I'm Irish American. Humor was always used in my family to lighten bad situations.  There’s an Irish proverb: “if it's good, it's going to get bad, and if it's bad, it's going to get worse.” I think that fear of catastrophe is the root of Irish humor.  So, I notice when I'm writing a dark scene, I throw little jokes in.  I think people want humor in those moments.

 

I worked for many years as a manufacturing engineer.   I worked in mold-making shops.  We would come up with ideas.  The boss would say, “Here are the ten leading things we need and here are the patents.  We have to get around these patents legally.” So I'd design it.  But there were ideas from people on the floor, molding ideas, ideas that took years and years of knowledge and craftsmanship, that we just incorporated without ever giving them credit.  And, when times were tough, we let them go.

 

They might have had something like that.  I kind of threw that in as a device.  There was one place that was big enough to have had that, but I never saw it.  They might have given you a plaque or something.

 

I signed one; I was paid to design.  But if the secretary came up with an idea, she could own that idea.  Lawyers who came to see this play said either, “there's no way Al could win,” or “Al could win that case.” And I was like, “well, that's sort of not the point...”

 

They're lawyers.  But what I'm concerned about is a guy like Doyle, who gave that company thirty years of his life.  What did he get out of it?  Maybe a gold watch.  At one place, these guys would get these giant TVs for using up years coming to work every day on time, doing their job and not sloughing off.  And what were they working towards?  It's like a thirty-year sentence, in a way.

 

Yeah.  And they gave him a big TV.

 

That's a true story from a friend of mine. Her father was a mailman who worked the same route for thirty years.  After her parents’ divorce she didn’t have a lot of contact with him.  When he died, she went to Colorado and everyone from his route showed up at his funeral.  While she had thought that life as a mailman was sort of a failure, she realized that all these people loved him.  He had lived a very simple life, but he was gregarious and the people on his route got to know him. She told me the story and I said, “I'm going to use that.”  She said “go ahead.”

 

But you know, when I was writing this play I thought in terms of work.  Are we going to retire?  And in the modern world, how do you retire from anything?

 

Yeah, there's no pension.  I'm not looking forward to any retirement - I'm just going to keep going until I stop.  How can you not?  So, in this play, I'm investigating the changing world of what my father and his father had and what we have.  We have much more freedom.  We can start over now at 40, or 50.  If you're a high level executive and suddenly you say, “I'm going to become a barrista,” people can say, “That's cool, you're doing something different.”

 

Right.  I wanted to be a writer, so I gave up the engineering thing....

 

It's interesting.  When I wrote this piece, I thought of it, almost, as a machine.   A machine should be simple and run with the least amount of energy.  It should go bing bing bing. When the actors try to slow it down, I say, “Don't slow it down, because that's not how people talk.”

 

Yeah, and when one of them starts doing that, they all start doing it.

 

Yeah, and if someone really did that, you'd think “What's going on?  Are they not paying attention?  It seems like they're drifting away.” And people in the audience will think, “boy, that was a slow play.”  My wife worked as an actress with the Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York.  During readings Curt Dempster, the head of the theatre, would start yelling, “pick up your cues!”  Unless it says “pause” or “beat,” just say your line.  The playwright's already figured out all the pauses and beats he wants – and a lot of those don't work anyway.  Half the time, I have to change stage directions when a play gets up on its feet....

 

When you get the play off the page, the actors and the director think of things, especially when they get into the text.  They have to have a life, to do something.  It shouldn't detract.  Like, I had a scene with guys in the lunch room, eating their lunch.  And we had to think: what are they doing, how are they moving around? We came up with a gag in which big burly Gino tries to open a potato chip bag, but can't.  This happens as he's talking about how bitter he is.  It added to his impotence: you know, how he thinks, “I'm the guy who really cares about this company.” And he's totally correct.  I always find it great to make your least sympathetic characters speak the truth.

 

It's part of climbing up the corporate ladder. It's partly who you know, but it's also who you screw.  And do you make that leap?  Do you say “I own this thing?”  It's like the classic band story when the executives come in and say to the lead singer, “Get rid of these bums, you're the guy.”

 

Oh, yeah, that happens a lot.  And do you say, “Oh, but I wouldn't have this opportunity if it weren't for this person's stardom, so I'll let them take credit, it's part of doing business.” or do you go the other way?  Because as you say, Frank's the conscience – the conscience of what?  What is conscience?  In my play I talk about South Asians who are animists: they think “the tree's spirit is talking to me.”  And the American oil guys are like, “hey, as long as the trees don't tell you to kill us, here's a temple for you to worship in.  We just want the black stuff in the ground – it's not doing you any good anyway.”  And the people on top are like that with the public: make sure they have their American Idol and their lottery tickets and movie stars, and we'll really run the world, and continue screwing people over.   I had so many people say to me, “I wanted to see Frank do the right thing,” but by the end of the play, I felt that would be phony.  The point I'm making is, we all have to make these decisions; this is the way we live now.

 

There was a writer for The New Yorker who got involved with these hedge fund millionaires. He already had a few million dollars – but he wanted hundreds of millions. When you hang around those people, you're like, I want that lifestyle: I want a private jet, I want a house on Lake Como with George Clooney next door.  You can't get that just being a millionaire.  He was doing better than 95% of the American public, but he wanted to be in the top 1%.  It totally seduced him.  So he put all the money he had with these guys.  And then he lost it all.  He had nothing.  And he said, “you know what?  I didn't even like those people.”  And Frank's dream is to be an executive.   It's a Faustian bargain.

 

So, yeah, Simmons is a truth-teller in this play.  One critic said, “if Simmons really believes all that he's insane.”

 

Money makes the world go round.  But as you go up the ladder, you get more and more isolated.  The higher up you go, the more personal sacrifices you make.  It's both sad and inevitable.  You can tell people all day long, “you’ll end up feeling empty,” but until they get there, they don't quite believe it.

 

I had a friend who became a school teacher.  He'd been an actor.  I asked him “how come you decided to go into school teaching?” He said, “because when I was acting all I was thinking about was me.”  Now he feels like he's doing something for other people.

All Connotation Press plays are presented online to the reading public. All performance rights, including professional, amateur, television and the rights of translation into foreign languages are strictly reserved. If you are interested in seeking performance rights to a specific work contact the Drama Editor, Joshua Fardon.