What Playwrights Talk About When They Talk About Writing by Jeffrey Sweet

Author:Jeffrey Sweet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

BRYONY LAVERY

• • •

Born in 1947. Plays include A Wedding Story, llyria, and a lavish adaptation of Treasure Island (which included changing the young boy Jim into a girl) for London’s National Theatre. She seized American attention with the opening off-Broadway of her play Frozen in 2004 (it was first produced in the United Kingdom in 1998). The play’s three characters are introduced in monologues—Nancy, a woman whose young daughter has been abducted and murdered; Ralph, who is responsible for the death of the girl and several others; and Agnetha, an American psychologist who comes to England to pursue her study of serial killers. Gradually, the monologues go by the wayside and the characters confront each other as Lavery explores the nature of responsibility and the point of revenge when dealing with someone as profoundly damaged as Ralph. The reception was so strong that the production was swiftly moved to Broadway, where it was nominated for the Tony as the best play of 2004. Those who would type Lavery on the basis of the grim subject matter of this play would be making an error. At the time of this conversation, in addition to Treasure Island, she had written a stage version of 101 Dalmatians featuring platoons of kids that had just finished a holiday run in the regions.

Q: You seem to shift territory a lot. Is this intentional?

LAVERY: I don’t want to write the same play. I’m really interested in form and I quite like challenges. So in the last four or five years I’ve been working with theater companies that are very physical, changing how I write depending on who I collaborate with. I got a bit bored with my authorial voice.

Q: A lot of my playwriting theories are extrapolations of improv to playwriting, because I think the improviser has to answer in the moment the same questions that we writers have the leisure of addressing over a period of months.

LAVERY: We’re not quick and smart enough to do it in the moment. We’re like those kids who couldn’t think of the smart answer immediately. So we had to become writers.

Q: So instead of the hares we’re the tortoises?

LAVERY: This is a tortoise meeting [shared laughter].

Q: One of the things that interests me about Frozen is that it starts off as a monologue play and then suddenly, without the audience being quite aware of it, the characters are in dialogue.

LAVERY: I used to write a lot of monologue plays because I think I have a lot to say to the audience [laughs]. With Frozen there was a conscious plan to keep them talking until you think, “Please meet. Please, please start listening to each other.” Because it’s about those three quite similar brains and attitudes being very frozen and then, as soon as they abut each other, starting to melt and change.

Q: There are some teaching playwriting who think that direct address is somehow a copout. I don’t agree with that, particularly when direct address is done as well as you do it.

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