With every compromise we make, our lives spin into new, perhaps unanticipated, directions. Is it feasible to follow Polonius’s advice and keep ourselves on an authentic pathway? How much do we have to give up to get where we think we’re going? These are the kinds of questions that playwright Molly Smith Metzler contemplates in her play Elemeno Pea, which makes its debut as part of Actors Theatre of Louisville’s 35th Anniversary Humana Festival of New American Plays. Still identified within the industry as an “emerging” playwright, Metzler has an impressive list of honors already. Like one of her characters, Metzler’s journey took a dramatic turn based on a seemingly inconsequential decision
MSM: I love telling people in college this story, because one class changed my life. I had no idea I was going to fall in love with playwriting. I was a senior – and a serious English major – in college at SUNY Geneseo, a very small school in western New York State. I had applied and been accepted into Ph.D. programs in Comparative Literature; I can’t remember what I actually thought I would write a dissertation on, but I was really nerdy and really into other people’s writing. I took an introduction to playwriting class on a lark while I was figuring out which Ph.D. program to choose.
SD: You had no idea that playwriting would be for you at that point?
MSM: I had heard the teacher was cool and I liked writing in my journal, but no. It turned out there were six of us in the class. I wrote a one-act play and it dramatically
changed everything for me.
SD: Did you get your Ph.D.?
MSM: No, I took a year off after college and moved to Martha’s Vineyard and wrote plays. I literally fell in love with playwriting and changed my whole life to do this zany, crazy thing. So I came to it at age 22 by accident.
SD: Is writing ritualistic for you? Do you have a particular place or time of day that focuses your creative energies?
MSM: When I’m in the zone, I can write anywhere because I’m in my own brain. But when I’m getting to know the characters during that first draft, I really like to write first thing in the morning. I like to sit down while the coffee is brewing before anything else can get to my brain. I can’t always do it, but 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. is my favorite time to write.
SD: You and your husband are living now in Brooklyn Heights. Do you find that an inspiring atmosphere?
MSM: Oh, yes! It’s sort of “theatre people central.” For whatever reason, Brooklyn Heights has become an industry enclave. The other great thing is that we’re not in the city and you can see the trees and have quiet in the morning. It just feels a little less like the treadmill. I go into the treadmill every day to work, but it’s nice to have this creative space apart.
SD: Along the way you met playwright Jules Feiffer and he became a mentor for you. How did that happen?
MSM: There is a beautiful program in New York at the Cherry Lane Theatre called the Cherry Lane Mentor Project, which pairs emerging playwrights with super-successful professional writers. From that, you develop a mentoring situation where you could meet for coffee to discuss rewrites and talk about your work. They also protect you a little bit, because most times you’re going through your first production. It was my first big production in New York City and Jules was really wonderful to me. He was tough on me in a good way – dramaturgically, he asked challenging questions that made my play better. But it was also nice to meet such a lovely person. There are a lot of people in the theatre who are snarky and competitive; but his perspective on theatre was so generous, so well-informed and so positive that I really felt he wanted me to succeed. He’s a great guy, and his daughter is an amazing actress.
SD: Do you still keep in touch?
MSM: We’re a little out of touch right now. The program was in 2007 and we’ve had a couple cups of coffee since then. He’s a very busy guy for me to impose my neurotic, needy, playwright life on him.
SD: You’re pretty busy yourself – you have an armload of awards to your credit already. Are these competitions that you chose to enter?
MSM: In the case of the Kennedy Center (National Student Playwriting Award, 2002), Boston University submitted Training Wisteria to the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival through the Institute. That one is a national academic award and the competition sort of felt like a beauty pageant with playwrights. That was right at the beginning of my career, and I don’t think I realized at the time that all playwrights don’t watch their first play on the mainstage at the Kennedy Center. Looking back, I’m like, “Holy crap!” That doesn’t happen. I haven’t had as big an audience since, although now, with Humana, I will again. It was really quite a coming out, and I think it’s amazing that I didn’t know better at the time because I probably would have had a panic attack.
SD: The benefit of naiveté.
MSM: Yes, I was so green I was able to enjoy it. I think if I went now, I’d die. It’s funny how time changes your take on these things. But back to your question, most of my awards have gone through institutions that have nominated me for things. Being associated with an institution is really great for an emerging playwright: you get the stamp of the institution and they really have a lot of power to help build your career and share your work with people.
SD: With which institution are you currently affiliated?
MSM: I’ve got the coolest job. I work with the Theatre Communications Group (TCG), a not-for-profit theatre service organization. It’s funny, because Actors Theatre’s Artistic Director Marc Masterson is a member of our board, but he had no idea I worked at TCG.
SD: What do you do at TCG?
MSM: I work in the publications department as associate editor of the book program, and I’m also the play editor for American Theatre magazine. So all day long I work with plays: plays we’re publishing, plays we’re considering publishing, unseen plays. It’s a great place to work as a playwright – especially my department, because I’m pretty sure I read as many plays a year as some literary managers. I also have the advantage of knowing what plays are going up, which theatres are doing what kinds of plays…. I know what plays aren’t going up. I really get to see the industry up close and personal, for good and for bad.
SD: You mentioned the Humana Festival and, to Louisville, Kentucky, this is a huge deal. Is it as big a deal to people outside Louisville as we think it is?
MSM: Yes.
SD: So, we’re not blowing it out of proportion?
MSM: No. I have to choose my words because I don’t want to seem immodest, but the Humana Festival of New American Plays is as big a deal as it gets. Everyone wants to be in the Humana Festival and everyone wants to go to the Humana Festival and, honestly, everyone does go to the Humana Festival. This is really the first major production I’m having, and I’m unbelievably honored to be part of it. I look at the line-up of other writers and I’m just blown away. But, yes, everyone pays attention to Humana and it feels like a New York festival because of how much everyone here in New York cares about it.
SD: Do people still write with the idea of having their play performed on Broadway? Broadway seems to have moved so far toward spectacle. Do serious playwrights still have that dream?
MSM: I have no idea. There probably are playwrights who sit down and think about commercial production when they’re writing. I try not to think about the production while I’m writing; I find it throws me off the tracks a little bit. While I’m writing a play, I’m mostly trying to think about the characters and how to be honest about who they are and what their experience is in the play.
SD: Do you ever cast the play in your head?
MSM: Sometimes I will think about the actor. If I see a fantastic production and I’m inspired by someone’s performance, I will think about writing something worthy of exploring with an actor of that caliber. But if I think about the actual paying audience, it tends to make me so self-conscious I can’t do my job. Maybe there are writers who sit down and decide to write a “two-hander” for Broadway – and maybe I’ll write that way some day, too. But right now I try not to think about the bodies in the seats for as long as I can help it.
SD: Do you think about the director and the designers and what they will have to do to make your play work?
MSM: Once the play gets to the point where I can think about it as a play, yes. Then I get excited and start to think about what it feels like and tastes like and sounds like. I get very excited about design. And I try to write plays that will excite designers.
SD: Reading the script, I enjoyed your minimalist stage directions.
MSM: I don’t want to be too specific. I’ll write something like “The couch is very confident” and let them figure out what that looks like. I love collaborating; that’s why I’m not a novelist. I love the idea that the four or five of us sit down and realize this world, and I find that thrilling.
SD: Your show for the Humana Festival, Elemeno Pea, is set on a beach estate on Martha’s Vineyard, and it is certainly a designer’s dream: one set, five actors, no intermission. It’s all very straightforward in terms of staging – no one levitates suddenly…
MSM: That’s my next play! The world of this play is actually very close to me. When I finished college, I rejected everything I thought I wanted and was going to write plays. I had been to Martha’s Vineyard once on vacation with a friend and felt like it was this calm, serene, beautiful place where Eugene O’Neill wrote Long Day’s Journey Into Night. I got it into my brain that I was going to write this opus play and I needed to be by the ocean to do it.
SD: So you rented a beach house on Martha’s Vineyard?
MSM: Uh, no. I went on Craig’s List and found a listing for servers at the Edgartown Yacht Club. I packed up my little car, took all my graduation money and moved to Martha’s Vineyard to try to write a play.
SD: Is that where Elemeno Pea began?
MSM: I think I’ve been collecting material for this play ever since my time there. Everyone in this play is based on people I met while I lived there. The Edgartown Yacht Club is the kind of place the Kennedys belong to. It’s unbelievable some of the people I waited on that summer – really, really, really old money. The kind of money where you don’t even talk about it…obscene money.
SD: Tell me about creating these characters.
MSM: The woman Michaela is based on would not recognize herself – I fictionalized her a lot. But that woman fascinated me because she did not come from money – she was not in the club – but she was outrageously beautiful. It was so interesting to watch the way the women who were from this world treated her. Ever since that time, I’ve been thinking about how you gain entry into that world; what you give up to be in that world; what it feels like to wake up and live in the houses I saw.
SD: Which is how the play begins: Simone, the personal assistant, showing her sister Devon around her employer’s guesthouse.
MSM: The guesthouse thing is true. I went to someone’s guesthouse and thought it was their home because it was the most beautiful house I had ever been in. I suppose I have been contemplating just what that kind of money can mean.
SD: I found some of the structural elements of the play intriguing. I’ll assume that my readers will all go see it and consider these points in retrospect. I noticed the parallels between Simone’s perception of herself as something more than an employee and Michaela’s position as a wife in which she is, in a sense, a sort of contractor.
MSM: One of the things I observed that summer is that if you are magnificently beautiful, like Michaela, you can get in. But if you come in on that boat, it’s a very different game. The “trophy wife” is very different than the “moneyed wife.” It is kind of like being hired because you have a very specific skill set: you have to do four hours of Pilates every day and be gorgeous. It’s very lonely to me because you don’t actually get to make any friends; you don’t have anybody’s respect. It seemed to me a very sad and lonely gig.
SD: Part of the action of the play, of course, centers around her violation of that unwritten contract. I don’t want to be a spoiler, so we won’t go into that here. So, turning to another subject, the sisters in the play are both from blue-collar Buffalo. Are you originally from western New York state?
MSM: I’m from Kingston, New York, which is about 90 miles north of the city. Geneseo is about halfway between Rochester and Buffalo, and my three best friends from college were all from Buffalo. So I know that city extremely well and I love, love, love the people I know who are from there.
SD: You’re in rewrites now, so the version I’ve read is not what will finally appear in the Humana Festival, but you open a lot of doors in this play without giving us your thoughts on the subject.
MSM: I find it very encouraging that you can’t tell how I feel from reading it. The last thing I’m trying to do is write an issue play or warn about the choices being made by the characters. I will say that the decisions that drive the play are not fictional and I don’t necessarily agree with them. But if I can surprise the audience and challenge their perspectives on these characters, then I’ve done my job.
SD: You said you don’t always agree with the decisions being made. How would you characterize your own feelings toward the characters?
MSM: I think perspective is a really hard thing to cultivate. I didn’t have it then; I’m not sure I have it now. But people make bad decisions and it’s their own journey. I open doors to let the audience in, and it is my hope that they will leave the theatre and discuss and expand their own thoughts.
SD: I like the way you use comic stereotypes to disarm the audience while you set us up to meet the real person behind our expectations.
MSM: I think if you only read the first half of the play, you might think it was just a stupid, rich-person comedy. These people aren’t the stereotype you think they are at the top of the play – or that I thought they were at the top of the play. All three of these women surprised me in interesting ways as I got to know them.
SD: There are also two male characters, and I want to ask you about Jos-B (pronounced Hose-Bee), the caretaker who is a nemesis and also provides comic relief. Is he also someone you knew?
MSM: He is, though in real life he’s quite a bit younger. He’s a friend of mine from Brooklyn. I’ve also drawn on some other friends I’ve had while working in restaurants who manifested the classic servant/master dynamic.
SD: On the other end of the spectrum
is Ethan, who is part of the Martha’s Vineyard world but has become infatuated with Simone. That creates an interesting tension since she now has her feet in two different worlds.
MSM: Ethan is not a total jerk. When he talks about Simone’s goodness and beauty, I think he does love her.
SD: At the end of the play, Simone makes a dramatic decision and we probably won’t ever know how it turns out. Do you, as the playwright, know what happens to her?
MSM: I’m not sure. I think it would be exciting if the audience cared and was discussing that as well. I think it’s possible that she will turn out okay, but she may be headed down a very rocky road. I think if I were to telegraph my own impressions about her future, it would make the play less interesting. The process of making decisions isn’t black and white, and neither are the
outcomes of those decisions.
Molly Smith Metzler’s latest work, Elemeno Pea, will run March 8-April 3 in the Pamela Brown Auditorium as part of Actors Theatre of Louisville’s 35th Anniversary Humana Festival of New America Plays. Depending on when you go and where you sit, tickets range from $23 to $59 and may be purchased by calling 502.584.1205 or by going online at actorstheatre.org. This year’s Festival opens with Anne Washburn’s A Devil at Noon, which opened February 27 and continues through the end of the Festival. Visitors from all over the world will be competing for tickets to this event, so take my advice and call soon...