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Writing for Us
A CurtainUp Interview With D. W. Gregory
By Lucy Ann Dunlap
Gregory has won a number of awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts grant for the production in May 2000 for Radium Girls at Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey. The Newark Star-Ledger named it the Best New Play of that season. It and a number of her full-length and short plays have been published by Dramatic Publishing Co., and scenes from a number of them have been included in anthologies.
In addition to writing, Gregory is a teaching artist selected by the Maryland Arts Council to teach playwriting in the state's public schools. The Imagination Stage in Maryland commissioned her to write plays for young people. Penny Candy, her comedy for young actors, was produced at their Academy. She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in playwriting from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. and her bachelor's degree from Seton Hall University in New Jersey. She lives in Silver Springs, Maryland with her husband Paul, a bluegrass musician.
Q: What prompted you to write October 1962?
A: This play has two sources of inspiration. The first was a newspaper article I clipped about 10 years or more ago about how a small town dealt with a man who'd been released from prison after serving a full 12-year term for rape and kidnapping and how frightened people were just by the fact that he was there among them. He began to act very strangely — going to McDonald's, sitting in a booth and staring at young women, remarking on their appearance, that kind of thing. Very unnerving to an already skittish community. In the article the prison psychiatrist said he was convinced that the man was a "ticking time bomb" and that it was only a matter of time before he acted again — but until the man actually committed a crime, there was nothing anyone in the town could do about him, because he had served his time and he was free.
What do you do in that situation? I saw a drama in it, and I tucked it away in a clip file. And then I forgot about it.
When the Iraq War started, I remembered that story and pulled it out again. And thought about it: What if you're convinced of a danger you can't prove? What do you do? And so I began to think about what was going on at the time, about how shaken the nation was after 9-11 and how jingoistic and war-happy so many people were.
I began to think about some of these geopolitical issues on a domestic scale. We know what happens when a superpower gives in to paranoia and panic. What if we look at these problems in a more contained setting, refracted through the lens of a single family? And so the play began to take shape early in 2004 and I worked on it, off and on over the next year and a half in between other projects.
Q: Does it have any particular relevance in relation to the present day political climate?
A: Absolutely. The play could stand on its own, I guess, as a psychological suspense story — but I think it's really a metaphor for our country and our times.
Q: Two of your plays are titled, The Good Daughter and Are you the "good daughter," the "good girl?"
A: Not any more.
Q: Which of your plays are drawn from your life? Which are primarily research driven? A: It's difficult to delineate, because even the most heavily researched plays sometimes tap my personal experiences. I can definitely relate to Grace Fryer, the character in Radium Girls who moves from trusting authority to realizing that she'd been hoodwinked by people who were supposed to be looking out for her. The silent contract in that culture, in which women are expected to be supportive and sweet and unchallenging of male authority, is that in exchange for all this sweetness and subservience, the men in charge will look out for them. In this case, the men poisoned the girls — certainly not intentionally, but clearly with great negligence. And when they were confronted with the facts, they did everything they could to cover it up and put off dealing with the inevitable. That's a pattern I can relate to in my own life. I've certainly had direct experience with authority figures who turned out to be corrupt — and it's a pattern we see played out over and over and over again, most recently in the U.S. Congress and the White House -- where our leaders are more concerned about covering up their own mistakes than in finding out how to prevent the next disaster.
I have written plays that are clearly personal stories. Years ago I wrote a play called The Truth About Charlie that was really about my own family. Besides a workshop at Playwrights Theatere that play never got a production, but it's the most personal thing I've written, if by personal you mean based on true life experience. Somewhere I've read that every playwright's rite of passage is the "family play" that exorcises their personal demons. But that early play didn't exorcise any demons for me. It was a rather sanitized, sentimental view of a blue collar household wrestling with alcoholism, religious intolerance, poverty, and ultimately, the grandfather's infidelity to his wife and the impact that it had on his sons. It's all grim material presented in the shape of a sweet family comedy. Maybe that made it palatable. Maybe it made it unproducible. More likely that was also because it has six kids. At any rate, it went in the drawer. However, when I wrote The Good Girl Is Gone about six or seven years later I went back to the same material and this time, instead of a Kauffman and Hart type comedy, I wrote something much more raw and fractured — a five-character, surrealistic piece that careens from past to present to past. In the end it deals with the same questions: Why do the actions of a parent in the past continue to poison the relationships of the children in the present? Why must the sins of the fathers be passed on to any generation? That's a universal mystery, I think, upon which all psychotherapy is based.
Q: Which have proved to be the better received of your plays and whyhy do you think that is so?
A: Depends who's receiving it. Radium Girls got universally positive reviews when it premiered at Playwrights Theatre, and it did very well at the box office. Since then it has been published and has gotten a lot of productions — all of them amateur productions in high schools or colleges. Couldn't get a single professional company to consider doing it. The Good Daughter got very good notices (with one or two exceptions) when it was produced at NJ Rep. It was again a sell-out show, and again, I couldn't get any other theaters interested in it. But then neither of these plays is particularly easy to do. Radium Girls is this large-cast, sprawling Brechtian spectacle — which, by the way, got a fantastic production in London this October— and The Good Daughter is an epic story that skates on the edge of melodrama. It's not a melodrama -- but if you don't play it right, it will be, and I think a lot of theaters are afraid of that. Audiences aren't, though. They ate up both plays.
Q: What have you learned from teaching young people in the playwriting workshops?
A: I've learned to be more conscious of the choices I make in my own writing. That you can't teach talent; you can only teach technique. And that the kiss of death for any writer in any setting is to be defensive of your work. It's a strange thing, but while you need to be able to defend your choices, you should never be defensive about them because that puts up a barrier between you and your audience and denies you an opportunity to learn more about your work. But over and over again I see a lot of young writers get very upset if their work is not well received or not understood. So I urge them to think in terms of effectiveness in writing. It's not about whether the work is good or bad. It's about whether it works . . .. what they want the audience to receive. . .what they want the audience to think or feel or understand? And if the audience doesn't receive it as hoped for, analyze the work and try to figure out why. And then try to figure out what the fix is to get the reaction you want. That makes it less personal for the students and makes the point that writing isn't just about self-expression but about conscious choices and applying specific techniques towards desired ends.
So the lesson I take away from all of this is to do that. No matter how personal the source of the material might be — to set all that aside and focus as dispassionately as possible on the structure of the play.
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Editor's Postscript: Playwright Gregory has certainly given Simon Saltzman some benchmarks for evaluating the playwright's effectiveness in taking her own advice. His pending review of October 1962 and this interview also mark the premiere of CurtainUp's New Jersey page. October 1962 will play at New Jersey Repertory Company's Lumia Theatre, 179 Broadway, Long Branch from January 4 to 28, 2007. |
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