This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:01] Michael Ritchie: Welcome to 30 to Curtain, a Center Theatre Group podcast.

[0:07] Michael Ritchie: I'm Michael Ritchie, Artistic Director of the Center Theatre Group.

[0:11] Michael Ritchie: For each episode of this podcast, we talk with some of the talented artists working with us across our three stages.

[0:17] Michael Ritchie: The Amundsen Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum, and the Kirk Douglas Theatre.

[0:22] Michael Ritchie: Our guests on this episode are playwright Lucas Hnath and director Les Waters, who join us for the world premiere of Dana H.

[0:31] Michael Ritchie: Lucas returns to us having last brought his play, The Christians, to the Mark Taper Forum in 2015, also directed by Les.

[0:39] Michael Ritchie: Lucas is now fresh off two recent Broadway triumphs, A Doll's House Part II and Hillary and Clinton.

[0:48] Michael Ritchie: Les was the Artistic Director of Actors Theatre of Louisville from 2012 to 2018 and has collaborated with Lucas on a number of projects over the years.

[0:59] Michael Ritchie: Our Director of Communications, James Sims, caught up with Lucas and Les in the lobby of the Douglas as the two took a break from rehearsals to discuss their creative process and what little can be said about this play, which is full of surprises.

[1:14] Michael Ritchie: As you'll hear Lucas describe, he sees Dana H. very much as a black box recording and that the audience need only understand what they hear and experience during the play.

[1:28] Michael Ritchie: All that you really need to know about its plot is that it is a deeply personal story for Lucas that recounts the harrowing true story of the five months Dana, a psych ward chaplain and also Lucas' own mother, was held captive, trapped in a series of Florida motels with her life in the hands of a patient and ex-convict.

[1:53] Michael Ritchie: I hope you enjoy this conversation and we look forward to seeing you at the theater.

[2:00] James Sims: Can you talk about how your collaborative relationship started? What was that first project?

[2:04] Les Waters: We met in 2012 at the Humana Festival of New American Plays when Lucas' play Death Tax was part of that festival.

[2:16] Les Waters: And then our first collaboration was on The Christians at Actors Theatre and then it was here in New York.

[2:27] Les Waters: And then we recently did The Thin Place at Actors Theatre. Both plays were commissions and that will be in New York later this year.

[2:37] James Sims: How would you describe the relationship between playwright and director for you? Is it different on each project you approach? Have you guys built up a rapport together having worked closely on a few key projects?

[2:51] Les Waters: Well, I do think we have a rapport. I mean, we have probably a similar taste in theatricality, maybe.

[3:02] Les Waters: I think our rhythms of work may be in sync.

[3:07] Les Waters: Maybe, Lucas, what do you remember about that first time working with Les on a project?

[3:14] Lucas Hnath: I'm sure there's a level of intimacy involved in giving your play over to a director and having that vision sort of added on to what you've written, perhaps.

[3:25] Lucas Hnath: Sure. It's very much a brain meld, isn't it?

[3:31] Lucas Hnath: There's not much need to talk that much. We just look at each other and know what the other is thinking.

[3:43] Lucas Hnath: And you'll know when I want to sort of plow ahead and do script stuff.

[3:50] Lucas Hnath: I think the really reductive way to talk about it is I have a tendency towards having everything be extremely logical.

[4:11] Lucas Hnath: And you have a comfort with mystery that pulls me back from any spots where I've let the thing get a little looser, a little more mysterious.

[4:34] Lucas Hnath: You're very tuned into knowing where to preserve that.

[4:41] Lucas Hnath: And you're more comfortable with emotion than I am.

[4:47] Les Waters: Yeah, I'm a mess.

[4:51] James Sims: Working on world premieres, Les, as a director, I'm sure, is it different than working on a perhaps second, third, fourth production or a classic?

[5:03] Les Waters: I mean, there's something new to be found in the process, perhaps.

[5:07] Les Waters: And you guys have worked on Dana H. here, which we can talk a little bit about.

[5:12] Les Waters: As a world premiere, this is the first time it's really coming together in front of a paid audience.

[5:19] Les Waters: What is that, if at all, any different than a directing process on something else? Or do you approach it the same way when you're on a project?

[5:28] Les Waters: It is different.

[5:30] Les Waters: I mean, I suppose if you're directing a classic play, what you want to make is something with the feeling that it's new.

[5:43] Les Waters: You know, that it's discovered again.

[5:48] Les Waters: And with a new play, I mean, it's scary, which is fine.

[5:57] Les Waters: And it's enjoyable because you're the – well, as a director, you're the first person going into that territory.

[6:07] Les Waters: And sometimes it feels like you're going completely into the dark.

[6:12] Les Waters: And other times it illuminates itself pretty easily as you're going through.

[6:21] Les Waters: But what it is when you first go into a rehearsal can often be very different with the thing that's finally presented to an audience.

[6:34] Les Waters: I mean, I love it.

[6:36] Les Waters: I mean, it's what I've done most of my career.

[6:40] Les Waters: And it's a great opportunity to camp out in somebody else's imagination for a period of time.

[6:49] James Sims: And Lucas, as we're in this moment right now with Dana H., where it is this first real production in front of an audience, what is that process like for you as the playwright going into the sort of rehearsal, the creative process, and now the presentation process of watching an audience experience this work?

[7:11] Lucas Hnath: How does that arc change for you as the playwright and the creator of these projects to experience it in these different iterations, now being in the staged, fully staged in front of an audience moment of the show?

[7:25] Lucas Hnath: Maybe I'm in the part of the arc where it's hard to explain what the arc is or the arc isn't visible.

[7:31] Lucas Hnath: No, it's just, you know, you have your to-do list of work to do on the play.

[7:37] Lucas Hnath: And, you know, there is a date where you don't get to do that anymore, at least not until the next run of it.

[7:44] Lucas Hnath: So my answer is horribly uninteresting.

[7:50] Lucas Hnath: There's literally a to-do list I have on a document, and I'm checking things off.

[7:56] Lucas Hnath: And it's just, you know, you keep listening to it and try to hear the thing as though you've never seen it or heard it before.

[8:06] Lucas Hnath: And you keep doing that as long as you can until you can't.

[8:11] Lucas Hnath: And then you're kind of useless.

[8:13] James Sims: What role does the audience play on specifically like a world premiere first audience, which just was here at the Douglas experiencing Dana H. for the first time? Does that play a part in your sort of constant work until opening night?

[8:29] Lucas Hnath: Yeah, it does on a new play because the audience come in with clean ears.

[8:35] Lucas Hnath: You know, I mean, we've been sitting in a room for many weeks and you suddenly, you know, can they hear that? Is that clicking in? Is this going too fast? Is it going too slow? Are they ahead of the thing? In which case, what do you do?

[8:59] Lucas Hnath: I mean, it's a shock when they arrive.

[9:02] James Sims: Has there been anything that stood out for you here on this production, seeing how we just went through those first couple performances?

[9:09] Lucas Hnath: I think the rhythm of it is very interesting.

[9:14] Lucas Hnath: You know, I mean, like we all know it very well.

[9:18] Lucas Hnath: And is the piece kind of holding the audience in its hand, you know, moving forward.

[9:26] Lucas Hnath: So that's interesting. With Dana H., specifically knowing that there's a lot of this play that we don't want to talk about in depth now or really ever for the audience perspective, that there's a bit of this play that the audience is just going to come to understand when they experience it.

[9:39] Lucas Hnath: Can you talk a little bit about why that's important to you that we sort of let the play speak for itself and not really get into a lot of the details of what is happening and why it's happening the way it does in the show?

[10:01] Lucas Hnath: Some of it's just you want it to remain a surprise for the audience.

[10:07] Lucas Hnath: There's that sort of that reason for it. The I am generally not comfortable saying anything about what happens in the play, in part because it is a play about my mother and I was present for some of the events of the play.

[10:29] Lucas Hnath: And so it is, you know, there's this semi, at least for me, semi-autobiographical aspect to it to talk about it in interviews means that people will ask me further questions about the events.

[10:46] Lucas Hnath: And I feel as though the play is kind of this black box recording. You watch it and there will not be any additional information about it.

[11:01] Lucas Hnath: You don't go see Hamlet and ask further questions about what he was like as a child. But you do tend to do that when you know that you have access to people who lived the events of the story.

[11:19] Lucas Hnath: But I am asking that people sort of receive it as a story on its own terms and not seek out supplementary information.

[11:30] James Sims: Les, have you worked on projects before that have dealt with real people and real events or have you mostly focused on the sort of world of fiction?

[11:41] Les Waters: I'm trying to think. I don't think I have, you know. I worked for a long while in England in my former existence as an English person with a theater group called Joint Stock, which, I mean, was interview based.

[12:05] Les Waters: But then the interviews were, you know, the people were often two interviewees were turned into one character on stage. Now, I think this is a first.

[12:17] James Sims: What about Dear Elizabeth? Where does that fall?

[12:20] Les Waters: Well, I did Sarah Ruhl's Dear Elizabeth, which was the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop.

[12:31] Les Waters: But no, that that didn't feel I mean that I haven't. You know, that was their words. Well, this is Dana H's words. Now, it somehow feels different.

[12:45] Les Waters: Well, that for me as a director was very research based.

[12:50] Les Waters: And this is I'd love to talk about the form of this play, Dana H, in that there's a prerecorded audio component to the show that Deirdre, the actress playing Dana in the play.

[13:05] Lucas Hnath: It is, in fact, not using her own voice. I think that opens up such an interesting avenue of creativity and, I imagine, challenges or unique opportunity for you, Les, as a director, to direct an actress in movement alone, right? No vocal work to be done. Could we talk just a little bit about, Lucas, maybe starting with you, what it is like as someone who is often a playwright writing the words from your own imagination to, in this point, doing something different, in that you're working off of pre-recorded audio? And, Les, what that means for you as a director and how that changes the game, if at all, for how you approach it? I mean, it is, of course, undeniably different from how I write most of my plays.

And yet, at the same time, the way that I write is I will spend a period of time essentially just vomiting up text until I get somewhere between 200 and 400 pages of material. And then the writing process is just simply organizing that material and arranging it. And I've always found it useful to think about that part of the writing process as going into the editing room with footage that I went out and collected. So when I knew that I wanted this play to be composed from transcripts, I went ahead and just took the transcripts and organized them like I would any of my other plays at that point in the process where I stop and I figure out what are the compelling moments. I title each of them and I start arranging them.

And so the thing that this has also opened up is not only composing with words and sentences, but we're composing the play with utterances, sighs, laughs. Those all become tools for the storytelling. And also, when I assembled the first draft of it, I had no idea because I didn't listen to the recordings. I only worked off of the transcripts and that was intentional. But I had no idea if the cadences were going to line up because I was using material from all over the place from different days and in many hours. So composing the story out of her tone of voice and the speed with which she's speaking. That was another tool.

[16:12] Les Waters: As a director, working with an actress beyond just the vision of the show, you're directing Deirdre, the actress. What is that process like with this conceit that she's not using her own voice throughout the entire play? Well, it should have been head-bangingly difficult because, I mean, or like a huge challenge because I have no experience of lip-syncing. And it's not been because of three people, really. Misha, the sound designer, Steve, who worked with Deedee on lip-syncing, and because of Deedee, really, who is, what is she, immensely kind, very funny, very generous and sort of genius at it. And the tone of Dana's voice or the rhythm of how she's speaking on the tapes dictates a lot of what Deedee does.

[17:32] Lucas Hnath: I believe Steve had been telling us in a previous interview that you two had sort of played around with the idea of lip-syncing before. I wrote a play that was written to be lip-synced many, many years ago, probably 2004, 2005. That was the first experiment with that. And I knew that Steve had had, Steve Shiffo had had experience with lip-syncing, working with lip-synca. And so I brought him in for advice about how to make that play work. So yeah, that was the first experiment with lip-syncing.

[18:24] Les Waters: What intrigued you by that concept? What led you to even experiment with that form? It goes back to when I was in grad school, I got really interested in the work of this director, a director who has since passed, Reza Abdo, who would, a number of his plays were written to be lip-synced. And they allowed him a certain kind of narrative freedom because there's this implicit understanding that the thing that you're watching is on a kind of track. And so it even goes back, as far as grad school, I was doing experiments in one of Richard Schechner's classes with lip-syncing. So it goes back even further than that play from 2005. And yeah, I was just interested in theatrical conventions that can share some of the burden that certain narrative structures typically take responsibility for.

[19:50] Lucas Hnath: This is a co-production with the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. So it has its world premiere here in Los Angeles at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, and then it moves to Chicago. What happens with the creative process between here and there? Is there any more, will you look back at the piece once the run's complete and do anything between the two, or is that unknown at this point? I think it's unknown. I'm sure we'll talk. There'll be some conversation.

[20:17] Les Waters: Thinking of Center Theatre Group, the Goodman, Lucas, or Les, your previous work as the artistic director at Actors Theatre, Louisville. Could you talk about the role non-profit theatre has played in your careers? Lucas, clearly a lot of your work is coming out of the non-profit theatre world. What is that role in the American theatre construct? And maybe just speaking a little bit about how it really allows things like this, this true sort of new form of sorts and new experience to happen and get an audience in front of it. What are your thoughts on the state of non-profit theatre and its importance in the culture right now?

[21:06] Lucas Hnath: Well, sort of my American career has mainly been in non-profit regional theatre. And I've done, I mean, my New York work tends to be work that I was commissioned by regional theatre and has moved to New York. So these places that can commission writers and artists to make work and give you the time and facilities to do it are remarkable. And, you know, I worked at Actors Theatre for six and a half years and the Kew Manor Festival, I suppose, is still part of the engine that moves the thing along. And for young artists, it's not easy to get a break and to be able to do your work at a bigger scale that you usually do.

[22:10] Les Waters: Lucas talks about young writers perhaps getting a break that might come only by way of regional non-profit theatre sort of being a place. Do you remember, can you talk about perhaps your first break or what you remember of really having an opportunity to see your words brought to the stage?

[22:31] Lucas Hnath: Well, the first full-length play of mine that was professionally produced, I mean, before that it was 10 years of putting up anything I could in whatever free space I could get with dollar store props. And then Actors Theatre of Louisville produced my play Death Tax. And, you know, I mean, the fact is most theatres, not-for-profit theatre, that the commercial theatre represents an incredibly small percentage of theatre that gets done. And it may be more amplified, I guess, but most theatre is in the not-for-profit sector. So it's also hard to speak generally about it because it's basically, well, that's all of theatre. In the case of Actors Theatre of Louisville, it was a place where I was given remarkable freedom to fail with as little interference as possible. You know, it was just they came to me and asked me what I needed to do the play. And that's, you know, ideally how it works.

[24:11] Les Waters: Speaking of the, I guess, dichotomy of most theatre being non-profit, you've had some very recent high-profile opportunities in the Broadway universe, the for-profit world. Does that change anything for you as a playwright? Does that open new doors for you? I mean, you definitely have, for instance, Doll's House Part Two certainly had origins in the non-profit space, but then went to Broadway, as does Hillary and Clinton, right? There was sort of that pre-New York iteration of the work. What changes for you when it does go to Broadway and have a much more commercial sensibility about it and how it's handled?

[24:44] Lucas Hnath: Honestly, in my case, very little. It's because I worked with a producer, Scott Rudin, who, when we did Doll's House Part Two, asked me how I like to work. And because Actors Theatre of Louisville and the Humana Festival trained me to know what I want to ask for, I actually literally said to him, I want to do this like I work on plays at Humana. And he said, okay. So, you know, there is significantly more press you have to do. That changes the experience a lot. But the actual process of working, for me, and I'm very happy to say, has been very similar to my experiences in the not-for-profit world.

[25:50] James Sims: You've been listening to 30 to Curtain, a Center Theatre Group podcast. You can find out more about Dana H., our organization, and upcoming productions on our website at centertheatregroup.org.