MTC produced the world premiere of Liz Flahive’s From Up Here in association wih Ars Nova . Liz is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Department of Dramatic Writing. Her plays have been produced, workshopped or read at NYU, Williamstown Theatre Festival and Naked Angels. From Up Here was featured in Ars Nova’s Out Loud Reading Series and was subsequently developed in their Next Step Workshop. Play Development Associate and Sloan Project Manager Annie MacRae sat down with Liz to discuss the steps leading up to her exciting Off-Broadway debut.

AM: When did you first begin work on From Up Here?

LF: I started the first bits of the play my senior year of college. It began as a ten-minute and continued to grow in a very unfocused way. I was having trouble finishing the play after I graduated from NYU. Luckily, Jenny Gersten motivated me to finish it by telling me she'd consider reading it up at Williamstown. I finished this uneven first draft and thanks to Evan Cabnet, my director at the time, the reading went okay. So I kept working on it.

AM: How did your collaboration with Leigh Silverman begin?

LF: We had a reading at Ars Nova in 2006 and a couple days later they decided to produce it. Since Ars Nova traditionally pairs a new writer with a more established director, they suggested that I think about working with someone more experienced. I suggested Leigh, thinking there was just no way. My friend who worked at the Public had snuck me into the final dress rehearsal of Well, which she directed and I loved it so much. I sat in the back just weeping and trying not to be seen. Luckily, she liked the play enough to sign on to develop it.

Leigh and I have a great mind meld. I can stop in the middle of a sentence and she knows exactly what I'm saying. She's very good at helping to refine my impulses and translating them into actionable things. She's a dramaturgical wizard—smart, analytical, and compassionate. You can drive yourself crazy as a writer, circling a problem or idea. Leigh came in at the right time and asked the big picture questions. I trust her so completely with the play.

AM: You and Leigh workshopped the play at Ars Nova?

LF: I rewrote at least eighty percent of the play in that workshop. It was a really transformative moment. We were working with lovely actors and had the space and the time to get a lot done. With real support, I felt comfortable making a bigger mess, pulling scenes apart and putting them back together. I rewrote a ton and the play took a leap forward that I didn't know it was capable of taking. I didn't know I could rewrite that much that fast without the whole thing crumbling.

AM: Was the play always called From Up Here?

LF: No, it was called Pass You By for awhile, which was a lyric from a song I liked that seemed to encapsulate Kenny. But it was a bad title. My husband helped me brainstorm a bunch of new titles when I was in a panic, actually. I'm terrible at titles.

AM: What changes have you made over the course of the rehearsal process?

LF: I've made a bunch. The rewrites in the room have come very naturally. It was really important for me to write my way into this family. I hate hearing any sort of exposition, anything that feels clunky so there's a constant chipping away at the text. Because when you're a family, there's none of that. People talk over one another and don't clarify things. There's a lot of writing it all out and then taking it mostly all away again.I'm pretty particular; I score the script to indicate the exact overlapping. When I'm writing I have to rock back and forth to find the place where someone would naturally interrupt. I try to take away anything that feels overly manufactured.

AM: Do you make changes in the rehearsal room or at home?

LF: A bit of both. I like the energy of making a change in the room. There are two kinds of rewrites I'm doing. When it's just a line edit or smoothing something out for the actor I change it right there. But I do larger structural changes at home. I've thought a lot about how the scenes play physically. There's a real choreography that's been in my head so it's exciting to hand it over to people and let them figure it out.

I think there's a feeling when a writer is in the room with a new play that on some level every line's negotiable. In truth, there are many things I'm absolutely not going to let go of. But there are many things that change for the better when you start to cut away some of the fat.

AM: How has it been working with Tony Award- winning Julie White?

LF: She's a comic genius. She could recite the alphabet and get a laugh. But she doesn't simply play for laughs even though she gets them. She has incredible instincts, true depth and great timing. She's very comfortable working on new plays and has a great ear. She's able to keep a lot of pieces in her head and track ideas and questions the same way I do. And she's very nice.

AM: How has your experience been working with the design team?

LF: I keep looking at the set model and I just can't wait to see the actual set. For me, I think it'll be just like when the kids in Goonies go down that waterslide and land in that cavern and then they finally see One Eyed Willie's Pirate Ship and start splashing around. For any who haven't seen Goonies, it's this really exciting moment.

I had a very strong idea about what that kitchen should look like and that it should be the most fully realized set piece. Set Designer Allen Moyer really understood exactly what kind of house I was talking about. It was exciting to talk to him about the texture of the countertops and the color of the cabinets. You learn a lot about this family from the look and feeling of this kitchen.

AM: Tom Kitt is composing the original music and some of the songs of the play.

LF: Tom's awesome and has let me be very involved in his process. And that's really exciting for me. When I first met him, I made him a mix cd of the music I'd listened to while I was writing. I felt like that might be helpful so he could know my musical taste and get a feel for the kind of tone I liked before even talking about what the play needed specifically.

AM: What was the genesis of the play?

LF: Growing up a moody kid had something to do with this story. My teenage years were rough. I had a really hard time in high school. I have great, loving parents and still it was such a struggle so I can't imagine what it would have been like if they were awful. Regardless, one of my happiest pictures of high school is on the last day, just being absolutely done with that place. When you're in it, it feels like it's never going to be over. From a dramatic standpoint, it's a time that's so fraught but also so funny due to this utter lack of perspective. And I thought it'd be interesting to have a kid and a parent in crisis at the same moment and see how to play that out through the play.

AM: In the play, you see the strains in many different relationships—the step father with his children, a marriage, two sets of siblings.

LF: There's chaos, for sure, but I didn't want it to feel antic. Teenagers think they're hiding everything and don't realize everything's on the surface. That not speaking speaks volumes louder sometimes. The main teenaged character, Kenny, has a word he says more frequently than anything else. And it's "...yeah…". Playing a teenager is about finding the difficult and specific balance of hating people for being alive and hating yourself. It's great to see all those young actors onstage fully inhabiting these spaces.

AM: It must be so exciting for them to be originating a role at this stage in their career.

LF: The whole collaboration feels surprisingly natural. Ars Nova is a young organization and MTC is a seasoned one and they have worked together beautifully to bring this production to life. Leigh is an established director who has directed a ton, I'm an emerging writer who has written very little. Julie's a seasoned pro and Tobias is a young actor who moved to NYC very recently. And even though a lot of this collaboration was a product of luck, circumstance and timing, it feels fortunately balanced.