Yes.  In some way the characters are past time, in that they’re repeating their memories.  They’re sort of outside of time, and what they do while being outside of time is engage in pastimes.

 

 

Their present is oriented towards their past.  That’s sort of been a theme for me - I’ve recently written three plays dealing with people recreating things that have happened in the past.  Because that’s what theatre is: you’re making a little terrarium in which you can create these moments – either your real past, or your fictional past.

 

 

On one level, we’re all acting all the time.  Even when we’re sincere, we’re all trying to be our better selves or to be someone else.  To me, there’s something beautiful about trying to do that, and there’s something beautiful about letting that go.

 

 

They have to go in the house through the back door.  And then once they get there, they’re there.  At the end, they’re more Chris and Meredith than they have ever been, but to get there they have to play other people playing themselves.  Which is what you do in the theatre - you learn about yourself by pretending to be other people. So, yes, it’s a little absurd, but there’s nothing fantastical about the play.  It’s people acting in an absurd way, but it’s grounded in reality.

 

 

It’s not necessary, but, yeah, I was imagining that.  It makes it feel like a fairy tale.  And it feels nostalgic- you’ve already learned the major plot points, so when you see them happen for the first time, you’re also remembering them.  So, it’s not a necessity, the play could happen without the titles.  But if I was going to produce it for the first time, I’d try to superimpose them.

 

 

The image of two cranky old men painting unicorns –the tension between who they are and what they’re doing – I thought that was a great thing to start with.  And I also wanted Lou to be doing something artistic, yet small.  In one sense, it’s an unimportant thing – it’s sort of kitschy, but for him it’s everything.  He’s doing it because it’s a metaphor for him and it means something to him.

 

 

Sure. Often as a playwright, you find yourself writing about something you think is insanely meaningful and other people treat it as if it’s painted unicorns.  Especially in this town.  So, yes, in a broad sense, this play is about being an artist.  But it’s also about making meaning out of pain.

 

 

There might be a joke, where I’ve thrown in some that I made up, but in general, they’re all real.  I was just fascinated by them.  Those aren’t the colors that Home Depot names their paints – they’re from color palettes, printing colors, internet colors – there’s different families of colors.  But, yes, they’re all real.

 

 

In the color wheel, you’ll have these two shades and it’s ludicrous that they have different names because they’re so alike, and yet, as you keep going through them, when you get to the end, you’re at a completely different color.  And that’s sort of what aging is.  It’s a bunch of presents –as in “in the present” – it’s a lot of them lined up.  And it’s about splitting something into a million distinct things and naming them.  And that’s what happens when we look at a memory or analyze it.  You can cut a memory up into an infinite amount of pieces.  You could talk to your buddies for a hundred days about the single hour of time you broke up with your girlfriend.  And every sentence could be broken down into shades of meaning.

 

 

I got married coming up on two years ago.  And I’m having a kid in March.  So I think maturity and growing older is something that I’ve been thinking about and analyzing and experiencing for the last few years.  I’m not a big proponent of fate or anything like that, but I definitely think that every person I had a relationship with before taught me something I needed to know for my wife.  So each experience is necessary for that last one.  And I think the experiences James has gone through have changed him.  It’s not that James is saying anything necessarily objectively different than Chris, but the colors are different.  Saying hello as a 60 year old man is going to be different than saying hello as a 25 year old man.

 

 

The young characters in this play want to be old and the old characters want to be young.  That tension is always there.  You’re always yearning for the other.  That’s not a negative thing – I think that’s just a natural tension in life.

 

 

Early on, I was influenced by The Far Side. I guess I’m kind of Gary Larson meets Samuel Beckett.  They Might be Giants taught me a lot about wordplay.  Then, my introductory playwriting teacher was Mac Wellman, who was a crazy genius.  We didn’t’ have a textbook – he just told us about things like his friends who thought they were wolves and ran around New York.  And my next teacher was Doug Wright, before he wrote Quills and I Am My Own Wife.  He was much more structured - we had a reading list.  They were both wonderful, but came at playwriting in very different ways.  But lately, my stuff’s been getting a little more serious.  The play I’m working on right now, that I‘m also directing, Puzzler, which goes up in January at Scared Fools, is sort of a dramatic spy thriller with touches of noir.  It’s part of the triumvirate of memory plays I seem to be writing.  Puzzlers were people hired by the reunified German government to piece shredded files back together.  There’s a man in the play who’s piecing together what happened to his own life in this way – so it’s dealing with the same sort of issues.

 

Yeah, it makes writing a little less precious.  It makes you just write.  You have to.  And you have to assume you have an infinite number of great things to write.  It’s also made me think about narrative and structure.  I have to streamline things.  In Serial Killers, every seven pages has to hook ‘em.  There has to be a reason for everything you write - and that’s helped me with this thriller.  It’s about how to keep ahead of the audience, but not so much that you lose them.