A Date With Theresa Rebeck

An evening with her plays may make you laugh or shudder (or both)—or see the human condition with fresh eyes

by Sarah Hart

MWF, early forties, settled, accomplished, witty, professionally versatile. Strong views on contemporary social and political mores. Loves Dickens, the Red Sox. Dog person. Seeks creative adventures. Send self-analysis, no calls, please.

You might expect a date with Theresa Rebeck—judging from her wildly popular solo play Bad Dates—to be an awkward business. But once you meet the playwright on her home turf—the Brooklyn brownstone where she lives with her husband, stage manager Jess Lynn, children Cooper and Cleo (10 and 3, respectively) and Mrs. Boffin, a canine with a Dickensian moniker—you're struck by how approachable this brainy, matter-of-fact woman of the theatre is. Rebeck tells is like it is with an easy sense of humor, whether she's talking about human behavior, political quagmires or the troublesome business of producing plays (sometimes all in the same sentence).

So, why will Bad Dates be among the most-produced plays of the coming season? Rebeck frankly admits her first thought was, "This is the one?"

The play tracks the travails of Haley, an Austin, Tex., single mother recently transplanted to New York City who has decided to start dating again. True to Rebeck form, however, what could be a one-sided rant on the battle of the sexes becomes more a consideration of the need for genuine community—and takes a turn for the sensational when the Romanian mafia and other unsavory elements make appearances. Rebeck makes the gambit work by sheer dint of Haley's charm and resilience—and audiences' eagerness to identify with her.

Actor Julie White, for whom Bad Dates was written, followed the play from its New York run at Playwrights Horizons to Boston's Huntington Theatre Company to Dallas Theater Center: "Three very different houses, and it's worked quite well every time," White declares. And Rebeck gamely repeats a producer's benediction: "You wrote a one-actor, one-set comedy? You smart girl."

But Rebeck has another hypothesis for the play's success that has to do with the psychological reactions audiences have to a comedic universe. "There's something quite peculiar about the way the pieces fall together," she says. "And in a play like this, things are slightly negotiated. I went back and looked all those old Shakespeare comedies, because there's something unreal about them: This happened, and then this, and so now there's a happy ending. There's this sort of frothy feeling of delight when the pieces come together and everything's okay." This examination of structure is characteristic of Rebeck's working method; she's very much at home unpacking the structural bones of her forebears, trying to get at what makes Shakespeare, Molière or Chekhov work.

But the comedic universe is not the only one inhabited by Rebeck's characters this season: Two other new plays are set in a distinctly darker cosmos. For The Water's Edge, which opens at New York City's Second Stage in April, under Will Frears's direction, Rebeck went straight to the Greeks to deal with the notion of cycles of violence. "Justice has relinquished the earth," she says of her domestic drama, which played at Massachusetts's Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2004 and features Kate Burton as the matriarch of a family trying to overcome a past atrocity. "In such cases it feels necessary for the human soul to reclaim the tools of vengeance."

And The Scene—which Rebeck calls "a perverse retelling of Of Human Bondage"—is slated for production next year at New York Theatre Workshop, to be directed by Daniel Aukin. "It's very funny—sickly funny," says Rebeck. "Things go poorly in the second act. It gets darker and darker—and then it gets darker again."

Rebeck's conversation is wide-reaching, but she propels thoughts and ideas forward fluently, without a whiff of pretension—notable attributes of her straight-talking plays. Anger, pathos, danger and comedy slam against one another in Rebeck's work, which she characterizes as "popped realism." She has a knack for looking squarely at a problematic world and making it theatrical without reducing life's untidiness to proscenium-sized proportions. Arthur Miller once said that playwrights must "be able to swallow bicycles and digest them." Such an enterprise, posits playwright Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros, is exactly what Rebeck undertakes. "She has a very good grasp of the whole, of where the play is trying to go. She's very clear," says Gersten-Vassilaros, who co-wrote Omnium Gatherum with Rebeck in the wake of 9/11.

"Theresa doesn't write in a literary form," adds Jim Nicola, artistic director of New York Theatre Workshop, which, in addition to presenting The Scene, produced Rebeck's View of the Dome in 1996. "She writes a text for performance. She thinks—and her imagination is a theatrical one, not a literary one."

Rebeck's break-out play, Spike Heels, debuted at Second Stage in 1992 and tapped into the budding national discourse on sexual harassment (while offering meaty, complex roles for four actors, including Julie White and Kevin Bacon). Following closely on Heels in the public eye were two plays that dealt with alternately dysfunctional and essential friendships among women and delved into such weighty themes as adultery, abortion and abuse: Loose Knit, which premiered the next season at Second Stage, and Sunday on the Rocks, at Connecticut's Long Wharf Theatre in 1994. Rebeck quickly earned the dubious label of woman playwright or feminist playwright—a pigeonholing she scoffs at.

"I would call her an American writer," says Kristine Nielsen, who, like White, has appeared in many of Rebeck's plays, beginning with Knit. "I think she's like Sophie Treadwell. Maybe her plays are even more immediate about relationships, the politics of male and female. That's what people like to engage in, because it's such a mystery. Some of her best roles are for men.

"And she's articulate," Nielsen hastens to add. "She still explores and uses language, when language is something that is so diminished in our society. She can be incredibly profane as well as academic."

If Rebeck's plays could be said to have a common theme, it would be what divides human beings from one another—and that includes male-female negotiations as well as female-female and male-male. Her stories, palatable at the outset, harbor nasty streaks: A reasonable young woman pulls a knife on her roommate; a liberal idealist runs to the Religious Right to wreak her revenge. ("Perverse" and "sick" gleefully roll off Rebeck's tongue in reference to anything fun.)

"I'm interested in work that is subversively accessible and yet intellectually and psychologically complex, and rewarding to a deeper understanding of theatrical storytelling and human psychology," she says, then cheerfully laughs off such a lofty goal. "The people who achieve that are Charles Dickens, Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock. I'm not saying I'm in their company, but that's who I have my sights on."

Much to her own surprise, she is also frequently cited as a "funny" playwright. Her plays are funny—but not one-liner funny, a skill she claims she lacks entirely (she lays bare TV-land's single-minded joke obsession in 1994's The Family of Mann, for which she mined her own frustrating experience writing for sitcoms). Rebeck's brand of comedy rises out of the situations of life; her plays veer to the absurd only as human nature veers dangerously—and uproariously—to the absurd.

"I've always felt like a joke is a desperate act," she says. "It's an act of survival. You could either kill yourself or you could tell a joke. That's pretty much the equation, as far as I can tell."

Both The Family of Mann and View of the Dome unfold around women with seemingly simple expectations. But the people in the worlds these women inhabit—L.A. and the cut-throat political sphere of Washington, D.C., respectively—make quick work of such naiveté. Reluctant to settle for mere satire (in the preface to her collected works, published by Smith and Kraus, Rebeck demurs, calling Mann a documentary), she hints at the surreal, all the more jarring as it coexists tacitly alongside comic realism. (In Mann, a character sprouts angel's wings—and no one notices.)

A trace of nightmare haunts the edges of Omnium Gatherum, too, which takes place over a post-9/11 dinner party with a bevy of quasi-recognizable guests and a multitude of very recognizable worldviews—a hellish proceeding even without the sulfurous smoke billowing in from the kitchen. While many theatre artists were questioning their relevance in the face of 9/11's horror, Rebeck sought out a way to respond. "I was terrified not just by the event but by the way the talking heads on television tried to squeeze this very large and incomprehensible moment into their own little space of understanding, to shove meanings onto it," she says. "That seemed quite surreal to me."

Omnium's talking heads (or, rather, heads volleying cross-examination at one another) are arranged by the playwrights with as much care for diversity of opinion as there might be by any dinner party hostess. "We had to be educatable," says Gersten-Vassilaros, describing how she and Rebeck would insistently role-play to record each character's rants. "Occasionally we'd stun each other to the degree we'd take the other position."

Nielsen, who played Omnium's Martha Stewart-like hostess with a blend of the manic and ditzy at Actors Theatre of Louisville and in New York, confirms, "Theresa writes wonderfully complex, complicated, unique people. They're not dumbed down, not reduced. There's no diminishment of the thought process. She has such respect for how individuals come to their points of view."

All of this sets Omnium—which was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004—apart in the genre of 9/11 plays. Its disquietude lies in how it turns back at us and tears at our comfortably drawn rationales. "You can argue it, you can cling to your separate opinions," says Rebeck, "but we have got to come to a stronger understanding and awareness of our shared humanity or we're doomed."

Sudden mirror-of-reckoning moments for the audience are part of Rebeck's theatrical force, says Nicola. "Theresa is a very moral writer. She looks at some corners of contemporary life and human behavior and brings those people to account for their behavior. She asks all of us who see her work to see our own accountability."

Rebeck may owe her skill for such discernment to three advanced degrees from Brandeis University in Massachusetts. After pursuing acting and writing while growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio, Rebeck hit on the idea of combining the two: becoming a playwright. "It seemed very clear," she says. "But it has never seemed a clear choice since that moment." Among her perambulations on the way to the inevitable, Rebeck went to graduate school to study literature—but while working toward a Ph.D. in Victorian melodrama, it became clear to her that she wasn't cut out for an academic lifestyle. So, she switched to the theatre department, got her MFA in dramatic writing and, meanwhile, figured she'd better finish up that pesky Ph.D. "I'm somebody who's not interested in unfinished things," she says.

Those studies, however, have come back to haunt Rebeck's writing—even in ways she claims she buries. "I'm strongly attracted to a lot of elements of melodrama, mainly the structural elements," she says. "It's a geometric form that is intriguing and satisfying to me as a storyteller, and I think also to audiences. It's maligned because of the collapse of psychology and language. There's a depletion in what we think of as melodramatic. If you can reimagine storytelling and infuse greater complexity into those elements, the structure will support it."

The Bells is one work in which Rebeck's predilection isn't confined to the structural elements. The text is a reworking of an old melodrama of the same name, which Rebeck transposes from France to the Alaskan gold rush, about a successful man who murdered an outsider for money 18 years ago to save himself and his young daughter. "That was an element that I found pertinent to American history," says Rebeck, who professes a very real love of country, in addition to being deeply troubled by many of today's social and political currents. "There's a notion that we can justify any act of violence by framing it in terms of domestic necessity. The Bells is very much a play about America and the way we justify our violence." (Rebeck recalls with some merriment that Eugene Lee, who designed the sets for the production at the McCarter Theatre Center this past April, called the play "a cross between A Christmas Carol and The Visit.")

Rebeck has also turned a clear eye and articulate pen to present the oft-ignored frustrations in the life of a playwright. In 1995, having just begun writing for "NYPD Blue" to supplement her family's income, she wrote a column for the Dramatists Guild newsletter about making space for playwrights to write for television and film without being denounced as having sold out [reprinted in American Theatre, Dec. '95]. What seemed like a very obvious, almost redundant point cut a swath of furor in the theatre world (and earned Rebeck another label she would just as soon cast off: playwright who writes for television).

"You know what they don't tell you about 'The Emperor's New Clothes'?" asks Rebeck good-humoredly. "They don't tell you what happens after the kid says it. The kid says it, everybody laughs and says, 'He's right, he's right, the emperor doesn't have any clothes on.' Then they take the kid outside and stone him to death. Don't ask me how I know that."

Still, such forthrightness has been a boon for other playwrights. "I have people, almost 10 years later, saying, 'I was so glad that you wrote that,'" she says. "Playwrights feel strongly, I think, that there's not a firm awareness among producers and others in the community about the frustrations we face and the struggles that are our lot." Rebeck has gone on to write several Hollywood scripts as well as episodes of television's "Third Watch" and "Law and Order: Criminal Intent."

"You get very lonely," Rebeck says of a playwright's life. She found a community at New York City's Lark Play Development Center, where, under the tutelage of playwright Arthur Kopit, she was writer-in-residence 2002-04 and developed both The Scene and The Water's Edge. She remains on the advisory board.

Rebeck has also used her plays to build a community of actors. "I look for actors who can deliver their laughs and still keep the emotional level high," she says. Among those she counts White (who also played Rebeck's stand-in in The Family of Mann and appeared in the 2004 film version of Sunday on the Rocks), Nielsen, Reed Birney (The Butterfly Collection, Mann and Knit) and two newer cohorts, Marin Ireland (The Bells) and Austin Lysy (The Water's Edge). These collaborations have provided a new direction for Rebeck: writing specifically for actors. "Molière did it," she shrugs. "I think it's too bad that things aren't set up that way any more. You should attach a playwright to a regional company and let 'em hang out for a year and write something for that company."

Not blessed with a ready-made company, Rebeck has assembled her own. When she set to work on Bad Dates with White as a template, Rebeck threw in as much as she could about the actress's quirks, characteristics and rhythms—not to mention her string of actual bad-date tales that inspired the piece. At one point, White remembers, Rebeck came in exclaiming, "Wait till you see what I've done!" "She'd written a chunk of the play where I'm just making faces," says White, "knowing that I have a great face-making ability."

Having had such success the first time, Rebeck endeavored to see if the same thing would work for five actors. The result was Mauritius, which she and five actors—including Reed Birney—are workshopping at the Lark. "And I'm thinking of something for Kristine," she says. "Things are starting to mess around in my head that way."

The truth is, things never stop messing around in Rebeck's head; for her, to be at work is the most important thing. Even at a point in her career where she could rest on an emerging veteran status, she's grasping at how to push her plays further, testing new limits.

"The most inspiring thing to me about Theresa is that she writes every day," says White. "She'll finish a play and clap her hands and start on the next thing. We say she's like a machine—but that takes a lot of courage. She never gets bogged down, never goes through a time when she has writer's block. It's so gratifying to see someone doing exactly the thing they should be doing."