THE FOUR OF US Playwright Itamar Moses Discusses His Creative Process
Playwright Itamar Moses - The Four of Us
Playwright Itamar Moses grew up in Berkeley, California. His plays have appeared at New York Theater Workshop, Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater, Portland Center Stage, South Coast Rep, Florida Stage, Milwaukee Rep, and elsewhere. On the eve of his new play The Four of Us debuting at MTC, Itamar sat down with MTC’s Literary Manager Raphael Martin to chat about his work, influences, the creative process and fertile theatrical partnerships.
RM: Where did the idea for The Four of Us come from? It has a very true-to-life tone.
IM: It came from a couple of places. After my earlier plays Bach At Leipzig and Outrage, which took place in different time periods and were intentionally arch and theatrically heightened, I wanted to go totally in the opposite direction and write something really naturalistic, with characters who were more-or-less like me. I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to put that directly onto the page. In terms of what subject matter to do that with I wanted to work with some of the things that were actually obsessing me. I was beginning my career, I had had a little bit of success and peers were having various degrees of success as well. It was a complicated relationship where the people who were inspiring you artistically were also competing with you professionally. That seemed like a good metaphor for all kind of things that had to do with growing up. To me, the fact that the play is about writers is almost incidental. It’s about the struggle to maintain that childlike sense of wonder that made you want to be an artist in the first place, while also growing the adult skin that’s necessary to live in the adult world.
RM: I think the idea of celebrity is part of the play as well. Is that something you wanted to specifically address?
IM: I think that it’s less about celebrity and more about the public sphere versus the private sphere. Good writing comes from a place that’s intensely private; then you put it out there and the response is public. Writing honestly seems to involve ignoring the things that are inevitably on your mind: who’s going to see this and what are they going to think of it? Especially in a form like theater which is a live performance for an invited audience. The notion that you’re writing a play so that the script can then sit in a drawer is pretty ludicrous, but you almost need to have that attitude in order to write anything authentic. I never completely buy it when a fellow writer says they don’t care about what anybody else thinks of the work. That doesn’t make any sense to me. Because if you cut yourself off from risking judgment you also cut yourself off from the opportunity to share. But at the same time it’s enormously dangerous to allow worrying about what reaction you’re going to get to become the driving force behind what you’re doing.
RM: Can you speak a little bit more about how The Four of Us compares to your other plays? Celebrity Row is about real life domestic terrorists, for example. Do you change your creative process based on the subject matter?
IM: I think I’m still figuring out what my process is. Really broadly speaking there are two categories of plays that I’ve written so far. There are plays like Celebrity Row, where the characters include Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber, or my new play Back Back Back, which has characters based on real baseball players, or Bach at Leipzig with its cast of minor musicians, in which the real historical or biographical facts are a kind of scaffolding, providing some formal boundaries to work inside of, and which I can then discard when they are not useful anymore.
RM: And The Four of Us?
IM: In a play like The Four of Us, or my play Yellowjackets, which is about the enormous public high school I went to in Berkeley, the characters aren’t historical figures, but they are based on something. They’re based on me, or people I know, and in those cases the factual or biographical building blocks are things I experienced firsthand. So, in a way, both kinds of play are the same kind of play. It’s just two different doors into the same room.
RM: Who are your writerly influences? What plays are you reading and seeing for kicks?
IM: I try to read and see as much theater as possible. If it’s good, if it’s bad, there’s always something to learn. There’s something to be gleaned from everybody. I also think we happen to be living at a particularly exciting time for contemporary playwrights. There are a lot of really brilliant writers who are writing great things. I’d be willing to bet that in ten or twenty years people will look back at this period and there will have been a large number of really exciting playwrights who were beginning to create their bodies of work. It’s a peer group I’m honored to be a part of.
RM: Let’s chat about Pam MacKinnon, who’s directing The Four of Us here at MTC. You’ve worked with her a couple of times. Such a partnership seems pretty rare for a relatively young writer such as yourself. What’s that on-going collaboration like?
IM: I’ve worked with a small number of directors several times each. My experience has been that I find a collaboration that works and I sort of stick with it. I suspect that it frees up a lot of space because I trust Pam so much and the play is in very good hands with her. It frees up time I would use to otherwise worry. You can just focus on the work itself. So, to sum up, my radical opinion would be that having a director you trust probably improves the quality of the work. With Pam in particular she has such an innate understanding of what I’m trying to do. I have very few memories of having to explain to her what I mean by something. She seems to just understand the play. The Four of Us and Bach at Leipzig can’t be any more different, but she has a very deep understanding of both.
RM: And how does that on-going collaboration affect your creative process generally?
IM: Let me say this: I think there’s a ceiling on how good a play can possibly become when you are alone at your keyboard. You can tinker forever while staring at the screen. As soon as you put a play in the hands of actors and a director and you hear it out loud the ceiling goes up, particularly if you are willing to take in the new information you are getting. That continues to be true at every stage: when people begin to rehearse and when designers get involved. As we well know the collaborative process can also overwhelm or kill a play or at least move it in the wrong direction, but it’s also an opportunity to improve it. I don’t try to make a play perfect at home, alone. You get a really strong sense of that point when no more meaningful changes will take place until the time you get into that rehearsal room. Having good collaborative experiences sharpen those instincts about what those possibilities are.
RM: I imagine you can rub the really good, interesting work away if you keep fiddling by yourself…
IM: Yeah! In fact I think there’s a second draft phenomenon where your second draft is much worse than your first draft while you are hopefully on the way to a third draft that’s better than the first. There’s a thing that happens with the second draft where everything that was unsaid and subtle in the first draft you make over-explicit because you finally know what you are writing about. And then in the third draft you take it all back out again. That seems to be an almost unavoidable process.
