An Interview With
Kevin Doyle
The Position

Your play, The Position, deals with the anxiety-inducing ritual of the job interview. Was it inspired by personal experience or was it simply the context you chose to explore a larger idea?

The play was not inspired by an actual experience. My plays tend to start with an image of a stage picture that won’t go away. For The Position, it was an image of men in a waiting room dressed in identical suits and they all have the same name—and one man noticing this, and caring about this—but the other five not noticing and not caring. This difference between those that notice, those that care—and those that pretend not to notice or care. I think this difference was the start of the play. This image remained for several years and never receded. [Photo: ©2004 Gilmore Daniels]

The play was written during an anxiety-ridden period. But that anxiety had nothing to do with a job search.

Only after the play was completed and the development process started that I found myself living in the play. Desperate for a job and going to countless interviews. During the rehearsal process, everyone in the cast endured what the Sixth Man endures in order to work on the production. Maybe it was one of those instances of art predicting life instead of imitating it.

You run your own theater company, Sponsored By Nobody. What were you reasons for starting it, and how long has it been going now?

The initial reasons for starting it formally were simple. My first produced play, Styrofoam, was presented in the winter of 2004. It had been rejected by everyone – for four years. Four years! And it was a hit. People laughed. People got it. The production got extended and the play was reviewed favorably by everyone from The New York Times to The Village Voice to nytheatre.com. The play sold out and people laughed.

I just refused to wait another four years with a new play like The Position. Which was rejected by everyone in the world, too.

I don’t know what’s wrong with the people who read scripts. Its almost as if they are incapable of reading a play and imagining it as what it should be – what the German playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt described as a “composing with the stage.” Its not a work of literature, I mean not really. A play is a composition for the stage, not just words on a page to be read. The actors, the director, the production team—they’re like musicians in an orchestra, or chamber music. You’d be amazed at some of the rejection letters I’ve received. (I just got a few more in the mail last week!) I suspect they read plays like they would read a TV script or a screenplay. Maybe that’s what they’re looking for—easily digestible drama that looks and feels like “TV On Stage” acted by attractive people.

Sponsored By Nobody started without a name—just a core group of people I worked with in the fall of 2003 on two different projects – a performance of Michel Vinaver’s 11 september 2001 – and two one-act plays about the Iraq War. A combination of people I knew from Purchase College and from grad school. We picked up a few more people from other projects, like Styrofoam, and during the course of the last year—while working on The Position and the development of Not From Canada and W.M.D. (just the low points)—it all just crystallized into Sponsored By Nobody.

In 1988, Neil Young released a song called “This Note’s For You” which satirized corporate sponsorship in music. The song and video were subsequently banned all over the place – even though it didn’t have a single swear word in it. (Says something about who really pulls the strings, huh?) Well, the subsequent tour that year by Neil Young was called: “Sponsored By Nobody.”

Our logo is a play on all the corporate names and logos stapled to the bottom of your program – whether you’re at DTW or The Public or any arts institution. When did it all become sponsored by Altria and Target and Bloomberg? How effective can your art be when its sponsored by these folks? The questions and the answers are interesting to think about.

According to your company website, you guys don't have a mission statement, per se. Your "Psuedo-Statement," as it calls itself, states that the "American theatre has too many mission statements, too many manifestos..." It goes on to say that "Our role models are people like who have very little to do with theatre," and then cites the band Belle & Sebastian as an influence: "If we had to describe our aesthetic, it would be like characters from a Belle & Sebastian cover coming to life and deciding to speak." Is that the whole truth or is there more to Sponsored By Nobody's mission than that?

American theatre does have too many mission statements. A mission statement? What is that? What is a mission statement? A mission statement is a characteristic of the realm of business. A manifesto, maybe. If you’re going to talk about what you are planning to do, maybe cook up a manifesto. But a mission statement?

I think the people who are creating real art and new work don’t have time for a mission statement. They’re too busy trying to survive because no one is going to see their new work. Artists like Klee, Magritte or Wojnarowicz always just kept on working.

I love music and I love bands. I wish I could put my plays on a CD with cool album art (which is why I love taking great care in designing the postcards for our work). I wish somebody could play their favorite track from The Position over and over again somehow on their stereo like I’m playing “Anchorage” over and over again as I answer these questions.

I’ve never seen a mission statement on a Belle & Sebastian album cover; or on a Silver Jews record; or an Elf Power record; or on the new release from the Fiery Furnaces.

I’ve never seen a mission statement on a painting I love. Or a photograph. Maybe a critic’s essay will be on the wall of an exhibit, but a mission statement?

I don’t think Eugene O’Neill had a mission statement when he was writing Long Day’s Journey Into Night. And I’m pretty sure Samuel Beckett wasn’t carrying one around with him in post-war Paris. And I’m positive Sam Shepard didn’t have one in his back pocket when he stumbled into the cafe/theatres downtown. (I don’t think any of them had MFAs either.)

The mention on the website to Belle & Sebastian covers refers to that I get inspiration from painting/photography/sculpture/installations, rather than from theatre. That mention reflects that their album covers are very theatrical and I love it. Just as the paintings and photography I love is very theatrical, too. And don’t get me started on sculpture or installation art. I wish I could stage all my plays in a public sculpture or installation, rather than in a theatre.

You've mentioned both the Quebecois director Jean-Phillipe Joubert and the French playwright Michel Vinaver as being huge influences on you. How so? And, for our readers who are unfamiliar with their work, could you tell us a little bit more about each of them?

After 9/11 (the actual event, not the play), I lived in Quebec City for several months with my cousin’s family who have a house there. It was my first time outside of the U.S., and I did not speak French. Quebec City is not like Montreal. Its either French or nothing. Which was nice if one wanted to get away from distractions and focus on one’s writing.

While there, I stumbled upon a poster in the street for a new theatre piece called (in English) The Peach and Other Erotic Fruits. I don’t know why, but something about the poster just drew me in and I felt like I had to see the play. It was produced in a “found-space” above a youth hostel in downtown Quebec City, just inside the castle walls, by a company who called themselves Les nuages en pantalon. They were a group of friends who all went to theatre school together in Quebec, headed up by this young director, Jean-Philippe Joubert.

I was blown away by the production. I didn’t understand a single word of the language, but I understood what was going on at every moment during the production. Not only because of the beautiful acting, but the stunning physicality present in every moment. Jean-Philippe is a trained dancer, and there was such a precision to their movements and gestures. It conveyed so much to me non-verbally about what was going on in the play. It made me realize the importance of physicality in theatre, and that its not just talking heads in a room, but could be something more entirely. The physicality was an integral aspect of the stage composition, of composing with the stage. I was blown away.

I went back to see the production twice and had wonderful (if somewhat halted) conversations with Jean-Philippe and his set designer, Claudia Gendrau. I have been back to Montreal and Quebec to see more of their work, including their recent production of a new work called Satie. And again, the physicality is a key ingredient in their brilliant compositions. I wish New Yorkers could see their work. I am a major fan!

Who are some of your other influences and inspirations, artistically speaking?

The late American artist, David Wojnarowicz. Not much more one can say about it him, except his name. A stunning artist who worked in every discipline. Everything. Painting. Film. Sculpture. Punk rock. Essayist. Installations.

Slawomir Mrozek and Vaclav Havel. Those Eastern European writers wrote with such immediacy living under the Iron Curtain. They did not mess around. They didn’t have time to theorize or debate. They just wrote it. Then staged it in barns and people’s apartments. People in the West can learn a lot from the Eastern European writers from the Cold War—any artist who creates under restrictions/oppression. People in the West have never confronted their very own Western version which developed alongside the Iron Curtain at the same time. Our version isn’t harsh – it’s pleasurable, it’s amusing, we love our prison. Our version is a Huxleyan nightmare.

This is why I love the work of the French dramatist Michel Vinaver – as well as his late contemporary, Bernard Marie-Koltes. Vinaver gets right to it and doesn’t let up – he explores the structure of the corporation and the workers who inhabit it— the nature of advertising—the logic of the television program—our relationship to work and how it affects our relationship to each other. Vinaver’s play on 9/11 is one of the greatest works of our young 21st century. Its up there with Picasso’s Guernica and Heller’s Catch-22 from the previous century.

Koltes immerses himself in the carnal aspects of buying and selling just as easily as he deftly handles complicated international issues like colonialism and multinationals. A shame he died young. I’d like to see what he would say about Globalism in its current, crystallized 21st-century form.

Other influences? Don DeLillo. George Saunders. David Berman. Kurt Vonnegut. Nathalie Sarrutte. Par Lagerkvist. There’s so many. I read a lot in my late teens and throughout my twenties. Paul Klee. Whatever is the most recent art exhibit I’ve seen. Whatever new CD is out on Merge or Matador or Rough Trade.

When did you first become interested in the theatre? And was it different from your inclination to start writing, or did the two coincide?

I hated the theatre for most of my life.

It wasn’t until I turned 21 and took a course in Modern British and American Drama. Even then, nothing we were reading really jumped out at me. During the course, I came down sick with mono and was home for weeks upon weeks. Eventually read every book in the house, and finally turned to my course textbook (edited by Harold Clurman) and read all the plays in the anthology that were not British and American.

Friedrich Durrenmatt’s The Visit did me in. The chorus by the townspeople at the end of the play especially. Other plays in the anthology were by Ionesco, Genet, Mrozek, Beckett. When I came back to the course, all I wanted to do was talk about these Europeans.

I had been writing poetry for several years. In fact, published three books of it. Some of it good, some of it bad. But the poems started getting longer and longer. It wasn’t until I read Durrenmatt that I realized I was writing dialogue in those poems – just not the kind of dialogue one would normally be exposed to in American Realism.

Encountering Durrenmatt when I did was a natural progression from those longer epic poems. The only similarity between the early poetry and the plays today is the subject matter. Still trying to figure out why there are some people who notice and care, and why there are other people who don’t seem to notice and don’t seem too care. And how the latter seems to outnumber the former.

I understand that you're also starting to branch out into making short films. How did that come about? And how's it going so far?

Some ideas I have don’t fit into that idea of composing with a space. They involve composing with a different medium. I have an interest in short film studies. Most are not more than a few minutes long. Not many words. A lot of stationary images and pictures. One about my father commuting to work by commuter train every day is at the forefront. It would be going great if we can just get him to appear on film!

I’ve written longer screenplays. I’d rather like to be able to work on them myself one day, or with some directors I like who are friends of mine.

I’m supposed to be in a film, which goes into a shoot next month. A stunning experimental filmmaker, whose work I love – Peter Bolte. I fell in love with his film Consuming Capitalism a few years back. Its an honor to be involved.

What else is up next for you?

Stop answering these questions. Steer clear of photo albums.

Get back to working on a new play called Consolidation. Its set in the waiting room of a car dealership. Kind of like The Position in reverse. Instead of people exiting a room, people are entering and staying. And the room keeps filling up and filling up with strange characters.

Visit France and Michel Vinaver in the Spring. See what he’s working on now. He’s making his directing debut in Paris—at the ripe young age of seventy-or-eighty-something.

Come back and work on the next Sponsored By Nobody production—Not From Canada.

Kick some ass. Take some names.

Interview with Kevin Doyle was conducted by Michael Criscuolo January 2006.

Read more interviews with the playwrights