What inspired you to write a play about 'living historians'- also known as Civil War re-enactors?

 

I’ve always been fascinated by the Civil War, but the real trigger was reading Tony Horwitz’s epic travelogue Confederates in the Attic.  Horwitz embedded with hardcore re-enactors on a Civil “wargasm” all over the South. Up until that point, I had no idea that grown men would spoon each-other in the dark as way of paying homage to a conflict that ended a hundred and fifty years ago. There’s something both endearing and disturbing about that kind of commitment, and I knew immediately it was a world I wanted to explore.

 

 

I haven’t been to any battlefield re-enactments, but I have a vivid memory of a woman at Gettysburg interpreting the story of a nurse.  After the battle, she comforted a dying man by pretending to be his mother.  I was probably eight or nine at the time, but that story stuck with me, and formed the basis of Amy’s character in the play.

 

 

There aren’t any pretensions of ‘winning,’ but I think some hope that by mourning and consecrating the Southern cause, they can preserve a positive narrative about the Confederacy.  They want that loss to mean something.

 

 

I fall more in line with this point of view.  It’s hard not to love re-enactors; they’re imaginative and passionate and unafraid.  Personally, I prefer hiding in my room with my imagination, so I admire anyone who lives out their imagination in public.

 

 

The Sons of Confederate Veterans actually pledge allegiance to the United States of America before saluting the Confederate flag.  There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging positive elements of Southern society, but I do think that it’s fundamentally dishonest to pretend that the Confederacy didn’t exist for the sole of purpose of leaving the United States.  If you want to remember history, you have to accept all of it.  The good and bad.  You can’t pick and choose.

 

 

This is going to sound really weird, but research is actually my favorite part of any writing project.  I get to immerse myself in an exciting, meticulously detailed world. Sometimes it’s hard for me to start writing, because I’m afraid what I create won’t hold a candle to the real thing.  Of course at a certain point you have to let go.  Stories are driven by character choices, and characters are necessarily a creation of the imagination.  But those details definitely help me access the characters when I write.

 

 

I’m definitely a buff.  Like a lot of little boys, I was fascinated with military history.  But my mother is from Massachusetts, and my father is from Texas, so it was probably inevitable that the Civil War would become my favorite.

 

 

I wanted to use Conor to explore some of the contradictions inherent in Confederate politics.  When people dress up in costume, all sorts of things that are normally unacceptable suddenly become feasible.  Conor is deeply closeted, but when he’s re-enacting, he can rationalize homosexual relationships between soldiers as “historically authentic.” It’s no coincidence that Conor also sees no problem with running a minority outreach program for the Sons of Confederate veterans.  He can’t sort out where his own desires end and the truth begins, and that makes him dangerous.

 

 

Lost Cause is my third full-length creation. It is, however, my first comedy.

 

 

We experience the world through dialogue.  We don’t have close-ups or voice-over or omniscient narration. I think of all the mediums out there, theater is the one that most closely resembles real life.

 

 

Not really.  I just wound up the pieces and then watched them go.  Later on, I went back and developed a more coherent architecture.

 

 

I just finished a play called Perverse Incentive, a revenge story set in an obscure corner of the securities market called “traded life policies.”  Next, I’m hoping to write a play about the Pullman Strike of 1894.  It has some exciting parallels to the Occupy Wall Street movement, so I’m excited to sink my teeth into that.

 

 

Sarah Treem was my first playwriting teacher and probably remains my greatest influence.  I’ve always been moved by her ability to probe complex moral issues with depth and accuracy. I like David Wiener and Stephen Karam for similar reasons; they’re playwrights who aren’t afraid to chase the big idea.