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Playwright-director Glyn O’Malley, measuring the heartbeat of the American theater

June 2, 2011 8 comments

For all you theater wonks and aficionados out there, here’s another piece of mine from a years back, this one based on an interview I did with playwright/director Glyn O”Malley. Not many months after I spoke with him he passed awat, lending a poignancy to his comments about the future of the American theater, for which he held out great hope. He came to Omaha, as so many leading theater figures do, for the Great Plains Theatre Conference.  The 2011 event runs through June 4.  I am posting stories I’ve written about the event, some its many luminaries, and other aspects of Omaha theater.  O’Malley is not the only Great Plains guest artist whose loss has been felt.  Actress Patricia Neal was a regular and much-beloved fixture at the festival, and she’s gone now. Founder Jo Ann McDowell was also close to other giants of the American theater, namely Arthur Miller and August Wilson, and they too are gone.  The point is though their work lives on, as does the theater.

 

 

 

 

Playwright-director Glyn O’Malley, measuring the heartbeat of the American Theater

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally published in The Reader (www.thereader.com)

 

Playwright/director Glyn O’Malley of New York epitomized the distinguished guest artists here for the Great Plains Theatre Conference that closed last Saturday. Over the course of the eight-day gathering O’Malley, a Fellow at the Cherry Lane Theatre and a faculty member at Lehman College/SUNY, joined other major figures of the American theater in considering various aspects of stagecraft. They addressed everything from the work of new and established playwrights to the role of playwrighting in society to the richness of Omaha’s theater community, whose artists presented plays in lab readings and staged performances.

For O’Malley, just as for Edward Albee, the esteemed playwright whose imprimatur is on every aspect of the conference, it is neither a lark nor a vacation, but a working event that puts them through their paces. “There’s an awful lot to do,” said O’Malley. “I came in earlier to do a preconference workshop with 39 playwrights and then there are morning and afternoon panels and evening programs. So, there’s always something. It’s very intense, very packed.”

Artists use the occasion to measure the health of the American theater, whose state Edward Albee lamented at a Great Plains salute to the late Arthur Miller and August Wilson when he said, “our losses seem to keep outweighing our gains.” But O’Malley said the promise of a vital theater could also be seen in the conference.

“I have hope. There are new young voices emerging that, while they perhaps don’t have the gravitas yet to handle some of the larger questions, they’re touching and pulling up small pieces of the turf and handling it in ways that certainly exhibit an ability to grow into that. There’s work all along the fringes of Broadway that’s hopeful and inspiring. It’s simply a matter of time here in terms of maturation. Everyone who keeps doing this long enough and well enough carves out a place for themselves, a specific niche, and one can stay in it or move on,” O’Malley said.

Events such as the Great Plains, he said, showcase “an abundance of all sorts of plays and playwrights at different stages of maturation.” He added playwrights “all have things we’re attracted to and lean to — plays that are basically captivating enough to pull us into their orbit because of how they approach their subjects.”

What he’s seen of the Omaha theater scene gives him more reason for optimism.

“Well, I think it’s phenomenal. I’m thrilled you’ve got so many good people here — so many good theaters. I can’t believe how much theater there is,” he said. “I guess I’m surprised there isn’t a dominating professional regional theater here, but that may in fact be one of the reasons Omaha has such an abundance of different sorts of theaters that address specific missions and specific visions. I’m extremely impressed by that. There’s a lot going on here and I’ve wondered why it’s stayed relatively off the radar, because I would never have known about it had this conference not moved here.”

As home to the conference, reconstituted here from Valdez, Alaska, Omaha’s now at the center of the American theater’s process for new play development, which at its “core,” O’Malley said, “creates an environment where young playwrights just finding their way on the page can have discourse with people who have done it, done more of it and taken some of the risks they want to take. I think the only person who can really speak to a playwright in terms of really helpful sorts of response is another playwright, a director or an actor. It’s a very specific craft.”

He said if theater is “to gain, we’re going to have to do this right and keep it going” via events and programs that nurture new artists and new works. “These are all really important because otherwise the opportunities for new plays in the commercial market are very, very slight and they get slimmer each year. I think persistence is something we need to encourage. Not everyone’s going to have the trajectory in their careers that Edward Albee’s had. He’s a phenomenon. There is hope as long we encourage and promote responsible thinking and courageous, daring, bold, innovative plays…as opposed to merely good entertainment writing. There’s an abundance of that. There’s a lot of people who can do that. But there aren’t a lot of who can move an audience and cause them to turn over a thought in their mind, to walk out of the theater with it and discuss it over dinner, and let it haunt them for days after until they’ve made up their own mind about it.”

O’Malley, a one-time assistant to Albee and a leading interpreter of his work, agreed with remarks his mentor made at a May 29 Miller-Wilson salute, when Albee said: “Both Arthur and August understood playwrighting is a deeply profound social, philosophical, psychological and moral act. A playwright may not lie because a playwright at his very, very best is believed and must tell whatever truths he knows as clearly and in as tough a fashion as he possibly can. They understood what playwrighting is all about. They understood a play has no excuse for being merely escapism…merely frivolous. They understood the act of creating the play is holding a mirror up to people in the audience and saying, ‘Look, this is who you are, this is how you behave. If you don’t like what you see, don’t turn your back — change.’”

 

 

 

 

O’Malley embraces the weight Albee attaches to playwrighting, saying, “Plays need to open up worlds that other areas of society have concluded about, so that we can go in and personally experience them and begin to ask questions for ourselves. Most of the time we relegate somebody else to answer these things for us. But it’s always about the next question. I think that’s what one has to do. I’m led by that. That informs my choices of subject matter and how I write about it. I’m not interested in what’s known and concluded. I’m interested in finding my own way into things and then I find how I feel about them as well.”

He said Albee’s work “has always been” about probing, challenging the status quo, “and my own view is very much in agreement with that. I have very little patience with the merely frivolous. Obviously we have a great deal invested right now in our society into the pulling away from reality. If you come to New York and go to the theater you won’t be asked to think very often. You’ll be certainly entertained.”

Echoing something Albee declared in 1988, when he was last in Omaha and said, “If we prefer ignorance to dangerous thought, we will not be a society that matters,” O’Malley’s own play Paradise “was stopped from reaching production in Cincinnati. People were afraid of its power and what it would do. It examines how a 17-year-old Palestinian girl was coerced into becoming the third female suicide bomber. It is a very dangerous play because it is right on top of both…an Israeli and a Palestinian position. People want this very much to be an answer play, and it’s impossible. I don’t have the answers. It’s a question box play. It’s a play full of them and they’re all questions we need to be asking ourselves.”

Theater’s capacity to “be dangerous” and “an impetus for change,” O’Malley said, stems from its “immediacy. Theater is very much the vehicle by which we still gather together and view in the first-person with real live people. There isn’t the detachment one has with film. where you can sit back because it happened before and was put together before.” Or, as Albee likes to say, “film is then, theater is now.”

O’Malley, Albee and the rest are expected back next year for Great Plains II.

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Q & A with Edward Albee: His thoughts on the Great Plains Theatre Conference, Jo Ann McDowell, Omaha and preparing a new generation of playwrights

May 29, 2011 13 comments

This is another glimpse at the annual Great Plains Theatre Conference, this time through the prism of playwright Edward Albee, who served as artistic director its first couple years. The 2011 conference, running May 28-June 4 in Omaha. I did the following Q & A with him by phone in advance of one of the early conferences. He’s since disassociated himself from the event, which led to some speculation about its sustainability, but after a limbo year or so the event has come back stronger than ever. In the intro to the Q & A I share some of the trepidation I felt going into the interview. I mean, am used to interviewing celebrities and public figures in all different fields of endeavor, and the names and reputations of some of these folks carry even more weight than Albee’s, but he is a writer extraordinaire known to not suffer fools gladly, all of which made me more than a little tense. It went fine, as these things usually do, and his easy charm is a big reason why the interview session went smoothly, though I distinctly recall feeling a self-imposed pressure to not tarry or dally or digress, but to get on with it, to move quickly from his answer to my next question.  If I had been a bit more reflective and deliberate I think I would have gotten more from Albee, but while it’s not a great interview, it’s more than satisfactory looking back on it now a few years later.

 

Q & A with Edward Albee: His thoughts on the Great Plains Theatre Conference, Jo Ann McDowell, Omaha and preparing a new generation of playwrights   

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally appeared in the Omaha City Weekly

 

That old lion of American theater, Edward Albee, wears well the mantle of expectation that comes with being his country’s “foremost” or “preeminent” living playwright. The descriptions of him, used as if official titles conferred by some ministry of theater, appear whenever his name is invoked. Living legend status is part of the baggage that comes with being a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. As he might wryly observe, there are worse things he could be called.

Considerations of Albee are far from abstractions for locals now that the Great Plains Theatre Conference  he helps direct is an annual event hosted by Metropolitan Community College. The second annual conference features a full schedule of play labs, readings, panels, lectures and performances.

Before you ever interview Albee, you hear that the author of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Seascape, A Delicate Balance and Three Tall Women can be peevish and prickly. That he reads everything written about himself and his work and won’t hesitate to point out errors. That he’s an intellectual of the first order, you don’t need reminding. You hear, too, how deeply he cares about theater. How he generously advises young playwrights. How the future of this art form is often on his mind.

In preparing to talk with him you read his plays. Then you realize it’s folly to engage him in a discussion of his work. No, it’s best to focus on the conference and his efforts at passing on his wisdom to the new wave of playwrights coming up. To draw him out on his long association with Metro president Jo Ann McDowell, who’s responsible for making the conference and luminaries like Albee fixtures in Omaha. The two met when she directed the William Inge Theatre Festival in Independence, Kan. and they went onto organize the Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez, Alaska. Last year they launched the GPTC.

Still, you despair: What hasn’t he been asked before? How to go beyond the banal?

When you finally speak to him, by phone, you find an amiable man who, as expected, listens closely. His responses come quickly, precisely on point. His speech is formal, his delivery measured. His glib sense for irony and his dry wit ever present. You’re keenly aware of the analytical mind on the other end of the line. One always a step or two ahead of you. It’s intimidating. It all goes by in a rush.

As you’ll see below, the Q & A resulted in several of my questions being longer than his answers, which is less than ideal, but I think I evoked reasonable responses in most cases. I was likely a bit too timid and deferential and not being as active a listener as I needed to be. Though he was nothing but gracious, I think it’s safe to assume he was not the most willing of participants.

LAB: McDowell says that when she informed you she’d accepted the Metro presidency, she was afraid you might look askance at doing a conference here, but you embraced the idea, saying something like, They do my plays there — we’ll have better audiences in Omaha.

EA: “Well, you know, we did it for 13 years or so in Alaska and it was lovely up there, but it was a little harder for a lot of people to get up there. And I just thought it would be a lot easier for people to get to Omaha then to get to Alaska. And it being a bigger city and having a theater culture already — because Valdez had no theater culture, we had to create it — that it might make a lot of sense.”

LAB: Other than residencies at Creighton University and an awareness your work is performed here, I take it you didn’t know much about this place?

EA: “I’d been to Omaha a couple times over the years. I’d been to the art museum and I’d been to that lovely downtown complex (the Old Market or Old Towne as he calls it) of galleries and shops. I knew Omaha a little bit.”

LAB: But isn’t what really sold you on Omaha, McDowell?  She says she can’t imagine what made you two “click” given your disparate backgrounds and can only guess her demonstrated passion and commitment for theater gained your trust.

EA: “Well there it is, she has great passion and commitment. She gave the impression that she could work miracles, and if you’re in the theater you like people who can work miracles.”

LAB: You obviously have an understanding of what each other wants.

EA: “She and I disagree sometimes on how best to go about it, but it’s her conference more than mine, so she gets to run the show.”

LAB: But isn’t the event informally known as the Edward Albee Theater Conference?

EA: “Well I’ve been doing my very, very best to destroy that impression. It’s now the Great Plains Theatre Conference. There are many who get invited there — major theater people. It’s not just me showing up, You know, I guess my name sells a few tickets or gets a few people there, but I don’t like being used that way.”

LAB: Yet I’m told this is the only event of its type you lend your name to.

EA: “I’ve lent my presence and my participation and I guess the name goes with it. I wouldn’t lend my name unless I felt there was some virtue to it, and we’ll see how this develops there in Omaha.”

LAB: You’re far more than a figurehead. I mean, you take an active role in the meat of the conference — the play labs.

EA: “Yeah, sure, of course. I try hard to do that. One thing I’m not happy with and it’s one thing this conference has to develop is a much broader base of young playwrighting talent, because it’s tending these days to be a little parochial and I’m afraid the quality of plays being submitted has declined from the Alaska days. But we’re going to be working on that…There’s no point in having all of these wonderful professional theater people around to evaluate work that really isn’t worth evaluating, and there’s quite a bit of that I’m afraid. So it’s got to become less parochial. I understand it is Omaha-based and we have wonderful theater companies in Omaha, and they should be involved in doing the work, but we’re going to have to have to get a much more national and international base of young playwrights coming there for the thing to really matter.”

LAB: By casting an ever wider net?

EA: “Yes, of course, which I’ve been trying to do, but I’m going to have to try harder. We’re going to have to do better than we’ve been doing it.”

LAB: Are there other things about the event you’d like to tweak?

EA: “I just want to find out what all this film nonsense is that’s beginning to happen (He refers to a cinema component this year called Fringe Fest.). I don’t feel there’s room for it at all. But, again, that’s just me. I’ll talk to her (McDowell) about it.”

LAB: It may come as a surprise to people that someone of your stature takes such a hands-on role. I’m told no detail is too small to escape your attention.

EA: “I’m a control freak, but so is Jody. You get two control freaks together, you get a lot of control, and a lot of freaking.”

LAB: Why do you choose to take such a keen interest in emerging playwrights?

EA: “Because I think if you’ve had some experience in the arts and you know something about teaching and you know what you’re doing in the arts, you have a responsibility to pass on the information and that expertise to younger people. You need the new, young generation of wonderful creative people and if you can be helpful in keeping them on the straight and narrow and keeping their sights where they should be, then it’s your responsibility to do it. In the same way I feel creative artists should be loud and vocal politically.”

LAB: When you were a young playwright were there experienced writers who served that same function for you.

EA: “Well sure, but those were the playwrights whose work I was beginning to see in Greenwich Village. The great Europeans — Brecht and Beckett and Inoesco and Pirandello and all those people. And then when a whole new generation of us came up at the same time. Me and Jack Gelber and Arthur Kopit and Jack Richardson and Lanford Wilson and a bunch of others (including Omahan Megan Terry) were there, and we were feeding off each other.”

LAB: Were there events like the Great Plains Theatre Conference then?

EA: “There may have been one or two, but I didn’t know about them. I was living in New York City, in Greenwich Village, in the theater hotbed, in the center of experimental and adventuresome theater in America, which New York still is.”

LAB: So in that sense every night was like a play lab.

EA: “Of course it was.”

Melinda Dillon and Arthur Hill in original Broadway production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?

LAB: Omaha’s a long way from New York. McDowell’s maintained her commitment to theater wherever she’s been and that’s never wavered despite various political machinations she has to contend with.

EA: “It seems not to have to. Yeah, sure, I understand the pressures, but whenever I think the pressures she is under are dangerous and destructive, I try to put a lot of pressure in the opposite direction.”

LAB: She likes to say she’s been “carrying this thing around with me for 26 years,” meaning her devotion to theater and these conferences. Her support of theater has remained consistent in an era of scant federal funding for the arts in America.

EA: “Certainly, look at the last 25 years. The William Inge Festival was begun by her and then the Alaska Last Frontier Conference and now this. She just keeps right on doing it. Of course continuity is very important. And I appreciate her ability to get funds from the local big wigs. I think that’s very important — as long as the local big wigs don’t have anything to say about what we do.”

LAB: Do you ever involve yourself in the fund raising?

EA: “No, she seems to get that all done before we show up.”

LAB: Earlier you mentioned Omaha’s fine theaters. From what you’ve glimpsed of Omaha’s theater community, how do you appraise it?

EA: “Well from what I’ve seen when they come to do readings of plays they do a fine job. They’ve very talented people. You don’t need to be an equity company to be good. I’m always gratified when I find people are doing what they should and doing it well.”

LAB: As you say, local theater companies are a vital part of the event.

EA: “We just want to be sure we give them the best work we can possibly find for them to participate in. It’s good publicity for them. They’re doing a responsible act and they’re probably being exposed to interesting new plays they probably wouldn’t have known about without the conference.”

LAB: As all of theater is, the event’s very much a collaborative, communal affair…

EA: “What do you mean by collaboration? A play is written, that is the individual creative act. Everything else is interpreted.”

LAB: Well, in the sense that a team comes together…

EA: “That is not a creative act, that is an interpretive act. That shouldn’t get in the way of the creative part of it.”

LAB: The conference mission statement mentions your quest for an important, enduring discussion of theater at the national level. What aspects of theater need addressing on a continuing basis?

EA: “Trying to develop an audience that wants theater that matters rather than safe, escapist stuff. Basically developing audiences and critics who know the difference between junk and excellence. And a conference if this sort can be very helpful.”

 

Maggie Smith and David Hilder (center) and participants at the 2015 Great Plains Theatre Conference.

 

LAB: In line with that you have a goal of growing audiences for serious theater.

EA: “The only way to do that is to give them good stuff to see and that’s why we have to keep improving the quality of the scripts by casting our net wider.”

LAB: You’re often asked your opinion on the state of American theater. Last year you were pessimistic in the wake of the deaths of Arthur Miller and August Wilson. Since then, Lloyd Richards and Glyn O’Malley (a participant at last year’s GPTC and a director of Albee’s work) have died. All great voices silenced. You seemed to lament the theater can’t recover from such losses.

EA: “Well we can recover from our losses. Losses are always terribly distressing and damaging, but if conferences of this sort can develop a whole new generation of first rate theater people than the continuum is on.”

LAB: But these have been such major losses.

EA: “Well we’ve been having them all along. Look back at every decade — you lose an awful lot of good people.”

LAB: Miller, Wilson and company were more than colleagues, they were friends.

EA: “Yeah, of course. Well the older I get I keep having to scratch out more and more names in my address book every week. It’s terrible. I must develop a lot of younger friends. See, I usually have friends older than I am because I learn something from people who know more than I do, but they seem to be going away pretty fast.”

LAB: Have you seen promising new talents emerge from conferences like the GPTC?

EA: “Oh sure, a number of talents have emerged, but you can’t ever tell whether that’s going to be enough to save theater from the forces of darkness, which are commercialism and sloth — intellectual sloth.”

LAB: At a play lab last year I was struck by how many questions you asked the playwright, such as Did you consider this? or What was your intention here?

EA: “Yeah I like to teach by the Socratic Method of asking questions rather than giving answers because I have a lot more questions than I have answers about everything.”

LAB: Do you follow a similar process, internally, with your own work?

EA: “Gee I don’t know, it’s hard to talk about what I do when I’m writing. I try to stay away from too much conscious awareness of what I’m doing. I just let it happen.”

LAB: Is there someone you show your work to as you’re developing it?

EA: “No, I don’t show it to anybody until I’ve finished it.”

LAB: May I ask what you’re working on now?

EA: “Nothing right now. I just finished a long two-act play about identical twins, Me, Myself and I, which is going to be done at the McCarter Theatre (Center) in Princeton, N.J.  next fall. (To be directed by Emily Mann, a visiting artist at the GPTC in Omaha.)

LAB: Has the subject of identical twins fascinated you for awhile?

EA: “Apparently it has. If you go and read The American Dream (an early ‘60s play by Albee) there’s a pair of identical twins there, so it goes back a long time in my career.”

LAB: When you come to Omaha are there rituals you follow to begin your day and to end your night?

EA: “Well let’s see, unless I get to read the New York Times I’m an incomplete person, so I do that over breakfast. I try to go to the gym. I work out every day. At the conference Jody has us doing things 27 hours a day, so it’s very difficult to do anything else. Sometimes it’s even hard to get the Times read. The only things I keep protesting are the social events.”

LAB: A necessary evil?

EA: “Ahhh, I decide about half of them are a necessary evil. I involve myself in what I think the most important things are.”

LAB: What about the host site, historic Fort Omaha with its military provenance, Victorian buildings and green spaces?

EA: “It’s a really interesting campus. They always give me a nice place to live and I’m happy when I’m there. They give me a car, not that I ever get a chance to drive it anywhere. They treat me very nicely.”

LAB: McDowell’s stated she wants Omaha as the permanent home for the conference, which she hopes to endow. Are you fine with that?

EA: “Oh, of course. Why not for heaven’s sake? Sure. I have nothing against Omaha.”

LAB: We spoke of losses before. You suffered a great personal loss recently with the death of your longtime partner.

EA: “Yeah, I did. Thirty five years with the right person, that’s a pretty big loss.”

LAB: I know you were really hurting at least year’s conference. How are you doing?

EA: “Oh, I’m functioning. It never gets better, it just gets different…that kind of loss.”

And with that, one could only say, “Thank you for your time, Mr. Albee.” “You’re very welcome,” he said.

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