Rod McLachlan received a BS in Speech and Drama from Northwestern University and has been a member of David Mamet’s Atlantic Theater Company for nearly 20 years. His professional credits include seven shows on Broadway, five shows at Lincoln Center, five seasons at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and numerous Regional Theater productions. In addition, Rod has appeared in countless films and guest starred on network series such as CSI and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Rod has appeared with Martin Sheen and Al Pacino in Julius Caesar at the New York Shakespeare Festival, and on Broadway with Laura Linney in Holiday. Also on Broadway; Death and the

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Rod McLachlan interview, with Kathleen Dennehey

Good Television is a very powerful play about Reality TV.  Please tell me what inspired you to write this?

My wife, Soodabeh Khosropur, has produced several psychologically oriented reality shows over a number of years. She was trained as a Drama Therapist, with concentration on addiction and eating disorders (considered an addictive behavior). Her first job in this vein was with Intervention.

As I listened to her describe the ethical demands she held herself to as a trained addiction counselor, combined with her job as a producer of TV, I started becoming fascinated with the unique pressures she struggled with. Producers of most TV shows will sometimes use the phrase "Well, we're not curing cancer", when things go wrong or get all screwed up.  It’s their way of reminding themselves that what's at stake is not life and death, just some low budget reality show on cable. But my wife's shows were about life and death. She was working in a "done is good" medium, but people's lives were in the balance. She and all her fellow producers felt that keenly. But they worked for production companies, who produced lots of different programs and only knew TV. And I couldn't stop thinking about a show in which the future of terribly vulnerable people was being determined by "TV" people.

Just to be gossipy, do you watch reality TV? What shows? Personally? I got rid of my TV after a weekend long marathon of Queer Eye For The Straight Guy. As someone who is married to a reality show producer, do you find yourself a more finicky and demanding Reality TV viewer or do you avoid it all like the plague?

A plague is the most apt metaphor. I can only watch the documentary style shows, I should say the REAL documentary style shows, which deal with intense personal distress. Addiction, therapy, etc. My wife produces them, so I have to watch, but there is another reason. As an actor they are a great study of how people actually behave in extreme situations, as opposed to the usual stone-faced mumbling that passes for good acting on TV.

As for the rest of reality TV, I'd rather be drawn and quartered. 

A fun/intriguing aspect of the play is the fact that while the Reality Show producers are 'playing' the family- the family is also 'playing' the producers... so in this search for the 'truth', everyone is deceiving everyone else.  Do you feel that reality TV creates fiction in its attempts to 'catch reality'?

Most reality shows are unbelievably contrived and forced. As real as CGI. Of course the audience senses it. You can practically hear the producers whisper "Slap her! Turn over the table." Most reality shows are essentially a form of improvisation. A detailed agenda is explained to amateur performers and they execute it with various amounts of skill. The rest is editing. They have a technique called Frankenbiting. Matching sound bites and quick reaction takes to craft an event that never happened. 

Most casting for reality shows consists of weeding out the thousands of people who just want to be on TV. There is a huge awareness of the mechanics of TV in the viewing audience; they are far more sophisticated about how things are done.

You touch on this 'sophistication' of TV audiences in the play.  Some of the characters in Good Television attempt to play up and even alter themselves in order to get on the reality show, and not all of their reasons are noble.  As opposed to my initial expectation, you took the interesting turn of not portraying the family at the core of this 'episode' as innocent victims of the predatory reality show producers. Why was this important to you?

 I tried very hard to make the Producer characters in the play appear as intelligent and principled as I could. The people who do the field producing on Intervention are not predatory TV bloodsuckers. They effect very real, very positive change for a great number of addicts, getting them treatment they would not otherwise have. 

But they also have to make a TV show. Conversely, addicts and their families are veterans of years of abuse, neglect, and usually poverty. They do not have the resources to be patient, accepting or grateful for anything. Addicts are grindingly narcissistic and they are usually the product of narcissistic families. And narcissists LOVE to be on TV. For the sake of drama, if not truth, there couldn't be any purely good guys or purely bad guys. We did some readings earlier drafts at the Atlantic Theater Company, and Neil Pepe and Christian Parker pointed out that I needed to mix up the moral equation a bit. They were right and when I did the play profited enormously. 

In light of just about seemingly everyone in reality TV becomes a default star no matter how awfully they are depicted or actually behave, I believe our collective sense of shame or is dying, compared to people even 10-15 years ago.  Which makes me wonder- did the death of shame coincide with the dawn of Reality TV? I'm curious if this played any role in your writing.

Reality TV, it seems to me, set the erosion of personal privacy in motion. Years of watching people reveal every lurid thing about themselves on TV has rendered it the norm. It began as a shocking spectacle, even watching such shows was a socio-economic marker of ignorance and puerile taste. Now a new generation of young people have grown up with social media. They have combined the means to broadcast their every whim, thought, and questionable act with the long erosion of privacy and any sense of what is appropriate to the private and public spheres. 

Piggybacking on my earlier question number: since people have been inundated by Reality TV, they also know how to play it, or affect the outcome in order to capitalize on the fame/fortune aspects. Do you feel that Reality TV has changed society or humanity in other ways than the death of shame and privacy?

It has democratized the desperate need for attention that used to be the province of tempermental actors. People who are utterly unprepared for widespread exposure or fame now have unprecedented opportunities to get it. I believe they sense the artificiality of the people and situations they see in most reality shows and think, "I could do that." And they can: actors disguise their artifice, reality show subjects just wing it. They will sacrifice their dignity, their future in their community, even their own peace of mind to be exploited in front of millions. And, of course, it makes them very unhappy when they get what they want. That used to be an actor's problem.

Despite all the pain, treachery and tragedy you depict in Good Television, you find levels of humanity, humor and hope. (Nice alliteration, KD!) Do you consider yourself a hopeful, optimistic person/writer (unlike many other writers we both know but won't name).

Anyone who knows me would laugh out loud at the suggestion that I was an optimistic anything. I think the only consolation for life's many terrors and disappointments is the sudden realization that others have felt, and continue to feel, what you do. The thing I crave in storytelling is the empathic response I experience, and receive from others. When, on some deep level, we are assured we are not alone in what we feel, we get stronger. As for humor, despite the above statements, I'm Irish in background.  If I can't make you laugh a bit, what good am I?

You always make me laugh, but rarely in your writing.  For such a polite man, you can get very dark. I like it. Why did you write this as a play as opposed to as a screenplay?

In a word, exposition. This play requires a lot of exposition. It hinges on rules, ethical dilemmas, and sudden revelations. To convey this all visually would be a challenge for anyone, and it's well beyond my skill. I needed to write in a medium where people could talk... at some length.  Meaningful looks wouldn't cut it. To craft it as a screenplay would sacrifice the debate that serves as the main action of the piece. 

Since you are also an actor, do you find that your perspective as an actor helps (and or) hinders your intention to write?

Writing for me is a way to act out all the characters. I play the character as I compose her, so I definitely think being an actor advances the project. I found it liberating getting beyond writing for myself as an actor, bound as I am by type and age and sex. The ultimate litmus for me as a writer is: would this scene be fun for me as an actor to play. If the answer is yes, then I'm on to something.

I've always held that actors know how to write great characters because they know what actors enjoy saying... do you have anything to add to that or do you disagree?

See above. But I will also add, that in doing lots of plays, most of them classic or at least well made, I got a certain amount of structure in my bones. Nothing allows you to learn more from a great piece of literature than embodying a portion of it on stage.

How long have you been writing? 

I did not start writing with any ambition until about the year 2000. I had written sketches and a one man show, but writing for other people did not begin for me until the millennium. I resisted it, out of fear of not excelling at it, my whole life. As challenging as it is, I feel like I am utilizing more of my potential now than when I didn't write.

Tell me about your education. Did it involve writing?  

There was a tremendous appreciation for literature at Northwestern, where I went to college. I was steeped in comparative literature. But more importantly, there was the Department of Interpretation of Literature, a discipline that taught that the best way to develop a critical understanding of a piece of literature was to embody it in performance. It was not my major, but I've found it to be my writing apprenticeship.

Who are your favorite writers/playwrights? Who would you consider a major influence?

I am most influenced by well-made plays. I did a play called "When the Rain Stops Falling" by Andrew Bovell that I thought was a masterpiece. I love Martin McDonagh and have performed in one of his plays. Conor MacPherson and Enda Walsh are favorites. And Mamet. I cannot get over his ruthlessness with himself. He "kills babies" in his scripts with unbelievable discipline. I'm way too precious about my good lines. I need to take a few leaves from his book.

I’m hoping you mean Mamet kills beautiful babies inasmuch as he’s willing to kill great lines of dialogue in order to save the forward action of the play.

Exactly. The phrase originates with Faulkner, but I don't remember it perfectly. I believe he was talking about writing for Hollywood. That it entails "killing babies," meaning excising lines or scenes or characters in the pursuit of a clear, comprehensible and forward moving development of the story. I'll put everything but the kitchen sink in the initial draft, telling myself its easy to cut later. Then I resist every stroke of the red pen. 

I've worked, as an actor, on a first production of one of Mamet's plays. He'll his cut his own stuff mercilessly, sometimes to what I felt was the bone. Then I would see how well it worked. I guess that's what years of practice writing superb plays gives you.
 

Are you working on a play now?

I've got one cooking in the subconscious. I will mull over a story for a long time, often a year or more, until I can't stand not writing it. Then I usually bang out a fat first draft. It's agony getting the story to "the end" the first time. It's so much more fun to rewrite once you have the bones knit.

And I have screenplays that I am polishing. They pose a lot of challenges for my wordy Irish soul.

Is Good Television your first full length play?

It is my second full length play. My first was a farce adaptation of Jonson's "The Alchemist." My version is called "The Experts." There is also a one man show I wrote for the stage. It was more than full length. Talk about wordy... Jesus wept. 

See. You always make me laugh.

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