Tell us about your play, La Tempestad, and what it's adapted from.
I don’t think of La Tempestad as an adaptation. It is referential to Shakespeare’s Tempest. It uses several of Shakespeare’s characters, including Prospero, Miranda, Ariel, and Caliban, and there is an underlying relationship between the two plays’ themes. But as one reviewer aptly said, it is more of a “riff” on the original than an adaptation. My play is set in Puerto Rico, on the island of Vieques, during the run-up to the current Iraq war. It is based loosely on a real event, the death of a Puerto Rican civilian named David Sanes, who died when an American warplane “accidentally” dropped a live 500 pound bomb on the observation tower where he was working. Until 2003, Vieques had been the site of American military bombing practice for over 60 years. The play is about loyalty, parental love, marriage, usurpation of rule, patriotism, and power—the same themes I find in Shakespeare.
What inspired you to write La Tempestad?
I visited Vieques in 1999 and was struck by the contrast between the amazing natural beauty of the island and the abuse of the place by the American military. My wife and I had come to the island because friends of ours offered us the use of their house, and I envisioned a quiet honeymoon-like idyll. Early in our stay, however, American fighter planes started to fly practice runs over the beach where we were swimming and sunbathing. I began to think about how I would feel if a place I loved and called home was likewise abused. I didn’t make the connection to Shakespeare’s Tempest right away, but when I read about the political history of Puerto Rico, and about the North American diaspora of Puerto Ricans in the 20th century, it struck me that there were ways that the story I wanted to tell had parallels in the world in which Shakespeare’s Prospero and Miranda lived in exile. I also wanted to write about love and marriage and commitment and parents letting go of their children. In La Tempestad, in addition to Prospero's nemeses, the storm brings three very distinct couples to the “enchanted isle” (as the travel brochures call Puerto Rico) and they get caught up in the magic and intrigue of the place.
As far as you're concerned, what is still pertinent about both The Tempest and Shakespeare for today's audiences?
I have always loved the poetry and magic of The Tempest, but it was not until recently that I felt I understood—from parallels in my own life—why Shakespeare’s irascible and protective Prospero suddenly turns philosophical and forgiving. Shakespeare’s career was long enough that he wrote through all the stages of his adult life. In The Tempest we meet characters at the moment they must confront and resolve their relationships to the past in order to move forward. So why is The Tempest still pertinent? I have a naïve response. I understand my own life better when I see or read Shakespeare.
You began your career nearly twenty years ago as a dramaturg. How did you transition into writing?
Actually, I wanted to be a writer from the time I was about 15. I was an English major in college, and have an MA in English and creative writing. I taught college English for a while and then went back to school for an MFA in film and television, and then spent a number of years working in that field. I wrote poetry and fiction during all of that time. Then, in 1987, I was asked to dramaturg a new musical that was being co-produced by the American Music Theater Festival and Philadelphia Theater Company. I had no real practical experience with theater except as an audience member at that point. I spent five weeks in the rehearsal room, and I fell in love with the process of play-making. Shortly after that I decided to try to write a short play. Miraculously, that play was produced almost immediately in separate festivals in Philadelphia and New York. Nothing like a little success to encourage you to continue down a particular path. I didn’t start to dramaturg regularly again until some years after that. So really, with the exception of that one musical, playwriting came before my long-term gig as a dramaturg.
You worked for InterAct Theater Company in Philadelphia for several years. How was that experience, and what did you do for them?
When I decided to stop working in film and television—I had been producing a weekly TV show and I was kind of burned out—I decided what I wanted to do was work for a theater company. InterAct is a company whose mission to do political work and whose general aesthetic matched very well to mine, and I went to work for them, on a limited basis at first but after a short while, full time. InterAct did new or very contemporary work, almost always with the playwright involved in the process. I did all of the functions of a literary manager and dramaturg, including reading a great many plays, research, rehearsal dramaturgy, and working with plays and playwrights during development. I was a staff member at InterAct for seven years, and I still have a relationship with the company. I was recently awarded a new play commission from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture for a play that InterAct will develop, and I have dramaturged two plays for them on a free lance basis since leaving their employ. I learned a great deal about how to write a play from watching seven seasons of new plays develop, rehearse, and perform, and from reading nearly 1000 plays. It was an amazing professional experience. I tell people InterAct was my PhD in contemporary theater.
What inspired you to first become a writer?
Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, J.D. Salinger, Joni Mitchell, Tom Stoppard, Ken Kesey, Thomas Pynchon, my youthful heroes. And the list goes on. I saw Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead when I was 17, and it changed my life. I left the theater knowing I wanted to be a writer. And Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead probably suggested to me, in some way that I have carried all these years, the literary and artistic value of referencing one play with another. Strangely, it did not at that moment occur to me to be a playwright. The distinctions between one form and another were somewhat vaguer to me at 17 than they are now. Writing was writing. I thought I would write poetry and fiction. I made a gradual portage toward writing plays, coming to it fully in my mid 40’s, though I still write an occasional short story.
You were born and raised in Philadelphia, and have lived most of your life there. What is it about your hometown that compelled you to stay there, instead of going the usual route to either New York or Los Angeles?
My family was a mix of Philadelphians and New Yorkers, and I spent a lot of time in NYC as a child and teenager. During high school, I used to ditch school occasionally and take the train up to NYC to see shows, music, and theater, and my parents took me to see theater in New York from the time I was very small. So I have always felt at home in New York, and it has always seemed very close by to me. To a lot of New Yorkers, Philly is the sticks, but to me, New York was always just right next door. It takes me under two hours to drive to lower Manhattan from my house, and I know where all the cheap parking is, so I come up pretty regularly to see plays and hang out with friends. But lest it seem like those excursions imply a negative judgment on my home town, let me hasten to add that Philadelphia has become a great city in the last two decades, with an amazing theater, arts, dance, restaurant, club, and gallery scene. And it’s still very cheap to live here compared to NYC, as a lot of New Yorkers are discovering; I hear Philadelphia called “the sixth borough” with increasing regularity. But it is also a city with a complex social history, and several of my plays are set here. Historically, it is a city of great promise and accomplishments, and also a city with lots of civic, athletic, and political failure and, therefore, citizen self-doubt. For a writer, that is pretty fertile ground. I recently dramaturged a piece called Planetary Enzyme Blues for a wonderful Philadelphia-based experimental company, New Paradise Laboratories, that explored Philadelphia’s self-love and self-loathing, among other things. I also spent a significant portion of my film career working on historical documentaries set here. So I have a deep connection. I thought about moving to L.A. when I graduated from film school, and I went out there to check it out, but I simply could not relate to it at all. I’m a city rat and to me LA seemed like a place with no there there. But New York has never seemed a distant place, or a far-away goal. I have a lot of regular connections to New York through family, friends, artistic colleagues, agent, etc. As often as I come up, I’ve never felt the need to move there.
Interview with Larry Loebell was conducted by Michael Criscuolo September 2006.