087 How Am I Ever Going to Get There?

Acting is a collaborative art form, and for an actor, the most important collaboration is with the writer, the playwright or screenwriter. Their process of getting an idea to the page is no less a creative struggle. This week Charlie shares a talkback from the Maggie Flanigan Studio in NYC with Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle award winning playwright Joshua Harmon. His latest play Prayer for the French Republic comes to Broadway in January 2024. Joshua talks about his process, about riding out the lows, and the importance of replacing judgement with curiosity. Here's another incredible conversation about living a professional creative life. You can follow CBP on Instagram @creatingbehavior, and Charlie's NYC acting conservatory, the Maggie Flanigan Studio @maggieflaniganstudio. Theme music by  https://www.thelawrencetrailer.com. For written transcripts, to leave a voicemail on SpeakPipe, or contact Charlie for private coaching, check out https://www.creatingbehaviorpodcast.com

Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):

Acting is a collaborative art form. If you're lucky enough to live a creative acting life, you're going to work with directors, producers, other actors. You're going to work with set designers, lighting designers, sound designers, an entire crew. And I believe the most important person you're going to collaborate with is the writer, the playwright, or the screenwriter who busted their ass, turned themselves inside out to put those written words on the page, and I think it's very important as an actor, you memorize those words word perfectly. You don't want to bring your own isms and reduce what's written there to something that's convenient for you to say. I think it's very important.

(00:46):

Today we're going to talk to a playwright. I'm going to share with you a talk back that we had at the Maggie Flanigan Studio with Joshua Harmon, the writer of Bad Jews, Significant Other in the upcoming Broadway play, Prayer for the French Republic. We're going to talk about the writing process, about living a creative life, how to write out the lows, how to replace judgment with curiosity, and how to answer the question, "How the fuck am I ever going to get there?" Put the phone back in your pocket. Creating Behavior starts now.

(01:20):

Well, hello, my fellow Daydreamers. Today is a first for Creating Behavior. I am going to share with you a talk back that we had a couple of weeks ago with the playwright Joshua Harmon, and we do three or four of these a year. We try to bring in a significant creative artist to talk about their work and have our students ask questions, and it's just really a wonderful community building opportunity and I learned a hell of a lot from these. Our last talk back was with Joshua Harmon. Now, Joshua Harmon has been working and pursuing a writing career for 20 years. Went to Carnegie Mellon for undergrad, got into Julliard as a playwright, where he had the opportunity to work with Christopher Durang, Marsha Norman, mentored by them, if you can believe that. That's what happens when you get into Julliard. You work with the best of the best.

(02:54):

I would recommend before you listen to this conversation, go grab a couple of his plays. If you're living in New York, get to the Drama bookstore, pick up a copy of Bad Jews, Significant Other, and Pray for the French Republic. And if you're somewhere in the world, order them. I think it'll help you appreciate what Joshua has accomplished. He wrote Bad Jews almost 12 years ago now, and in 2014, 2015, it was the third most produced play in the United States. It's been done all over the world. The West End, Australia, you name it, all over the world. That's incredible. What an accomplishment, certainly for a playwright. Are you kidding me? I think there are two really, really challenging art forms if you are cursed enough to want to pursue them, playwriting and poetry. You think acting is difficult? Jesus, to become a published playwright, to get your work done anywhere as a writer is amazing.

(04:10):

And Bad Jews was actually the first play that Joshua wrote that actually performed for more than three nights. The Roundabout Theater Company picked that up. They also did Significant Other, and now he's going to Broadway. The Manhattan Theater Club in January is putting up a Prayer for the French Republic. He's won two Drama Desk awards for outstanding play, two Outer Critics Circle awards for outstanding off-Broadway play. He's won Lucille Lortel awards. He's accomplished. I think it's really important to hear what the fuck he has to say about his journey. Do you know, how do you get there? How do you ride out those lows? Those times where you just don't think anything ever is going to happen for you. You can't even see sometimes what is possible. And the creative process, how he writes what he does to be able to get some shit on the page, and I think it's a fascinating conversation.

(05:21):

I'm going to turn it over to Dariush Kashani who ran the talk back for us. Dariush is one of my senior teachers, an accomplished actor in his own right, and he also runs the Professional Actor Business program for me at the Maggie Flanigan Studio. And at the top of the conversation, Joshua was talking about just what life was like for him pre Julliard and his time at Carnegie Mellon and what it meant not just to get into that school, but how his life took off from there. Let's turn it over to Joshua Harmon.

Joshua (05:59):

Here I am. I'm sitting up here and we're talking about all the good things that happened and it feels inevitable. But before Bad Jews got picked up and before I got into Julliard, I had graduated Carnegie Mellon. I had this fellowship in Atlanta through the National New Play Network where I wrote Bad Jews. It was very clear to me by the way my friends and people were responding to the play that it was different somehow than the other things I had written. And then nothing happened. And so I went back and got another assistant job and I was treated badly there, and I quit that job and I went home to my parents' house and I had no job and I had no production and I had no agent and I didn't know how long I was going to be in that space.

(06:48):

I had this play that people seemed excited about, but nothing was happening. I say that just because I think when you're talking, there can feel like this inevitability of things, but when you're in your life, it's just like there was this chasm of what will be. And then I got a really great call that somebody had passed it onto the Roundabout. They did a reading and I had applied to Julliard, and so good things started to happen.

Dariush (07:16):

It started at a 62 seat black box theater and the underground of what the Roundabout has under the Laura Pels, and then it went upstairs where the theater's 424 seats, okay. I don't know how you feel about reviews, but here's what I want to say. One review in particular said this about Bad Jews. "It's rather brilliant. As badly as these Jews behave to one another, there is something life-affirming about how they grapple with the legacy of their grandfather's experience. And with Auschwitz casting a shadow over even the funniest moments of this comedy, you can't ask more of a play than for life to be affirmed." Pretty fucking incredible.

Joshua (08:02):

I thought you were going to read my favorite review, which was from an organization called White News Now, a white supremacist organization that came to the play and said, and this is seared into my mind. "When we rise up and take our culture back from these vultures, we will turn this title into true poetry." And I remember being like, "That guy was in a 62 seat. He was here?"

Dariush (08:31):

Wow. Wow.

Joshua (08:32):

Yes. It's a period piece now. It's crazy. The play happened in 2012, 2013, and was fine. And then it happened in 2014 in England and was fine. And then in 2015 when it went to London, it started previews a week after this shooting that had happened in Paris at a kosher supermarket where four Jews had been gunned down. And that moment of violence was not unique. It had caused all of these conversations about how safe it was or wasn't for Jews in Europe. There's a line toward the end of the play that the lead character has about, says something to the effect of, "Now when it's safest to be Jewish in the history of the world." And she said it and I went to two previews and people laughed. They did not laugh in 2012 and 2013, but they laugh because it was not true, and so I had to cut that line. The world had changed.

Dariush (09:24):

What expectations did you have for Bad Jews overall when you were working on it?

Joshua (09:28):

I really hoped it would get a reading somewhere. That was my dream.

Dariush (09:31):

Can you tell us more about your relationship with all the characters you write?

Joshua (09:36):

Marsha Norman talks about how you can't write about somebody that you want to get revenge on and you're like, "I'm going to show you up and put you over there and I'm going to write you from here." If you're writing them, there is some piece of you that is connected to them, even if it's a character that's behaving in ways you wouldn't or saying things you don't believe. You have to find your thread to that person in order to give them a fair shot on stage, because otherwise, people can suss out pretty quickly if you're like, "This is the straw man. There is something enjoyable for me about trying to put myself in the shoes of somebody I don't even agree with."

Dariush (10:17):

Another thing that I read, you said working to make characters likable is destructive to the conversation and simply bad for the writing.

Joshua (10:25):

I feel that so strongly. And likability is something that you hear a lot in dumb meetings where it's like, "It's producery, this person's not likable. And you're just like, "Is Madea likable after she kills her children? Do you want to be friends with Blanche Dubois? I don't. Is Nora likable?" That's not why you go to the theater, I don't think. You don't go to make friends. You go to see people wrestling with really impossible questions and those people are in really difficult circumstances and you suss out how they make the choices they make and then that gives you information in your life, "Okay, I wouldn't do that or I'd do that." But the idea that you go to a play because you want to meet nice people just is false, is historically false. Hamlet's not nice. I don't want to be friends with him, but I'm curious to see what he does.

Dariush (11:21):

You wrote a play called Ivanka.

Joshua (11:24):

I did.

Dariush (11:24):

About, there's only one Ivanka in my mind, and I'm just pulling up a couple of quotes from Josh in reference to the play. "As of now, I still have the right to freedom of expression and I want to use that right while I still have it. I'm not an activist and I'm not usually overtly political, but in my small way, I wanted to have this act of civil disobedience." What was Ivanka about?

Joshua (11:51):

Ivanka was written in the summer of 2016, if you can remember that time. It was really scary and disconcerting and it was just day after day of awful news and this sense of powerlessness like, "What am I going to do in New York City? I already know how New York's going to vote. What am I supposed to do?" And so I decided to write this play. I sat down for two weeks and I adapted Madea, a very close adaptation called Ivanka. And I made Ivanka Madea and I used her father as Jason and Chris Christie was there, Omarosa. It was the whole gang. And we got it read all around the country the night before the election as this act of just... Because it was like, what is about to happen? At least right now we can say, "Yes, I'm going to say all of... I'm going to just do this." And for two years after that, whenever I flew internationally, I was always pinged. I always had to go and talk to somebody.

Dariush (12:55):

Really?

Joshua (12:57):

And I was like, "I think I was put on a list." I don't know. That's my conspiracy theory, but it had never happened to me before and it happened every time for two years.

Dariush (13:05):

And you weren't even pushing for that show to have a full production. It was just...

Joshua (13:09):

It was just to try to do something. I went to see it, we did it. They did it in DC and it was really intense the night before. I walked to the White House where the Obamas were inside and you're just like, "What is about to happen here?" And it felt good to do something. Did it have any impact? Obviously not, but I still believe in speaking out in some small way.

Dariush (13:34):

Let's talk about Prayer for the French Republic now. I'll just give you a little background on the play. It's about five generations of a French family with stories happening between the 1940s and 2010. It is set in France because that's where Josh's ancestors are from, his family's from. France is the first European country to emancipate Jews. It also has a history of anti-Semitic attacks and brutal murders causing thousands of Jews to relocate to Israel. Josh, tell us about the title, the play. What does it mean?

Joshua (14:09):

That shooting happened in 2015, all these stories were written, "Is it time for Jews to leave France?" I was really interested in that question because it's interesting, but also because of my background, I speak French and so I went to France to do this big research trip and while I was there, I went to services at the Grand Synagogue in Paris and they read the Prayer for the French Republic. There's a similar prayer that's read here called Prayer for Our Country, and there was something really profound about walking into this synagogue. You have to have ID, you have to have a passport, you have to go through security. There are armed guards with machine guns, for good reason. And then you go in and you say, "Please keep us safe in our country. Please stay true to your ideals of liberty and democracy." And it was intense to just, I think being a bit of an outsider and hearing that and having that experience and it not being routine for me. And so that title for that prayer just stayed with me.

Dariush (15:10):

How did the play get developed and how did it get to Manhattan Theater Club?

Joshua (15:13):

It was a commission for them and it was a Broadway commission, and that was the first time that somebody had asked me to write a play for Broadway. Not that I had limited myself previously, but I think there is a piece of me that's always writing a play and being like, "Well, I could get my sisters and we could just put it up in my parents' living room." It took me a few years to write it and a couple trips to France to do research and do a lot of interviewing and talking to all sorts of different people, which I had not done before.

Dariush (15:45):

Right. And did you find family members there in France that you had maybe, I don't want to say you didn't know they existed, but you were maybe familiar with them and then there they were in front of you?

Joshua (15:56):

My family split, so there's four or five generations back, the ones who came here and the ones who stayed. And the ones who stayed, as is in the play, some of them right at World War II escape and get to Cuba. From Cuba, they go to Mexico and after the war they come to Brooklyn and meet my grandmother, and they're young and she's young and this reconnects the family and they're writing letters back and forth my whole life. My whole life, I'm aware of our French cousins. And then when I was in college and studied abroad, I went and I met them, I stayed with them, so I had a connection to them. And then there was other family who had not left, and a lot of it is in the play is inspired by these people. I just showed up at their place of business and was like, "Hi," and it was pretty amazing. He spoke to me. We spoke twice and he was very forthcoming.

Dariush (16:50):

One review in particular, a positive one, Josh, I'm sorry. Okay. "Prayer for the French Republic is a lesson in French history and examination of many different relationships to Judaism. A grappling with resurgent antisemitism in a nearly flawless script that never once leaves us wishing for less, even at a near three-hour running time." There's a line in the play, "It's either the suitcase or the coffin." It's chilling. You got a letter from someone who had seen the play, French Jew who had left France, and she wrote you and said that she felt that the divorce between France and its Jewish population had been finalized, so she left. This is all very real. It's like you're not even dealing with what if anymore.

Joshua (17:39):

Yeah, it's really interesting and cool to do research for a play. There's this thing that I had heard Lynn Nottage say about Sweat. I don't think it's original to her, but I hadn't heard it before, where for Sweat, she had gone into Reading, Pennsylvania and conducted all this research and she said the thing she kept saying to herself was, "Replace judgment with curiosity." And I thought that was really, really smart. I went and I didn't want to go in with an agenda. It was just like, "Tell me what's going on." And the thing that was confusing, ultimately exhilarating, is that everybody had a different point of view. It wasn't like you talked to 10 people and they all told you the same thing. They all had wildly different points of view. And so it was a real challenge to figure out how do you tell a story about a tiny group of people where everybody sees things differently?

Dariush (18:34):

Differently. From another article, you said, "If we're going to grapple intelligently with the problem of antisemitism today, we need to know how we got there." And then Patrick has a line in the play that, "If we don't keep track of it, do you think they would keep track of it for us?"

Joshua (18:53):

I mean, I think there's this idea of there was the Holocaust, but the Holocaust is not an isolated incident in the history of Jews, certainly in Europe and throughout the world. And so I did have the experience. My family is from Strasbourg, from Alsace-Lorraine. I had done some historical research and my great-great-grandmother was born in Strasbourg. And I'm walking in the city during my research trip and I, as in the play, see this plaque where it says, "In 1349 was the Valentine's Day massacre where 2000 people were burned alive." And you're like, "Okay, that's 1349. She's born there a couple hundred years later, but we've been there for a long time." Somebody survived that. I didn't know anything. Why would we know about what happened in 1349? But there is documentation for all this stuff. And so part of what I see my task as a writer is just to put down on paper, this is what it's like right now. This is what it feels like. This is what is happening, because other people have done that before.

Dariush (19:54):

How did you prepare for the rehearsal process before the off-Broadway production?

Joshua (19:59):

It was COVID and it was Omicron right when it happened, and so in all of my previous rehearsals, I had been a real anxious mess. And there was something about coming out of the pandemic, I don't want to say I was so grateful, but I was more aware than I had ever been how precious the opportunity was just to be in a room with a group of people to try to make something. And we were all masked the whole time. There was a lot of eyebrow acting. There was a 91-year-old in the play. He would show up, he had trouble keeping his mask on because he's an older guy and you're just like, "He could die. He could die coming here."

Dariush (20:44):

And it takes him two hours and 40 minutes to make his first appearance.

Joshua (20:47):

Oh my God, yes.

Dariush (20:48):

Yeah, yeah. He's still in the play.

Joshua (20:49):

Yes. And so you're like, "People are sacrificing a lot to be here." There was a sense of just gratitude. And at the same time, you're trying to hold your own feet to the fire to still be a rigorous artist and to really look at each moment in each scene and be like, "Is this as good as it could be? Is this achieving what I want?"

Dariush (21:12):

Right, and I know that whatever directors you've worked with that is at the center of the relationship where when they have notes and they give them to you, you really take them seriously. You don't...

Joshua (21:24):

Yeah, I mean, it's a marriage. It's a real... I think of the playwright as the mother and the director as the father. The playwright gives birth to the play. I've carried it for nine months or however, in this case, six years, and then I give birth and then it's their job to help me raise this baby and get it off to college.

Dariush (21:44):

Right.

Joshua (21:44):

Yeah.

Dariush (21:46):

Well, the baby's now out of diapers and going to Broadway. Okay, I think this is a good moment to turn it over to our students here and they can start asking some questions. Sound good?

Joshua (21:58):

These were such a nice question.

Dariush (21:59):

Oh, you're welcome. You're welcome.

Speaker 4 (22:00):

Thank you so much for being here. I feel like I'm in a magic show standing up. I saw Prayer at the Manhattan Theater Club and it was wonderful. Congratulations on your success. I have two questions. One is going to be a fan girl moment. I need to know what was one piece of advice that Christopher Durang and Marsha Norman gave you that really stuck with you? And my second question is, I'm a writer myself and I've produced work and I've noticed for myself, I have to move granularly. It has to work moment to moment for me before I can flesh it out and make it a full length piece. What have you noticed about your writing process and the tricks of the trade that has stuck with you? Or maybe things that have changed for you the more that you've written?

Joshua (22:52):

In terms of the advice, it wasn't advice so much as this notion, both of them have long careers in the theater, which is not easy to do, and had real high highs. I mean, you all have heard of them, so obviously, but real low lows. And Chris especially talked about riding out the lows, the things you will learn from them. And if you're on the track, if you're in it for the long haul, knowing that the low isn't the end, it's a point on the road and there'll be highs and there'll be lows, and if you're lucky. I think Marsha halfway through her career really pivoted and went into musicals, Secret Garden, Color Purple, Bridges of Madison County. She has worked on some really iconic musicals, which is not where she started.

(23:48):

Oh, this is a piece of advice Chris Durang said that I have held on to. "There could be something you want and you keep banging at the door to get it and it doesn't come to you." And he's like, "And you can stay there and keep banging at that door. You will not notice the door over here that's opening for you. Walk through the doors that are open to you. Don't stymie yourself because you're not going through the door that you think you wanted. There are other things that you can do."

(24:18):

In terms of writing process, I can't really write a play until I know where it's going to end. For me, the hardest part is going to be that the middle, where it starts and where it ends, and Marsha and Chris are actually really interesting about this because they have two very different takes on how they write plays. Marsha Norman talks about, I'm going to get this wrong because I don't know Marvel that well, but she talks about Spider-Man, and she's like, "Spider-Man doesn't stand in the middle of the street and just put his grappling hook up into the air and start going. He's like, "No, I'm going to that building," and he throws the grappling hook there, and then he climbs." And she's like, "And that's how she writes. I know where I'm going, and so now I just have to figure out how to climb there."

(25:02):

Chris talks about writing as he's driving in the dark in a rainstorm in the fog, and he's like, "I can see an inch in front of me. I can't see past that, so I'm just going to keep going inch by inch until I get there." And I could not work that way, but I think you actually can feel it in his work that it goes in these places where you're like, "How did it go there?" Whereas something like Night Mother, which a perfect play, is beautifully structured and feels it has that drive and I think I am more of that model.

Speaker 5 (25:43):

I just wanted to ask you about the ending of Bad Jews, especially the last lines. I wanted to ask you what brought you to end it in that way? Something that is unexpected. It's like everything it needs to be, and yet the last thing I thought it would be.

Joshua (26:02):

Yeah, I mean, I knew that it ends with that revelation of his tattoo. It's hard for me to remember. Knowing myself, there was probably a lot more dialogue at some point. There was something about the quiet character of Jonah that was really... I'm really compelled by people who don't speak, and so it felt like all these other people in the play had monologues and this revelation was his monologue.

Speaker 6 (26:38):

Do you ever get creativity block or writer's block, and if so, how do you pull yourself out of it.

Joshua (26:40):

I don't really believe in it. I'm not somebody who writes every day, and so I don't believe that you have to. And so if I don't feel like writing, I don't. I guess one way I deal with it is by just not working. But I also am somebody who believes in going out. Go for a walk, go to a museum, fill your head with... Get off your phone. For me, get off my phone, get off my computer. Don't look at a screen. Just be out in the world. Go get a cup of coffee and people watch. I don't think that writing is always you and your computer or you and a pen. Writing is you puzzling through an idea. I like to take walks with my headphones in so that if I want to talk to myself, I can do it and not feel crazy. And so that can be something useful too. I can pretend to have a conversation with whoever to work something out. I think you can put pressure on yourself like, "Why am I not getting this?" And why put that pressure on yourself?

Speaker 7 (27:51):

Hi. I just want to hear your opinion on the current generation, I feel, is desensitized to current political situations and they isolate themselves away from that and they try to hide from things that are going on around in the world. I wonder, as an artist, how do you feel about educating yourself with the things that are going on with our world and if it's really essential to the core of your artistry?

Joshua (28:18):

It's really interesting, this question of what is the function of a play? By its nature, all works of art are political. I mean, they all speak on some level too, but the thing you have to keep in mind is there's a world in which Hamlet, when it came out, was really insightful about Danish politics in the 1500S, that they were just, he was really examining something and we have no idea now. The thing that's going to sustain the drama is always going to be those human relationships and what is happening between two or three people. You want to stay informed because we live in this world. You're writing, and for the most part, most American plays that are good are written about that writer either in the present or their lifetime. There are very few Crucible's and even The Crucible is him responding to the moment with something historical.But you look at the plays that stand the test of time and it's people writing about their experiences, their childhoods, what's happening now.

(29:30):

And so a play like Glass Menagerie, on the one hand you could say that's not a very political play. Will this mother get her daughter married off? But the circumstances of it are extremely political. Where they're living, right after the war. You want to be responding, but I think if you're just trying to make a political point, people want to, I want to feel the human story and what's going on between the people. It's a balancing act because you have to recognize that everything is political, but it doesn't necessarily have to be overtly political in order to do that. Hi.

Speaker 8 (30:17):

I just wonder whether you ever feel overwhelmed by how much there is to read and see, and if so, how do you navigate that, if you are someone who pursues more your passions, or just reads everything?

Joshua (30:31):

I find it really overwhelming. Going into a bookstore, which I love to do, but if you are like, "I haven't read her, I haven't read him. Oh my God." The New York Times just had the 33 books to read this... I was like, "What?" I read a book this summer. For me, particularly when I was starting out, I felt like you want to try to read as much as you can, but you really want to listen to the part of you that's like, "I like this. I'm drawn to this. This is speaking to me."

(31:04):

I think it's better to go deep with one author or two authors who really speak to you. You don't even have to rationally understand why as opposed to being like, "Well, I've read him and him and her." Who caress? I think you will learn more by... I mean, when I was in college, there were a couple movies that I just watched all the time. I watched Thelma and Louise twice a month. I don't know why, but it is a perfectly structured film and there was something about watching it over and over again that understanding story seeped in a way that I think if I had watched 20 different films, wouldn't necessarily have happened in the same way.

Speaker 9 (31:49):

Hi, I would love to know what your day-to-day is like as a writer and the balance between your writing process, but also creating and seeking out opportunities for yourself as a writer, and then also how that's changed over the last decade.

Joshua (32:06):

I don't have a routine. I think of myself as lazy. Maybe deliberate would be a nicer way of, but I don't force myself to write when I don't feel like it. One of the things that I discovered, which I'm like, I'm now proselytizing, that I discovered over the pandemic is something called Pomodoros. Maybe you've heard of it. I had not. But you put 25 minutes on the clock and you work and then it goes off and then you get a five-minute break, and then you put another 25 on and then you get a 10-minute break. There is something about that that really helps me. Having a deadline really helps me.

(32:51):

The issue for me that what's changed over time is Prayer is going to open in 2024. I started working on it in 2015. That's nine years. I mean, obviously I was doing other things, but it takes a long time and I have become more aware of how long it takes, which means I think 10 or even more years ago, I was more eager and willing to be like, "I have an idea going to..." And now I'm aware that if this happens, if this becomes something, this could be 10 years of my life that I have to be talking and thinking about these characters and this situation. And do I want to spend a decade... And if you're lucky, I mean, here I am talking about Bad Jews. If you're lucky, that happens. I think I've become more aware of how long it takes and so how interested I have to be to get going, to not follow every idea in a way that I did when I was younger.

(33:53):

What I learned by working for a theater agent, for a lit agent, is that they can't make anything happen for you. They can submit your play to places, but every agent I know has plays they love that have never been produced and there's no reason why. It always comes back to me. I have to do it in order for it to happen. During the pandemic, I was like, "What is going to happen? I'm never going to write again. Theater's dead." And then at some point I got tired of that and so I was like, "I want to write something."

(34:24):

And the way I did it, which is how I work all the time, is I called up a couple friends and I was like, "Can you reserve this day in six weeks?" And then I wrote a play and we read it, and at that point it was December 2020. I was like, "This could be the only time we ever hear this play, but at least I did something." For me, those kinds of deadlines where they don't actually mean anything, you could cancel, I could call all those friends and cancel, there's something about asking people to hold a date that just makes me anxious, which is good for me. Yeah, sure.

Speaker 10 (35:03):

Hi.

Joshua (35:03):

Hi.

Speaker 10 (35:03):

Thank you so much for coming here today. I want to ask basically just about something we talked about in script analysis last year, which is that if you read a lot of an author, they have something that keeps them up at night. Obviously, I can see some through lines and infer my own impressions of what that might be for you, but I'm so curious as to what you would say the big questions that keep you going and writing stories about the culture, about your lineage, and I love how you said, "I'm all of my characters," how that relates as well.

Joshua (35:37):

There are different kinds of writers. I am not a writer who wants to position myself above the audience in the sense of saying, "You need to know about this," or "I'm going to tell you something," or "I have a lesson to teach you." I call myself a selfish writer because I just try to write for myself. And in doing so, I only want to tackle questions that I can't wrap my head around, that I don't have an easy answer to, that are worth looking at from multiple points of view, just to try to understand something and to step into those different points of view. If there was a question about something that I felt very clear on, I would not want to write a play about it because I would not be able to...

(36:21):

The example I often use is abortion. I don't have anything to say about that. I know exactly how I feel about it. I know what I believe. And so the idea of trying to write something where I'm showing... I don't want to do that. It has to be a question that I don't feel certainty about or that I don't have answers to. And then my feeling is if I'm not psychopath, then other people are going to share. I'm not the only person who can't wrap their head around this question.

(36:55):

The idea that I'm all my characters is just a sense that if I were to write the Roe v Wade play, I would not be able to write the person who's super pro-life in a way that... There's nowhere for me to... It would be very hard. I mean, I could probably talk myself into it. It would be very hard to-

Dariush (37:12):

We'll write you a check.

Joshua (37:17):

I don't want to try to convince myself of something that I already believe. But a question like, are Jews safe in Europe? Are they safe in France? Should they leave? Should they stay? Where should they go? How should they... Those kinds of things where I don't have a clear answer are much more compelling to me.

(37:33):

Speaker 11

(37:33):

So structure has come up a number of times. I'm curious how meticulous you are about that, or maybe when and in what ways you're meticulous about that. At what point an idea feels like enough of the structure is pivot down that you can move forward to take the draft and see how that goes?

(37:53):

I have become a structure nerd. I really do love it. When I was starting out, I actually put the question of the play in the... I put it there. Bad Jews, she literally says, "Poppy's Hiye, I want it." And so you're like, "Okay, is she going to get it or not? There it is." It's that deliberate. I'm not always that on the nose. I tend to write a beginning with a sense of where it's going and then put it away for a while, and then the real work is the middle and the rewriting. Rewriting is like 90% of it. I don't churn out a first draft and I'm like, "Ta-da." It's a lot of workshops and hearing the play over and over and trying to understand.

(38:45):

I mean, the first time you hear it, you're just scared. You can't even really hear the play. You're just like, "Oh my God. Oh my God." And it takes a few to be like, "Oh, that's terrible." I'm really mean to myself in my journal. I'll say really nasty things to myself. It's not structured like this, then this, then this, then this, but I will say one of the things I've taught that I love that's worth looking at is a book called Backwards and Forwards by David Ball. I find it a very clear way of thinking about how this leads to this, leads to this, leads to this.

(39:20):

There's another book I recommend, Edith Wharton's book, The Art of Writing Fiction, which is useful for dramatic stuff too, but she's like, "You have to remember that the audience is always asking the unconscious question in every moment. Why am I being told this? What is this for me?" If it's just a beautiful passage that has nothing to do with anything, people are going to tune out usually, and you'll feel it in a theater. You'll feel when they're with you and you'll feel when they're done. And so there's something about thinking about structure even just as you watch a play and really try to watch the audience and feel when they're riveted and when they're not, and it's usually because they understand that what is happening on stage doesn't impact whatever has come before or might be coming next.

Dariush (40:15):

Charlie, go ahead. You're allowed.

Speaker 12 (40:17):

Get us out here on this. Thank you. This is incredible. What did it mean in '21, '22, '23, thinking about pursuing a serious creative life and what it means now to look back over the last two decades?

Joshua (40:34):

It felt, I will say, inconceivable, when I was starting out. It did not seem like a thing that I could achieve, and I don't know if that's just because I didn't come from a world where there were creative types around me. I couldn't imagine how you make a living building a life that has, around the arts.

Speaker 12 (40:58):

Especially playwriting and poetry.

Joshua (40:59):

Yeah. Yeah, and I was coming up at a time, I mean, it's an interesting moment right now because Broadway is actually expanding a little. But I was definitely coming up when I just hoped for an off-Broadway production. That was it. That was the total dream to be produced. It was not like, that just wasn't... I didn't see young people making it there. It felt impossible. And I think that's why I wanted to say about that period before Bad Jews got produced, because it's a lot easier to sit here and look back and be like, "This happened and this and this." But when you're in it, the lows especially, you just are like, "How am I ever going to get there?" It's an interesting year on Broadway because I have a lot of friends who are going to Broadway for this year, and you're like, "Wow, we came up together and here it's happening and people..."

(42:00):

I guess what I would say is when I was an assistant in my early twenties and there were people above me who'd be rude to me, and you would just be like, "You do know that assistants become people. We don't always stay here." I think there was something in there of the people you're with, somebody's going to find a path, and someone else will find a path. And so it actually will, it can happen, but it's the kind of thing where you can't see it. You don't know what it's going to look like. And so it's this leap of faith, but you have to keep leaping. It's a constant leap of faith.

Speaker 1 (42:50):

Well, my fellow Daydreamers, thank you for sticking around on this one, keeping that phone in your pocket. Please, you can subscribe, follow the show wherever you're getting your podcasts. You can go to iTunes if you've got a few seconds, write a review. That would really be helpful for the show. Spread the word. Tell your friends about this great podcast for actors and artists, anybody who wants to live a creative life. You can go to https://www.creatingbehaviorpodcast.com Go to the contact page, hit that red button. I use SpeakPipe. Leave me a message, give me some things to read and watch, share some of your thoughts. You can go to https://www.maggieflaniganstudio.com if you're interested with training with me in New York City. Lawrence Trailer, thank you for the song, my man. My friends, please replace judgment with curiosity, play full out with yourself. Stay resilient, and don't ever settle for your second best. My name is Charlie Sandlin. Peace.