Seven Playwrights to Watch

Eric Coble, Karen Hartman, Javon Johnson, Rogelio Martinez, Adam Rapp, Alice Tuan and Annie Weisman discuss their busy schedules for the upcoming season

 

ADAM RAPP: Dark Passages

by Jim O'Quinn

You think you’ve got troubles? You should be a character in an Adam Rapp play. Seeing one of this prolific 34-year-old New Yorker’s dramas—in some cases, even hearing a cursory plot summary—can be enough to convince you that there’s been an angel in your pocket all your life.

Take the pair of ill-fated homeboys in Faster, currently running at the Rattlestick Theatre in Manhattan. Desperate to escape their nowhere hometown in the Midwest, they decide to raise cash by selling a girl they’ve picked up—but the buyer turns out to be the Devil. 

Consider the twisted clan at the center of Trueblinka, also now on the boards in New York, under the aegis of Last Minute Productions. When Mom and Pop aren’t tormenting the kids with the family business—manufacturing ceramic crosses for the Catholic Church—they’re threatening them with imprisonment or liquidation.

Count the problems of the loquacious narrator of Nocturne, which has played to critical acclaim at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., and New York Theatre Workshop, and is slated for January at Safe Theatre of Austin, Tex. Having run down his little sister with a car, the guy is branded a killer and rendered impotent. Then his father dies of an incurable disease.

The main character in Dreams of the Salthorse, currently running at the Encore Theatre in San Francisco, doesn’t even have a head. 

“I’m not trying to make everybody feel bad,” vows the playwright, a tall, gangly fellow who moved to New York from his native Joliet, Ill., a decade ago—for the express purpose of playing street basketball, he claims—and in the interim turned himself into a prize-winning author (his fifth novel is due out this spring) and playwright. “For me, theatre is an opportunity to look at stuff that troubles me,” Rapp explains, leaning seriously into his subject, “not to indulge in escapism or to duplicate the narcotic of TV and the Internet.” 

So where do those grisly stories come from? “I’ve had kind of a rough life—there were a lot of problems,” he says with a shrug, not going into detail about the time he did in reform school before ending up in a military academy in his teens, events recorded in Missing the Piano, his first novel for young people. It was when Rapp reconnected with his actor brother Anthony (late of Rent) and the two took up residence together in Manhattan that both their theatrical careers began to fall into place.

Adam now shares the East Village flat with one of his frequent collaborators, actor Dallas Roberts, who won plaudits for his disquieting performance as the anguished antihero of Nocturne and wowed Louisville audiences as a drugged-out rocker in Rapp’s uncharacteristically comic Finer Noble Gases at last season’s Humana Festival. 

What’s it like to have five plays premiering in a single season? “What that means,” he says without blinking an eye, “is that I don’t have a day job any more.”

JAVON JOHNSON: When an Actor Writes

by Holly Bass

On sight you might mistake him for an athlete—albeit one with a mischievous and lively intelligence dancing in his eyes—rather than a playwright. But despite the reputation he’s gained for his forceful and sensitive plays, Javon Johnson considers himself an actor first and foremost. “All my undergrad and graduate training is as an actor,” he says. “I write from voices that begin to speak in my head. I just trust that dialogue—that it will evolve into something at the end.” Though only 29 years old, the ambitious thespian has seen professional stagings of eight of his plays, is a founding member of the Congo Square Theater in Chicago and has appeared on stage, on television and in film.

Johnson’s theatre career began in earnest when a high school friend needed a last-minute partner for an acting competition. “After the first three or four weeks of competition, we were losing. It dawned on me that I was the reason we were losing. I was terrible.” He had an epiphany after seeing Danny Glover in the film The Color Purple. “Watching him I realized, ‘Wow, that’s what I’m supposed to be doing,’ so I got serious about it. We came in first-runner-up, and the next year we were the winners for the state competition.” 

While attending graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh, Johnson met August Wilson, who soon became his mentor. “I encountered Wilson’s work first as an actor. I realized that there was something special in his work, and in turn I realized that there was something special that I had to do in the theatre as an artist, particularly as a black artist.” Like Wilson, Johnson finds tremendous inspiration in music, often listening to blues, classic soul and the occasional hip-hop track as he writes into the wee hours of the morning. His plays come out of the black experience and focus on the intimacies and intricacies of personal relationships.

This season, Johnson will have three plays produced, including his latest work, Runaway Home, at the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C., and Atlanta’s Horizon Theatre. Set in Johnson’s hometown of Anderson, S.C., the play tells the story of BettyAnn, a single mother of five balancing the responsibilities of child-raising versus her desire to live her own life.

All these plays, plus the birth of twin boys last year, leave precious little time for his acting career (though he and his young sons appeared this past summer in a Hanes commercial). “I always felt it was selfish for actors to be in their own work,” he says, “but it became very difficult for me to get work as an actor because people knew me as a writer. So I’ve had to do some of my own work in order to get on stage!” Next January, Johnson will appear in the Pittsburgh production of Cryin’ Shame at Kontu Repertory Theatre, reprising the role of Sherman (played by Malcolm Jamal-Warner in the play’s L.A. premiere).

Freelance writer Holly Bass is a regular contributor to Washington City Paper.

ROGELIO MARTINEZ: Losses and Gains

by Christine Dolen

As nine-year-old Rogelio Martinez got ready for the Mariel boatlift that would take him from Cuba to the United States, he was told that he, his mother Teresita and his aunt were going first to America and that his father Wilfredo would follow in a week. Still, the women said he should kiss his father goodbye.

He didn’t see his father again until he was 19.

“He got out of Cuba later, but it broke the family apart,” recalls Martinez, now 31 and an award-winning playwright whose works are rooted in his homeland. “I remember the impression, when I finally saw him again, that he’d gotten smaller. He died a year and a half ago. I was just getting back to knowing him.”

After two months in Miami and another six in Grand Rapids, Mich., Martinez and his mother settled in a large Cuban community in Union City, N.J. In high school he did tech work on Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals—“I still think ‘If I Loved You’ is one of the great pieces of writing, musical or not,” he says—but he didn’t see a play until junior year, when he and his mother, on a trip to Manhattan, saw Madonna in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow.

He loved the “energy, economy and efficiency” of the language bouncing into his ears. Yet he majored in communications at Syracuse University because, he says, “I didn’t know theatre was something you studied; it was too much fun.” Finally, at Columbia University, he earned his master’s degree under the guidance of mentors-turned-friends Romulus Linney and Eduardo Machado. After graduating in 1996, he became a member of New Dramatists and has been turning out plays ever since.

Edgy comedy and sudden sorrow intertwine in many of Martinez’s scripts. Arrivals and Departures, done by Miami’s Cuban American Repertory Theatre, reunites a brother who left Cuba with one who stayed—the result is a Sam Shepard-style conflagration. The company plans to do a site-specific production of Martinez’s film-noirish, La Ronde-style They Still Mambo in Havana this spring.

Other plays—including Lost in Translation, Illuminating Veronica and Union City, N.J., Where Are You?—have been read, workshopped, developed or presented at companies from coast to coast. Rosie Perez starred in Union City, which won Martinez the James Hammerstein Award for most promising playwright, at Ensemble Studio Theatre of New York’s one-act festival in June. Previously, Martinez won a Princess Grace Award for I Regret She’s Made of Sugar, also workshopped at EST as part of its Octoberfest. Lost in Translation was part of the Hispanic Playwright’s Project at California’s South Coast Repertory in August. A spring New York production of his commissioned script The Transformation of Leroi Pike is being planned.

His style is hard to describe, Martinez says: “I do love film noir and that ’40s back-and-forth dialogue, when men and women can’t say what they really want to. That lends itself to Cuba, where people can’t say what they mean.” 

Christine Dolen is the theatre critic for the Miami Herald.

ALICE TUAN: Butting Heads with Power

by Terry Hong

Alice Tuan recalls two defining childhood moments that directed her toward writing: being forced to sit through Chinese operas (“I inevitably fell asleep after the first 40 minutes”) and seeing her first Broadway show, Beatlemania (to which she reacted, “Is this all theatre is? Imitation? Fake? Wow. Theatre’s uninventive.”). So out of “sheer will,” just to see if she could do it, Tuan decided in her late twenties to create her own kind of theatre—after detours in economics, teaching and import/export trading.

Over the past decade, Tuan has written so prodigiously that she’s able to talk about four distinct “eras” of her work: Her Asian-American era includes Last of the Suns, Ikebana, Iconana and Some Asians; her Virtual Hypertext era, which blends technology with the physical stage, includes Coastline, mALL and F.E.T.C.H; her Pornography era includes Ajax (por nobody) and Hit; and her Historical era includes The Roaring Girle and her recent 4 Days in Red Gulch.

Tuan has also collected an enviable posse of committed admirers. Paula Vogel talks about Tuan’s ability “to create wonder in the reader: to break rules, to take us on flights of fancy, to play with language and to forge theatrical spectacle.” The Public Theater’s producer George C. Wolfe says, “Alice Tuan has a wonderful sense of the outrageous, is a brilliant craftsperson of language and has a thrilling theatrical imagination.” His associate producer, Bonnie Metzgar, enthuses about Tuan’s “incredible delight,” her sense of mischief mixed with her sheer intelligence: “I can’t wait to see what she does next.”

The waiting’s over. This month, Tuan’s latest play, 4 Days in Red Gulch, about the stretch of time between June 30, 1919, the first day of Prohibition, and Oct. 19, 1929, when the stock market crashed, will get its first workshop at the Mark Taper Forum’s New Work Festival. In November, Tuan heads to McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J., for “Keyword: Alien,” a project in which seven writers present short pieces based on their individual interpretations of the word “alien.” Tuan’s contribution, Bai Li Wong Liebling, is a subversive look at a Chinese adoptee who returns to her native village as a young woman.

Further ahead, Some Asians, which captures three seminal moments during Britain’s and Hong Kong’s entwined history, goes up in February 2003 at UMass Theater in Amherst, Mass. In April, Last of the Suns, loosely inspired by Tuan’s grandfather, who was a lieutenant general in Chiang Kai Shek’s army, opens at New York’s Ma-Yi Theatre Company, directed by Chay Yew. In June, Salvage Vanguard in Austin will produce Ajax (por nobody), about four people bingeing on attraction and repulsion. And in September, New York’s Foundry Theatre will present Tuan’s adaptation of Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s 1611 work, The Roaring Girle, about a woman of notorious exploits who keeps butting heads with the societal powers that be.

“When I first met Alice,” says Melanie Joseph, Girle’s director and the Foundry’s producing artistic director, “I thought I was looking at a modern, real-life Roaring Girle.” Apt description indeed.

Arts writer Terry Hong lives in Washington, D.C.

ANNIE WEISMAN: Writing into the Void

by Joel Hirschhorn

When Southern California playwright Annie Weisman was asked for permission to include her play Be Aggressive in an anthology, The Best Plays by Women 2001, she turned the offer down, explaining, “I don’t recognize myself as a woman writer. I recognize myself as a writer, period.” This decisive statement impressed the publisher, who placed the work in another collection, with a gender-reference-free title: The Best Plays of 2001.

Audiences and critics embraced Be Aggressive after its July 2001 opening at La Jolla Playhouse—a geographically apt venue for Weisman’s sparkling satire of the superficial values so prevalent in Southern California. The play, about a 17-year-old cheerleader, was intended as “a cultural commentary,” the writer says, “showing tribal, chanting rituals that allow these girls to express and shape their feelings.”

Weisman’s other acclaimed work, Hold Please, which also premiered in 2001, at South Coast Repertory, highlights the escalating jealousy among four women in a corporate office. “I wanted to write about the way women participate in creating and perpetrating sexism in the workplace,” Weisman says. “I’m also interested in the way women relate to each other, not just on the job, but as mothers and daughters. It seems to me that there’s tremendous resentment from older generations, because they think the youngsters don’t have to struggle the way they did.”

Still safely ensconced in the younger generation herself—she’s 28—Weisman says she always knew her destiny was theatre. Her first work, We’re Talking Today Here, won a high school playwriting contest. She honed her craft at Williams College, immersing herself in authors she admired—Harold Pinter, Anton Chekhov and David Mamet—and writing her thesis on puns in Hamlet.

So far, this background has stood her in good stead. One year after the premieres of Hold Please and Be Aggressive (which Dallas Theater Center is staging this month), she’s working on a comedy pilot for HBO and a musical about Hollywood for Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I. And recently she polished off 40 Years in the Sunshine, a play commissioned by A.S.K. Theater Projects for an August reading at the New Work Festival of L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum. The piece deals with a young Jewish couple who visit a New Age Jewish retreat. “They stand at the buffet of world cultures and beliefs and take whatever they think is meaningful,” Weisman says, “rejecting things they find too challenging or foreign. I’m interested in the legacy of secularism and cultural relativism in the American Jewish community, as well as how ego and commerce can dominate in the absence of faith.”

Weisman writes in the mornings, structuring her material without an outline. “I want to explore my ideas and characters spontaneously,” she says, “then start writing into the void.”

Composer and writer Joel Hirschhorn is a critic for Variety.

KAREN HARTMAN: Structure and Rebellion

by Celia Wren

"I have an anachronistic streak, but I’m forward-looking,” Karen Hartman muses as she sips an intimidatingly healthy bottled juice concoction in a sleepy café not too far from her Brooklyn residence. That dichotomy of qualities—a dual interest in “probing the tension” between structure and rebellion—may explain the fascinating hodgepodge of subjects and scenarios the 31-year-old dramatist has alchemized in her plays: among others, Gum, an unnerving fable about forbidden desire in a fundamentalist country; Girl Under Grain, which retells the Biblical book of Ruth, focusing on a generation gap between women; The Mother of Modern Censorship, an “office power play” whose characters include a Chief Music Censor; and Going Gone [see “In the Bullpen,” page 26], about a Yiddish-speaking immigrant who becomes a famous baseball announcer.

So far, these and other plays by Hartman—16 in all—have been staged at over 40 theatre companies, including Baltimore’s Center Stage, San Francisco’s Magic Theatre, the Dallas Theater Center and New York’s Women’s Projects and Productions. Credit for first snapping up her work, however, goes to the California Young Playwrights Festival, which mounted her first play (about mothers and daughters) when she was a 16-year-old living in San Diego. She’d already succumbed to the literary bug long before then, though; she recalls “narrating things” in her head at the age of three. So it’s not surprising that, shortly after snagging her B.A. at Yale University, she enrolled in the MFA playwriting program at the Yale School of Drama, where she studied with Maria Irene Fornes, a seminal mentor.

A former Fulbright scholar, a member of New Dramatists, a recent Hodder Fellow at Princeton and a recipient of numerous commissions (including the opera MotherBone, which Austin’s Salvage Vanguard Theater stages this month [see “What’s Opera, Doc?” page 12]), Hartman says she’s been “pretty unscathed” by the kinds of frustrations and play-development debacles up-and-coming playwrights often suffer. Perhaps as a result, she takes a sanguine view of the future of theatre—an art form she thinks humanity will always need. “It’s become a truism that our lives have gotten small and comfortable,” she says, “but the fact is that all the big things still happen to everyone. People still experience grief and love in fundamentally the same ways. People still die. And we need some form to practice the resulting emotions, because we are in no way prepared for them.”

Theatre, she suggests, enables audiences to “practice” life’s ups and downs before they happen. And how do playwrights come up with the right practice material? “You have to write what you love,” Hartman says. “If you want to write about something you don’t know a lot about, you have to learn enough about it to be able to love it.”

ERIC COBLE: Moral Outrage Can Be Funny

by Sarah Hart

To hear Eric Coble describe his childhood—he spent his formative years on the Navaho and Ute reservations of New Mexico and Colorado—one envisions a 10-year-old boy’s paradise: With the open desert as a stomping ground, he could be anyone from Indiana Jones to a stuntman. It’s no surprise that a spirit of playful invention pervades the playwright’s repertoire—or that three of his four plays on tap for the coming season are children’s pieces: Pinocchio 3.5 at Stages Repertory Theatre, in Houston, Cinderella Confidential at Cleveland Play House and Sacagawea at Oregon Children’s Theatre, in Portland. (The fourth, Bright Ideas, also at Cleveland Play House, is a Macbeth-esque tale of parents who will stop at nothing to enroll their child in the right preschool—not for kids, Coble emphasizes.)

Coble’s conversation accelerates as he describes writing his children’s plays: “Watching my own children play, they’re going along and—suddenly there’s a volcano! How are we going to get around that? I know, I’ll grow fairy wings!—and on and on. I like trying to write children’s plays that just tumble forward with continual revelation.”

It’s easy to see why Coble understands the importance of whim. Though he lives in Cleveland now, he was born in Edinburgh after his mother moved there from Iceland upon discovering Scotland’s low infant 
mortality rate. “And I still, to this day, don’t know why she chose to move to the reservation,” he admits of the subsequent stint in the American West. But as far as his playwriting is concerned, he says, the location didn’t matter; what was significant was his penchant for inventing tales from an early age.

His storytelling affinity, however, did not lead Coble immediately into playwriting. Through his undergraduate years at Fort Lewis College in Colorado and in pursuit of his acting MFA at Ohio University, Coble’s aspiration was to deliver the lines, not write them. But playwriting opportunities continued to assert themselves and the aspiring actor eventually succumbed. Now his growing roster of productions includes engagements at New York’s Playwrights Horizons; the Kennedy Center, in Washington, D.C; and Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre.

Classic sources, be they fairytales, Shakespeare or history, provide the inspiration—or at least the jumping-off point—for many of Coble’s plays. “I think of it as jazz,” he says. “You have the classic song and then how do you make that your own? How do you bring out something new and intriguing and fun—in a way that illuminates not only the situation, like current parenting, but Macbeth too?” Fitting a timeless story to the present often gives his plays a political bent. In keeping with this, Coble cites Peter Shaffer, Brian Friel and Athol Fugard among his influences—although he smilingly points out what might seem an inconsistency: “None of them are known for their wacky comedies. But I respond to their ability to deal with big social issues, big themes, in very human, small, personal dramas.”

Social issues aren’t relegated to the adult plays. His Cinderella Confidential takes info-tainment to task, and Pinocchio 3.5 calls multi-millionaire Gill Bates “Dad.” “I think that moral outrage can have a place in children’s theatre,” Coble says. “I think that moral outrage—tempered with humor—is the most entertaining thing you can do.”

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