Interview: Playwright John Biguenet and MAKE BELIEVE at NJ Rep

Marking the start of another extraordinary season dedicated to new voices and compelling stories, New Jersey Repertory Company (NJRep) proudly launches its 28th season of groundbreaking world premieres with Make Believe by acclaimed playwright John Biguenet, directed by NJ Rep’s Artistic Director SuzAnne Barabas. The production runs from February 13 to March 9 and will celebrate its opening on February 15. 

Make Believe is a nostalgic, haunting look back at the world of 1930's Hollywood, where larger-than-life movie stars went to great lengths to keep their secrets from coming to light. The play stars Quentin Chisholm as Bailey and Éilis Cahill as Eleanor  as two lost souls who are thrown together to create a fantastical scenario that could only be dreamed up in Hollywood, the land of dreams.

The production is helmed by SuzAnne Barabas, whose extensive directing credits at NJ Rep include The Housewives of Mannheim, Broomstick, The Adjustment, and more. A dedicated advocate for new works, Barabas brings her visionary direction to Make Believe, ensuring a season opener that audiences won’t forget.

We had the pleasure of interviewing John Biguenet about his career and the upcoming show at NJ Rep.

Biguenet is an award-winning playwright and author of ten books, including Oyster: A Novel, The Torturer’s Apprentice: Stories, and The Rising Water Trilogy, which chronicles the personal and cultural aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. His plays have won numerous accolades, including the National New Play Network Commission Award, Big Easy Theatre Awards, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Biguenet's work has been performed internationally, with Rising Water, Shotgun, and Mold earning critical acclaim. His stories and essays have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Awards, and Harper's Magazine. Biguenet was named Louisiana Writer of the Year in 2012, and his works have been translated into a dozen languages.

When did you first realize that you wanted to be a writer?

When I was ten years old, the New Orleans Public Library sponsored a summer reading program that promised to award a leather bookmark to any child who read twenty books and completed a book report for each book read with a picture or a paragraph. I dreamed of growing up to be an artist, so I submitted nineteen book reports with what I thought were superb drawings. But because I could not draw a horse, I completed my last book report (on a biography of Paul Revere) with a paragraph about his midnight ride to warn the colonists that the British were coming. I received my leather bookmark, and a few weeks later, my parents received a phone call explaining one of my book reports had been chosen as the best in the city. There was to be a ceremony at which I expected public acknowledgement of my talents as a visual artist. Instead, I tasted bitter humiliation when it was announced that I was being honored not for one of my drawings but for the paragraph I had written about Paul Revere. A few days after the event, my parents received another call from The Times-Picayune, the region’s daily newspaper, asking if I would be willing to review children’s books for the Sunday paper. And that was the beginning of my career as a published writer.

Did you have any particular mentors for your writing career?

Miller Williams, the father of singer and songwriter Lucinda Williams, was my first poetry teacher in college and began to comment on my poems as I wrote them. Through him I met many other widely published poets and fiction writers. We shared an interest in literary translation, and years later each of us was elected to terms as president of the American Literary Translators Association.

Do you have any piece of advice for aspiring writers?

Spend twice as much time reading as writing. When it comes to telling a story, the best advice is from Robert Penn Warren: “No conflict? No story.”

We are fans of your plays Broomstick and Night Train, that were also produced at NJ Rep.  How does it feel to be working with the company again?

It is difficult to overstate the importance of New Jersey Rep when it comes to the development of new American plays. The commitment of Gabe and SuzAnne Barabas to produce only premieres provides playwrights a home to develop new works with a fantastic team of actors, designers and other theater artists. SuzAnne is one of the finest new-play directors in the country, always asking questions about a script rather than insisting on the answers. She has a very sensitive approach to nudging writers in the right direction. 

What inspired you to write Make Believe?

As with Broomstick and Night Train, which New Jersey Rep also premiered after I developed its script on a Studio Attachment at the National Theatre in London, I am fascinated by counterposing different voices on stage, a bit like writing a composition for various musical instruments. Because Broomstick was written in rhymed iambic pentameter, I used Appalachian English with its heavily accented Scotch-Irish origins. Make Believe counterposes two very different characters, one a Hollywood matinee idol with the non-regional American English movies and later television popularized and the other a young woman from Pennsauken with a very old-fashioned Jersey accent. (My wife grew up in Pennsauken, so I know that accent well.) Of course, their two different voices also express two different classes of society. Since the play is set in the middle of the Great Depression, the precariousness of their lives is also expressed in their voices. I think audiences in 2025 will understand and sympathize with that precariousness.

Can you tell us a little bit about the cast and creative team that will be bringing the show to the Long Branch stage?

It’s not often that a playwright can point to the moment when his or her words on the page suddenly leapt onto the stage as an actor began to embody the character the writer had created.Usually, over weeks of rehearsal, the character slowly emerges. But when I saw Éilis Cahill’s audition tape, whatever I had imagined the character of Eleanor to be was replaced by Éilis’sinterpretation. Similarly, I left a long day of auditions convinced that Quentin Chisholm grasped the complexities of a character like Bailey Hunter, an ordinary acting student discovered by a press agent and swept up into the world of Hollywood in the ’30s. The New Jersey Rep creative team members are sensational. They know the theater itself so well that they can transform its stage into something enormous or something so intimate the audience feels as if they are on the stage with the actors. The research that goes into the designing of the set and the props and the costumes and the music is quite amazing. And, of course, to have SuzAnne Barabas as the director is to have one of the best new-play directors in the country overseeing every aspect of the production. New Jersey Rep is a playwright’s dream.

What would you like potential audience members to know about the show?

Make Believe is a play about love—about first love, lost love, faithful love, repressed love, imagined love, physical love, impossible love, and a moment of, perhaps, true love. It’s appropriate the production opens on Valentine’s weekend.

Can you share any of your future plans?

I’m just finishing a new novel and a new collection of short stories. And I’m working on two new plays. So I’m scribbling away.

Anything else, absolutely anything you want BWW NJ readers to know.

If you don’t know New Jersey Rep, discover it. It’s a gem!

You can visit John Biguenet's biographical information at https://njrep.org/about/cast-creative/#profile-254842-info. Follow John on Facebook where he has over 5,000 friends at https://www.facebook.com/john.biguenet/. 

New Jersey Repertory Company is located at 179 Broadway, Long Branch, NJ.  For more information and tickets to Make Believe please visit  njrep.org or contact the NJRep Box Office at (732) 229-3166.

Photo Credit: Kyle Encar

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