Theresa Rebeck

You have had a long relationship with the theater as a playwright, and you also have written for TV: what is it about the theater that draws you to it, and keeps you there?

People ask me this all the time and I have no good answer, except that I think the question is a little odd. The assumption behind the question seems to be that if you could get paid a lot of money to write for television, why would you write for theater? And the assumption there is that money is the best reason to do things. I don’t think that. I think that a love of beauty is a better reason to do things. I think that challenging my heart and mind is a good reason, and challenging the hearts and minds and spirits of my collaborators is also a good reason, and challenging an audience is also an excellent reason. This is what the theater does, that television does not, for me.

For whom do you write when you write a play?

I write for an audience — I am deeply committed to giving the audience an experience they can grab, and enjoy, and ponder. I’m not interested in making theater that is exclusive; I say the more the merrier, everybody is invited in. I yearn for a popular culture that is also spiritually and intellectually demanding. I admire greatly the work of people like Charles Dickens, or Charlie Chaplin —great artists who reached out to everyone.

What triggered you to sit down and write The Bells? What did the story then become for you as you began to write?

I had been doing research for my doctorate in Victorian melodrama, so I had to read a lot of melodramas, most of which were written in the nineteenth century. There was one, also titled The Bells, about a man going mad because he was remembering a murder he committed many years before. I was intrigued by the way the play used the stage picture to portray interior states of mind, but I spent a lot of time thinking about that before I started writing. I always want to make sure that I have landed the world of my plays solidly within an American identity. So it was when I went to Alaska and learned a little bit about the gold rush, that I realized that within that story, I could tell this other story. In 2001 I was invited to the Women Playwrights’ Festival in Seattle, where they put me in a cabin in the woods for seven days and left me alone to think about this world. Out there in the wilderness (it wasn’t really a wilderness, but it was a cabin in the woods) I came up with some of the major questions of the play — what does it mean to be human in the wilderness? In the face of the desperate need to survive horrible degradations of the body and spirit, are there still laws which govern us out there?

Have you always been a fan of melodrama?

I think I have to say yes to that. Since my childhood, I have deeply admired the work of Arthur Miller, and all those masterpieces of his — Death of a Salesman, View from the Bridge, The Crucible — absolutely embrace the form. And there have been important revivals of the form periodically; when I was in graduate school, I flew to Washington to see Peter Sellars’s astonishing deconstruction of The Count of Monte Cristo. Sellars was clearly fascinated by the melodrama’s love of the elaborate stage picture, and I like that too, but I am also compelled by the melodrama’s insistence upon a completely muscular sense of storytelling. There is a commitment, in melodrama, to pushing your characters to a place of real desperation, and then watching what the psyche releases under that kind of pressure. In the nineteenth century this formal element of playwriting unfortunately was not met with an equally rigorous sense of language or psychology, so the plays from that period seem depleted; that’s why the form has such a bad reputation. But if you marry that muscular and insistent kind of plotting to a language and psychology which widens the scope even further, I think melodrama becomes a form which overlaps with both epic story telling, and — because it is also, historically, fascinated with elaborate stage picture — with expressionism.

What about your experience in Alaska have you tried to capture in the play?

I was overwhelmed by its great beauty and its coldness, and darkness, and mystery. It is a crushing and unknowable place.

What made you interested in the Gold Rush?

Okay, the Alaskan Gold Rush remains fascinating to me because of how desperate a situation it really was. It was like one long Donner Party up there. Those men really looked into the mouth of hell, to go up there and get that gold. And I am still pondering the mystery of that. The whole idea of a gold rush is that you get something for nothing — the gold is right there, ready to come out of the earth for you! Let’s just go get it! But if you have to go through the mouth of hell to get it — who would take that bargain? And why? How does greed itself grow to such a place that it overwhelms and destroys all knowledge and reason?

For many writers, “rewrite” is a dirty word. Not only are you an avid writer, you are an avid rewriter. Do you enjoy the rewriting process?

I do not believe that writing comes from some mysterious god-like place and it just emerges from the writer’s mind in some inviolate form. That’s a really silly idea, if you ask me. While we all may want to believe our first drafts are sheer genius, they never are. I fall into that trap as much as anyone — the first draft comes out and I think, for a moment, This Is The Best First Draft Ever Written. It’s nonsense. The crafting of the writing, which comes with successive drafts, is as important, or more important, than the inspiration which started the whole journey. This play especially taught me that.

What is most exciting for you about this upcoming production?

It’s utterly impossible for me to choose an element of this situation which outshines the rest. The design team is quite excited by the demands of the piece, and it’s thrilling to watch them puzzle out and give life to the play’s many expressionistic elements. The actors are all artists I’ve admired for many years; that’s always an amazing gift to get to watch artists who are very much at the top of their game throw themselves into my work. Also, this isn’t the sort of thing they get to do very often, so they’re jazzed. The size of the house is exciting to me; I don’t often get to see my work brought to life on such a grand scale. Emily [Mann] is such a challenging collaborator, her mind is so acute, it’s great to watch her probe both the text and the physical life of the play with such vigor. Also, I’ve worked on the play for so long, it really feels like a long birth, finally happening.