Playwright Edward Albee on creativity

this program is brought to you by Emory University the creativity conversation is a series of interactions with University guests faculty staff and students about the creative processes and how creativity enters our daily lives of inquiry creativity conversations take place live and many are presented on every iTunes U the conversation today is being taped and will be available on the iTunes site within a few days all Emory iTunes U content is free and available to the public but you're here today's moderator is rosemary Magee Emory University Vice President and Secretary no one has done more to cease focus and enliven artistic and creative energies on the Emory tennis changing the Emory landscape architectural and in forums conversations and centers of collaborative effort as witness of the kinds of forces rosemary habitually gathers let me announce that today's creativity conversation is co-sponsored by the 1913 the office of the provost the graduate school the Hightower fund Maggie Smith archives and rare book library the office of the Provost luminary series the creativity and art strategic initiative Emory College Center for creativity and arts the department's of comparative literature creative writing English French and Italian Irish studies built on the identity owners why why why all those people because we'd like to work together since he first onto the international stage with the zoo story in 1958 every Aldi has continued to challenge himself and us by never ceasing to write stealing himself against the bakeries of critical fashion he called the Zoo Story with the death of Bessie Smith he absurdist sandbox at American Dream and with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf in 1962 he stumped the establishment the pewter committee selected the play and then refused to honor it for perceived vulgarity of content mr. Hallman kept writing tiny elements a metaphysical bombshell delicate balance a play that the pewter committee felt it could honor he kept writing the formal experiment of box and quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong seascape the only play yet to win if you'll observe while the signing lines to see lizards adaptations of Carson McCullers Truman Capote Vladimir duboff james Purdy gold medal and drama from the American Academy and institute of the arts and arts and letters he kept on three tall women another Pulitzer Kennedy Center Honors a National Medal of the Arts in the same year he kept writing the play about the baby the goat in 2005 a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement and Edward Albee I have his personal assurance on this is still writing still gifting us with a satirical eye for peculiarly American falsehoods a heart strong enough to imagine the most savage confrontation of characters and to see hope there and an ear for the delicate music language that is learned funny eccentric violent and sharper than a knife in content and form of the most bracing of American writers ever please help me the welcome rosemary thank you very much Michael for that extremely generous introduction and thoughtful as well thanks to all of you for being here thanks to all of our many sponsors and special thanks to you Edward Albee for being our our guest and really our companion here at Emory for the past 24 hours or so very good as long as we don't have to discuss creativity well since you mentioned at first it's a concept I don't comprehend and I'm not sure it can be discussed can we straighten one thing out about the feeling surprise rejection if it was Afraid of Virginia Woolf it's a little more complicated and interesting even than you made it seem the feel of surprise jury was made up of qualified critics they voted who was the fate of Virginia Woolf the peerless surprise however I think it may still be true but I'm not certain the awards made by the qualified jurors had to be approved by some trustees of Columbia University 15 of them I believe which voted no now the New York Times blessed made some inquiries to find out how the voting went it was 8 to 7 by the way against giving the prize Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf they spoke to these 8 people who voted against it and discovered something very interesting five of the seven who voted against it had neither read the play nor seen it this gave them a kind of objectivity so that's the way that went but let me tell you I got far more mileage and the production ran far longer being denied the peel was surprising that every would have had they awarded at the price I just wanted to straighten that out very interesting we are here you're here in large part due to the celebration of the correspondence of Samuel Beckett which we had that celebration last night it's continuing this week and you have talked a bit about Samuel Beckett's impact on your influence on your life in your work one statement I've heard you make is we are all Beckett's children and in that most of us have well those of us who are wise enough to be there right okay the choice we have that choice and most of us have a complicated relationship with our parents and especially our fathers and I'm wondering if you see that in that statement we're all Beckett's children if you see that relationship is also being complicated for you well probably less complicated for me since I was an orphan and I had no idea nor do I still through my natural parents were back in the days when I was adopted you weren't allowed to find out than the adopting parents weren't allowed to know who the natural parents were and the natural parents weren't allowed to know who the adopting parents worth and the kid wasn't allowed to know anything so I never knew and so perhaps I needed a father so you adopted my back in the doctor Sam let's say I'm adopt me but it's really simpler than that as I said last night I will paraphrase what I said last night about Beckett that when you come across a writer quite as extraordinary an amazing and wonderful respected there there is no emotion advisable except prostrate gratitude to somebody was such a brilliant and wonderful writer and hey everybody wants to father like that now mind you I've been influenced by by other playwright yes such a no ever soften these long traditional Shakespeare no coward just about everybody but I think Beckett was able to teach me things about playwriting but maybe nobody other than Chekhov had clarity precision simplicity accuracy and humanity and how did you learn that did you learn it by reading the plays did you write it by it learn it by attending the performances well I'd read some of Beckett's plays when in 1958 I went to Berlin in Germany for the world premiere of my play the Zoo Story which happened to be happening in German the language which I had chosen not to learn and it was being done on a double bill with the play by Sam Beckett in the evening in in German not Mike the Zoo Story was called the saga shifter and the Beckett play was called das letzte bandha which turned out to be Krapp's Last Tape the play which I had not read but I saw that play it came first it was done before Zoo Story and it engaged me so completely that I was convinced though I didn't speak a word of German that I understood every single thing that was happening in the play I went back to England and read it and discovered that I had now a playwright that you can understand completely in a language you don't speak must have some virtues and so I seize it's a study that could work and learn the things that I just mentioned but Chekhov also also has the 222 most important twentieth-century playwrights I think perhaps and and I've kept studying I became a director as well as a playwright and I've directed a lot of his work and learned a great deal about both directing and playwriting and acting and just about everything else and audience response and everything from directing Beckett's work an amazing playwright and but I still don't know anything about creativity no we're not gonna talk about that thank you I think I've heard you say that Krapp's Last Tape remains one of your favorite plays by Beckett is that correct I think the two that I'm well I like so many of them it's hard to make a choice but the two that I think I have the most personal response to our happy days and and Krapp's Last Tape there's something wonderful in the letters last night my Beck had mentioned that he one of his books was finally published and had sold a couple of hundred copies which in the play Krapp's Last Tape you will remember Beckett translates as nineteen copies sold in trade editions getting known I think it's nineteen copies so what do you think he'd make of this this fuss were having the celebration were having in his honor and his work I've always thought that the theater would be a better place if I could go to any city in the world and find a production of one of Sam Beckett's plays open that's the way I feel about it I think we miss all so much to gain to and to enjoy from being in his presence as a playwright that he should be done everywhere all the time you guys are getting it going that's fine oh you know some people do pay attention to him but you don't find him on Broadway much though there is a production of Waiting for Godot which is in rehearsal now starring the extraordinary Bill Irwin and Nathan Lane not directed by Anthony page is a very good director we'll see what happens I don't expect it to run as long as Jersey Boys but you have written a bit about the subject of love in in Beckett's plays and some poets say or it has been said about poetry that all poetry is love poetry and I'm one about that in terms of drama in terms of lost yeah either through its presence or its absence well what can you write about the only two things to write about by from Jeff right and what happens in between and during and love yes of course love and loss so so let's talk a little bit about the subject of love and in love all in favor of it you are in favor of it absolutely excellent that makes two of us and especially in Beckett's plays and then I'd like to first talk of course it's impossible to write honestly about somebody that you feel nothing but put a treat for you can't possibly be objective and I'm thinking through bare Becca's characters is there anybody that does not possess the possibility of love no I don't think so either the capacity of being loved or more people possess the capacity of loving than they do the capacity of being loved of course so let's talk about happy days or Krapp's Last Tape the the sense of love as a presence there or as an absence I don't want to limit a discussion of bekatul to the concept of love necessarily because well that would that would be limiting happy days is about survival which I suppose is a form of love of being alive when he is a survivor you know why happy days is a two-act play by the way notice me I play those of you who know it was character winning in the first act of the play is buried up to her waist in a mound of Earth in the second act she's buried up to her neck in a mound of Earth that's why there's no thorough doctor what do you do next she'd be totally buried you were talking about survival survival being here is this woman who is surviving being alive the loss of so much in her life the fact that she may be just about the only person left on earth but she begins every day when the Sun comes up with opening her eyes say another happy day just for being alive being conscious right that that's such an important awareness let's take that a step further in in terms of being both a playwright as well as a director it seems to me that there's a there's a quality of both in your work in which you say about it the importance of that awareness of being alive and that that is the thing that keeps us you know both present and makes our life have a greater meaning Beckett once said when they everybody asked him why he wrote such depressing plays he said if I weren't an optimist I wouldn't write a because he believes the communication is possible not only advisable but possible yes but what I've learned from Beckett I've learned so much from the guy one of the things I learned by directing him even more than reading him I think is the relationship between drama and music he understood music absolutely he probably again more than any other playwright 20th century playwright than Chekhov he understood the fact that a play is sound in silence and a piece of music is sound and silence and he was able I learned from him to punctuate the way a composer know chase and I've learned the Beckett did this also in music a composer writes a quarter note and then he writes next to it a quarter note with the dot that's called a dotted quarter note you know the difference between the two a dotted quarter note has half again the value of the of the quarter note how do you punctuate last in a play because you learn the difference in duration between a comma and a semicolon and a semicolon and a period this may seem uninteresting to you but being able to punctuate the way a composer notates allows you to write so precisely and so carefully but nobody has to screw up your work because if they pay attention to what you've written they won't screw up your work you know nobody goes around rehearsing a Beethoven string quartets and the violas suddenly said excuse me I I don't like that progression there you know the D natural to the F sharp to the G I don't like that I think what I'll do and then tell us some other notes that he wants to do nobody does that with Beethoven people try to do it even with Beckett but they think that the play is an approximation rather than a very very specific statement of how it looks and how it sounds but Beckett was so precise and so correct in his notation I'll give you an example I was directing Krapp's Last Tape or Happy Days once I've directed so many of Beckett's plays and learned so much from them and at one point the character I think it's Happy Days the character Winnie has a line and then there's a stage direction two second silence parentheses and she has another line and there's another stage direction three seconds silence then another sentence well that's very interesting and we were doing that I had my actors had learned the difference between two and three and three seconds and they were doing it in the proper order I said I want to make an experiment I want you to do the three seconds of silence first and then do the two second silence they said why I said because I want I want to hear it and you know he did the three second silence first and then the two second silence and it didn't work that could move so precisely the difference between 2 seconds and 3 seconds he heard so precisely because he heard and saw his plays as he was writing them and he put down exactly what he saw on what he heard and that may be the most important thing I learned from him accuracy clarity and precision so when you're the director your job is to translate the play accurately and intact from the page to the stage interpretation well as long as you're interpreting exactly what the playwright intended that's fine but to play writes and composes do not put their sounds and silences and their value differences fast slow loud soft in there for their own amusement they put it because that's the way they want what they want to hear and what they want to see and if anybody can be as precise and as accurate as better than doing that you damn well better pay attention to it well the play is not going to be as effective so when you've directed your own plays and do you feel like you have a greater opportunity for poetic license shall we say or artistic room to develop the play or take the play in a different way well I don't let a play go in rehearsal for the first time until I'm pretty convinced that's what I want I'm not one of these playwrights who does four or five drafts of the play changing it from changing a pill nature III I don't write anything down until I'm pretty convinced that somewhere in my head I figured out the way it should go and the firt of the so-called draft that I put down is the play I go in rehearsal with and with the exception of a couple of cuts here and there that's what I open with so I don't do draft and so I don't run except in your head I don't love it into that problem I'm sure I'm doing them in my head as long as I don't know about it it's fine so when you take your own play into production you you you follow it exactly is the way it was written and I try to work with actors and directors if I'm not directing myself who respect the text yeah if we want to talk a little bit about we're not gonna talk about creativity but we might talk about my problem with creativity is like I don't know where it resides um everybody's different everybody's brain functions differently you know some people are playwrights some people are axe murderers they're even a few Republicans around and there are some people who are not content with having the same experiences that everybody else has but insist on on writing them down as something as poems as string quartets as as plays is that creativity I don't know the need to translate experience into something that could communicate to somebody else I guess that's creativity but I think like most black magic it's best not to carefully examined when you're thinking about a play or when it's developing in your mind even before you write it down do you have any awareness of how it's come to you does it come to you as a as a sound or as an image or experience or all of the above can you trace one of your plays back I'm not a didactic playwriting consciously anyway I don't sit around and suddenly decide gee now I've got to write a play about this of that no I don't do that I will discover one day when I'm wandering about theoretically minding my own business that a play is forming in my head how do I know that well there's some characters talking a visual image occurs to me which makes me realize that something's happening in my head can you give an example of that no in one of your plays what about know is usually is usually fleeting or I'll be at a recital listening to a pianist or a string quartet and all of a sudden I will start hearing people talking or getting a sense of some other reality taking place and the characters that you have in your stories they are they are they characters that are have come to you are they make a visitation to you or are they and also once the play is written do they stay with you do they continue to live with you and for example you have written you've taken at least one play and giving it a prequel over up here I don't like the term talk about that okay all right but giving it an additional use the same characters once I create a character I never forget the character and could probably go on writing about the character and that's like and I don't kill many of them in the place so I probably could but I don't for the most part for example what am I going to do with George and Martha at the end of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf I don't know personally whether or not they have the guts courage really to go on with their relationship I don't know I know they can are they able to I don't know and therefore I'm not gonna find out or nothing to write about such as I don't know the characters I write all of our characters we playwrights all of our characters come we even use ourselves or people we know or we invent better to invent because if you base the character on somebody you know for a real person you're limited by how that real person would respond and so if you invent the character you can do any damn thing you want you can have them behavior the way you want them to so for the most part I invent or think I do anyway and I let them talk I realize until I know my characters very well I don't dare put them in the play so what I do I sometimes like wait a year before I get to know the characters fairly well and I will do improvisation I will go for a walk and to think of some situation that can't be in the play possum can't possibly be in the play and improvised dialogue on that situation with two or three of the characters and if they can behave three dimensionally and that if they can handle themselves in an improvised situation then I think I can trust them in my play it's a sort of playwrights version of actors improvisation and it works very well we you mentioned George and Martha earlier and in one of the statements of the play when the comments Martha says to him truth and illusion George most people don't that's the question I was gonna ask you how do we know the difference we get and we make whatever decisions we need to make most how much we're lying to ourselves of course you said that you're not a didactic writer but I've also well my plays are about things things happen in them and I and they may imply something though I hate the term what does a play mean it means what it says and any good play um but sure they're about something things happen to people in the course of them I mean can you write a play in which nothing happens to anybody no I mean somebody said about Waiting for Godot it was a play in which nothing happens twice but stuff happens even even with its excesses but I've also heard you say that your your plays are political well they're political in the sense that I think what I'm trying to do sometimes is hold a mirror up to people when I write a play and say hey look at this this is the way you behave this is the way you're carrying on if you don't like what you see why don't you think about changing because I think all of us whether we want to admit it to ourselves are trying to make people behave the way we think they should sort of messianic but we pretend it isn't so sure I want people to change and that's a political that's because I'm convinced that politics is determined by how we respond to consciousness and do you sense any change speaking of politics and the political landscape I am aware that you had strong feelings about the former administration and you sense any change in the fact that it was a criminal act and he wasn't even elected it was a coup d'etat why didn't anybody realize or say anything about the fact that was a coup d'etat really the death of democracy really appalling what troubles me is still a lot is the fact that they're a couple of things we don't educate kids in any more in our schools basically one of them is in the arts and the other is something that used to be called civics the way government is supposed to work and the nature of democracy and how it's supposed to function at its best we don't teach that anymore and so people come into the book polling booth with an amazing illiteracy and I'm surprised elections ever result the way they should illiteracy about government itself the way the way it's meant to function and our responsibilities as informed citizens you know back in the old days Jefferson and all those people thought the vote should be limited for to property owners and people who the read didn't get away with it but that's what that's what them no we don't teach people our responsibilities well let's talk about the other part of that that you mentioned and that is art they the ways that we teach or that we don't teach art you're a teacher as well as a writer and a director how do you teach art well my German I only teach I work with playwrights I mean you can't teach playwriting but I try I work with playwrights and and and I tell them what I work with other writers too sometimes but if you're going to be a writer you have to know a great deal about all of the other arts you have to know about classical music because the shapes and the shapes of classical music so relate to the shapes of the play or novel or short story or a poem and you have to know about about the visual arts too especially if you're a playwright because a play is a physical act as well as a heard act and you have to learn how the other arts function and how they how they work effectively and when they don't work effectively and learn from that to help your own work and so I have all my students playwriting students I have them go around listening to the Beethoven the Shostakovich string quartets and I tell them to begin every day listening to Bach Prelude and Fugue you know it'll clarifies and orders of the mind beautifully then I have them do that as well I pretty much do I listen to music oh great Jim yes sir keep going and I like beginning the day with a couple of preludes and fugues it's pretty good it's nice then coffee other things that you instruct your students and beyond the pale interviews oh I tell them good stuff like let me tell you first though when I do teach playwriting I insist on choosing my own students and they let me get away with it which is nice because there's some people that are very very good at doing clever imitations of other people and you don't see terribly much creativity there I would rather work with the work of a of a young playwright and the play is an absolute mess but I know there's a huge amount of talent there rather than somebody who was capable of doing a good imitation of somebody else's work and I tell them several things so you read the students work before they oh yeah I kind of thought I loved them in the class of course yeah then I choose the ones that are that I think may someday turn into real interesting playwrights because that's what we should be after not merely instructing people how to imitate other people does everybody notice how to do that or can learn very quickly you can't teach anybody how to be a playwright I can teach somebody how to write like somebody else but that's not the same thing you can try to push people if first of all you have to find out whether playwriting is what they should do because a lot of people think they're playwrights when they're really novelist or poets and so you have to figure out whether playwriting is really what you should be up to and then I tell them there are no rules first I tell them every time you write a play you should write the first play ever written by anybody that's the most important thing to do all of these rules that you've learned about how the artist meant to be structured they don't necessarily work I tell them how long should to play be it should be exactly as long as it needs to be this notion that a full-length play has to be something that goes on for two hours any play that is full its length is a full-length play I tell them people want to our plays for commerce only for the commercial reasons because people got to get home to the babysitter's after a certain hour and they didn't want to sit around for four hours I tell them that right the first play ever written and pay no attention to what you're told does if you're writing a two-act play there's the first half act half to be an hour and 10 in the second act 50 minutes which is conventional no I can conceive of somebody writing a two-act play where the first act is an hour and 55 minutes and the second act is three minutes if that works or the reverse if that works wonderful that's fine whatever works whatever you can whatever works and whatever is worth having work that's that's the second important rule your play better damn well be capable of changing something somewhere we're eliminating something that's in the darkness somewhere you have to be able to do that but all of these rules as to how a play should be structured how long it should be what did you do that they're ridiculous no I mean nothing happens in Chekhov's plays either except everything happens of course yes so so if you're if you're a new and young playwright how do you know when you've reached that moment of of something changing something it depends first of all and whether you are a playwright by nature this is just what the way the playwrights brain functions makes it different from a novelists brain isn't it interesting how few playwrights are good novelists listen Sam Beckett of course and and how many novelists are good playwrights I mean you know Arthur Miller's a pretty good playwright do you ever read his novel don't know Thomas Hardy was it was a pretty good novelist don't read his play and me James was a good novelist don't read his plays stay away from them you know she has Eliot first-rate poet though nobody seems to read him these days um a couple of his plays are okay but if he's had to make his reputation as a playwright not as many people would know the name Eliot today is do because he's such an important apology people are certain kinds of writers by nature I mean check over a lot of good short stories I still think but he's better as a playwright more important as a playwright so there's something in the DNA of the person that leads them it seems to be and the signup fees from the electrical connection well you have also adapted the works of novels into place yes I get three like the Truman Capote was trying to save a musical about Breakfast at Tiffany's and they gave me three weeks and it doesn't work I don't even want to talk about that okay well how about Carson McCullers in Bella with sad cafe she's from Georgia the three year novels one novell them two novels that i translated from the stage from the page of the stage myself where carson mccullers fell to the south cafe and james Purdy's novel malcolm and he just died James Burton yes James just dies unless he was 93 good writer poor guy I had a lot of problems in his life health and lack of acceptance and all and the third was that book off Lolita which I adapted into a play which was never performed a travesty of what I've written was put on stage somewhere but don't even talk about that one what I was trying to do with the adaptations was write as a play what the novelist author would have written had he been me and I've been him so I was trying to do what what McCullers would have done had she made it into a play here seems to think about ballads asad cafe which suggests to me that maybe I succeeded a number of critics in New York theater critics said of my adaptation of The Ballad of the sad cafe all we didn't have to do much here only did was take all the dialogue from the Battle of the sad cafe and put it on stage this told me two very interesting things since it's not a word of dialogue in Carson McCullers Ballad of the sad cafe first that they didn't know what they were talking about they hadn't read the book which you know same objectivity those guys that Columbia had and also that they would they were giving me far more credit than they thought because they thought that was almond the colors and written because I was trying to write a play that my colors would have written had she made her to play so I wasn't which I don't try to put my own personality into my work again I don't know what that is in my work the people sometimes tell me well this playwrights been influenced by you I'll go go look I don't get it but then again maybe that's because I'm so dead so I changed my styles and like so much I don't know anyway those were interesting experiments how did you do that how did you how did you think the way Carson McCullers because I took her characters and had them speak the way she suggested they would have spoken have they spoken so did you do this kind of improvisation that you referred to earlier with us a while ago forty years to people very much like my adaptation of James Purdy's Malcolm James Purdy and me and that was enough formation animus I was trying to make James happy right and the the my Lolita adaptation was never performed I don't want to talk about something okay some other thing got performed and I have to take the blame for it oh well that knows that's my last adaptation having said that next week I'll probably do another one said are you willing to talk about what you're working on now well I will tell you that I'm working on two plays one of which is said on Easter Island and the other isn't I don't think I want to say much more okay because you know what if you're wrong I think I know what's going on I don't know what they're about I never understand this concept what does a play about it's about two hours you know I don't get it play is about things things happening to people they're both there I don't know which one all right first probably the one not set on Easter Island I don't know they both weren't they both serious of course because all my plays are serious one of them's a lot funnier than the other maybe I'll write that one first I don't know how do you sustain this over time this is what sustain this creative energy this creative output this generation of material and ideas I'm a playwright right that's what I do that's what I am I am what I do and I do what I am I write plays I get I get ideas for plays in my head and I got to get them out of my head and so I put them down on paper have you ever have you ever gone through a struggle all the time when you were when you weren't able to write plays no I mean there's some critics who think this has happened too often no once I start something I commit myself to it and mind you some of them have been extremely unpopular but there's some of the better ones so what do you do there I've heard you say make the statement good writers to find reality and what I meant by that yeah that's what I was wondering too it actually goes back to something that's a pretentious rule are sorry yes well my question is if it's possible it's true maybe somebody else said it too good writers define reality my question is do they also change it do what do they also change it as a writer can you change reality well reality is all based on perception isn't no two people have the same one right you can change people's perception of things yes and all all perceptions are changed and become the same thing then I guess you have an absolute reality but until then it's all perception so you so to the extent that people's perceptions change through the act of reading or performing in or attending your place there's no you see there's no value in going to a play or going to a museum to look at a picture or listening to music unless something happens to you there's no point in doing it it's expensive and it takes up a lot of time I mean I don't understand Broadway at all because almost everything that happens there you come out somewhat lessened rather than made better from what you've experienced and it's cost a lot of money but unless something happens unless a work of art can do something to you and then make make you perceive things differently or more interestingly or learn something then you've wasted your whole time and I think the function of art is to make us more conscious of consciousness we're at a university and our job is obviously has to do with education of ourselves and students and is there a way you're the most important part of a formal education well I think everybody knows this I figured it out eventually for myself is to teach you how to keep educating yourself once you're done with your formal education that's the whole point of it yeah that's there's not much more to be said about that I'd like to talk about the arc of your work over time do you see do you see your work having shifted in in a direction or having a different focus or the interior landscape of your work I'll tell you I have a problem answering that question because one of the things I like least in the world is thinking about myself in the third person I don't enjoy that so I don't think about that much I don't think about my work that way I mean I've written 30 plays they're all different in a way right but they're all some of the same concerns but how is it change I like to think maybe my craft is more under control I'd like to think that maybe I've learned something about how to put a play together over the years III know that my mind hasn't collapsed yet I know that and that the plays I write now are probably as useful as the plays I wrote a long time ago they're they're different necessarily because I'm different I've learned a lot of things and I've forgotten a lot of things so about Louise Nevelson or I think in a conversation you had with her there was a statement that she made I think every piece I've ever done as a part of a big piece yes Louise Nevelson she was a good friend of mine and I went to I was doing the catalog for her big show at the Whitney Museum number of years ago 20 years ago I guess and I took her I didn't I'm a Luddite I don't understand mechanical things very well but I but I took a tape recorder with me to record what she said I wanted to ask her a lot of stuff about early influences like the influence of Taurus Garcia on her sculpture and stuff like that and I tested the device at home and it worked perfectly well when I got there and I put it down on the table in front of Louise and she looked at it wrote balefully but she didn't touch it she looked at it and she said oh that's interesting she touched it in the air I recorded an hour track at home and it was completely blank she was a witch well that statement that she made though about every every piece being part of a big piece she thought that everything she did she thought first of all she thought everything that she did was making lace even though she worked at wood for the most part she thought she was making lace and she thought that every piece that she made was a part of a somewhat larger piece that she was theoretically eventually making and toward the end of her life she did a piece called mrs. Emma's powers which was a huge piece and you could answer it and walk into it and walk around in it it was a structure made up of nothing but her work and indeed everything she did was part of a larger piece very much like mrs. M spells yes she's got the lace thing I don't know do you see your work in that way that all of all of the all of the pieces are part of a larger piece well I suppose they are since they're all written by the same guy yeah who doesn't seem to change his mind about anything I can't persuade everybody else to change their mind either is that true you don't change your mind about things I don't think so no not too much no no if you want to stay an optimist you don't okay well I'm gonna ask you one more question and then we'll have a few minutes for audience questions as well true but Geri and the do story says sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly you know even when I wrote that line I didn't know what the hell of man I think maybe I do a little bit yeah what do you think that means I'm well I think probably just an elaborate way of thing you know you gotta think about stuff for a long time before you can figure it out right probably all of them it's just Jerry being pretentious not me absolutely not okay so let's look there are a few people have been raising their hand I'm also aware that some people have four classes or meetings so I know people be coming and going but we'd like to continue this for a few minutes the reason that I didn't mention that American playwright him with a to playwrights and I mentioned I suppose I could go on and talk about people I thought were the most important 20th century playwrights for example and I guess I would say check of Pirandello rectification and Beckett which is not to denigrate the extraordinary quality about love the fantasy was in vanilla no American playwrights but I don't feel that they're important in the history of drama in innovation clarification is quite important I don't think that they changed the face of theater quite as much as business the guise of an invention engine it's interesting that you know between insulin Chekhov the patient what happened in 20th century drama we follow in finis end up with with Arthur Miller you follow Chekhovian never Tennessee would now and they're both right I sort of agree about it one evil when he said inspired plays something to the effect of not a bad play I just wish I had the writing challenge for damages III don't think though new possibly something along their journey in tonight particularly persuasive playwright half the time I have trouble telling one of his characters from another the exception of place was really really matter to family plays some of the very early ones the scene but I have that problem with with innocence ooh I think it's his most interesting play for me and it is arrogant and the other most interesting that's a human god up money dead awaken those that like a lot the useful ones in between I don't think much other as a follow-up to that question were about other emerging artists high-rise that you see I'm I resist naming my sweeter for favorite living playwrights because then I always end up excluding somebody else and turns out that I like even more I want to do our problem and our problem in the world theater it's not having enough good talents it's providing an environment for these goods to translate to play onto the stage accurate accurate so here's my question though you know there's a phrase lost in translation I mean lost in translation every translation is going to be in approximate so my question then is before you even intend to direct a play but then you're talking about two kinds of translation here if you take me to play you're producing in its original language you don't have to build through the second translation which is quite often a distortion from English into French fail from French into English that's one kind of translation I'm talking about translating the play as it exists without the second translation from the page to the stage no I absolutely understand that distinction what I meant was just the implication of translation itself implies approximation you know what I mean it implies taking something and then imagining what the playwright intended and then trying to put it on stage so I have to take it takes less imagining if the directory was go to the place all the so many clauses it just plays any good I don't care what's wrong with Allah does he play the probably needs all the help if I'm doing a production of Uncle Vanya that play doesn't need your help Uncle Vanya doesn't need your creativity as a director it needs your ability to translate precisely things exactly what would check off that had it mine so the only problem that comes up for me is quite often people feel that the translating a play from the patient stage can involve a lot of distortion a lot of change and this happens only in theatre because it doesn't happen in music and it doesn't happen in proofreading a normal for example but so using the metaphor of language that I was using earlier for translation it's about word directing a good play until you know both the language of the text and the language I think it helps if you're equipped to find your way from the page from the stage it's not the easiest thing in the world to do faithfully accurately with respect and there are awful are directors who I've been seeing an awful lot of really bad production oddly the fuel from a good place but if certain shekel and various other people well I don't think well now I'm gonna hold a mirror up to people the reality of what is happening to the people on the play I suppose I make the assumption that maybe this thing will be useful maybe helpful maybe but I don't think about that I don't worry myself on writing up like gee am I being useful to society here no of course not think about getting act 1 through our tools so I think yeah all I write is the reality of what is happening to the people that's all well good then again I'm convinced I saw you didn't act and also want you to correct I don't think you can act metaphors and if you have metaphors and symbols of your play and they better be very quiet and spell correctly feel like I've just seen a very fast jazz concert in terms of the way that she writes I don't know if they're really good and it's so called commercial theaters they better find it in small theaters where people are working because they they care about interesting theater and not to make a buck of the commitment the Commerce is doing terribly terrible things and there will always be playwrights even if they play playwright he has to be done finally in a small room somewhere you know in front of five or six people they'll fill be playwrights who communicated that particular way don't don't get trapped by what's happening through commerce an awful lot of not very good productions and not very good plays and that's the unfortunately becoming the standard by which a theater is judged tiny house I was wondering speaking of reflections and the future that play after after Broadway became of tiny Alice it was not in London it was done all over yours it received a number of productions and regional theaters around the United States it turns up from time to time and it's not one of my most performed plays and that may be reasons for that it's all right you know it'd be nice and everything I performed all the time you know I suppose it's still who was afraid of Virginia Woolf it's before more than anything else from the possible exception of the goat or who is Sylvia because people seem to like plays about go became famous for being famous and he got a lot of productions because it was famous not because necessarily was more interesting in tiny hours it isn't necessarily but the place become famous and they get a lot more production for the place and I'm something you just take away I get it speaking of adaptations how did you feel about the film adaptation of Who's Afraid of Virginia uh as Beckett said about something once better than a kick in the teeth about playwrights directors wanted certain you know they think that their ideas are more important or something I think that's kind of I guess I just wonder what your opinions are then about kind of like collaboratively collaboratively developed works or you know works developed by Jojo chickens to shaken that a lot of collaborative work with jean-claude sunny telly and various other playwrights and they made the pieces together and sometimes with actors Robert Wilson wrote about a couple of pieces when he collaborated with his scriptwriter boy barely because he didn't want the text to get in the way of his own visual Bateman but some collaborative work is quite a different matter there's a difference between creativity and interpretation and interpretation must be of the creativity of different ultimate values and in music many questions with the classical music nobody questions and it opening this question being in a place nobody shows two-thirds of the veining or hangs the painting upside down the only happens in theatre where the Plagueis performed upside down I don't understand why calabria say that what a different matter I just wonder what the difference in the product is between what you do and then the difference is if you are working with several creative people at the same time while working theoretically the same goal of making an interesting optical experience and I've seen that work sometimes you don't get much great literature others if you've got a lot of interesting visuals we have time for just a couple more questions he said that you prefer to invent characters than basing them on real people and I'm just wondering what do you think of the inventive qualities of sort of historical place and thinking particularly of Tom Stoppard's work and his use of you know interesting zahramay house women having characters that are real people but still there are theoretical limitations dealing with the real character and you know a great deal about the character you shouldn't lie which makes just about every historical character that he decides to write about more interesting than there were that's another matter tom is being highly creative they're making these people I think that we have the combination very rapidly certainly in my lifetime that produces bad theater because what we seem to walk you that's that's real that really goes to my answer but I wanted to make it a little bit more specific if I am right in feeling that way is it more the responsibility of the playwrights the directors the actors or is it a matter of those corporate commitments that have to have that theater has to have to survive it has to do basically with how were educated kids who go to school and every kindergarten and their teacher is wise enough to put reproductions of Jackson Pollock paintings or Picasso paintings on the wall for these kids to see before before they even know that they're seeing and maybe is playing some Beethoven these kids before they know abusing is really even know what they're hearing these kids are gonna grow up intuitively expecting more out of the Arts than people who are not educated in the in the arts when they're very ill that's basically a difference it's not that we're becoming enough we are becoming a nation of the uneducated basically and if we're not educated they want less than assured what happened and of course commoners have fries on what is most popular and almost always what is most popular it is not what is for this one reason my mother I didn't think with a proper education really proper education especially before kids are able to be told that the arts are something that shouldn't pay attention to I think if the education took place you find that the the inroads of Commons would be not quite so impressive they'll be there I'm not quite sure the President on that note on the transcendent possibilities and responsibilities to both art and education we're going to bring this creativity conversation if you will to a close and again want to thank all of you for coming and participating and especially the special thanks the preceding program is copyrighted by Emory University please visit us at Emory edu

Channel: Emory University

Views: 18,985

Rating: 4.9189191 out of 5

Keywords: Emory, University, College., Creativity, Conversation., Albee., Who's, Afraid, of, Virginia, Woolf., Beckett.

Id: E_JDV4JXAcE

Length: 69min 48sec (4188 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 03 2009