emotional autobiography" in which his characters are correlatives who chronicle the shifting spiritual battle in his own very divided nature. Harold Pinter, by contrast, works entirely out of his unconscious. "I don't know what kind of characters my plays will have until they ... well, until they are. Until they indicate to me what they are." He adds: "I don't conceptualize in any way. Once I've got the clues I follow them--that's my job, really, to follow the clues." Many of the writers here bear witness to being taken over by the voices and almost channeling the voices who inhabit them. "There were so many voices that I didn't know where to start," Sam Shepard says, of beginning to write his off-off-Broadway p...