Laural Meade works as a playwright, performer, director and educator in her native Los Angeles. Her original plays about historical figures both infamous and obscure have been seen throughout Los Angeles and in alternative venues in New York, Seattle, Chicago, and Minneapolis. Highlights include winning a Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Circle award for Best Writing; a variety of playwriting commissions and directing and dramaturgy gigs for the Mark Taper Forum; a recent 5-month tour of her original non-verbal play for young audiences about the creative possibilities of plain white paper (winner of a MAP Fund grant through the Rockefeller Foundation) with Childsplay in Arizona; and singing legit, funk, gospel and blues with various bands and in various music-theater shows all over L.A. – most recently with Cornerstone Theater Company on the banks of the Los Angeles River. She holds a BA from Occidental College and an MFA from UCLA. She is a member of the theater faculty at Occidental College and a Core Writer at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis. This Spring she will join the theater faculty at USC as a visiting master artist. Her first international production, Rock Paper Scissors co-written with Corey Madden, will take place at Speeltheater in Holland for the 2010-11 season.

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I like theatre that's aware of itself. I get really excited when the playwright, director and actors push at the boundary between the audience and the artists. I like being reminded that I'm in a theatre. Realism doesn’t hold much appeal for me – but then again I’m game for anything as long as it’s done really really well.

 

 

Yes.

 

 

First I get turned on by a specific story, then I’ll do extensive research. I'm really interested in American History, especially in the years between the turn of the century and the Depression.

 

 

I like the music, I like the fashion, I think there's a sort of innocence and simplicity in the cultural mindset. I think that once the Depression hit, we lost a lot of that. By the time we got out the back end of World War II, we were deep into radio and the beginning of TV, and then things kind of fell apart.

 

 

I do. I tell my students in playwriting class that if you want to write something that's about you, it's good to back up a bit and create distance by maybe changing the sex of the character, or the era, or the class background, or the psycho-spiritual background. So, for me, to write about Aimee Semple is a way to write about myself without actually putting myself onstage.

 

 

Yes, very much so. She really was ahead of her time. This was 40 years before the Women's Liberation movement, and about five years after women got the vote. But, as a woman who was barnstorming across the United States, she was a revolutionary in her own way. A lot of the preaching of the time was fire and brimstone, hellfire and damnation, but her essential message was: live in a place of love and celebration, life is incredible, enjoy yourself. She really was about joy and happiness. In the pulpit she had to be a prohibitionist and anti-divorce. But in her private life, she divorced her second and third husbands, had many affairs. I've heard on the down-low that she was a bisexual who had a variety of sexual partners. She was incredibly liberated on so many levels. Some of the books from the period also ascribe a series of murders to her – she didn't commit them directly, but in the wake of this whole disappearance scandal she had people killed to cover up her story.  Her life embraces enormous contradiction. How she could say one thing Sunday morning behind the pulpit and then do another thing Sunday afternoon behind closed doors is infinitely fascinating to me. We all know this – but the human condition is not black and white, it's not good and evil, it's not dichotomies - it's actually nothing but complexities and shades. Aimee's an ideal metaphoric manifestation of something I think is really true about who we are. And she lived so large in the midst of all of it. She thrived on spinning these massive myths about herself – and her followers bought them. Even if they felt it wasn't true, they bought the beauty of the myth and the dream of the myth. I find that incredible.

 

 

The stuff about the blind lawyer and about Lorraine Wiseman was reported widely by all the local papers of the time, especially The Los Angeles Times. There's actually a whole other character who I didn't write into the play - Lorraine Wiseman, supposedly, at one point, produced a twin of herself. The story goes there were two women who looked like Aimee who were running around in the midst of this whole thing, saying “no, it was her,” “no it was her,” and “she was the one.” Basically, Aimee kept hiring people to say that they were in Carmel, and not her. It was just another the crazy thing that she did to try to cover up what she did.

 

 

Yeah.

 

 

She had a friend who owned a ranch and she stayed there until she felt it was time to reappear. Then her friend drove her to the edge of the ranch, and she ran out of the desert into this little Mexican border town. She said she'd been held captive in the desert for weeks and had been wandering for days and days. But she was actually in very good shape. Not sunburned, not thirsty. Her clothes were in perfect condition. She even had a corset on – which the investigators found strange.

 

 

I'm a great believer in the adage that fact is stranger than fiction. And it's important to me to be able to know a lot about a story. So, scandals are great because there's always lots of newspaper reportage, books, other plays and movies. It's also exciting to deal with people who were in the public eye and to see how they react in the face of a lot of exposure. I get excited about people who live large. Aristotle said that tragedy needs to be about kings and queens. I respond to the idea that we look for royalty to tell the great stories. Something about the elevated quality of characters makes them stage-worthy. In my own work, I look for the modern day equivalent of royalty. And certainly at the time, Aimee was a Los Angeles royal, if not a national royal.

 

 

Yes.

 

 

Way back in the day, we would start with a pile of books and articles and see what we would get. But now I walk into rehearsal with a full script and we work on it from there. In the two productions we did of this play, there were lots and lots of revisions. The essential idea of it – that there would be four characters telling the story in the structure of a vaudeville show/church service was there from the beginning, as were the essential things that happen in each scene. But the fine-tuning and the logic of why and how these characters who are dead would find themselves onstage together and how the evening would fall apart developed as we went. 

 

 

This is going to sound crazy cliché – but I love the classic American avant-garde ensembles. I'm a huge fan of the Wooster Group, Mabou Mines, Richard Foreman, Elevator Repair Service, SITI Company. I was also raised on a steady stream of MGM-style movie musicals and I Love Lucy. And my grandmother was a circuit vaudeville performer as well. So I've had a heavy diet of flashy song and dance and vaudevillian comedic timing, mixed with experimental (for lack of a better word) theater, throughout my life.  

 

 

I generally use a lot of classic Brechtian techniques: direct address, titling the p.o.v. of a scene, songs in strange places, mistakes, stopping the action, and so on. A lot of that also comes straight out of watching the Wooster Group do their work. I had the good fortune to see them do LSD (...Just the High Points...) when they were here for the LA Festival in 1988. I sat in the front row and it blew my mind.Up until that time, I had never seen anything like that - it was a seminal night in the theatre for me. I wasn’t the same person after I saw that show. And I certainly didn’t want to keep making the theater I had been. It took me four or five years to figure out how to address it in my writing. But, then, I began to try to take the essence of what they do (and what I'd learned form Richard Foreman and Mabou Mines) and shove it through the I Love Lucy machine. Then you add American history, a couple of authentic songs, some old school deconstructionist hijinx, and that's essentially how you get to my work.

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