BWW Interviews: Theresa Rebeck On 'OUR HOUSE'

Previews are now underway at Playwrights Horizons for the New York premiere of Our House, a new play by Pulitzer Prize finalist Theresa Rebeck. With this work Rebeck has again displayed the ability to challenge and impress her audiences with her thought provoking and often hilarious dialogue and plot. The playwright has successfully made her mark in the theater, film, and literary world.

Rebeck has written such Broadway hits as Mauritius and Off-Broadway plays like The Scene, The Water's Edge, Spike Heels, and The Butterfly Collection. She has written and received awards for her work on NYPD Blue, and was named one of Booklist's 10 Best First Novels Of 2008 for her work Three Girls and Their Brother.

Our House is a scathing new comedy that shakes up Reality TV. It is directed by Tony Award winner Michael Mayer and stars Morena Baccarin, Katie Kreisler, Stephen Kunken, Mandy Siegfried, Jeremy Strong,, Haynes Thigpen, and Obie Award winner Christopher Evan Welch. Opening Night is set for Tuesday, June 9 at 7PM. The limited engagement will run through Sunday, June 21 at Playwrights Horizons' Mainstage Theater (416 West 42nd Street).

Gabrielle Sierra (Broadwayworld.com): I loved Our House- I thought it was fantastic. Actually I am also about three fourths of the way through your novel ‘Three Girls And Their Brother'.

Theresa Rebeck: You like ‘Three Girls'?

G: Yes! I really do!

TR: (Laughing) Oh good!

G: Yes, I was like "Okay I'm going to try to read some of it so I can talk to her about it" but then I wound up staying up all night and read most of it and genuinely liked it so it was really my pleasure. On your website you state, "When I first started writing plays I was a woman playwright" and you go on to talk about being dubbed as a woman playwright as opposed to just a ‘playwright'. Do you feel that this was a very important title to escape?

TR: Sometimes I think ‘I'm a woman, there's nothing wrong with being a woman'. But I do feel like it so often part of the conversation that it's actually startling at times. It's very much an issue still in the community and that's perplexing to me, you know?

G: Right.

TR: I mean I don't think audiences care about the gender of a playwright, and the actors don't care. It's curious to me why it comes up as much as it does. I know that the numbers of plays produced by women are still disproportionately low and that there's a lot of growing concern in the community about why that would be.

G: Right.

TR: And I certainly have had moments where I just thought...could we... you know, it's just a scary thought. And I'm asked, a lot, to be on panels about it and stuff like that and I just think, surely there are more interesting things to talk about!

G: (Laughs) Oh. Absolutely, yeah!

TR: (Laughs) I mean, I don't say that to you! I say that sort of in a musing way to the universe, but I do think there is perplexing agony about gender in the culture right now that's disturbing. The Yin Yang effect, you know sometimes I talk about it and I say the Ying Yang is off on our planet right now. And there is definitely a problem in the power structure of how to include women.

G: Okay yeah I definitely see that. I mean as a fellow, or should I say ‘trying' woman writer I can understand that for sure.

TR: We see it in so many different epiphanies so many different manifestations of our culture. Our culture, other cultures, its everywhere. 

G: Well then moving away from that, in Our House you have a lot of heavy comments to make about the role of TV and entertainment in our society, and its roll in desensitizing us. I know that you work in television, so do you feel that you drew mostly from your own experiences or did you do research for this sort of thing?

TR: Oh wow, yeah that's interesting... you know I did watch some reality television (Laughs) but you know you don't need to watch a lot of it to get the idea.

G: Definitely.

TR: And I have worked with people in those network situations on the scripted side, so I did draw from my experience on that um, on that aspect of the play.

G: Do you feel that writing in TV and writing in theater has been a problem for you?

TR: You know, at different times it has been. A lot more people are doing it now so it's sort of...it's startling to me that there's this, there's still this discomfort that kind of comes out in indirect ways, it seems very un-thought-through. I mean, what is that? It seems that when actors do it no one acts like ‘Oh you're a big sellout.' (Laughs) And when directors do it no one acts like they are a big sellout. But when writers do it there's still something where no one wants to come out and say you are tainted but that's the idea. But I certainly think that that's untrue. And the fact is that television is a significantly better place for playwrights to make a living and sustain themselves as writers. You know, just financially, rather than features. There's this weird thing that goes on where everyone acts like if you are writing features it's elevating for you. But if you do any writing for television it's as if you sold out a little bit, and that's just crazy. (Laughs)

G: (Laughs).

TR: Because in television, scripted television, writers are treated significantly better and heard significantly more and given more opportunities to tell actual stories. Like there is a ton of great scripted television that's on right now, Weeds, or Mad Men, or Breaking Bad-there's a lot of great great stuff...30 Rock...there's just, it can be a great place for a writer to work. And in film, so much of it is about ‘blow um' up' and there's no respect for decent dialogue and stuff like that. So I think there's really something slightly upside down about that assumption, I do think its still appears every now and then, you do read something that somebody has said that implies something negative, and...actually I also constantly get this kind of discomfort about the whole ‘oh we're losing more young writers to TV' and I think, well that's not necessarily true. There are a lot of people who are working really hard right now to sustain a kind of balance, a move back and forth, something that I've been doing for a long time. I was one of the first ones to actually pull that off because you know it's not the easiest thing to do. You have to be pretty dedicated and you know sometimes I would just get really tired. Just trying to keep those balls in the air. But you know a lot of people are trying to do that now in a way that is actually better for theater and better for television.

G: Well that's good to hear. So in Our House you do this balance of comedy and shock. Do you feel that it's important to use both to convey a message?

TR: I certainly... do.

G: (Laughs).

TR: I do! I think the play makes people laugh and it scares them.

G: That's probably what it is; you get lulled into this comedy place and then something else suddenly shocks you. It's very affective.

TR: And I think we should be scared about culture. I actually think we should be trying to be rigorous in our thinking about television and the way it enters our lives and shapes the way so many people think. I don't think that we should let that be an unconscious event in the culture and so maybe that's what the structure of the play was pointing towards, you've got to stop taking this without thinking about it.

G: What sort of reaction, or what sort of feelings did you want the audience to have about the men in the play? What about Merv (Jeremy Strong) especially? He's this balance between a character you like and a character that is just... something else.

TR: Yes definitely he speaks well, he's funny...

G: Yeah, I mean you obviously must want us to wrestle with these emotions...

TR: Yeah well I actually just said this to someone else but I'll say it again to you, that television contributes to being a sociopath. That television can create sociopaths and I think that the play argues that. And I agree with that argument. By desensitizing us to a point where... glorifying this desensitization, that's the natural outcome of the constant bombardment of that kind of representation of culture into your life.

G: Right.

TR: Someone just said to me ‘You know sometimes Merv seems like a sociopath' and I said "Yeah, because he is a sociopath."

G: (Laughs).

TR: Seriously I mean that doesn't mean that he's... you know famously there are some really charming sociopaths! So I don't know that I'm making a comment about Merv. Wes (Christopher Evan Welch), who is also a sociopath, I find him to be hilarious in a different way.

G: Oh yeah he totally is.

TR: So it's just not to say that sociopaths can't be, you know...

G: Charming...

TR: You know, the devil is very attractive.

G: (Laughing) Oh yeah they are such great characters both of them. You're torn with them. But in your novel Three Girls and One Brother, it's just this whole other realm of writing. And it's interesting because you have similarities where you write from different points of view, but obviously the content is so completely different...although I'm just three fourths through right now so it might change!

TR: (Laughs) No it ends well, I like the ending.

G: Oh good! I'm looking forward to it. But do you feel that it's important to have this sort of variety that you have in your writing?

TR: You know, a lot of times I follow the writing. A lot of people ask me how I control it, and I think, "Oh I wish I had more control." But on the other hand I do find it sort of interesting to just follow where it's going to take you and I don't always know where it's going to go. And it was a surprise to me when the novel sort of insisted that I change narrators, it wasn't my intention to change the narrative voice...

G: Really? That's so interesting.

TR: Yeah so then I had to go back and rethink some things.

G: Oh really?

TR: Yeah for sure.

G: It's funny because when I was reading I was actually surprised that the narrators changed and at first it was like, oh I liked that narrator, you know? But then I loved the change, so it is interesting that you say that.

TR: Every time somebody stopped talking, and it was like... now they are going away. It was very mysterious to me and a little spooky, you know, and the first time Phillip was like ‘okay well I'm just done now,' I thought but wait I don't know if I'm done with you. And then when it started out with Amelia, then I fell in love with her, and when she finished I thought, well I don't know that I... you know what I mean? And apparently there is a little bit of that feeling as you read it.

G: Mmhmm

TR: You fall in love with them you don't want to leave them, and then you have to fall in love with the next narrator.

G: Absolutely you get comfortable with it and then it changes again. It's an interesting way to do it, and obviously you did a sort of similar thing in Our House with the sets and everything. You know, telling a different story...even the locations are different. Did you feel it was important to place the roommates outside of NYC or LA?

TR: You know what I wanted to do when I first started working on that play, I wanted part of it to be about the people who are creating this event and part about the people who are watching it. And so at some point the two worlds come together. But I do think that the production is really successful in insisting from the beginning that these are two very very very different kinds of worlds.

G: Absolutely.

TR: And even to the extent...we didn't do this on purpose but at one point Michael Mayer (Director) and I both realized that one side of the play was tall and one side was shorter!

G: Oh that's so funny.

T: And I just thought that was so interesting. In network land everybody is kind of tall and well dressed and over there in reality land, they are all kind of short and...

G: Yeah right like, sitting around in their underwear and...

T: Right, yeah right. So some of the physical aspects of the production caught us by surprise but they supported the rift that exists between these two kinds of people in these two different worlds.

G: Are you working on anything now? I know you work and write like crazy, are you working on anything else or are you just kind of enjoying the play now?

T: It's a problem, I think every writer in the theater winds up having several balls up in the air just because you don't know whats going to hit, and you know, most of us, well, I don't know any of us who actually can support themselves and you know, make a living just on this. So you always have a few things going. And I do have a play coming into New York in the fall, it's another play that's going to be done at the Roundabout, they are actually in pre-production on that.

G: Oh that's so exciting! That's great. So okay, not to be a cliche, but do you have any advice on being a writer or a woman writer...not to go back to the ‘woman writer' thing but a writer in New York or in the theater scene or just thoughts on writing plays and TV that you'd want to share with any up and coming-female or not-writers?

T: (Laughs) You know, honestly, the thing that I have found to be most useful over a long career, or maintaining a long career, is taking back the power at some point and self- producing. I have always worked consistently, even in small ways and even in smaller theaters where I'll do One Acts or something. You need to do things that don't rely so much on just sending the work out and hoping that someone will just adopt you. You know? You do have to do the other things that you need to do, I think that some people get caught up in waiting for someone to approve of them, and that can become very debilitating to the spirit and for me I always say to my students that you have to keep doing your own work. Get your friends to do it and be a part of it, do workshops, do whatever you have to do, because you are an artist and you are presenting your art and you're not waiting around for someone to tell you that you are allowed to.

G: I love that, that's... that's really wonderful advice it really is.

T: Isn't it?

G: It is.

T: People don't think about that but, you know, all the writers that I know that have sustained longer careers avoid that particular kind of depression. Then you will never feel dis-empowered.

 

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