I have to ask: what's the significance of your play's title?
Most of my titles come out of lines in my plays. At some point, in writing, my head gets wrapped around the play enough that a character will say something that I think really distills the feeling of the play for me — and it helps if it’s fun to say. …and we all wore leather pants is a lot about 80s heavy metal — the cock-sureness and the absurdity. So, when, midway through the play, my character Jagger is remembering his time in a band in Los Angeles (which, to this point, his wife, Mary, has wiped from his head with booze) says, “And we behaved like the all-blessed with the mouth a’ chimpanzees. And we didn’t have to wait for someone to come along and change everything, ‘cause we was that thing … and we all wore leather pants,” it just seemed right. It’s the attitude. It evokes some very distinct images (by which I mean, there’s a whole lot of plays that this won’t be with a title like that). And it’s fun to say.
Tell us a little bit about the play and where you got the idea for it.
As far as the hair metal: that was my youth. But I think rhythm is a very important aspect to my writing — so I’m thinking about music all the time when I write plays.
In fact, I couldn’t figure out what the hell to do with my play Kansas City Or Along The Way (a Depression Era piece I’d been working on for a while) until Bruce Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions CD came out. That was all folk music from the era I was working on and, after listening to Springsteen do those songs non-stop for about three weeks, the world of Kansas City started to make a little more sense. I even wrote some original songs for that play with my good friend, Adam Groves, who acted in Kansas City as well, because that stuff was so much on my mind.
So it’s an element I like to include … like to play with.
I’d written a play a number of years ago where I had a man get pregnant. It was a white trash play with poor characters and heavy metal music. But I was taking myself a little too seriously at that point and I was having absolutely no fun with such a crazy idea. It didn’t strike me until much later: Wait, this should actually be hilarious.
That got me into reading some magical realism — Gabriel Garcia Marquez and others — and I started to want to play with really real issues about magic as it pertains to the working class American psyche. Specifically, why don’t we get to have it? Other cultures get to have this relationship with magic — and it’s very important to their culture — why not us?
You taught high school English for a couple of years between undergrad and grad school. How was that experience for you?
Whew. It was all sorts of things. If you pay attention, you can learn a lot about yourself — and not always good stuff — when you’re standing in front of the same group of kids for nine months out of the year. Especially, when you’re completely unprepared to do so. I think, in a lot of ways, being a young teacher is like being a professional sports prospect. There really isn’t much room for patience. You’re expected to come in and start producing.
I looked at myself after the first year teaching high school — and I felt there were a lot of ways in which I was doing a very good job — and I realized it would probably be another two years before I could walk into each class and feel like I was really prepared to do a good job. That’s just how it is when you’re tough on yourself and want to do a good job. But you don’t have those kids four years from now. You have them now.
Ultimately, probably not the best match for me at that time in my life.
But I really enjoy teaching. And I’ve been able to maintain relationships with some of my high school students — they’re all well out in the world by this point — and they’re some of my favorite people in the world.
Teaching college was easier on me. At that time, I had some experience to fall back on, tricks I knew I could pull out, stories I’d taught a handful of times. And my mentor at John Carroll University, Dr. Chris Roark, was a fantastic writing teacher. So, I was able to steal a bunch of stuff he did as well.
When you finally went to grad school, you went all out, getting both a Master's in English and an M.F.A. in Dramatic Writing. Why both instead of just one or the other?
Well, like I said, I enjoyed teaching. I loved being an English undergraduate. I was a huge reader — loved to analyze literature. And I had a number of great teachers in my life. So, obviously, I came out of college wanting to be a college professor — go on and get my PhD.
That’s why I was teaching high school, actually. It was a stop that looked nice on my grad school applications, while I was prepping for the GRE and applying to schools. But, once I got there, I found I didn’t like being a graduate English student all that much. There’s such a race on to define yourself professionally once you get there. My experience felt like: take this class that will show you all these different schools of theory, pick one and then spend the rest of your time here doing nothing besides filtering what you read through that one theoretical school.
Now, obviously, that’s an overstatement. But it’s how it felt for me. I couldn’t figure out a way to make that satisfying for me. So, since The Ohio State University was flipping the bill for my classes, I started taking some classes in the theater department with my electives. I’d done theater in high school and college and I knew it would be a good outlet for the creative side of my head, since the analytical side was all I was using at the time.
I took some playwriting classes and found I rather liked them. But I had never really taken much theater outside of the plays I had acted in, so there was a huge gap in my education. It seemed, still being in school at the time, that I should go to school for this other thing and, somehow, I tricked NYU into letting me in.
And the good thing that came from the MFA was that I finally felt: NO MORE SCHOOL. Please, God, no more school.
You studied playwriting with Arthur Kopit, Neil LaBute, and Doug Wright. Quite a trio. What was that experience like?
Playwriting’s such a tricky thing to try to teach. But those three just know what the hell they’re doing, so I was able to take away a lot from each one.
Arthur was one of the first real supporters of my work. He helped me find a place (The Lark Play Development Center) where I could work on my writing after I got out of NYU — and that was really important … just being around other writers at various stages of their careers who were trying to make a go at the same thing I was. I joke with a playwright/actor friend of mine whenever he introduces me to friends of his who are playwrights that I really thought I was the only one in the city — because it feels so often like you’re going it alone. So, any time you can get that feeling of community, it’s a great benefit.
Doug was a really good teacher. He had us writing plays very much by the book. In fact, the play that I wrote for his class (which, after I went back and messed it up a little) became my one-act Thick Like Piano Legs that some people still say is their favorite work of mine. I always say it’s because that play is the most firmly structured thing I could bring myself to write.
And Neil has allowed me to stay in contact with him and has been very generous whenever I have any questions about the business. Though, the best Neil LaBute story I have is this: After the Master Class he taught at NYU, he took his stipend for teaching the class and, because he had gone through the same program and he knew the financial struggles we had been and would continue to be facing, he divided it up equally amongst all the students in the class. An absurdly generous gesture. So, what do I do with this little gift? I promptly lose it to a French couple in a housing scam in the Lower East Side. Um … yeah.
How did you first become interested in playwriting and the theatre?
Like I said, I’d been doing theater in high school and college; the acting end mostly, though I did take a playwriting class as an undergraduate.
I actually had some early experience with being an independent producer. While I was teaching high school in Mansfield, OH, I got a call from our community theater. They were looking for an actor for a play by a local writer. I did it — and said to myself the whole way, “I can do this.” So, I proposed a one-act play festival for the summer that would stage a couple of short, established pieces, but would mostly be a competition for area writers. I even submitted my undergrad play under a pseudonym, so sure that I’d be able to cruise through the judging panel (and also terrified that I wouldn’t).
But the better comeuppance for thinking “I can do this” isn’t not doing it; it’s having to actually figure out how the hell you’re going to do it.
Long story short: My script did get in, but then I decided not to tell my actors that it was my script so they wouldn’t treat me differently (I know, I know … but I’m 22 and really green). So I ended up having to tell them the playwright’s thoughts based on phone conversations I’d apparently had with the absent playwright: Mr. Cedric Vasquez of Cleveland Heights, OH.
You formed your own theatre company, Disgraced Productions, in 2005. What was your reason for doing so?
Okay, here’s the speech I give whenever I’m asked this question: since so much of this industry is out of control, I decided that any thing I could do to make myself feel like I had some power over the direction of my career in the theater, I had to do that. Producing my own shows turned out to be the most empowering thing I could think of. See, NYU left us completely unprepared for a life writing for the theater outside of submitting your scripts and waiting until someone chooses them and produces them. But, I’d decided to make a go of this and found it excruciating to think of just sending and sending and sending and waiting and waiting — especially, since my stuff tends to be less fun to read than it is to say — because of what I try to do with the language. I knew from my experience at the Lark that people responded well to my work, but only when they knew what they were getting themselves into. So, I submitted my play Places Like Here to the 2005 New York Fringe Festival and gave them the line, “This works, but I need to get it on its feet to prove that to people. If that’s not a Fringe show, I don’t know what is.” They bought it and I’ve been learning how to put on shows in New York ever since.
Of course, I still haven’t figured out how to get any money to help me, so these shows are all me, nearly 100% out of what I make bartending in the East Village. And that’s nowhere near perfect, but I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some really great, creative people (Rebecca Benhayon, Adam Grove, Joe Stipek, John Hayden and many, many others) who have helped me make some pretty damn good independent theater out of, sometimes quite literally, a shoestring.
Why the name Disgraced Productions?
It’s taken from the title of one of my favorite novels: J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. I think I had just gotten done re-reading it when I had to type in the credits for a short film I was making for a class at NYU. “A Disgraced Production” really sounded up my alley. So, when I had to have a company name when I applied for the Fringe, I just used that. And the business cards made it official.
What's up next for you, professionally speaking?
I’m working on a new script that looks like it will be put up by a new group, Barracuda Theater Club, in mid-March. I’m waiting to see how a couple of applications turn out before cementing Disgraced Productions’ official plans for 2008. But you can bet it’ll be something. I have a friend who, about a month after I close a show, jokes with me “Um, isn’t it about time for you to be putting up another show?”
But I’m also working on not producing a couple of my plays. Producing what you write is great, except that when you’ve finished your latest play, you have no more plays to do. Strangely, that’s not a good feeling.
So, I’m working on a backlog. Ain’t that exciting?
Interview with Robert Attenweiler was conducted by Michael Criscuolo January 2008.