Brooke Berman is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter. Her plays have been produced and developed across the US at theaters including: Primary Stages, The Second Stage, Steppenwolf, The Play Company, Soho Rep, Williamstown Theater Festival, Naked Angels, MCC, New Dramatists, New Georges, WET, SPF, The Hourglass Group, The Bay Area Playwrights Foundation and the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center.  In the UK, her work has been developed at The Royal Court Theatre, The National Theatre Studio and Pentabus. Her plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing, Playscripts, Backstage Books and Smith & Kraus.  Her memoir No Place Like Home was published by Random House in 2010 and called both “Highbrow” and “Brilliant” by New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix.  She is a playwright in residence at Juilliard and a resident playwright of New Dramatists. 

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Brooke Berman Interview, with Kathleen Dennehy

What inspired this play? The obvious question is- were you in your Jesus Year?

I was inspired by a trip to the Santa Monica Art Museum at Bergamot Station and specifically by an exhibit called SEMINA Culture, about the artist Wallace Berman.   My father (Harvey Berman) moved to LA when I was 4 and sort of disappeared for a few years. When he came back to Detroit in 1976, where my mother and I lived, he was dying.  And he died roughly two years later.   But looking at Wallace Berman’s art work, noticing a disturbing resemblance to my own (I make collages when I’m not writing plays), I started to fantasize: what if that guy were my dad? What if my real dad hadn’t died in Detroit but instead, created a new life for himself in LA?  What if he got the chance to change everything?  

I’d had my “Jesus Year” a bit earlier – and it was brutal!   When I turned 33, I was living on someone’s couch on the Upper West Side of Manhattan having lost my job to 9-11 and my downtown apartment to a friend’ illness.  My on-again-off-again boyfriend took off soon after because he’d fallen in love with a college student.  And my wallet was stolen.  Basically, I was at rock bottom. It sucked.  And then, it got better.  Much, much better.

Was making the protagonist a male more or less of a challenge?

No, it was amazing.  I’d been frustrated by hearing that my plays were very “female” and so I wondered, what would it be to write the same play but give the primary story to a male character?  It was an experiment.  Basically, I gave Max a lot of my own experiences and frustrations and let the character develop from there.   

The play is fascinating in that everyone is a bit of a protagonist as well as an antagonist- in that they love to analyze and see everyone else’s  ‘issues’ and wants to ‘help’ them, but do more harm than good, due to excessive self-interest and lack of empathy for each other.  Am I ‘analyzing’ your play and themes correctly?  Or am I way off?

I don’t know how to answer this one.  I mean, ummm, okay?  Isn’t life a bit like that?

I also love the ‘self-invention’ aspect of Zab, Anna, the missing Joe and Lady- is this something (as a New Yorker) that you see as a singularly Californian trait.

There is something magical about California – it’s the end of the line for Westward Expansion, the Gold Rush, all that, and I do think there’s something specific about reinvention here. You can be whomever you want in LA.  The past doesn’t catch up or reach you. You put up a billboard, get a new name, dye your hair, do The Secret… who’s to say you aren’t who you say you are?    I find this both frightening and exhilarating.

I love Max’s self-invented journey of seeking truth/answers from a long dead, unknown father-and the concept of ‘not asking the right questions’. What do you see as Max’s conflict/issue?

He’s trying to control his own pain, looking to put it into this tight little narrative, and it limits him.   He’s looking outward rather than within. All of the language that sounds like self-knowledge is exactly the opposite.   Things change for him when he finally starts to listen.

The introduction of AA and 12 step speak, as well as self-help is such a Los Angeles-centric construct. What interests you dramatically and thematically about the world of self-help?

I love AA.  I used to go to Alanon in my 20’s, and I remember walking into an AA meeting when I was 22 and asking some guy whether he thought I might be an alcoholic.  “Can you have one drink and not another?” he asked.  And I was like, “Yeah, no problem.” And he said, “Then you’re not an alcoholic.”   I was disappointed. Still, I did receive a lot of support and comfort from Alanon. It’s a great community.

Max’s incessant letter writing is a very funny and revelatory theme. What compelled you to include that in the play? 

Well, I did write each and every one of those letters (mine were longer and more vitriolic. And there used to be even more of them in the play!).  I was convinced that they could be a part of this narrative – a man seeking control of a world that is spinning out of control. But what good is control?  Of what use? Why not let it spin a little?

I also love the conceit of the Jesus Year- of deciding at 33 to make significance out of one’s life- it’s the sort of gateway to true adulthood- our last chance to escape youth and the mistakes people make in their twenties and to examine how to be a ‘better’ adult.  Can you expound on this as a dramatic concept- in terms of Max’s  journey?

My play SAM AND LUCY talks about Saturn Return in much the same way. Yeah, I guess I’m interested in orphans and mythology.  In order to fully become an adult, the orphan needs a meeting with the missing parent(s) – this meeting can be figurative, symbolic.  Max needs to meet his “father” and in doing so, he can absorb or integrate an “inner father” and finally, grow up.

Anna is intriguing as a source of mystery and- her absence adds a lovely tension and when she finally appears it’s a scorcher- devastating, as well as cathartic (for me anyway!)   Can you delve into what she represents?

It’s my favorite scene in the play.  And she’s my favorite character.  She has grown up.

Holden Caulfield is a recurring theme as well. Is he a ‘young man’ touchstone for Max and Reed?  Or an inadvertent (or advertant!) role model that Max needs to exorcize?

Max just couldn’t stop talking about Holden Caulfield and “old Jane”.   I think I mention Holden in my play The Triple Happiness too.  He’s a romantic figure all right.

The missing, unknown father is very moving- can you expound a little on what the loss of father represents?

My own missing father, perhaps?  Perhaps because I have lost both my parents, I write a lot about young adults and not-so-young adults in the same predicament.  The loss of a parent does something irrevocable to the psyche. There’s no going back, no safety net, you lose a kind of innocence with the premature loss of a parent.  Characters without root.  I’m interested in how they find their way.

What made you want to be a playwright?

Well, I was an actress first.  But I’d seen Spalding Gray and Sandra Bernhard perform when I was in high school, and I wanted to do what they did – speak their own words, play themselves, tell their own stories.  So I did that on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for a few years.  And then I started writing other characters on stage with me and then, gradually, I began taking myself out of the plays and completing the world entirely with made-up characters.   Acting became less and less compelling, especially once I went to Juilliard and worked with these crazy-talented people – Yvonne Woods, Liz Reaser, Michael Chernus, Robert Beitzel, and so on. I stopped needing to enact the plays and instead just wanted to write and write...

Who are writers who influenced you? Who are current writers who excite and inspire you?   

Influences:  Tony Kushner, Maria Irene Fornes, Anne Bogart, Chekhov,  Toni Morrison (although not a playwright, I’ve been really influenced by the way she tells stories), John Belluso, the Greeks (all that talking to the audience, the choral odes, I love them!), probably Tennessee Williams (all that talking to the audience!  The sexuality!)  The Wooster Group, ERS, companies who make their own work …   The people who trained me were coming straight out of Beckett and Brecht – really theatrical theater.  And that still excites me.   Oh yeah, and I’m a sucker for screwball romantic comedies and Nora Ephron circa “When Harry Met Sally.”

Current writers who excite me:  Gina Gionfriddo, Sarah Ruhl, Jessica Goldberg, Adam Rapp, Lucy Thurber, Annie Baker,  David Adjmi, Lynn Nottage, Jorge Ignacio Cortinas, Jordan Harrison, Adam Bock, Woody Allen (that idea of an auteur dropping you into his world and process each year with each new film) … and I’m terribly excited by Lena Dunham. I think she’s fierce.

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