Gregory Moss is a playwright, performer and director from Cambridge MA. He is an MFA student at Brown University's Playwriting Program, and he runs Independent Submarine Productions, a DIY production company dedicated to presenting challenging artistic content in various media (www.independentsubmarine.com). Gregory is a recipient of the Lucille Lortel Playwriting Fellowship for 2006-2007. Recent and upcoming productions of his work include Play Viewed From A Distance at The Empty Space Theater in Seattle; The Yankee City Theater Project at the Firehouse Center For The Arts; The Accident at Theatre Limina's Double Vision Festival in Minneapolis; and No One Remembers When as part of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival. Recent solo performances include 1000 Proms at The Zeitgeist Gallery in Cambridge MA and "let's pretend" (adults only) at P.A.'s Lounge in Boston. His latest play, House of Gold, debuted in February as part of Brown University's New Play Festival. Gregory is a member of The Dramatists' Guild.
I met Greg in Florida at the Atlantic Center for the Arts where we were both part of a seven person playwrights bootcamp for 3 weeks with Paula Vogel. Since then we've both be seeing each other around the Brown University campus for the past two years; he is completing his masters in playwriting, and I am working on my undergraduate degree. This has given me a chance to see some of Greg's latest work, and to watch him create it. I am always amazed at how he he gets me hooked into such absurd and disturbing stories-- but he does GET ME HOOKED on impossible people. Impossible! Greg revels in the grotesque and bizarre and always manages to scratch away at those levels to reveal something deeply human and deeply desirous of love. Magic. Weird. But magic.
Here's a few questions for Greg, just after the presentation of his new work PUNKPLAY at the Brown New Play Fest:
Where'd 'Punkplay' come from?
Punkplay came from a couple places. Last year I wrote a play called House of Gold which upset some people when it was done at Brown, which I found oddly surprising, and caused me to think a bit about my approach to making plays. Not so I could change it, but to figure why I was in fact I seem to be so intent on upsetting people. My default mode, as a writer, is to write from a position of aggressive provocative and irony, and I realized that attitude came from early exposure to first and second wave punk rock. So in part I wanted to explore my base assumptions about the world and art, which were so heavily influenced by an adolescence spent absorbing punk music and culture. But also House of Gold had been about growing up as a girl in America, and I write mostly female protagonists, so I wanted to do a boy play. I did the first draft in a class for Paula Vogel in which we studied Jacobean and German Expressionist drama, so some of that got in there too - this imaginative relationship of the individual to History. There's a lot of my own life in there.
How important is music to your stuff?
I am not a musical theatre person, but almost every play I write these days has at least one song in it, like new original songs. But music is one of the Aristotelean elements and I am nothing if not Aristotelean. Using the right song at the right moment can add inflection to a dramatic moment - ironize it or make it creepier. I don't want to use music to underscore (I hate that in theatre) or manipulate emotion, but it's a good way to linger in a moment without slowing a play's momentum.
Where do you go after Brown?
I will either be in Providence another year, or I will be in New York. Probably teaching, definitely writing, hopefully continuing to act and find other creative outlets as well.
What's the difference between being an educator and being educated?
Uh, I don't know. I learn as much or more teaching as I do as a student, cliched as that sounds. Educating, especially in writing and theatre, I feel, is mostly about presenting different approaches to students in a non-threatening, practical and contextualized way. To cultivate their curiosity and ingenuity, so they can write the plays they wanna write - and also to help them delay that reflexive "bullshit!" reaction so many people have when confronted with new or challenging work.
Are you ever compelled to fix people's spelling?
Not in like emails or whatever, but as a teacher, yeah, sometimes. I don't like misspellings, and if it's something glaring I will draw their attention to it. I try not to be a composition teacher - the spelling can get fixed later, once the play is in place.
What do you think every playwright should read?
Sheesh. I feel I should advocate for someone no one is gonna read on their own here. Fornes is my first and favorite, but I'm gonna say everyone should read the "Little Theatre of The Green Goose" plays by Konstanty Iidefons Gaiczynski. They are very short, absurd and hilarious sparks of resistance to socialist realism written by a crazy Polish writer post WW II. I directed 'em as a student project as an undergrad, and I've loved 'em ever since
Also everyone should read Ann Marie Healy.
What's the beverage that keeps you going?
Whey protein smoothie made with vanilla soy milk, a banana, and frozen blueberries. Every morning and sometimes again in the afternoon.
Why puppets?
Anyone who grew up in America with a television set grew up surrounded by talking frogs and anthropomorphic furniture. These things are our friends as kids and then we are very quickly asked to forget that world of living objects. Puppets and object with souls remain a fixture of my imagination, like dolls and toys and dead people coming back to life.
Got a personal mantra?
Work work work.
Anything else?
Naw. Thanks for asking though.
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