The Playwright Interviews Himself

Jock Doubleday

jock@spontaneouscreation.org

You're very handsome.

Thank you.

Do you feel that your looks have in any way made up for your lack of success?

I'm not sure.

What is your main inspiration for writing plays?

Truth in the center of a labyrinth.

How did you come up with the title of your one-act play, "Do Actresses Dream of Laminar Flow?"

It's a take-off on the title of Philip K. Dick's short story, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

Which became "Bladerunner."

Right.

What is "laminar flow," exactly?

Lack of turbulence. It's a physics term.

Do you enjoy physics?

No.

What do you enjoy?

At the risk of sounding like a personal ad, I enjoy walks on the beach, intelligent conversation, making up bumper stickers . . .

Bumper stickers?

Yes.

Can you give us one?

"THE BODY IS REDEMPTIVE."

Why haven't your plays been produced?

Fifteen years ago, I sent my first play to every contest in America. I received two replies. The first was a form-letter rejection. The second was the following: "Your play cannot be considered because it is not about America."

What was your play about?

America.

What did you do then?

I wrote ten more plays.

What is art?

I remember being in a classroom in Lawrence, Kansas when Allen Ginsberg was asked the same question by a student. His answer was, "Art is a three-letter word -- it can mean anything you want it to."

Was he right?

I think Ginsberg's answer was a huge cop-out, especially for someone at his level.

What do you think art is?

Art is a three-letter word with a very specific meaning. Artists have an intimate relationship to uncertainty. They dwell in not-knowing. Their work is therefore spontaneous. Yes, they work within certain cultural bounds, but within those bounds they are free. Free to do what? To take off their public masks and delve into their true natures.

True natures?

The true nature of every human being is the pre-cultural, spontaneous self -- essentially the child that lives within. This opens a can of worms because it is obvious that art takes cultural form. You need language, actors, an audience, and some sort of ritual space to put on a play. So from the outside, a play looks like a cultural creation. But a play has its own organic being, even if it grows within culture's framework. The being of a play is the collaboration of the true natures of the writer, the director, the actors . . .

The set designer? the lighting designer?

Of course. When Ginsberg wrote "Howl," he translated his true nature into words. He became transparent to a creative spontaneous flow, and he recorded that flow in hipster poetry, the cultural art form du jour. How he became transparent is another question. Was he on drugs? Drunk? Who knows? Who cares?

Many artists turn to alcohol. Do you drink?

Alcohol tastes like death to me. That's probably why a lot of people drink it. But I have a few miles more to go before I sleep. . . .

Is art therapy for the artist?

There is no doubt that art is therapy. But art does conventional therapy one better. Conventional therapy deals only with the past. Art allows the artist to enter into the past, the present, and the future simultaneously. When creating, artists live in a timeless realm, in exactly the same way that shamans live in a timeless realm. In fact, artists -- not doctors or priests -- are the shamans of Western culture. Artists engage the story, feel the story, and then relate that story to the tribe, whether through paint or music or words.

The creation of story isn't an intellectual exercise?

It seems to be, especially in the case of writing. But it's not. It's emotional to the core. Words, paint, musical notes -- all of them sit on waves of emotion like seagulls.

Are your characters you?

Absolutely. There's nobody but the artist, whether you're a writer or an actor or a musician or a painter. But every artist, every person, is a crystal with many facets. Each has an infinite repertoire of internal moods -- characters -- on which he or she can draw. It can even be said that there is no such thing as character. Behavior is subject to change depending on circumstance. People snap and go postal, or they suddenly become enlightened, or they simply choose to live a different way. You often hear of people experiencing a huge sense of relief when they move to a big city, because they don't have to keep up the hometown facade. A person's character changes, even on a daily or hourly basis, when the environment changes.

The main character in "Do Actresses Dream of Laminar Flow?" is a young woman who thinks the reason she's not getting parts is that her breasts are too small.

That young woman lives in me. She set up house years ago.

Many of your main characters are women.

It feels right to me to use female characters to express my deepest yearnings.

Why?

Nobody yearns like a woman.

Who is your favorite actor today?

Nicolas Cage. His courage and dedication to the craft are much to be respected.

Favorite actress?

Juliette Binoche. As Tereza in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," she manages to make herself seem awkward and plain. That's quite a task. Or maybe she actually is awkward and plain, and in all her other roles she makes herself seem graceful and beautiful. Either way, she's magic.

Would you ever go out with an actress?

One approaches an actress as one approaches a horse.

In what sense?

Have you ever approached a horse?

Have you ever been in love with an actress?

I've fallen in love many times, often during the audition process. Actorly talent -- the ability to reveal the true self even while fashioning it for an audience -- is the ultimate aphrodisiac. But betting on a horse and riding a horse are two different things.

If you could have only one play with you on a desert isle for the rest of your life, what would it be?

It wouldn't be privation for me to do without the vast majority of art created since Neolithic times. I wouldn't miss 99.9% of my culture's productions, dramatic or otherwise.

Shocking.

Only if you believe in the god of human history, the god of culture. Culture has no authority. Yes, we can build on the past, and we do build on the past, and we build fascinating things. But are we building something that's worthwhile? I'd trade ten dumptrucks full of modern art for five minutes in the presence of a Paleolithic cave painting.

Are you a Luddite?

I don't think that's the question. I think the question is, "Is the world going to hell?" And if you look at the world and you answer that question honestly, I think you have to say yes. Do you know how much depleted uranium is sitting in the sand over in Iraq, courtesy of the U.S. government? Enough to make it radioactive for several billion years. It is not nice to make the cradle of civilization radioactive for several billion years. And guess what, many of these radioactive particles are airborne. Every organism on the planet is going to be affected by that material.

Are you a back-to-nature writer?

There is nowhere to go but toward nature. Pre-technology cultures know this, have always known this. Modern culture is false promises. Unfortunately, art, which is supposed to be revolutionary -- which is supposed to break culture apart to show us its faults, its hypocrisies -- immediately gets assimilated. We'll hang this pretty picture of "The Last Supper" above the couch . . . Art, no matter how much it shows the truth about culture, becomes mere entertainment. That's how strong culture is. And that's precisely why artists must continue with unflinching hearts to try to break culture apart with the cultural tools at our disposal. We must use culture against itself. That's what artists are for. It's an awakening when we do so.

So again, if you could have only one play with you on a desert isle for the rest of your life . . .

I would write it myself, in the moment. I would let the hot sun burn the pages white. I would let the wind blow the words onto the page. I would let nature guide me. Each of us has to write our own desert island plays. Aren't we all living on desert islands? Aren't we all that alone? You don't need pop songs telling you you're not alone if you're not alone. And what is the one thing that you need to survive your solitude? Not technology. Technology is the creator of our aloneness. You need nature, the ground, the soil. The Bible had it half right. We are clay. Is there a God on a cloud watching us from a distance? No. Are we clay? Yes. And that is how you live on a desert island, by bowing to nature, by saying, "I am clay and I will work with what I am, not against what I am."

What are your favorite books?

The culture-killers. The books that haven't been, and cannot be, assimilated by Technoworld.

Can you give us a list?

The Continuum Concept, by Jean Leidloff. Lila, by Robert Pirsig -- he also wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Crack in the Cosmic Egg, by Joseph Chilton Pearce.

Only three?

I forgot The Tao Te Ching.

No other books?

Well, it's two weeks till doomsday. How many books can you read? If you're a speed-reader, try The Pursuit of Loneliness, by Philip Slater, Summerhill, by A.S. Neil, Underworld, by Graham Hancock, Sexual Personae, by Camille Paglia.

Paglia is a controversial figure.

And the greatest social critic of the twentieth century. She was asked in an interview if she was worried that the Internet might cause people to lose their connection with each other. She said no, she was worried that it might cause people to lose their connection with nature. Sexual Personae's first sentence alone is worth the price of the book: "In the beginning was nature." Camille's politics are her only weak point. She believes, as we are taught to believe, that democracy is good, whereas in fact democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding who's for dinner. Here's a bumper sticker: SATAN LOVES DEMOCRACY. The word "Satan" means opposer. Democracy creates groups of people that oppose each other. Look at our nation today. We are split apart on so many issues. Difference of opinion is not the problem. Difference of opinion is natural and good. The problem is a government that makes some of those opinions law at the expense of others.

What are you working on now?

A play called "Uncertainty." It takes as its premise the idea that when we acknowledge that we don't know anything, when we acknowledge that culture is by and large full of shit, when we acknowledge that our lives are based upon gross supposition and magic, when we graduate with high honors from the School of I Don't Know, we are in the best position to live. Do you know what a blade of grass is? You think you do, because you graduated from the School of We Know Everything. You think a blade of grass is a collection of parts named by scientists. It is nothing of the kind. As Pirsig makes so clear in Lila, you can't stand outside of something and turn it into names and say that you know it. Objective knowledge is a farce.

Who's your favorite modern playwright?

Sam Shepard.

Why?

May I diss Mamet as an intro to this?

Sure.

Here's my one-liner on Mamet: "David Mamet's plays have caused a sensation in an age of sound and fury, but they won't be remembered." Mamet's plays are, very simply, incomplete expressions of human truth. In Mamet's plays, the feminine principle is either a pallid ghost, as in Speed-the-Plow, or completely absent. Mamet's plays suffer under the weight of male bodies piled on top of one another, all aching for mama but deluded by mammon. The reason Mamet is so maddening to people, even to people who think he's great, is not that he's a male chauvinist (he may be one -- I neither know nor care), or that he uses swear words by the cartful, but that he takes on the great themes without truly facing them. Oleanna is a great beginning of a play about love. You didn't know it was a play about love, did you? That's because Mamet doesn't give you the ending. The ending of Oleanna is a scene in which the main characters meet by chance in a park, a year or so later, and tear off each other's clothes and do it like animals while declaring their undying love for each other. Mamet never gives us a hint in this play that these characters are attracted to each other. But unless these characters are attracted to each other, why should the audience give a damn about what happens between them? The play becomes merely political. Mamet's plays lack depth, and he attempts to make up for it by having his characters yell and flail their arms. His plays also lack nature. All great plays deal with nature, but there is not a scrap of nature in Mamet's plays.

When you say nature, are you talking about trees?

I'm talking about nature rather than culture. I'm talking about creation rather than re-creation. I'm talking about the feminine principle rather than the masculine principle. I'm talking about water, which has nowhere to fall, rather than the Tower of Babel, which is constantly crashing down. Mamet's plays are maddening because his characters keep talking and talking and talking and not noticing what's around them, as if the universe were made of words. In Ecclesiastes it says, "a fool's voice is known by a multitude of words." Keep talking, and you stand a chance of being gored by a bull or crushed by a boulder or sucked into the sky by a tornado or drowned by a deluge of rain. Only a fool disregards nature. If you want to read a playwright who takes the issue of nature by the horns, read Sam Shepard. And remember, I didn't say "solves" the issue of nature, I said "takes it by the horns." Shepard's plays are shot through with nature. His name is Shepard, after all. The shepherd stands exactly halfway between culture and nature. This is another way of saying that the masculine and feminine energies are balanced. For this reason and for other reasons, but mainly for this reason, Shepard is the greatest modern American playwright. Mamet as playwright isn't even a moth circling Shepard's flame. He's a page ripped out of the Torah and folded into a paper airplane and tossed through Shepard's flame. You can see him on Shepard's opening nights flying helplessly off into the dark abyss of nature, burning.

But don't Mamet's plays simply reflect the truth about our nature-distant culture?

Mamet's plays do reflect our nature-distant culture, but culture is not Truth. Nature is Truth. Culture is only a set constructed against the great backdrop of nature. You can't say you've dealt with the world if you've dealt only with culture. The world of nature is vast and mysterious. The world of culture is miniscule and wearisomely knowable. Nature goes on forever, culture stops short. The set is taken down at the end of the show, and the end of the show is inevitable for every culture. And this is one of the things that great art is supposed to tell us: that culture is temporary. Shelley's "Ozymandius" is a perfect example of art that speaks the truth about culture. In Shelley's poem, the great Ozymandius is no longer remembered, though he had been "king of kings." His statue lies broken and buried in desert sands. Mamet doesn't see the desert, or anything natural around him, because he is too busy carving a statue that he thinks will forever subjugate nature. Mamet said in a 2001 Face to Face interview with Jeremy Isaacs that his main ambition is to shoot a deer for sport. Yes, it's true: Mamet's #1 fantasy, literally, is killing a deer. So far, he has not been able to kill a deer, not because he has any sympathy for deer, but because he's just not that good of a hunter. So not only is Mamet's idea of manhood narrow, he can't even live up to it. But more important, only someone frighteningly far from nature would want to enter nature with a gun. Only someone unable to empathize with our animal kin would say that his greatest achievement would be to end the life of a fellow creature for sport. That desired animal blood is almost certainly a mirror of Mamet's emotional wounds. And I feel sorry for him, because he undoubtedly is in pain. But the truth is, if you're that cut off from nature, your plays are going to be only half-plays. The only deer you'll find in Mamet's plays are plastic ones on the front lawn or in some junkyard being bickered over by men. Do you remember that scene from Starman in which Jeff Bridges brings back to life the dead deer on the hunter's car hood? That is a beautiful scene and one that Mamet probably does not have the ability to write. To Mamet, the only good deer is a deer in the sights of a rifle. This is who we have writing the most lionized plays of the last two decades. It's a terrible problem for American theater. What we need is a playwright who allows nature, the feminine principle, onto the stage. Is the feminine principle sweet and loving? Sometimes. But nature is not just sunshine and butterflies. Largely she is chaotic, dangerous, death-dealing. Nature is the stormy sea upon which humankind rocks, the thundering sky against which men and women must define themselves.

But don't you love Mamet's words?

I can't stand this idea that Mamet is a great playwright because he can write dialogue, that he "has an ear for the way real people speak." Who cares? A play is an opera, a sonata. Mamet's plays have one note: grit. The whole oceanic flow, the surging movement, of a play is missing in his works. One leaves Mamet's plays empty. There's no emotion in Mamet, only swearing. In Oleanna we have two people who Mamet stages as angry at each other but who in fact are simply two ships completely missing each other in the dark night of past frustrations. We have amorphous frustration masquerading as deep anger as this play's main dramatic component. Frustration is the main theme throughout all of Mamet's plays. It is absurd for Mamet to be lauded as a playwright, because his plays are fantastically narrow expressions of human experience. His characters are pinched caricatures of human being. There are no female bodies in Mamet's plays, only females dressed up and bound in male language, language that is coughed out of their mouths like dry toast. Mamet's females' lips are pursed and dry. Their yoni juices are sucked out of them by acrylic pants suits. In interviews, Mamet places himself in a long line of word-drunk prophets and sees himself as the uber-prophet of a hyper-literate age. But it is precisely because of his word allegiance, his word worship, that Mamet is a playwright whose plays will be forgotten. Sure, Mamet writes good dialogue. He may even staple his manuscripts together neatly and lick his envelopes with grace. Mamet is a good playwright within the word-world he's created. But why all this gushing acclaim for work that should be merely golf-clapped for? To make myself very clear, it's not that Mamet isn't a good writer in his small corner of the universe. It's that he has been lionized out of all proportion to his contribution to the craft. I guess that's enough on Mamet. As for Shepard, words don't do him justice.

Any words for the actors out there?

Method acting is the toast of today's theatre world, and for good reason. But Method is only a small piece of a very juicy pie. Acting is not just recalling particular scenarios and emotions from one's past. It's taking the totality of one's past and the totality of one's dreamed future and being that totality in the present moment. Acting is being. The stage is one of the few arenas in society where one can truly express oneself, where one can truly be. Do you know how important that is? Do you know how important that moment is when someone walks onto the stage for the first time and realizes, I'm free?

Not completely free. They can't fly.

They don't need to fly. They just need to be free enough to engage and re-enact the self that culture has tried for their entire lives to crush. They'll feel like they're flying, then. No wonder actors think of the theater as home and of their fellow actors as family. Isn't home supposed to be the place where you can be yourself? But home, in our culture, is often the place where you feel least free to be yourself, where, if you speak the truth, you are shouted down and shown the door. Is the theater valuable? I think it is. In my opinion, there is no greater treasure than that sacred, empty space.

A bumper sticker for the road?

THOU SHALT NOT BE OTHER THAN YOU ARE.

Thank you.

Thank you.