I’m sure I had an excellent reason to start the play specifically in 1989 but I really don’t remember what it was. I knew I wanted the basic engine, or gimmick of the play is how long this seemingly trivial undertaking takes- and that it literally had to cover a significant portion of the characters’ lives and that it needed to end, somewhere around the historical time that even though this country is not Iraq. I don’t think I backdated the story- once again since it is loosely keyed to our history with Iraq and Hussein, it needed to start in a period which was believable that we’d have diplomatic and commercial relationships with a country like Iraq. For the architect, Hackett, to go from headstrong arrogant youth, to battered middle age, so that had to have a very set timeframe.

 

The genesis of the play was this New Yorker story in 1992, about a book, written under a pseudonym, Republic of Fear- the first expose of Hussein’s police state. Kanan Makiya is an Iraqi, His father had been a very prominent architect in Iraq in the years before the Baathists took over.  He had this sort of fraught relationship with his father, The Makiya family left Iraq after Hussein took over. They went to London and his father set up a architecture firm there. Then, sometime in the 80s, Kanan’s father was invited back to Iraq- at the personal invitation of Hussein. He was very wary to go but he couldn’t resist. He went back and had this meeting with Hussein just the two of them in this gargantuan, dictator-baroque dining hall. Hussein said, “I want you to come home. I want you to be my architect and I want you to rebuild Babylon. I want you to make a modern utopian city out of Tikrit. I’m going to rebuild this country, and I want you to be the person who does it with me.  Mikay’s father then said, “Gee that’s a tremendous offer, I’m so terribly excited. Can you give me a few days to think about it?” Rather uncharacteristically, Hussein said, “Yes. Of course.” And Makiya’s father got out of Iraq as soon as he possibly could and never went back.

Just something about that encounter always stayed in my head and the truth is of course of course dictatorships are great for architects- because there’s none of the messy business of having to deal with a populace that has some say about it. No budgetary concerns, no permits, no restrictions.

So much of the Nazi agenda was about building. Hitler fancied himself an architect and an artist. He wanted Germany and Berlin to be made over into an Imperial City. He wanted the new Germany to be such an achievement that a thousand years from now people would wander through the ruins of it, and know how great National Socialism was.

He had this essentially really curdled romantic view. Hitler was as enamored by the idea of the ruins of an empire as much as he was of the idea of empire itself. It’s a really corrupted esthetic point of view but dictators love their monuments. Something about that is the kernel or the heart of this play.

The play is essentially a necessity-romance-conflict between the artist and his patron.  The idea that you are nothing unless someone is going to pay you for your work. And in doing so you are making an ongoing series of bargains that take you further and further away from the idea of purity and yet nothing gets done without that relationship, nor without compromise.

The essence of the characters’ relationship- on some level I wanted to write a buddy comedy in which these people never became friends. They have this increasingly intimate relationship, but they never become friends. Hackett never lets that happen and Othman’s tragedy, such as it is, is that he finally makes the mistake that because they’ve shared this working relationship that Hackett understands him in a way that no one lese can or that he wouldn’t allow anyone to know him. Othman tells Hackett a secret, which no one else knows. Because he believes that this is the only man who can understand and forgive him. Othman believes the only way to erase this is to create something wonderful- out of the murderous, blood-soaked past of this country and his own personal past it could balance the horror and that Hackett could somehow believe that.

 

I read the article in 1992 and started writing the play in 2007- and finished it in 2010. I don’t think that is unusual for me and it’s probably not unusual for a lot or most writers. Things continue to tickle at me - I had 6 or 7 ideas kicking around at the same time and for that long. I can’t tell you at this point how things began to coalesce around this particular scenario. I wanted to write something about time and about aging. To me the play is about the very nasty business of making something beautiful. It’s about the way incrementally your life plays out when you aren’t even aware of how time is passing. It’s about compromise, the façade of the artist as this pure entity when in fact, underneath that is a person who will do just about anything to get their work done.

And about how the act of creation becomes a burden- what starts as a vision becomes this slog of ‘just let me get through it’, ‘let me get something finished so I can just move on’. And you can see that as a relatable struggle on so many levels. No work of art is ever finished; it’s just abandoned- or taken away from you.

He’s not Hussein and the country is not Iraq although it’s a lot like it. Obviously the play is asking you to connect it and to recognize it but it is not an allegory. Some people have blithely and confidently categorized it as an allegory. The play is most decidedly not that.  An allegory uses characters as emblematic symbol of something else- Like Pilgrim’s Progress, where everyone you encounter is a representative symbol of some quality or belief or stand in for some abstract figure or concept. And this play is not that at all.

Hackett is not meant to represent America and Othman is not meant to represent the inscrutable East. They are only meant to be the people that they are. And their relationship is meant to be specific and unique.  To me the play is lot closer to something like Nostromo- now, I’m not comparing myself to Joseph Conrad, but Nostromo is, maybe, the first of many, many novels and stories where there is an invented South American country which becomes a stage upon which various Western characters play out the colonial scenario with indigenous and Spanish characters. It is a place that seems a lot like places that really exist, but is invented so that the writer is free to leave history behind and talk abut his or her own specific world.

And that’s really why I invented this country. It’s not that I was trying to play peek-a-boo and say it’s Iraq, and now it’s not-- I simply wanted to have the freedom to leave history behind- and not be tied to the exact chronology, because there are things that couldn’t have happened in the play if it was set in Iraq, or if Brother Najid was Hussein. I wanted to tell this story and not the story of what would have had to happen if it had been set in Iraq. I wanted to not have to wrap this story around history, so I had to put it in a place where it could be played out.

 

So much of the engine of the play is what Othman does not and cannot say to Hackett. Othman is a man of exquisite taste and consummate judgment. He is endlessly refined and his judgments are discerning- he’s far more sensitive than Hackett is but he is not an artist- and he knows this and this is the thing of that gnaws at him.  He can categorize and make the finest distinctions and he can be moved by someone else’s creation and yet he is endlessly haunted by the fact that he could never do it himself.

And Hackett is nothing like that. He has none of those feelings. He really just wants to bang something out and move on to the next thing. His hunger to get established dominates everything He is just consumed with getting his name out there.  His hunger to be established dominates everything. And yet in there, almost accidentally, is what Othman can only recognize, and can’t achieve in himself and that is the ability to create and that is what he is trying to reach.

 

Othman does needs Hackett- because he very much wants to be a patron; he wants to be Pope Julius, is that who hired Da Vinci? He wants to create something, to be the Minister of Culture. Othman wants for this little gazebo to be his act of redemption. He’s looking for something exceptional perhaps unachievable, he’s looking for something to erase the bloodstains off his hands. So this has to not just be common, it needs to be a work of art.

And Hackett would never have been able to do this without Othman’s demands and endless coercions. And when he comes back at the end of the play, it is meant to be clear that Othman has extracted something from Hackett that he could never do before and could probably never achieve again. And that is why Hackett keeps coming back.

 

It really is a play about mutual incomprehension, keeping them honest to that idea of the anti-buddy comedy. They can never be friends. The idea was that ultimately they can never really understand each other. That’s the emotional core of the play- they can never hope to bridge that gap.  The only thing between them connects them is this esthetic act that ultimately gets destroyed. Hackett never sees the completed work, he only sees the ruins.

 

Well, the play I wrote before In The Garden had 13 characters and the one before that had 36 characters. It was time to write a two character play. I got itchy about that. And I got enamored of the idea of this sort of musical repetition of where we meet the guy once and then we meet him again and it’s the same guy but he’s not the same guy.

And I thought the play needed that new energy of needing a new character- someone new had to come in. Someone had to come in to change what we thought we knew about this character. I always think that’s a good narrative trick. Especially when we find out the first Brother Najib is a double. Because of how Othman treats him- it makes Othman look more powerful than he really is.

It’s a good exploration of perceived power as opposed to actual power. In life we really don’t what’s going on. We proceed on a series of educated guesses. Sometimes we are accurate and we completely misread the basic dynamic of what is going on. All stories are mysteries because life is a mystery and we don’t really know what’s going to happen.

We don’t really know what another person is thinking; all we know is what they do. I think people need to want something and also they need to not get it. Because once they do they need to want something else. Which is a kind of debase rephrasing of the precept of Buddhism- as long as you are looking at this world which is a world of illusion you won’t be happy.

 

Of course, it’s very American that Hackett doesn’t understand a word of Pusha- and there are those two extended sequences and I wanted to capture that sense of comedy and dread that you are being talked about right in front of your face and have no idea what they are saying about you.

 

I’ve never outlined a play. I have a road map in my head. I have a destination in mind. And I have certain scenes or images in mind. I often have the last scene in mind before anything else- so there’s a lot of asking myself of how do we wind up getting there. In terms of the gaps between scenes it really was more a function of there are things that had to happen relatively quickly, in somewhat quick succession, and then there needed to be spaces between scenes where literally years have passed. It was tricky.

There was a reading in NYC and it was extremely unpleasant. The artistic director started tearing into me about how unrealistic it was for an architect to work on a building for so long. I knew he was wrong.  Architects have spent decades trying to get things built. Zaya Habib didn’t have anything built for 15 years. Rem Koolhas didn’t have anything built in this country for decades. And look at the new World Trade Center- it’s been nearly a decade. This is a fact of being an architect- you may never get built. It’s the equivalent of screenwriters who spend decades as succesful screenwriters and never get anything produced.

 

At one point, Othman comes back, and he’s been tortured. He merely says he’s ‘been distilled’ to become more faithful, to be more of a dog on a leash to Brother Najib.

And you are meant to feel in this scene that this man goes from being absolutely commanding to realizing he is and always has been just an underling who has been ruled by fear like everyone else. He has self-awareness without the ability to change. He knows what sort of person he is and yet too much of a realist to know who he is and what he has done cannot be forgotten- that there is something he build do to erase that- this really is the equivalent of a slave holder building a church to mitigate the evil he has done. He’s too tormented a soul to really believe it is possible, but if he doesn’t have that, that he doesn’t have anything.

Othman is trying to recreate this fallen world of his childhood that he is the agent and responsible for destroying it. He’s kind of exquisitely and impossibly trying to he can never really reconcile these things and he knows it. But it’s that kind of impossibility that is at the heart of why he keeps driving Hackett to do something better.

 

Hackett absolutely would be spied on. As he accumulates personal losses and divorces, and even at his own physical peril he keeps coming back to chase down the work and beg for it- ultimately this is the only job Hackett gets, it’s all he’s got- and his whole sense of himself is wrapped up in being built. He’s forced to realize as Othman says to him, that there’s only one person who understands him, and it’s the last person who he would have chosen. But that’s who it is.

 

I’m wary to make any thematic statement about my own work. But I guess I’m interested in the gap between what we want and what we wind up end up getting. Maybe there’s only one story ever to tell and it’s the story about the loss of innocence -the moment where you realize the world isn’t what you thought it was and with that you change in that instant, you can’t ever go back. There is a JG Ballard quote- Only a guilty man can conceive of innocence- The state of innocence is you don’t even know your own innocence- You can’t be aware of what you don’t know- and the moment that you step over that line the door shuts and you can never go back.

Othman even says it in the first scene- he recites the poem-  “In the garden we did not know anything, even what we did not know. Were not we happy then?”  That is exactly what I am saying here. It’s the end of The Bicycle Thief where the kid looks at his father and knows something about him, which he can never forget, and in that moment the boy is not a child anymore.

 

I started writing plays seriously because I knew I would never be a rock musician. I never knew how to play an instrument, but I wanted to channel that energy and sensation, that excitement, that level of emotion that I heard in music, I guarantee you if I played guitar, I’d be doing that instead. You’re young, you’re full of conflicting emotions and you need to find a form to put that voice in. I wanted to make plays like that. I wanted to write because I loved to read. Writers could trap me in my chair, and I wanted to do that. I wanted to make others feel, as my favorite writers made me feel, to show something about how life exists. In retrospect, I look at myself and think I’m not nearly that headstrong now. I’m sure my family thought I was trying to get away with something- avoiding serious work.

 

I always put Chekhov at the top of the list. What still strikes me as being this fundamentally modern blending of the comic and the unbearably sad and the way they are endlessly dancing back and forth with each other- that kinda feels life to me. I was really excited by the Jacobean writers like John Webster- the language was so supercharged and I was thrilled with how these people talked and how the language was packed with violence. I was also deeply influenced Pinter and Mamet. It was tremendously exciting to discover those plays.