Book Review: Nuff Said? — “What Playwrights Talk About When They Talk About Writing”

 Jeffrey Sweet has provided a handy oral history of the ways playwriting has changed over three generations.

What Playwrights Talk About When They Talk About Writing by Jeffrey Sweet. Yale University Press, 304 pages, $30.

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By Ian Thal

Playwright and theater historian Jeffrey Sweet’s What Playwrights Talk About When They Talk About Writing collects seventeen interviews with English-language playwrights from both the US and UK, along with a profile of the late Edward Albee that originally appeared in Dramatics. With the exception of playwright Lanford Wilson, whose interview is featured as an epilogue, the conversations with the playwrights are arranged chronologically, in the order that each came to prominence.

Sweet embraces the role of interviewer rather than interlocutor. Aside from his obvious admiration for his interviewees, his opinions are kept off the page. This may be what passes for conventional journalistic practice (particularly regarding puff pieces), but when nearly every interviewee has either taught or studied playwriting at Yale, or has served as a judge for the Yale Drama Series’ David Charles Horn Prize, the arrangement advances a propagandistic assumption: that the recent history of American and British playwriting should be seen primarily through the lens of the Yale School of Drama. So it should surprise no one that Yale University Press is the publisher. And it should be even less surprising that YUP did not want Sweet to bring in any of the critical charges he has leveled at the industry in other publications.

The result is a volume that can be read in two very different ways. On the one hand, the conversations are clearly packaged by the publisher to be inspirational, and that is how the book is being marketed — cue the superlative blurbs on the back dust jacket (Ed Asner “loved every word”). For those who want to read that sort of book, they should stop reading this review. This is the tome for them.

However, there’s also another way to appreciate What Playwrights Talk About When They Talk About Writing. Sweet has provided a handy oral history of the ways that playwriting has changed over three generations: the silent generation (“bomb shelter generation” for the British), the baby boomers, and Generation X. Examining the volume for what it says about the evolution of writing for the stage is not particularly inspiring, but truthful nonetheless.

So yes, it is exciting to read how Arthur Kopit’s career was propelled early on when Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet And I’m Feeling So Sad was, upon its 1960 premiere at a student run theater at Harvard University, roundly praised as the best play of the year by Boston area critics. But something like that could not happen today because universal admiration has become the default position for most of the theater reviewers in the Boston area. Few are willing (perhaps because they are constrained by editorial fiat?) to give a negative review, so no play could rise to such prominence. Every production generally floats somewhere between an A and an A-.

And Kopit didn’t have (and still doesn’t have) an MFA. Today, it’s hard to imagine that even a renowned political cartoonist for an alternative weekly (such as Jules Feiffer) would be allowed to break into the world of non-profit theater without an MFA in playwriting (the Yale and NYU dramaturgs who run the literary departments at the nation’s regional theaters do not like outsiders treading on their turf). And the commercial theater would not be interested in a theatrical version of a cartoon that doesn’t have a money-generating media property behind it. (While Allison Bechdel did repeat the feat with Fun Home, it was Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori who wrote the stage adaptation – only after her graphic memoir had achieved bestseller status.)

One controversial point repeated in many of the interviews is that British writers create “state-of-the-nation” plays and that Americans write “through the lens of the family.” It’s a canard, of course. Robert Schenkkan, the author of All The Way and The Kentucky Cycle, is an exception to that rule included in Sweet’s book. But Sweet is careful not to press the issue with the Americans – it might make things so much less congenial. Today’s MFA playwriting programs do not inevitably carry on the liberal arts traditions of the humanities and social sciences. (It is revealing that the younger the writer in the collection, the less likely it is that he or she sees the dramatist as a public intellectual who engages in social debates.) Meanwhile, American gen-X and millennial dramatists seem to have little connection (or understanding) of the counter-culture that animated older writers who believed that, by bringing sexual edginess and formal experimentation on stage, they were committing revolutionary acts. Many of today’s writers seem to think that a few F-bombs or merely mentioning sex makes a play innovative.

Perhaps the most scintillating exchange in the book takes place in the interview with British dramatist David Hare, who has little patience with nonsense about the social engagement of American theater: “Tony Kushner wrote Angels In America for a theater that did not exist. That theater came into being because he wrote a great play.” Kushner’s absence as an interviewee is notable. And the politically engaged theater that Hare is talking about still doesn’t exist in America. In most urban centers the same mediocre two and three-handers are staged every season, while years go by without a production of a Kushner script. Hare, of course, is privileged to live and work in a country where theater productions are subsidized (American stages, in contrast, are cash poor), so he could write a political drama such as Stuff Happens and expect that resources would be found for a professional production. And this assumption leads to the only real clash in this otherwise chummy collection, when Hare fires back at A.R. Gurney’s objection in The Dramatist, the journal of the Dramatists Guild of America, that an Englishman gets to have his contrarian play produced in American theaters instead of a hypothetical play by an American.

In the margins of Sweet’s oral history you can chart the rise of the demand (academically fueled) that playwrights need ivory tower accreditation. The older writers are (largely) autodidacts who moved into academia relatively late in their careers, accepting faculty positions dedicated to teaching baby boomers how to write for the stage. Feiffer eventually found himself frustrated with his playwriting pupils, irritated that his students were becoming increasingly bourgeoise and careerist. He eventually decided to teach only graphic novel writing. Of the playwriting teachers, only Marsha Norman discusses the craft of narrative structure in a manner that makes one suspect her classes at New York’s Juilliard might be worthwhile. Few dramatists talk about a depressing cultural reality: the new play sector is dominated by the triumvate of MFA programs, large (and commercially minded) regional theaters, and grant giving institutions. Dramatist Lynn Nottage is the only courageous voice in the volume who articulates a reasonable critique:

“They’re not allowing young playwrights time to find their own voices. The minute they come out of these graduate programs they’re given big commissions and then those subsequent plays are produced before the playwrights have a sense of their own identity.”

Anyone who has sat through much-hyped new works, developed via an assembly-line of heavyweight commissions and grants, knows that Nottage’s concerns are well-founded. Indeed, I am reminded of a moment in December 2015 when I was in New York for a staged reading of one of my plays. I was having dinner with friends at a restaurant near the NYU campus, and I overheard a conversation between two graduate students in dramaturgy at the table next to us. One made this statement: “I don’t want to work with a playwright who can’t get a main-stage production by the time they turn twenty-six.” This is the definition of ‘success’ that the Tisch School of the Arts is teaching the next generation – and the creative vitality of American theater is suffering.

So, some readers will value What Playwrights Talk About When They Talk About Writing as a pick-me-up  – especially if they are fans of the interviewees. But its greatest value (critically speaking) may be to suggest difficult questions that are not being asked, and should be. For example, why do theater folk put up with a new play development industry that is so obviously dysfunctional? Why can’t we — playwrights, audiences, artists, critics, and producers — talk about that?


Ian Thal is a playwright, performer, and theater educator specializing in mime, commedia dell’arte, and puppetry, and has been known to act on Boston area stages from time to time, sometimes with Teatro delle Maschere. He has performed his one-man show, Arlecchino Am Ravenous, in numerous venues in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. One of his as-of-yet unproduced full-length plays was picketed by a Hamas supporter during a staged reading. He is looking for a home for his latest play, The Conversos of Venice, which is a thematic deconstruction of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Formerly the community editor at The Jewish Advocate, he blogs irregularly at the unimaginatively entitled The Journals of Ian Thal, and writes the “Nothing But Trouble” column for The Clyde Fitch Report

3 Comments

  1. Ian Thal on March 20, 2017 at 10:46 am

    “I don’t want to work with a playwright who can’t get a main-stage production by the time they turn twenty-six.”

    As both a postscript and a brag, I will note that shortly after I filed this review, I found out that the play of mine whose staged reading had brought me to NYC (Jan Kultura, Substitute Teacher, Meets the Crowd), and ultimately to a table next to dramaturgs who were proudly displaying their contempt for dramatists over the age of 26 whose plays were only staged in smaller venues, was cited for praise in Pete Miller’s essay in 2am TheatreWhy We Need Plays About Capitalism.

    But of course, I am too old and I don’t write through the lens of the family.

  2. John Fiorillo on March 24, 2017 at 1:04 pm

    Hooray Mr. Thal! Your review is worth more than a hundred copies of the interviews in Sweet’s collection. This is not to criticize Sweet, but to call out the groupthink promulgated by the MFA crowd. Another great writer, Jim Harrison, in his memoir called out the entire world of literary Masters Degree programs as “the greatest Ponzi scheme” in the history of eduction — training writers to teach writing rather than teaching them to write.

    I recently attended a conference for “working playwrights” with 50 participants, 8 of whom were under the age of 30 and recent graduates of MFA programs. ALL of them hed commissions to write a play (one had two). None of the older writers had one. I had occasion to attend a reading of one of the commissioned plays in progress. It was a total mess. When I asked the AD of the theater that gave the commission what he thought. He just shrugged his shoulders and agreed he had no idea what the play was about. But he had an MFA!

    As to your point that no one has raised important questions about why American playwriting is in crisis, I partially disagree. About five (or 4?) years ago Todd London’s study of the failure of the new play process in America, “Outrageous Fortune,, raised many of the issues you’ve cited. However, after an initial flurry of “concern,” the report sank like a stone and the industry went on as if nothing had happened.

    Congratulations for speaking truth. Unfortunately, the system is deaf.

    • Ian Thal on March 25, 2017 at 7:34 pm

      Thank you.

      Yale University Press wanted a celebration of the playwrights affiliated with its playwriting prize and Sweet wanted to celebrate playwrights he admired — fair enough; the book is valuable even if my criteria for valuation is different than either of theirs.

      In some discussions The Arts Fuse’s editor-in-chief Bill Marx and I had over the past week with Sweet over Facebook — and to his credit, Sweet is willing to engage critics — it was clear that he didn’t want to see the book read in the light of the debates that emerged in the wake of Todd London’s book, but as you point out, these debates disappeared because apparently everyone either gave up, or decided that “if you can’t beat them, join them” and enrolled in the ponzi-scheme you mention.

      And yes, given how often I have been underwhelmed by the unremarkable mediocrity, or shocked by the sheer incompetence on display in plays written by those who possess the prestigious MFA, and in some cases, are faculty members at these MFA programs, it is a ponzi scheme, and it does lead me to read Sweet’s oral history in a more depressing light than either he or his publisher had hoped.

      It’s depressing because there’s so much out there that is excellent, but doesn’t have the institutional support.

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