Jason Grote's work has been presented and/or developed with The 24-Hour Plays, The 92nd Street Y's Makor/Steinhardt Center, Baltimore Center Stage, The Bloomington Playwrights Project, The Brick, Circle X, Clubbed Thumb, Denver Center Theater, Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Flea, HERE, The Lincoln Center Directors' Lab, Manhattan Ensemble Theater, The Millay Colony for the Arts, The NY International Fringe Festival, The O'Neill Playwrights' Conference, P73, The Playwrights' Center, Salvage Vanguard, Sanctuary, Soho Rep, Studio 42, Theatre of NOTE, The Williamstown Theater Festival workshop, and The Working Theater, and published in The Back Stage Book of New American Short Plays 2005 (edited by Craig Lucas). His play, Hamilton Township, will be presented in Slovenia in December 2006, and his play, 1001, will premiere at Denver Center Theater in January 2007. Honors include a nomination for the 2007 Kesselring Prize; an NEA grant via Soho Rep; a Sloan Commission from Ensemble Studio Theatre; The P73 Playwriting Fellowship; and multiple-year finalist for The Bay Area Playwrights Festival, PlayLabs, and The Princess Grace Award. He is co-chair of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab and theatre co-editor of The Brooklyn Rail, and has an MFA from NYU.
Current and upcoming projects include his commissions from Clubbed Thumb, Denver Center, and Ensemble Studio Theater, as well as various projects for film, TV, and radio. He teaches playwriting and screenwriting at Rutgers University, is a member of PEN and New Dramatists, and a contributor to Comedy Central's "Indecision 2008" blog. He was co-chair of Soho Rep's Writer/Director Lab from 2004-07, and currently serves on their Artist Advisory Committee. He is represented by Antje Oegel at AO International, in Chicago and Berlin.
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I got a chance to meet Jason at the O'Neill Theater Center this summer and to see his play BOX AMERICANA, a play that takes you in and out of the Walmart nation. Here's an interview conducted via e-mail:
I'm glad we got to meet at the O'Neill last month, and it was a treat to see such a smart comedy.
Thanks!
Your play, BOX AMERICANA, was presented at the O'Neill this summer. What compelled you to set a play inside and around a Walmart?
It was a commission from The Working Theater, a labor-oriented theater in NYC. I'm generally interested in writing about contemporary issues, and Walmart's labor troubles have been receiving a lot of press lately, especially their systemic failure to promote women into management positions, which is the only way to make a decent living working there. This inspired the largest class action suit in history, which is still pending, but doesn't look good in light of the recent Supreme Court decision reducing Exxon Mobil's penalties for the Valdez oil spill to a slap on the wrist. The play was largely inspired by a book on the topic, Liza Featherstone's excellent SELLING WOMEN SHORT.
This is your second summer at the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference -- how did the experience change for you?
I was much more aware of how quickly the month goes, and tried to use the time for efficiently (though who knows if I did or not). I also tried to make more time to have my wife up, which is really important - as I discovered in 2006, a month is a really long time to be apart.
How do you prepare for a workshop experience like the O'Neill's?
I mailed a lot of food and books to myself, and tried to square away as much business back home as I could. As far as the art of it goes, I'm not sure what preparation one could do, other than having written the actual play. Everything always happens in the room.
The mother/daughter relationship that you and the cast conjured at the O'Neill was mesmerizing and very real. What brought you to creating that duo? What were you channeling?
Thanks!
I was channeling lot of different things, actually. Partially, my own life - while my mother has achieved great material success, when I was born she was 18 and single, and we were on welfare for the first 4 or 5 years of my life. I also worked at an elementary school by the Farragut Housing projects in Brooklyn while I was in grad school at NYU, where I got to observe a lot of mother-child interaction in a largely poor, African-American community. I also listened to a lot of colleagues who would tell me things like, "black people would never say that in front of white people," and stuff like that - the playwright Marcus Gardley was a great help when we were both at The Lark. I also took a lot of inspiration from authors like Toni Morrison, Octavia E. Butler, and George Saunders, as well as various nonfiction sources, including documentaries.
The first summer you were at the O'Neill with your play 1001 was also the second summer led by NPC director Wendy Goldberg. What changes, modifications, or growth happened during the interim conferences?
I think Wendy (who started in 2005), and Preston
Whiteway, Martin Kettling, Jill Mauritz, and the many other people working there have done a pretty amazing job of righting the ship. Playwrights are thankfully shieded from these kinds of details, but the problems the O'Neill was undergoing have been pretty well-publicized. I don't know enough to say where the problems came from, or even what they were exactly (other than the fact that they were financial in origin), but it was clear from my experiences in 2006 and 2008 that things are much more stable now. It's a process that was clearly underway when I was originally there - but these
things take a while.
Other than that, theater is an extraordinarily social art form, and so the experience is very often shaped by the people there. I'm very lucky to have had a number of close friends in residence in 2008 (some of whom, like Irish playwright Ursula Rani Sarma, actor Daoud Heidami, and props master Scott Melamed, I had met in 2006).
An integral part of the O'Neill experience is the month-long residency of the playwrights. What on earth did you do all month long?
Wrote, read, went to the beach, drank, went bicycling, looked for places to get real food, emailed, downloaded music.
Where do you go from here?
I'm opening another show, Maria/Stuart, in Washington, DC - it's starting the season at Woolly Mammoth. I'm also developing a new play with Clubbed Thumb in NY, a process that will include some of the actors from the O'Neill (some from other projects). After that, 1001 is going up at Mixed Blood Theater in Minneapolis, and there will be a student production at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where I'll be teaching a workshop.
What do you think are some of the finest opportunities for playwrights in
> the US right now?
Well, I'm pretty partial to the O'Neill. Other than that, I love the Soho Rep Writer-Director Lab (which I ran for three years) and had a blast at Portland Center Stage's JAW/West Festival. The former has an
open submission process but looks for very, very specific kinds of work, and the latter is invite-only, though. In terms of open submissions, New Dramatists is an amazing organization, and I've
always wanted to go to Sundance (but never have).
How do you answer the oft asked question, "Where do you get your ideas?"
I steal them.
What's a recent good read that made you rethink or inspire your work as a playwright?
Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk, a truly amazing piece of criticism. A few other must-reads for playwrights are Story by Robert McKee, The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, New Playwriting Strategies by Paul Castagno, The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri, and the film criticism of Slavoj Zizek.
If I had to pick ten playwrights with whose work everyone should be familiar, they would be: Shakespeare, Chekhov, Brecht, Beckett, Churchill, Paula Vogel, Maria Irene Fornes, Mac Wellman, Naomi Wallace, and Suzan-Lori Parks.
I'm on a puppet kick right now. At the O'Neill they have some pretty inspired puppets and puppet art around the place, and they host one of the finest puppetry conferences in the nation. What do you think about puppets showing up in serious plays like Vogel's LONG CHRISTMAS RIDE HOME or larger pieces like the work of Julie Taymor?
Great, I'd like to see more of it. I recently turned my play Moloch and Other Demons into a puppet play, though that hasn't seemed to increase interest in it. I have a theory that really uptight older rich people hate puppets, which makes me love them even more.
Where do you recommend a fledgling playwright set her/his sights?
On whatever makes them happy. There's really no other reason to do this - a lot of people will try to make you feel like they're doing you a huge favor or that you owe them something because they're
working with you in some capacity, but that's almost never true. Work gets difficult sometimes even under the best of circumstances, but there's no reason to suffer through anyone treating you badly or to do something you're not enjoying. Life's too short and the rewards are far too meager. If you want to get an MFA and work at commercial or nonprofit theaters, do it. If you want to produce your own work, do it. If you want to write poetry or screenplays instead, or a comedy video on YouTube, or go to law school, or do community theater because it makes you happy, do that.
Who drew that caricature of you on your Facebook profile (it's pretty awesome)?
The amazing
Neil Numberman - his website is www.neilnumberman.com.
