An Interview With
P. Seth Bauer
The First Time Out of Bounds

The First Time Out of Bounds is a short play. What was it about this story that you felt was more conducive to the short format versus full-length?

My friend, Joe (Hamilton) Clancy at the Drilling Company, had asked me for a play about Honor, and I tend to do short plays for them. I didn’t necessarily choose the format of a short play for it but focused on the moment in which this story takes place. In fact this piece and another piece of mine I just did called Stop The Lawns may be part of a larger play I am exploring about American kids breaking taboos.

Where did you get the idea for it?

I’m embarrassed to say this one is slightly autobiographical, though the girl is more of an amalgamation. So I guess I got the idea from my own backyard!

I have been wanting to write about young people for some time and have just started doing so in earnest. Last week, I wrote a short play for a cousin of mine who is a young acting student in high school. She had called me up asking me for suggestions on where to look for cool plays that she and her friends could do. And it struck me that I couldn’t really think of many at all. When I was a kid acting, we were always playing parts that we would never play in the real world and in plays that had little or nothing to do with our lives. I played an American soldier in a British farce, the plant in Little Shop of Horrors, I played a middle-aged man thinking of killing his wife in Nightwatch, and a British artist in Shaffer’s Black Comedy and this was all while I was in high school. I think I wrote The First Time Out of Bounds partially in order to create a play that was much closer to exploring the kinds of problems facing the kids I knew growing up. The problems we faced were about how (and where) to have sex when you’re embarrassed to be scared of it; how to be intimate personally when you’re anesthetized by the fear of being un-cool, girls I knew were constantly dealing with the balance of whether or not to be a slut or a prude; whether or not to take drugs or be labeled a druggie; finding the courage to act out in random acts of violence – you know “kid stuff”! And in some ways, these subjects would all be taboo on a high school stage, and yet they’re the very things that kids are thinking about. Or at least I was thinking about.

The First Time Out of Bounds won the New York Innovative Theatre Award for Best Short Play. How was that experience for you?

It was a bit of a surprise to be honest, and I didn’t know that the award ceremony would be so official and such a to-do. But it was a great night with an incredible blend of new people making theatre, and people who helped create the theatres we’re now working in. I think we were all a little amused to see each other there, and even more surprised that nobody had put together an Off-Off Broadway awards ceremony during the past forty years. I forgot to thank the Drilling Company in my speech however. Thank you Drilling Company!

What came first: your writing or your involvement in theatre?

I was training as an actor and I discovered part-way through that I loved rehearsals a lot more than performances, which bored me after a half-dozen performances doing the same show. Also I had a bad habit as an actor of trying to act a scene rather than just my character. I was also rightly accused of ‘acting in my head’ whatever that means.

Your first play, 16th & Mission, was written at the Eugene O'Neill National Theater Institute, and led to some very interesting opportunities for you. Could you tell us a little bit more about your time at the O'Neill, and about the doors it opened?

I went to National Theatre Institute to study acting for a semester. It’s a phenomenal program as it really immerses you completely in to the world of theatre and training. You’re living on this lovely campus on the water, but there really isn’t anything to do other than train. They schedule you in such a way that you work harder than you ever did before and there are no other distractions so you really get an immense amount of work done. The main thing is you learn then and there, not everything you need to know—but whether or not you’re going to make a go of working in theatre professionally or not. Most of my friends who were there decided at the end of the semester to drop everything and pursue this dream or to be sensible and take up welding.

My first playwriting teacher was Ernie Schier, who was the lead drama critic for years at the Philadelphia Inquirer and helped create the National Playwrights Conference. We all had to write a play, didn’t matter if you wanted to be a playwright or not, and I had never seriously considered it. He was a rather intimidating person at first, not particularly friendly, with an extraordinarily dry and cutting sense of humor. In some ways, he was hoping to weed out the bulk of kids who he knew were never going to be playwrights in the first place. One day when I was at the grocery store in town, I spotted him in the paper-back section of the Piggly Wiggly browsing through romance novels and I sort of stalked him and followed him to the parking lot. I asked him if he wanted to get a cup of coffee. We went to a diner and smoked dozens of cigarettes while he peppered me with questions about my life and I could tell that he was really trying to see if I had the kind of life that would make a good one for a writer. After an hour and a half of questions about me, we just got the check and left in separate cars without explanation. The next week, I was desperately trying to print out a scene for writing class and was having severe printer problems. A number of kids came back to the dorm saying Ernie wouldn’t let them in to the class because they had been late. I panicked, not quite knowing why but mainly because I didn’t want Ernie to think that I was blowing off the class. While the printer strained away on my little scene, I took the time to write a passionate letter to Ernie explaining not only about my printer but why I needed to be let back in the class and how important it was to me—because I wanted to be a serious writer. I wish I still had the letter now because when I finished it and my friend delivered it a message came back “inviting all serious writers back to class.” And I’m pretty sure that’s the morning I decided to be a writer.

Are there any writers that you draw particular inspiration from?

Oh sure, but the list isn’t surprising. When I was first beginning to write I became obsessed with the plays of O’Neill, Shepard, Mamet, and Caryl Churchill. Samuel Beckett has always been important to me. (More recently, the plays by my friends from University of Texas are very inspiring to me, particularly the work of Lisa D’Amour and John Walch.) On occasion, I’ve been accused of being Pinter-esque or Albee-esque, which is both praise and chastisement simultaneously. The main thing I culled from these writers has been about focusing on a people’s need to be where they are while simultaneously wanting to get out of it. I think that’s why family works so well onstage – we all recognize the rules of family even if the family doesn’t resemble our own, and we all long for that cozy belonging to a group of people which may be our own tormentors.

You've lived all over - New Hampshire, California, Maryland, South Dakota, Ohio, Texas, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Has that influenced your writing at all?

That’s an interesting question that I’m still very much exploring. When I first started writing and studying those playwrights who came before me I panicked—they all seemed to come from places which made great partners, even characters in their plays, so that they felt like duets between writers and places —Williams and New Orleans, Mamet and Chicago, O’Neill and New England, Pinter and London, Shepard and The West. And I had no true sense of place. Most of the places I lived I never truly felt like I belonged anyway, except maybe New York. But now I’m finding that maybe my estrangement from New England may actually be my sense of place. I’ve begun placing some plays there and the characters are all very ungrounded in those places which has kept the location active. That’s even true of The First Time Out of Bounds—the boy doesn’t have an accent, doesn’t know where to go, where he belongs or what home is.

I understand that another one-act of yours, The Back of Your Fingers, is being made into a film. Tell us more about that.

This is a play that I wrote for a wonderful actress called Dena Tyler, and yet she has never been able to be in the play for various reasons. It’s a play about two lonely strangers who meet in a motel room – she wants to be swept off her feet and he is tormented by his own demons and cannot find intimacy. Last year, it was produced at Abingdon by the Sounding Theatre and at the Jewel Box by Playwrights/Actors Contemporary Theatre, and it played in the Samuel French Festival. But now finally, Dena is going to be in the film adaptation along with another wonderful actor Darrell Larson.

What's next for you?

Well tomorrow, The First Time Out of Bounds and Stop The Lawns are opening up in Germany at the 100 Degrees Berlin Theatre Festival which I’m thrilled about. My adaptation of Iphigenia has some productions coming up, both here and in London, and it’s being published by Algonquin Productions in their upcoming anthology. I’ll write some plays for my friends at the A Train Plays, the 24 Hour Play Company and the Drilling Company. And I am hard at work rewriting my new play, Early in the Mourning, which is about sitting Shiva with my old teacher’s ghost and his parents in Newton, Massachusetts. We worked on it last summer at New York Stage and Film and have been developing it at the Lark and other places and it’s really been going well. And yes, it’s a family play set in New England.

Interview with P. Seth Bauer was conducted by Michael Criscuolo February 2006.

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