An interview withKATE FODOR06

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JEREMY B. COHENFROM PRODUCING ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

What an incredible 40th year we’ve had at the Center. From PlayLabs

to the Ruth Easton New Play Series to our 30+ additional development

workshops, it has been a delight to share with you just a handful of

the phenomenal artists we have had the privilege of supporting.

We close this year with the workshop of an incisive and timely new

play by Kate Fodor, the winner of our 2011-12 McKnight National

Residency & Commission. Kate has been having a banner year—

in addition to her concurrent commission and upcoming premiere

of Fifty Ways with Chautauqua Theatre Company, her satirical Rx

opened to effusive reviews Off-Broadway this spring, and her 100

Saints You Should Know continues its march into theater seasons

across the country.

Here is a playwright whose voice is at once blissful, lucid and deeply

empathetic and humane—the very same qualities that make her

such a joy to work with. Personally, I’ve had the great pleasure of

watching Kate grow from a burgeoning writer at Oberlin (where we

were college chums), to the author of the towering achievement of

her first professional play, Hannah and Martin, which swept NYC and

the country, to the profoundly nuanced and soaring artist I now see in

each new brush stroke she paints.

This newest play comes to the Center in the throes of the generative

process (such is the very nature of new commissions), creating an

exciting opportunity for both Kate and our artistic team to grow the

play over the course of a weeklong workshop. It is a beacon that

illuminates why this nimble organization must mold itself to the needs

of each writer, each creative voice that steps up to the plate … and

another reason I am so proud to call the Playwrights’ Center home.

I hope you’ll join us in our 41st year as we turn our eyes toward a new

season and a new roster of playwrights that we’re quite excited to be

rolling out in June! Thank you for being part of our family.

JEREMY B. COHENPRODUCING ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

Supported by a grant from The McKnight Foundation, the McKnight National Residency & Commission aids in the commissioning and development of new works from nationally recognized playwrights. The recipient playwright receives a $12,500 commission as well as workshop funds to support the development of the play. Past recipients include Kia Corthron, Daniel Alexander Jones, Craig Lucas, Taylor Mac, Ruth Margraff, Dan O’Brien, Kathleen Tolan, and Mac Wellman.

THE MCKNIGHT NATIONAL RESIDENCY & COMMISSION

HOW IS THE COMMISSION GOING?It’s still in a pretty chaotic state, but I’m pushing through. One of the reasons I wanted to do this year at the Playwrights’ Center was for the accountability of it. That, for me, is one of the gifts of the fellowship—knowing that there is a deadline, but also that the Center is a safe place to turn up with a draft that’s still a little unformed.

WHAT IS THE PLAY ABOUT?I started the year with the idea of doing a play about the history of the birth control pill, jumping around in time and looking at it from all different angles—scientific, cultural and personal. But, as my daughter once said while she was playing with a paper towel roll and some masking tape, “I don’t know what I’m making until I make it.”

The play is still about reproductive issues and how they affect our social and personal relationships, but it’s morphed into a contemporary piece about a young couple, entirely fictional. The young man in the couple, for various emotionally complicated reasons, becomes involved with an organization that pays drug-addicted women to be sterilized or to go on long-term birth control. (The organization is based on an actual group called Project Prevention, but it’s been heavily fictionalized in the play.) The young man’s wife is pregnant, and the play is in part about how his involvement with the group affects their marriage and their feelings about their incipient parenthood.

Although it isn’t what I was expecting to write this year, the play did come out of the research for my original idea. When I started researching the history of the birth control pill, I rapidly branched out into all different areas of reproductive history, and some of the places where reproductive history intersected in the most interesting and shocking ways with our social history had to do with coerced or enforced sterilization.

It’s a little hard to outline the plot of the play for you, because there’s a bit of magical realism in it, and there are pieces of it that don’t quite fit together

KATE FODORAn interview with06

because they’re not supposed to, as well as pieces that don’t fit together because I haven’t figured out how to make them fit together yet! REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS HAVE BECOME A FOCUS OF THE PUBLIC DISCOURSE RECENTLY. HAS THAT DEBATE SHAPED THE WAY YOU APPROACH THIS PLAY OR ITS SUBJECT MATTER?It hasn’t really been part of my process of thinking about the play. When I start writing something, I actually try to shut off the outside stimuli about that subject, so in some ways I’ve been averting my eyes from the current news, even though in other circumstances I would have been following it obsessively. I understand who the people in my play are and what their issues are and what the very specific world of the play is, and I don’t want to think outside of that too much right now.

TELL ME A LITTLE ABOUT YOUR PLAY FIFTY WAYS, WHICH IS PREMIERING IN JUST A COUPLE MONTHS. The Chautauqua Theatre Company commission was awarded last summer and it became clear about halfway through that we were actually going to be headed toward a production this summer, which is by far the fastest I’ve ever had a play go from conception to production! So it’s been very intensive. And great! We playwrights often complain about “development hell”—how you can end up doing 17 workshops of the same play, and

“WHEN I START WRITING

SOMETHING, I ACTUALLY TRY TO

SHUT OFF THE OUTSIDE STIMULI

ABOUT THAT SUBJECT, SO IN

SOME WAYS I’VE BEEN AVERTING

MY EYES FROM THE CURRENT

NEWS, EVEN THOUGH IN OTHER

CIRCUMSTANCES I WOULD HAVE

BEEN FOLLOWING IT OBSESSIVELY. ”

somewhere around workshop 14 feeling like you never want to see the thing again! This is sort of the opposite experience, where if I have a fear, it’s that there hasn’t been enough development. Be careful what you wish for!

It’s the fastest I’ve ever gone from genesis to production, but it’s also just the fastest that I’ve ever written a full-length play. It’s a big fat two-act family drama, and it just came out a lot faster than anything I’ve ever written before, even much skimpier plays.

THE TITLE IS A REFERENCE TO THE DIFFERENT WAYS THAT PEOPLE LEAVE EACH OTHER AND MARRIAGES DISSOLVE, IS THAT CORRECT?Yeah, it is. The play follows a long-married couple over one summer and fall of their marriage as it is changing drastically. It deals with the many ways that people leave each other, or plot and plan to leave each other, or fantasize about leaving each other, or fear that they themselves will be left. There’s packing your bags and walking out the door, but there are also the more subtle emotional ways that we leave or turn away from each other.

YOU’VE DONE A LOT OF WORK WITH CHAUTAUQUA THEATRE COMPANY.I have, yeah. They do a new play workshop series every year, and I’ve done two of those. I’ve also taught at Chautauqua, and then of course there is this commission and upcoming production. Ethan McSweeny, who is the Resident Director there, has directed two of my plays Off-Broadway, and Vivienne Benesch, who is the Artistic Director, is a friend and collaborator. So it’s definitely a place I feel really at home.

HOW DID YOU GET INTO PLAYWRITING?I was a journalist for a long time out of college, but I never felt like it was what I was born to do. I hate the phone. I feel guilty when I bother the lady at the bookstore by asking her to check the price of something—so the idea that I was making a living trying to hound people for facts and scoops and secrets was sort of a mismatch.

Meanwhile, a lot of my old college friends became actors and directors and set designers and stage managers in New York. I was constantly at people’s Off-Off-Broadway shows and at the bar afterwards, so I felt like I had a toe in that world, even though it wasn’t the one I lived in.

Then one of my dearest friends, an actress, talked me into writing a

play for her. I was terrified, but she held my hand while I did it. (I mean, metaphorically—it took six years, which would have been an awful lot of actual handholding.)

When I started writing plays, which was past the age of 30, I felt like I had found my voice. But I didn’t go to grad school or any of that stuff.

DID THAT EVER CONCERN YOU, OR DO YOU CONSIDER IT A STRENGTH?Well, I’m certainly happy that I don’t have student loans to repay on a playwright’s income! So that part worked out well.

At the beginning, maybe my crooked path to this made me a little timid, because everybody else had gone to school and had taken their theater history classes. They not only knew more than I knew about theater, but they also all knew each other, because they’d been in school together and then working together for years, so maybe it was a bit more intimidating to come at it as an outsider than it would have been to take the grad school path.

When I think about my first couple of plays, there are definitely things that I would have done differently if I’d known or understood more then. And I’m sure grad school is one of the ways that I could have known more. But

“I FEEL GUILTY WHEN I BOTHER

THE LADY AT THE BOOKSTORE BY

ASKING HER TO CHECK THE PRICE

OF SOMETHING—SO THE IDEA THAT

I WAS MAKING A LIVING TRYING TO

HOUND PEOPLE FOR FACTS AND

SCOOPS AND SECRETS WAS SORT

OF A MISMATCH.”

whatever route we take, we’re all so young and stupid! As old and trained as we get, it is the human condition to be young and stupid. So I just try to make my peace with that.

I also feel lucky because I’ll be 42 next week, and the work still feels so new and exciting to me. Maybe if I’d been writing plays since I was a college undergraduate, I’d be feeling beaten down and sick of it all by now. It’s nice to have something that in my middle age still feels challenging and scary in a good way.

WHAT DO YOU LIKE OR DISLIKE IN A PLAY?Ah, that’s a hard question. What I really like is ...

What I dislike is a sort of … It’s so hard to say.

You know, I think the reason it’s hard for me to answer that question is that my attitude towards watching other people’s work has changed so much over the past five or six years. Maybe I’m just getting older and mellower, but it’s hard for me to think in terms of liking and disliking anymore. Because as a playwright myself, there is so much empathy for what’s being put forward. Every single time I see or read a play, I feel disappointment and frustration about the missed opportunities and the missteps, just as I do about my own work. And every time, there are also things that wildly excite me, just as there are in my own work.

“THERE’S NO ONE IN THE WORLD

WHO YOU COULD SAY YOU HAVE

ENTIRELY STRAIGHTFORWARD

FEELINGS ABOUT BECAUSE PEOPLE

ARE TOO COMPLICATED FOR THAT.

I’M STARTING TO FEEL THE SAME

WAY ABOUT PEOPLE’S WORK.”

I feel like because we live and die by reviews, there’s this binary approach to evaluating what you see—was that good or was it not good? Did you like it or did you not like it? And plays are such complicated beasts. Like people! Maybe every now and then there’s someone whom you’re just allergic to, and every now and then there’s someone whom you just adore, but there’s no one in the world who you could say you have entirely straightforward feelings about because people are too complicated for that. I’m starting to feel the same way about people’s work.

So, you know, I started to try to respond to that question as though I knew the answer, but I think I really don’t. I think I’m trying very hard not to know the answer to that question, if that makes sense.

The Playwrights’ Center is a fiscal year 2011 recipient of an Institutional Support grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is funded, in part, by the arts and cultural heritage fund as appropriated by the Minnesota State Legislature with money from the Legacy Amendment vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008.

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