Disclosure:  Joshua Fardon, the interviewer, directed the first production of this play at The Hudson Guild in Los Angeles (extended through November 10, 2010).  Although proud of his work with this accomplished cast, he doesn't mention it in this interview; instead he just gets all formal, despite having been friends with the playwright for years.  He's working on a better approach to communicating... for $120 an hour.

What inspired you to write this play?

In the town I grew up in, there's a weird dichotomy.  There’s good people, but they're not always self-aware.  Sometimes they say horrible things, but do really nice things. I wanted to explore a character, Joe, who's just like that, who says all these racist homophobic things, but who at heart is actually a really good guy.  His actions belie his words.

I also wondered what it would be like for someone in that environment to be secretly gay.  There were people who were gay in the town I grew up in, but most of them weren't travelling in the jock circle or the popular crowd.  They were outcasts.  I wanted to take a popular kid on the wrestling team and see what it would be like for him to have to grow up in that town, to staying in that town because of all of his friendships, but to not really be his true self.  I thought that would be a good “as if” scenario: the good looking jock comes out of the closet fifteen years after high school – how does that send shockwaves through that small town?

It's a fictional community.

The town that I’ve written is fictional.  It’s called Hadley Township, and it’s loosely based on South Plainfield, New Jersey, where I grew up.  I called it Hadley because there used to be a famous airport base called Hadley Airstrip, which is now, ironically, a strip mall in South Plainfield.  Lindbergh and the Flying Tigers flew out of there.

Joe's not the only character whose actions belie his words.  Shawn, who's a hyper-religious preacher, is also cheating on his wife with a man.  He's also the only black person in the play – which to some extent, is a play about racism - but he turns out not be not such a great guy.

When I started to examine this, two things were converging in my world-consciousness:  First: Oprah had an episode on gay men living on the down-low.  When I saw the episode, it wasn't news to me that there were married guys doing this: when I was living in Pennsylvania, I had been propositioned by two guys who were married.  I was in community theatre, or whatever, but it was still kind of shocking to me.  And that memory kind of stuck.  So, when I saw this episode, there had been an epidemic of African-American women in their forties and fifties, who had been in monogamous married relationships, and who hadn't had blood transfusions or anything like that, who were suddenly HIV positive.  So they dug deeper and found that there were these guys in the black community who did this.  It was a huge stigma in the black community to be gay.  So I wanted my black preacher to be gay, because I thought it would delve into that stigma.  Even though Shawn is kind of the antagonist, there’s a moment in the jail scene with Joe when he says, “I would lose everything.”  And that moment is why I wanted to write it.  There's a sadness that no one would ever accept that decision.

The other reason I wanted to deal with this issue was I read an article in which August Wilson challenged white playwrights to write about racism.  He said a lot of white writers shied away from it because they didn't know how to be real with it.  I'm personally always frustrated with what I call the old Morgan Freeman character.  In a play or a movie by white writers, there's always an old wise black man - because white writers don't want to write an obnoxious, horrible black guy.  I mean I get it: there have been so many bad stereotypes of African-Americans throughout the years. But now there seems to be a lot of people who over-compensate.  Like in Million Dollar Baby, you see Morgan Freeman holding the spit bucket and he’s espousing wisdom, but I'm like, if he was so damn wise, he wouldn't be holding a spit bucket.  It's become a caricature; it's not real to me.  I wanted to create a guy who was flawed, just like we all are.  It doesn't matter if he's white or black, he's flawed.  Every character in the play is flawed. Some people are put off by Joe’s homophobia and his racism, but when you meet Shawn, Joe's a picnic – his hypocrisy is nothing compared to Shawn's.

There's also Joe’s friend Troy, who has a sudden racist outburst.

I wanted to write the conversations that some whites who are prejudiced have behind closed doors.  Troy is that guy who hasn't changed over the years.  He grew up racist, there's some things that have happened to him and his family that involve race riots or certain incidents.  And he's held onto that.  He says the “N” word in a climactic scene in Act Two.  And he makes racist jokes because he thinks it's funny.  But it's not.  And when Joe doesn't laugh with him, it shows growth.  By the end of the play Joe’s changed.

Have you had anyone in the audience react uncomfortably to that scene in performances?

We've had people gasp and people say “oh shit.”  It's jarring.  Troy says a bunch of misogynistic and racist stuff in one sentence and the audience is like, you can hear a pin drop.  But most of the people I've spoken to after the show realize it's in there for a reason. Most of the African-Americans who have spoken to me after the show have said they liked it because it's honest.

There are people who talk like that in blue collar New Jersey.

Exactly.  He really means it.  What I love about this play and this production is that no one apologizes.  They all go for it.  Troy's an incredibly difficult role.  You're on for three scenes and in the last scene you have this outburst.  Thankfully, the actor playing it, Gary Wolf, is good at getting us on his side in the first two scenes.  When he comes on for the third, the audience already knows he's a wise-ass.  They're shocked, but they're also like, “you know, he was a wild card to begin with.”

Why did you choose to make Joe's wife Sherry an atheist?

I felt there was a sense of longing.  I think she started out as a Catholic who went along with the motions.  Once Joe cheated on her for the first time, and definitely by the second time – and my feeling is, if he's done it twice, it just means he got caught twice - she became disillusioned and lost her faith in her marriage.  Then it extended to life and God and the afterworld.  I think she started in high school as this pubescent girl who had this horrible crush on Joe. She watched his relationship with Melissa.  She watched him wrestle.

Wrestling's huge in Jersey.

Yeah.  In a lot of blue collar towns, they're really fighting to get out.  So, I envisioned Joe as a big stud senior in high school who's good enough to get to the State Championships.  While he's there, Sherry, who eventually becomes his wife, is keeping stats.  She's a groupie who just worships Joe.  She bides her time dating some guys here and there. When Joe and Melissa break up, he's about 24.  Because he won't leave that town, he knows he'd look awfully bad to be alone for any long amount of time.  He's always had a girl, he's popular, he's the captain.  So, he knows in his heart the first date he can go on is with Sherry because she's always loved him.  He goes into this relationship right after another relationship and doesn't have time to think it through.

I feel in life women, especially young women, ascribe attributes to men that they might not really have.  And Sherry’s disillusionment of realizing “oh my God, he's not all that” has developed over ten years...

And that's shaken her faith.

Everything gets questioned.  God, how could he hurt her?  The narcissism he has is earth-shattering.  That's really his problem.  He can't really think of others first.  He does on a surface level: he'll help you out, he'll change your tires, but Sherry's line “All you ever think about is anything that either gets you off or pisses you off” is true.  That's Joe's M.O.: what’s in it for me and why are you in my life, because you're pissing me off.  I think her foundation is rocked when she sees how narcissistic, closed-minded and hurtful he can be.

What do you think happens to Joe and Sherry's relationship after the end of the play?

I think there'll be an immediate separation, but ultimately, I see them together.  I think Joe will eventually make an effort to change. And Ray will be negotiating either Murder 2 or a Manslaughter charge after killing Shawn.  But it'll be Joe who helps Ray out, because he's loyal to him.  And I think Joe will shift in his thinking and realize maybe this whole “it ain't my business” thing is a little extreme. And by changing, he'll become a little more self-aware, which will make him more attractive.  So he'll finally start to realize how much he's hurt his Sherry.  At the end of the play, when he says goodbye to Melissa, that's a strong moment.  But the stronger moment is when he realizes: “Oh my God, the one person who has loved me and done everything for me, I've shit on her.  How could she live with me?  I have to do something if I want her back.”  So, I think that Joe is a good enough guy that he'll make the changes that are necessary to keep her.  I see him back in therapy immediately.

What’s it like to act in your own play?

It's funny because in the training I've had, the first thing my instructors have told me is to cross out the stage directions.  But as the writer, I'm like “fuck that.  I just wrote them.  They're there for a reason.”  But I will say this, the acting teachers are absolutely 100% right.  My vision of what Joe was as a writer is incredibly different than my performance of him.  Even the relationships.  As a writer, I saw Joe blowing off Sherry blatantly, but as an actor I realized the stronger choice is if he's in love with both women – he just loves them in different ways.  As a writer, you're sterile.  You have distance, you're not as emotionally involved. You have to be clinical.  But as an actor, you have to make it work, you have to be emotionally invested, you can't be clean, you gotta get dirty, you've got get in there.  So it's been trippy.  I've learned a lot as an actor working on my own shit.  I've had to go back to square one.  When I started I took a lot of things for granted.  The  process I would have preparing for Shakespeare is the same process I would have preparing for my own words.  You have to fill the moment, no matter who the writer is.

And early on in the run, the toughest thing was not allowing the writer to pop up onstage while I was acting.  I'd be listening, like, “I always thought that line was funny – why aren't they laughing?”  And you have to fight that voice.  You have to be emotionally invested and ready for the next thing.