John Patrick Shanley & Stephen Adly Guirgis

[Applause] [Music] my name is Steven Ali Girgis I'm a playwright and actor from New York City and we are heading downtown across the bridge to Brooklyn to visit mr. John Patrick Shanley Oscar winner Tony winner the surprise winner Bronx Hall of Fame John is the author of like 25 or more plays including Danny the deep blue sea doubt he's the screenplay penner of moonstruck I'm really excited to go talk to him I was introduced to the Shanley's work I think I just like stumbled on the play and it was Danny the deep blue sea and I read it and in the long run I changed my life reading John at the age I did gave me focus that was absent in my life and I know I'm not the only one so it's not a stretch to say in some cases that his plays to save lives [Music] one component of who John is as a writer is he's a truth teller whether you like the truth or don't like the truth he's brave enough to lay whatever it is on the table for people to take it or leave it alright mr. Charlie welcome thank you thank you feel free to run him up Thank You Man Oh didn't didn't your son take that photo yeah he did my son Nick took dad and down in Del Rio Texas Wayne was on a trip investigating his roots I'm as talented yes he is oh I see you got some awards in a nice non showy place but yet they're here what do we got here you got an Oscar Tony a Pulitzer now what's the little book next to it I think it's just a little book Oh [Music] memoirs of Casanova one of my favorite pieces of literature it's I cried but it was over because it basically stops in the middle of the paragraph because that's when he died really yeah autobiographies you know the real genuine article yeah they you never get to finish them [Music] this is the room where I do work nice yeah you can distract yourself with the Williamsburg Bridge and sit in some kind of economic chair and my economic keyboard do you have any objects here that I always have to have around I have a many objects I always have to have a piece of this hardwood around since I was a child my brother brought it home from Morocco that kind of wood and it's always been a great thing for me since nice lapis lazuli turtle and various rocks many rocks where the rock may be from paulie's Islands not that different pawleys island it's that I like these rocks yeah this is a moon rock I thought cuz I think this really does look like the moon so we'll have a Bronx walk of fame with a name just I was with you I know member I split my pants I wasn't wearing underwear yeah and you gave me your underwear gave you my underwear and a bond like that it's never pro-life long it's yeah here's another this is a rock but I also use don't fear I'll prop up on the door and the wind blows through it it keeps warmer papers from go home it's nice Rock yeah is it you know it reminds me of beef fat that's part of it all right you ready for some penetrating questions and I want you to break through all of my defenses so tell me how did you end up as a playwright this is something that you suspected or never suspected what was that process like for you well I certainly didn't suspect it I mean I grew up in the Bronx and I'd never met a playwright I never met anybody in the arts but I was always writing I was writing from the time was about 10 I wrote poetry and little stories and stuff like that and it was there like a family history of writing little poetry no there was nothing my father was a meatpacker my mother was a telephone operator I'm the youngest of five children I'm the only one ever to graduate from college and have my family except my father red was a kind of voracious reader of all so it's a different stuff but I was the only one who became a writer or wrote and that was from the beginning was congenital mmm and how did it evolve into playwriting well after I got out of the Marine Corps I'd gone to college for a year and dropped out and I went back to NYU and I liked writing so I would take any writing courses they had and the only one left that I hadn't taken was introduction to playwriting so I took that and as soon as I started to write dialogue I realized that this is what I was going to do mmm I could say something about that time that I could still say now which was I had a gift and I couldn't control it so I started writing plays when I was about 23 just experiments really and they were mostly produced in small theaters around New York but nothing ever came of any of them and I guess in retrospect I didn't want anything to come with them I wanted to I needed to wander in the this strange overgrown garden called off-off-broadway yeah you seem to exude you know a reasonable amount of confidence and and uh self-assuredness but I wonder like what have you wrestled with what in the process of becoming a writer has been your biggest struggle it's almost all struggle it's almost all in this sense I mean sometimes I'll do something without a thought in my head that turns out to be really good yeah like down uh you know I just sat down and wrote down and I made a few changes in rehearsal but basically it just appeared you know but it appeared out of use struggling on a conscious level mhm and then meanwhile you know this is two narratives going on all the time you're unconscious narrative and your conscious narrative and your my consciousness anyway is what this big and my unconscious is enormous and I am the steward of my unconscious i am i work for it it does not work for me and it is made that apparent on many many many occasions so I struggle with structure storytelling I wrote a play about three or four years ago that I did up at New York stage in film that Vassar called the Danish Widow and I got into rehearsal with that and very quickly in rehearsal I realized that I had violently overwritten the plan hmm which shocked me I'm like shouldn't I by now know when I've overwritten but what plot is I've always said that to me is the biggest mystery why something is moving the story forward and why something isn't for some reason is very hard for me to decipher move on on occasion like why isn't this part story and why is this part story mm I did a play quote Defiance have been having theater club play about the Marine Corps about the military back in the 70s and when I got into previews I looked at the play and I thought this place starts three scenes in and then it was really good but that's too late you know it has to start in the first scene and I thought that in equal parts I found that upsetting and really fascinating and defines followed out um did you feel pressure in the follow up like no I mean I knew I was gonna fail so you know you really did yeah because in other words I might not think that the next play is gonna fail right but I know I'm gonna write a whole bunch more and that you know my batting average is probably 40 50 percent at the most and let's get on with it you know like what I learned in high school and Cardinal Spellman in the Bronx was I could not control the fact that I was gonna fail some of my courses but what I could control was I can fail all of my courses and then I'm in charge and so I just went ahead and failed everything and then I was free and in the the vast expanse that failure provides then you can really succeed I mean this sounds like it's a philosophy that worked for you but wouldn't it be able to say like no you are in control of you don't have to fill any of your classes if you just do what the is supposed to do yeah but in other words I was not that person so you were aware that you weren't capable my unconscious was incredibly powerful and it simply was not going to sit there and listen to the algebra teacher right and so you know I was gonna be reading Lord of the Rings under the desk or in the life of Ivan Denisovich or Oliver Twist or whatever the hell I was reading that week and because I very much needed an education but it was not the education that I was being provided and yet you know some years later your valedictorian NYU it was a different era of my life well in a different house well I'd gone in the marine corps and I come out and much more disciplined and much more focused and one of the great things about the military is you give up all control of your outer life which creates a freedom inside mmm it's like being in a certain kind of monastery and so when I got out I had it in my body to get up at a certain time and and that I would go right to work on something and so I got up and I rode for three hours every day and then went off to my job and so then when I went back to NYU maybe a year after that I just kept to practice up and I would ride all my papers and everything I get up at five o'clock in the morning and write a write for three hours and then go out for a three-mile run and then go to school you know and my day my productive day was done by nine o'clock in the morning and the rest was gravy so I had a really good time in college and I had a 4.0 for the whole time I was there so different but but so you had success right out of the gate and in different periods of your your life in your career you have experienced success on out on a really high level pretty young you know winning an Oscar winning the Pulitzer Prize you know winning a Tony you know you've gone through what have you learned from success and what pitfalls have you stepped in or learned to avoid along the way winning is easy in other words when you win I remember when I won the Oscar I was a second to last category so I had to sit there through three hours waiting for my category and then when they called my name I didn't know up until that moment I might do I think I'm gonna win this who do I think I'm not gonna win this and then they called my name and I was shocked and I realized that I had completely prepared myself that I was not going to win and I was comfortable with that and then as I walked down the aisle I thought this is easy winning is easy and everything else is hard so it's a fun day it's a great day I wouldn't have missed it for the world but you know it's like when I graduated from NYU and I was valedictorian of all the schools of the University and I spoke to you know an audience of 5,000 in Washington Square Park on a PA system that would have been good frayed off Hitler and a great day you know and then I stayed at NYU for another year as a teaching fellow and halfway through my master's I stopped one day I went I'm educated and I left and I became a bartender a brew burger on 34th Street and all of the sort of trappings of you have been so successful fell away and I was completely impoverished and obscure and fighting to get through the week in a way that made some kind of sense I'm writing my little plays and putting them on to complete failure for a decade mmm and that's the norm yes and then after all of that time I did Danny in the deep blue sea at Actors Theatre of Louisville with John Turturro and June Stein and when at the end of that performance and the whole audience stood up and started cheering and openly weeping and I did too I thought this is what I was after I was after I wanted to do a play that got this kind of reaction I wanted to do a play that brought the whole audience and a discerning audience to their feed uh Nomura's orbitally hmm and then I thought I'm 34 that was my life's goal what now right and that was really interesting and freeing I was freed from the servitude of trying to make that happen I'd made it happen hmm and so now you know now what was I gonna do and other things presented themselves like making a living and then so what was that like for you well I am I had the first straight job I ever had which was working for drama display service as the person who handled their professional rights for plies mmm and I did that for a year and then I quit to go and do Danny when it came to New York and yeah I didn't make any money doing Danny I made like $5,000 and I was that was about to run out and I got a National Endowment for the Arts grant for seventeen thousand dollars and I thought well I better use this money to write a film because if I don't in one year I'll be painting people's apartments again and so I read a bunch of screenplays and I watched a bunch of movies and thought how would you write this most specifically James Bond I was like how would you write this and then I wrote my first screenplay which was five corners which were great and you know I just thought about it and you know how do you do and I thought well let me think about my childhood and think about what I would like to photograph and the images from my childhood no dialogue that I remember that burned into my memory as things that I would like to see on film and so I came up with all of these images look like I'm a st. Bernard and no penguins that have been beaten to death and a fountain and a bunch of other stuff and then I was like now what story do all of these images suggest and I started to build a story like four or five scenes at a time I would outline like three to five scenes in advance just on a piece of paper and it would just be what the scene was gonna be and then at the end of the screenplay when all of these stories these parallel stories came together I percent ative because I didn't see it coming and yet I had been the engineer of it yeah and I knew I'd done something I think the first film to portray a son throwing his mother out the window well you know I asked my parents at one point if they'd seen my first film and my mother said no now I hadn't seen it so why didn't you go and see it and she said well I understand that a mother's thrown out the window in that film and I said yes and I thought I guess she knows talk a little bit about your relationship with your mother and and how you have been able or unable to sort of exorcise demons through you know the creative act and write you know I loved my mother and I wanted her to be happy hmm and she was never gonna be happy and I felt that what stood between her and happiness was her worldview which was that she saw the world as an utterly unmagical place and I saw the world as an utterly magical place and that struggle I took out of my home and into my life and as an artist I showed as many people as I knew how to that the world was a magical place and that that's a better way to see the world that you're gonna have a better experience of life if you see the world in that way and when I wrote my first screenplay I had a mother in there who had an utterly magical view of the world with a brass tacks son who've been driven mad by her denial of saying listen and finally he picks her up and throws her out the window after she finally has one moment where they share on the same plane and what he knows is it's never gonna get this good again so let me offer right now it's interesting I think what you described was like how you might have employed the idea of a mother mother it was it's not literal into your life but that you take something to put a twist in it and inversion in this and that makes it something completely different or I'm twisted I don't have to put the twist in it yeah the twist is there the problem that writers have is they get conventional they want to make believe that they don't have a twist in them right and that makes this writing flat if you don't mind like to go back to - Danny which was my introduction to your work and I've said it before I don't mean it Larry but you're my favorite playwright and and and that play just blew me away it still blows me away and so my question is can you talk just a little bit about how much where it came from how much of it was you how much of it you know where does where does autobiography and the imagination meet you know well you know I mean I grew up in this neighborhood in the Bronx and it had a lot of violent disaffected people and especially guys and guys who just didn't fit in anywhere and I felt like I understood these guys and I felt that they were sort of the outward embodiment of a lot of things that I felt Danny is a guy who works on a as a moving man on a truck and I worked as a moving man on a truck and I was the odd man out for different reasons than Danny is but I contained all those never extinguished fires of rage and alienation that I I grew up with I contained all those things and I'm really nowhere to put those things in daily life so I was very lonely in the Bronx I was very lonely after the Bronx and I dated a girl up there who I could just see tragedy written all over her and I styled the girl Roberta in Danny on her and I felt her you know there's some people and I know that you have this experience there's some people and you just go like I can conjure that person any time and they can talk forever and she was one of those people from me I could conjure and I tell me I could conjure Danny at any time for the same purpose it's sort of like that part in the Odyssey where Odysseus goes to the edge of the land the dead and one by one they drink from the cup of blood and they can speak for a time and to me in a way that's what playwriting is is you're surrounded by these hovering ghosts and if you give them a cup of your blood they will speak to you for a while and you can talk to a Kelly C or you can talk to Agamemnon or you can talk to Danny and Danny in the deep blue sea and and so if I'm a young playwright and I'm hearing these words and and I'm and I'm saying like what yeah there's no ghosts around me how do i what do I have to do to get the ghosts around me and how do I hear them speak what do you say to that well you know it's sort of like what a person is they're having that feeling they think there's no ghosts around them and everything else but if they stop and think about it do something and they hear a voice in the head and said that was stupid and that's an alien voice mm-hmm and it's probably the voice of their mother or father or sister or brother familial figure and one by one you need to cast those voices not out of your life but outside of you and argue with them and reason with them and kill them and bring them back to life again and one by one you'll realize that you are teeming with alien voices if you're a playwright yeah and you do have to have an ear but what is a good ear a good ear is that you can hear the voices that are out there and then if you're gonna be a good playwright you have to discern between in other words I'm a radio I can sit down right now and I can write a full-length play that doesn't mean it's gonna be any good but I can sit around and listen to those voices and then once in a blue moon go like wait a minute that's an interesting voice I want to follow that voice is going somewhere and I want to follow and see where it goes so again if I'm a young writer and I'm I'm trying to gain information I'm like okay Channel he said yeah I know that voice that he's talking about the voice of the critic or the voice of the mother and I can have an argument with that but how do I get past just having voices I think you I think it's actually a process of winnowing down the number of voices I mean we're living in a time of incredible noise you know and so why would you say I will now pay attention to this one voice or this one idea or this one question to the exclusion of everything else and let everything be drawn to that you know so people who very often want to write like a big play a big novel big movie that's like about America or is about it you know totalitarianism and it's paralyzing but if you write a play about a dog you know that you know the whole world will hover around that you can write about all of those feelings through writing very specifically about the dog and never writing anything that is larger just be very specific about you know what that story is that you're telling and let you know let the story be as big as it is don't try to make it bigger than it is off of that you have to recognize that it's not all about you in order to be a player and I know that an observation that's been made many times about William Shakespeare is that he's not in this place and it's really kind of true mmm I accept maybe Hamlet and uh and it's a tremendous strength no subject hemmed him in mm all of them freedom hmm he found a way that no matter who the character was that he was not inhibited that's what I mean by freedom when I was 22 I met Marshall McLuhan the great communications theorist and the way that he talked the conversation that we had suddenly made me free because he described like try saying statements he called them probes and I thought that's a great way to think about it and I don't have to be permanently wedded to anything I say I can try things on and see how far I can take them it reminds you is like oh yes yes you can write about anything in terms of like stages of writing and stages of your career I know Danny was received successfully so subsequent players received successfully as well I well you know the next play I did after Danny in the deep blue sea was savage and limbo and I thought that I had done Danny and so that now the door was open and no one wanted to do a savage and limbo except some kids who were just starting a theater company in at the Kip's Ian Vassar and they were the only people who wanted to produce that plane Wow and so we did it and because it was the inaugural season and they didn't really know what they were doing yet they gave us eight weeks of rehearsal and I had a stellar cast and we did it first up there and then we did it in New York City in Midtown and it was one of the most electrifying productions I've ever had and the audience went crazy every night and it got terrible reviews and I didn't care I didn't care I don't and that gave me somewhere in there it just doesn't matter and then I did the dreamer examines his pillow and again not one good word like in The New York Times hated savage and Limbo hated dreamer examines this pillow and then I got I did moonstruck and the New York Times hated moonstruck not one good word in the review and the basis of the criticism was this is not what Italian people are really like and then the movie went to number one in Rome and then they wrote a second review and said it was classic I never mentioned the first review again and that opened my eyes to something as well as Elizabeth Taylor once said there's no perfume like success and then I did italian-american reconciliation and lo and behold New York Times gave me a good review it's great you know the door doesn't open you have to kick it down [Music] so let me ask you this then when you see something new from somebody young what are the components that makes you go oh this person is a writer five good minutes you know I'm not looking for what doesn't work most things don't work and I'm not just about place people most people that you know most of them don't work but maybe there's one part that's really alive and operating and that's the part that interests me when I watch a play a film and respond to any kind of work of art I am looking for the part that works that's what I'm looking for when somebody talks to me about my work talk to me about the part that works because I'll know what you're saying I don't know you're saying ninety-five percent of this doesn't work but a part that does work is this I don't know if I've ever been able to like peek under the curtain and be like oh he constructed this why it always feels like it's coming straight out of the moment yeah and sometimes that illusion takes a lot of work I know sometimes it doesn't you know sometimes it does come out that way but a lot of the times you know the whole point is to make it natural and natural within the specific universe that you're inhabiting in other words Shakespeare it would feel clunky if suddenly they started talking in prose because he has chosen as his natural state right the state at the poet and you have to you know you choose your state within each play and then you've got to make everything natural to it and nothing new nothing should sound for instance like you're telling the audience something they need to know in order to understand what happens next but it should all feel like stuff that that's the way somebody it would actually just sort of come up in conversation about something else and finding that construction that feels natural sort of like emulating the structure of a crystal so that you can't tell the difference between the artificial crystal and a natural crystal you know I remember you once saying to me and no Steven you and I will never write a great tragedy because you said something like because we have the souls of a comedian or something no we have a sense of humor yeah true tragedy is utterly humorless utterly and that makes it very hard for the modern sensibility you know is there a great modern tragedy that you can that you can death of the salesman's pretty good pretty good in the last couple of laughs in it as a few but I you know when I was a young writer I did not like Arthur Miller because I thought he was one of these grey men from the 50s and that he was paternalistic and that he was holding forth the deep knowledge that he knew as an eminence and was sharing with me and I am Irish and I rebelled you know I cannot walk into a courtroom without feeling rage that there's a judge I just want to and the idea that somebody's sitting higher than me makes me want to burn down the building and so I felt that Miller was sitting higher than me and I didn't like that more recently I've revisited the material in going the guy was incredible he was incredible but there was a worldview in the 50s that colors all of those plays from that design and they're colored by the repression of the era in which they were fashioned just as you know Sam Shepard's plays are colored by the feeling of like pushing off all of that stuff you know it's and then this Shepard thing came to an end and then something else came in just like you know the commercial comedies that Neil Simon was writing were at first incredibly liberating and then became a prison that he inhabited and towards the very end because he really hung tough for a long where does Tennessee Williams for you fall into that continuum of the old in the new if I had a pic like the two giants for me would be a gene O'Neal and Tennessee Williams they both were poets of a different stripe and had experienced incredible emotional pain and found a way to metabolize it into something beautiful O'Neal news weird things about the theater about you know an experience that we all have as playwrights is that you go into a rehearsal room and the actors say the same things over and over again they're saying the script and they're learning the script and so they say the same things over again over and over again which is the same thing as prayer you know it's an incantation and that sometimes something comes down into the room and somehow O'Neal knew stuff about that we're alike in Iceman Cometh he could repeat over and over things that then deepened and deepened the more that they were repeated in a way that I find mysterious and very powerful and with Tennessee Williams he found a way and I would say a freedom to allow people to speak in poetry without you noticing hmm and to elevate the material in a beautiful elegant subtle way with the audience at the same time we could go that's poetry and yet I'm not in school mm-hmm this is like the birth of poetry this is in the early days back when Homer was around wine poetry caught on in the first place do you think courage can be taught or is it something you either if you're a writer if you have a desire to write your desire has to be stronger than your fear hmm and that chemistry chemical balance I don't know that you know there's something you can say that makes that be the case but I always think it's just very simple things like gonna die so let's get on with it mm-hmm you know this is it you know it's like they you know those chess games with the clock and their names it's somebody else's turn and so you got a certain amount of time to make your move and like let's get on with it and the people who are paralyzed they can't get on with it it's like it's your life clock's ticking now of course that could cause massive anxiety is it yeah there's no way but but what are you gonna do that's the truth of it because your work your writing that's one of the words it's courageous and that's what resonates for me and where did I'm just curious where did it come from I think that I certainly contained fear and faintheartedness and recognized that that was a very important thing for me to overcome because I admired courage when I saw it when I saw it in literature when I saw it in film when I saw it in life and that's who I wanted to be you know it's what they saved by Cary Grant Cary Grant got a vision one day he was Archie leach and he invented a guy named Cary Grant and he decided to become that guy and eventually he became Cary Grant and that's who he was and I liked that idea and I think that there's real truth in that idea that that is what happens to people that they either get a vision of who they want to be a positive vision and head towards that and it doesn't matter whether it hurts her it's fun or it's terrible or it's depressing they head towards that and eventually they become that what they wanted to become and I think that more people should do that I think and it doesn't have to be about writing they just should do that they should and people should help them do that when they're young um I understand from what I've read and saw that that in high school a sort of a seminal experience for you was seeing or working backstage on the production of Cyrano can you talk a little bit about what it was about that experience about that play about that character that you know turn the light on for you a little bit sure my brother Tom said it was you know stage crews fun and so I joined stage crew and I started building scenery and the production that they were doing with some Sara node2 Bergerac and it turned out this was going to be a legendary production and then the guy who played Sara know who was incredible he had that poetry in his soul and I would stand in the wings in the dark with these little lights and everybody having to be quiet because he's supposed to be quiet backstage so people can't hear you that are watching the play and listen to this extraordinary poetry and taken this story about a guy who was a freak and it was the toughest guy in the room and it was a poet and up until then my idea of a poet was not the toughest guy in the room and in that moment I saw that my persona that I had developed in the Bronx to survive and my soul which was the soul of the poet could Co inhabit the same frame and sort of found a role model yeah again that word freedom I found a way to be a poet and feel free about it and be something that people don't understand in this society that we're living in you know I several years ago I read something this young woman had written and I said you're apart and that's a big responsibility because you can do anything you can have anything you want you can do anything and I knew what I meant by that because a poet is like a nuke romancer who takes over the entire world and heaven and hell takes over everything you're a daunting and you get to you get to control the elements you know when I wrote my first screenplay about halfway through the phone rang and I stared at the phone and I was really honestly puzzled and I was puzzled because I hadn't told the phone to ring and that's when I realized I'd lost my mind and at the same time that I was engaged in an amazing and wonderful pursuit me and that thing that I discovered in writing that screenplay you can discover that in writing a play you have the power of life and death over everybody you have the color of the walls can change you can change you can do anything you have control of the physical the emotional the spiritual the psychological and the psychophysical now you can do anything and what's more socially you can kind of do anything because once you truly take on the mantle of a poet nobody can stop you because the world society needs poets desperately always does I'm not speaking is like some kind of educator who says you know the world needs poets what I'm saying is people men in children old people they all want you to connect them to something larger and they'll do anything for you if you can give it to them when you were watching cirno in the wings were you aware that you were having an experience that other people around you weren't having no you know in other words I did not know I existed I remember when I found out that I existed one was there and it was late it was but I was a Cardinal Spellman it was about a year later and I was I had just been suspended from school and I had just said in religion class that I didn't believe in God and I had failed all six of my subjects and I was going home with all three of those pieces of information on the same day to my mother who was not going to be amused and when I got to the corner of East Tremont and Beach Avenue there's a candy store and in the window of the candy store was a foil mirror hmm that was there for reasons that are unclear to me and I was walking by and I saw it and I stopped and I looked in the mirror and I spoke to myself and I said as long as you and I are okay the rest is gonna be fine and I made a deal with myself that day and I've kept the deal I've kept the deal I you know I experienced huge bounce of guilt and shame and everything else but never between me and me I know why I've done everything I've done well then how can you if it's not between you and you that how can you how can you experience shame if you're not experienced you say him over something you've done societal shame in other words I I would never if I was Robinson Crusoe one of my favorite fantasies ever I'm all alone on it on an island tropical island there's nobody else there and I've built my hut not you know fishing or whatever nothing I do would cause me shame it's the eyes of others that make you feel shame you projected out perhaps but if they weren't there you wouldn't do it interesting yeah because it's getting right to the heart to me of of a theme that you come back to in your writing and I remember sawed out twice but I remember opening night of doubt me and Phil watched it and I was like I think that this play in some ways is about John's attempt to justify or excuse any bad behavior does as long as the concept of doubt is a is a valid one then everything becomes well really what is what is shame and what is right and what is wrong is there any truth to that no no I mean you know uh the real you know the real the most central experience that I had that engendered the play was I went to a private school in New Hampshire and I was very troubled I was 15 I've been thrown out of a bunch of schools and I was very widely read but I didn't really get to talk about what I'd read much and I was violent and I was in this suddenly in this tiny boy school on top of a mountain in New Hampshire and a teacher took me under his wing and he protected me and he educated me was the head of the English department and he recognized that I was gifted and but he was a predator and he didn't prey on me mm-hmm all around me but not me and I didn't know that I sensed - all sorts of things but I didn't know that at all and I was in I think in denial about it because I needed him to survive in that school they would have thrown me out and then many years later there was a reunion that hadn't been a reunion in 30 years so I saw these guys as you know teenagers and then the next time I saw them as gray-haired men and at that reunion I found out for certain that he had been a predator and I talked to more than one person who'd been victimized and and he was there and then a year later I got a letter and it was from him and I looked at the envelope and I put it in my bag and I drove to my country house and I in lit a fire and turn on the lamp and sat down and I knew what the letter was going to say I knew the letter was gonna say that he was dying because I was psychically connected to him and I read the letter and that's what it said and he asked me to come and see him and I threw the letter in the fire and said I will not visit him even though I am grateful because he has done something that was too bad and I can't do that and that ambivalence and contradictory feeling about somebody who had been good to me but had done terrible things I couldn't I couldn't I couldn't reconcile it and so those questions surrounding that idea of that predator and how I felt about it had a lot to do with why I wrote down that and a changing world you know I grew up in a changing world the 60s I found to be in many ways catastrophic my neighborhood was destroyed in the 60s and it was basically swept away within five years of when I left and the nuns were going to be swept away penmanship was gonna be swept away classics departments were gonna close all across the United States so that was about all of that stuff it's about when you're in a situation where you sense and I did sense when I was 12 years old hmm this whole world is coming to an end and when I left the Bronx when I was 19 I took one long look back cuz I knew it wasn't gonna be there when I came back after the Marine Corps is there ever a scenario you can imagine where you would sacrifice the work and what you do for something else out of either necessity or or whatever well I made a decision a long time ago that my children came first and and also that my life comes first and the degradation of my work would be considerably less important the degradation of my soul that's pretty clear to me mm-hmm and you know I right now I've written for many years I can do something else in other words I would be exercising what would you do I would be exercising this which is to create a fact but I can do it in other ways in other words I could lose the part of yourself that feels heavy in many many activities I could paint and even though I have no particular gifts that I know of I'm like I think I could do something with that so there's other stuff that might satisfy it hmm but I am a born playwright and what does that cost me the world hurts people hurt everything that has to do with interacting with this mortal existence is painful and so the price that I'm paid as a playwright is you know I have my thing that I do at home that I might have a certain level of comfort and safety and exhilaration doing it but then I insist on taking it out of the house and putting it up in front of people where it will crash and burn in flames and I'll be really killed in public very painful and an absolutely necessary part of the process but if I were you know working in an office I would suffer more but I'd feel that the price is very low in terms of what I've gotten to do in comparison with a lot of other people about to do [Music] you

Channel: Dramatists Guild Foundation

Views: 7,785

Rating: 4.9699249 out of 5

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Id: cJOBPxAAfYA

Length: 50min 41sec (3041 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 06 2016