An Interview With
Rebecca Louise Miller 

Fault Lines

 

Fault Lines is based on a true happening.  What made you decide to write a play about it and why did you choose to take the approach you did in writing this?  

I've been hesitant to discuss this subject— particularly in print—mostly because I'm still so disturbed by it. The play is a response to the 1993 kidnapping and murder of Polly Klaas and was also driven by the very intense ambivalence I've felt about the media storm that followed. Exploitation is a central theme of Fault Lines, and the uncomfortable irony has never been lost on me that I'm now dragging this tragedy back into the public forum.

Polly and I were friends in elementary school and lost touch when her family moved to another district. We hadn't spoken for a few years by the time she was taken. My family was in the car when a story came on the radio about a local girl who'd been abducted from her home during a slumber party. It was a few minutes before they used her name, and I remember sitting there numbly until we finally arrived home to see her school photo on TV. During the nine week search that followed, I asked my parents a lot of painful questions that I sort of already knew the answers to—many kids in the area shared that experience, became wiser in ways that we would never have chosen for ourselves.

Over the next decade I didn't spend a lot of time reflecting on Polly's abduction. In my hometown everyone had gone through the same process of shock, hope and grief, and many were closer to it than I'd ever been. For me it became a secondhand trauma, tucked away in a dusty shoebox until a news story or random memory would shake it back to my attention. It was too upsetting to dwell on. It was well into my twenties before I suddenly found myself thinking and talking about it again. I'm not sure what brought it all back, but the memories were persistent enough that I took notice.

This event had made a tremendous impact on my worldview, and I wondered how it had shaped other people (kids and teens, in particular) in our community. And it led me to think about the survivors. As foundational as it had been for those of us who grieved after the fact, how had it affected the girls who had witnessed it? How does someone who has survived this type of trauma firsthand find a way to move on, raise her own family?

It feels important to note here that Fault Lines is a work of fiction. It was fueled by emotions stirred up by the flawed memories of a distant event. The circumstances of the play are different than the facts of the actual kidnapping, and none of the characters are based on real people. The times I started to research the real life case, I found myself further from the impulses and issues that made me want to write this story. In order to give myself permission to deal with the subject, I had to create a distinct, fictional reality. Characters were built around the opposing points of view that had formed in my own brain since the abduction, and I sent them to do battle.

You have told us about a program in your local high school called ArtQuest which seems to have had a great part in your deciding to join the theatrical community.  Can you tell us a bit more about it and do you know of other similar programs across the country?

ArtQuest was offered by my public high school, and it was amazing! I started as a freshman in 1994, the first year drama was offered in the program. We got to spend two hours every day studying drama, plus afterschool rehearsals and a special English class where we'd research the plays we were working on. Our teacher, John Craven, taught techniques that still serve as the foundation for my acting, and we performed challenging material—Chekhov, Caryl Churchill, Tony Kushner. A disproportionately large number of ArtQuest alumni are now pursuing careers in their fields of study, and many more have integrated the arts into their lives in other ways. The teen years are such a ripe time for studying acting- outsized emotions run rampant, and young people are still more open to new ideas than adults. I've started teaching acting in the last few years, and especially enjoy working with teenagers.

Unfortunately I don't know of any similar programs at public schools, but you can check out the ArtQuest webpage at www.artquestonline.org.

Your husband, David L. Epstein, has had several successful productions of plays he has written.  What's it like having two playwrights under the same roof and do you toss ideas back and forth, criticize, and/or work collaboratively?

Fault Lines wouldn't have been written without David's persistent nudging. An actor-turned-writer himself, he'd been hounding me for a year or two to write a play. Over a few months I started telling him— totally hypothetically—about the characters who might be in this one, even figuring out my central conflict. He started telling me that we'd be able to produce the play, possibly even get it published, and I just sort of rolled my eyes. He finally got so tired of my stalling that he threatened to write it himself. I didn't believe him until he plopped down theatrically at his computer, started typing and announced "I'm outlining!" The tactic worked; my territorial instincts kicked in and I started writing.

These days we brainstorm and talk out ideas, and serve as fresh eyes on each other's writing projects, exchanging lots of notes. It's a fabulous and fun arrangement, particularly now that we've learned to avoid arguing about specific notes. The deal is that the writer has a right to their story no matter what, though if the reader really gets fired up about an issue, that probably means it warrants a second (or third) look. But we try not to go back and forth, knowing that ultimately the things that don't work in a script will come out in the wash. The screenplay I'm working on now came out of a long brainstorm we had last summer, and ultimately the writing duties will likely end up being shared. We have a great time dissecting every movie, television show, and play we see.

You say you are "on a personal mission to encourage actors to write!" Why do you think this is important and how do you go about making this happen?

Ok, the most frustrating thing about being an actor is waiting around, praying for work to come, spending your life at the mercy of other people and their projects. You can perform Hamlet for your cat, but your cat doesn't care. You can end up creatively constipated, bitter and frustrated. Writing is the antidote to this because it's solitary and self-motivated.

Actors tend to instinctively understand the ingredients of a good scene, and they're comfortable building nuanced characters and arcs. Playwriting is just an improvisation that you write down (and can edit!), and you get to act all the parts.

One of the things that drives many of us to acting is a love of plays. Once you start to experience great dramatic literature from the inside, discovering all the interweaving through lines and themes of a really well-written play, it feels like seriously unattainable genius. Because I'd always put playwrights on a pedestal, I was convinced that writing was beyond me, and actively avoided playwriting classes. I'm kicking myself now because I've missed opportunities to study with amazing people. So now I nag all my actor friends about writing their own material. Get over the fear, people; Shakespeare was one of us!

Your work in the theatre has been primarily as an actor.  Which do you prefer, acting or writing and why?

I can't choose. As an actor you get to physically be part of this living, breathing experience, which is taken in and shared by an audience, never to be recreated or received in exactly the same way ever again. That is pretty unbelievable. On the other hand, as a writer you rarely find yourself in a casting office, attempting to dance seductively to salsa music while purring copy about a "male enhancement" product, pondering the boatloads of money wasted on your college tuition.

Honestly, I've been shocked by how similar the practice of writing feels to acting: you breathe deeply and work to stay honest and emotionally vulnerable for as long as you can stand it. I haven't really had the full writer's experience of sitting back to watch my work, because I played a role in Invisible City's production.  My next project will not have a role for me. Actually, of all the actors in our production of Fault Lines, it took me the longest to get a real bead on my character. Living with someone in your head is vastly different than physicalizing them, and acting is all about ridding yourself of preconceived notions and being open to fresh impulses as they arrive. I was saddled with so many expectations of who my character was, that I had to work to erase all my pre-existing knowledge of her and start fresh in order to play the part. It was surprising to be the playwright and still have those actor struggles of figuring out how to "crack" the scene.

Since this is your first play many of our readers might be interested in learning how you got it from the "page to the stage".  Who did you turn to for help in getting it produced, was it workshopped, how did it get to be a semifinalist for the O"Neill National Playwrights Conference, etc.?

Honestly, just getting the thing onto the page was the biggest challenge. It's still strange to think that I chose to spend a couple years dealing with this really painful childhood stuff that haunts me well into adulthood. It was tough to make myself sit at the computer and court all those feelings.

I wrote the first scene for a writing group I'd joined (due to everyone's crazy schedules, I find that writing groups tend to start and die out within a few months). I liked the scene, but it sat in my drawer for an embarrassingly long time. Once David finally convinced me to sit down and finish the script, I decided to submit it to three different places, purely to give myself a deadline. The great thing about being a beginner at something is that you have absolutely no expectation you'll do well, so it's easier to take risks.

I submitted to the O'Neill Playwrights Conference, Playwrights Week at the Lark, and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, simply to get the thing out on paper, and to take the first scary step into sharing my writing. I remember shaking a little bit at the post office when I sent off my scripts, it just felt so strange and naked. Of the three, I thought maybe the Bay Area fest might throw me a bone, since Fault Lines is set in the North Bay, so I was shocked when it was selected as a semi-finalist for the O'Neill and a finalist for the Lark. Not a sniff from the BAPF, go figure. It's dangerous as an artist to rely on validation from outside sources, but hearing back from the Lark and the O'Neill were amazing confidence boosters.

Back to David, who really liked the draft and started whispering in my ear that we could produce it—that was a terrifying prospect. Before I had time to chicken out, he sent it to some of the actors in our theater company, Invisible City, who were very enthusiastic about acting in the show. Now that people I respect were rallying around the play, it no longer felt ok to second-guess it. So we all got down to fundraising and things sort of took on a life of their own. We had a really wonderful, challenging and intense rehearsal process. There wasn't really any workshopping, though I did wind up having to add a scene in order to prevent what would have been an awkward transition between two others. I was freaked out to have to write something new just two weeks before opening, but ultimately we all really liked what that scene (Bethany's monologue) added to the play. We produced Fault Lines in December 2009. I got the email from Martin about publication a year later. All because I married a master manipulator.

Why have you turned to screenwriting next instead of writing another play?

Well... I haven't turned away from the stage. Honestly, I just needed to work on something more lighthearted than Fault Lines. David and I started riffing one day on an idea for a quirky romantic comedy that turned out to be well suited to film. The genre also seemed like a great challenge: romantic comedies tend to either be completely amazing or total dookie, and because it's a screenplay I can say "I'm a beginner at this," which is liberating. I bought Syd Field's Screenwriter's Workbook and it's been the most helpful purchase ever. I'm slowly making my way through the first draft, and will probably pass it over to David to have a crack at a second draft once his current writing project is finished.

 

Interview with Rebecca Louise Miller was conducted by NYTE Small Press April 2011

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