What’s it like to be back in the playwright’s chair for your second play, after your first, The Twenty-Seventh Man, ran both at The Public Theater in New York and here at The Old Globe?
It’s an absolute joy to be back at the Globe and working with Barry again, and to have this dreamy set of actors onboard. I’m literally floating around the theatre. As for being a playwright, the process is as intense as always. But identifying as the writer is noticeably easier this time. When I did my first play at the Public, they were shooting this promotional video, and they had to do 50 takes to get me to look into the camera and say, “My name is Nathan Englander, and I am a playwright.” I couldn’t do it. It felt so strange. Also, after a decade, it’s nice to have a second play. There were 10 years between my first and second book, and for all that time, when people asked what I did for a living, I’d have to say, “I write book.” So by the time anyone reads this I’ll be able to say, “I write books and play…s.” Which will feel really nice. Also, coming to work in Balboa Park every day is truly special. This is a magical place for a theatre to land—which is what I assumed happened. That it dropped out of the sky one day just like James and the Giant Peach.
(from left) Director Barry Edelstein with
Nathan Englander. Photo by Mike Hausberg.
Would you talk a little bit about your short story on which the play is based? Where did that story come from?
For our whole lives, my sister and I had a kind of shorthand to represent trust. When we’d meet someone new, we’d say, “Oh, yeah, him? He’d hide us.” That is, in the event of a second Holocaust, we believed that this individual would save us. I was maybe 40 years old before I thought, “That’s pretty pathological.” It’s a mindset that was very much a product of our education. And it just seemed like a jumping-off point to explore ideas of Jewish culture and heritage and education, and what it means to be Jewish in America as opposed to Israel. On a universal front—which is something I deeply care about; if a story isn’t universal it isn’t functioning—it’s about how all these things work together in a general sense too. Ideas of friendship and family and memory and history and the anxieties so many of us are feeling about the vast distance between folks these days.
What made this story a good candidate to be adapted for the stage?
Honestly, I just saw it in my head—which doesn’t speak to the candidacy part of your question. Considering whether to invest years into transforming the story into a play is a whole separate matter. I always tell my grad students highfalutin things like, “A novel isn’t just a fat short story.” What I mean by that is things need to fit their forms. They need to earn the space they’re taking up. In this case, the ideas behind What We Talk About were still bouncing around my noggin long after the story came out. As I watched America change around me, as I watched it become ever harder for people of differing beliefs to communicate, to sit down at a table together (as they do in this play), I wanted to spend more time with those characters. I wanted to explore along with them the notions of trust that are at the heart of the story.
What keeps you coming back to writing for the theatre?
That’s easy! And it’s especially easy to answer during rehearsals (which is when we’re talking). I love this process so much. It is so, so communal. When I write fiction, I do the lighting and the sound, I build the sets, I am the parents and the children, the husbands and wives. And the notion of all these people traveling to San Diego to build this world together is deeply moving to me. And deeply inspiring. To see each of the actors take what’s on the page and slowly transform that into a person they inhabit, a new, living person, and then to see the relationships build up between them. To see how that all changes when they’re up on their feet in a mocked-up set, holding props, half-costumed—it really is just fascinating and exhilarating. There’s this endless amount of craft that goes into getting us to right now, where someone is maybe reading this in their seat and waiting for the curtain to go up, waiting to enter this world we can all, for a time, live inside.
Do you think about the audience when you are writing?
Of course, of course! I’m writing for the audience only. But it’s always hard to explain exactly what that feels like inside my head. I talked about universality before, and if you break that idea down, if you think about what it means in practice, it’s that every person, each unique individual, should be able to experience a production as if it were made just for them and them alone. I can still remember dreaming of being a writer and sitting on the couch with a book and just being amazed that the story I was reading existed. Thinking it was so clearly written just for me and knowing, yes, who else is a book written for but the reader, whoever that may be. So that’s it. This play is for each and every person who comes to see it. That’s who I wrote it for.
(from left) Robert Dorfman, Ron Orbach, Eli Gelb, and Hal Linden in The Twenty-Seventh Man at The Old Globe, 2015. Photo by Jim Cox.
