NN:  And an attempted strangulation.  But I agree that in your play two people are primarily expressing their suffering.

EM:  I think so.  Both plays are about suffering.

NN:  In my play, Anthony’s ability in some way to control his guilt may not be redemptive from a moral point of view, but it’s certainly redemptive to him as a human being who continues to live in the world.

EM:  I think both plays are redemptive theatrically.  They are plays that don’t live within the world of psychology; they live within a theatrical world.  “Oedipus” doesn’t end with redemption; you get redemption in the next play.  But the theatrical act of Oedipus smashing his eyes is redemptive for the audience.  I think both our plays certainly have moments of redemption, through the language, for the audience if not for the characters in the plays.  This type of play is pretty unusual these days, because people tend to turn to psychology rather than to theatricality. 

NN:  I absolutely agree.  The plays have a catharsis, theatrically speaking, even if the characters themselves don’t find salvation.  I don’t think there’s a divine in either play, so there’s no salvation after life.  In some ways, Anthony is able to redeem himself more than Carlos, your character.  There may be redemption for Anthony in the fact that suffering has come full circle in the sequence of events.  But I don’t know if this is redemptive.

EM:  The language of both plays is very potent, and they are very European plays.  The male characters in both plays are stuck in an English world.   No one could think the way your male character does unless he came from English schools.  The male character in my play is stuck in an English world because he is obsessed with an English person.

 

I feel that your play is controlled by modern Shakespearean language that I was really drawn to.  It’s in the same kind of world that Sarah Kane’s plays are.  Some of Sarah Kane’s plays are articulate; some are not.  I’m fascinated by that world.  It’s the same world where the Duchess of Malfi lives, which is a form of theater that people seem to think doesn’t exist.  I’m drawn to it because I think it needs to be the future of theater.  Psychology and television and reality shows can’t continue.  There’s nowhere to go with them.

 

My play was influenced by “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore” by Tennessee Williams.  When I saw it at the Hartford Stage, I was taken with its ability to articulate sexual doom.  It was articulated in a way I’d never seen before.  I thought: Wow; I’m going to write this play; I’m going to let the characters talk and take it away from realism. 

 

I’m acting in “Out Cry” [by Tennessee Williams] now, which is a play similar to the two plays we’re discussing.  It takes you into the tragic.  That immediately makes people nervous.  They think you’re going to be sentimental.  But tragedy is not sentimental at all.  Tragedy is guttural.  Another thing I like about your play is that it goes into guttural language.  It’s the sounds Medea makes.  I think the female character in my play goes into that place too.  The last couple of scenes of “Hedda Gabler” go there in a way.

 

I’m interested in how theater can be the opposite of television and reality, dealing with words rather than physical movement.  Movement is dance, but it doesn’t have to say anything. Because both of our plays live in this world opposite of reality, the actors have to go into a register that’s different from the one normally heard at this time in the theater.

NN:   The reason your play isn’t sentimental—it’s the opposite of sentimental—is that the characters are very honest.  Your character Carlos is honest about what he’s thinking:  “I need to be saved.  I want you now, and you should take me in.”  It’s honest in that it’s true to a kind of very lonely existence. 

 

I don’t think there’s room for compassion here.  That’s true of a lot of great drama, in which characters are expressing their pain and asking to be saved.  They are not asking to save others.  Therefore, they have these terrible moments.  Carlos, in some ways, only realizes the pain he has caused when he feels that pain himself.

EM:  Another reason I wanted to do your play at INTAR is that I think people have a very limited idea of what Latino is.  Your mother being Argentine makes you Latino, but you’re not what people usually think of as Latino.  If you were drawing from someone who is completely English, you would have written a completely different play. My having lived in a leftist-socialist-Jewish world and being a Latino affects the way I think.  Even in my Cuban plays, there’s a leftist-American sensibility.  It’s there throughout “The Cook.”

NN:  I feel within me a clash of the Latino and…the Viking.  It may be an imagined clash, but it’s certainly very real in my trying to understand myself.  My play is filled with a kind of Latin energy.  It’s much more willing to express itself; it’s much more passionate.  You might say that the character Anthony is caught between the Latin and the non-Latin.

 

I also think that English writers during the Jacobean period are very poetic and expressive but they’re really murderous and cruel.  Even in Shakespeare, I think there’s a selfish, lonely will to power.  I want to respond to the idea of excessiveness.  I feel that in some way the theater community is disapproving of cruelty that appears on the stage.

EM:  Yes, it is disapproving.

NN:  Your play has very direct expressions of pain and cruelty, and so does my play.  I have struggled with feelings that my characters weren’t human.  But then when I sit down to write, my characters seem honest.  They really do. 

EM:  It took Sarah Kane her entire life to get produced in America .  It took her brother ten years to get a production of “Blasted” in this country, whereas in the rest of the world, it gets produced every five hours in every major theater.  So now it gets produced in New York , and there are lines of people around the corner waiting to get in to see it.  Yet no one will move it to another theater.  They don’t want to deal with the cruelty in it, even though the cruelty is there for a reason.

 

After I wrote “In Paradise,” no one would direct it.  And nothing happens in it:  it’s just words.  I guess it shows the power of words.  That’s what is exciting about it.  And Theatre Row isn’t the right place for it.  The Zipper Theater is right. 

 

Friends of mine were in a very interesting play called “Jerker.”  The play was produced in 1986, and it sold out constantly.  It was about two guys on the phone having fantasies.  The New York Times had a rave review of the play, and they hid it for two months and then published it on Thanksgiving Day.  The play was too confronting for them. 

 

I wrote a play called “Don Juan in New York City ” that was produced at the Theater for the New City .  I was told that the NEA wasn’t going to fund Theater for the New City because of my play.  People said it was obscene.  My play was updating Molière’s “Dom Juan.”  One NEA panelist said that he had seen “Don Juan in New York City ” and thought it was a masterpiece.  He knew what I was doing.  But because of prudishness, Theater for the New City almost lost funding.  The sex in my play did only what the sex in Molière’s play did.  Passionate allure: that’s what “Dom Juan” is.  There was nothing graphic in it at all.

 

I started writing differently after that.  I tamed myself.  Until “In Paradise .”

NN:  I think both our plays are unapologetic.

EM:  I agree.  I’d say that at the end of the plays, there’s no apology, and that’s what will scare people.

NN:  In the end, you really nailed the structure.  There was no explanation.  Instead, you said: “This will happen.  I will suffer.  You will suffer.” 

EM:  Both plays have a barrenness.  It makes them work.  The barrenness allows the audience to participate in it and think about the play.  It’s easy to write a realistic play with people apologizing and showing that 1 + 1 + 1 = 3.

 

Theater can’t be easy listening, because it can’t compete for audiences that spend a lot of money on easy listening.  I think the problem is that everything is becoming easy listening.  The American theater used to produce Brecht about every two days.  Now nobody produces Brecht.  They stopped producing him around the end of the 1980s.  People started censoring themselves.  He was the most popular writer in regional theater, and when did they decide he couldn’t sell out anymore?  When people started wanting easy listening.  Most people who want to be playwrights haven’t read Brecht, and that’s part of the problem with theater now too.  

NN:  I see myself as following the classical tradition.  I spent the last two years immersing myself in the Greeks, Shakespeare, the Jacobeans, some of Ibsen’s earlier plays.

EM:  Your play is more classical.  My play is more Williams.  That how they’re different.

NN:  I agree.  I’m just following the tradition.  I see that theater is about this: we’re not getting out of here alive, and we all have to come to terms with it.  I think an act of love in theater needs to be earned.  Otherwise, it’s just chucked about.  It’s sentimental and loses meaning. 

 

Sometimes I wonder, frankly, if there isn’t a lot of courage in cruelty.  I increasingly feel when I look at my play that Anthony has no choice but to live a life of solitude.  It’s a horror that he has to experience, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not an ecstasy and a worthy state to be in.  He’s interested in trying to attain great moments of being, and he manages it.  It would be a bit like diving in the North Sea to see all the wrecks from the Second World War.  You’re in a deadly place.  You really are.