I went to the Atlantic Theater Company Acting School at NYU. David Mamet, who started that company, came and taught a master class. In it they picked six people – three scenes went up in front of him. And mine was one of them. And then he gave us notes. So I was shitting in my pants.

 

 

It was from Women in Motion by Donald Marguiles. It’s a great scene between two women, it's wicked, fast, dry humor. Totally my shtick. So I go out there, we do our scene and I breathe for the first time in ten minutes. It's time for notes and David Mamet starts with my scene partner. He gives her a lot of notes – and then he turns to me and says, “I think you're sitting on a lot of joy.” That's all he said to me. We didn't get to do the scene again. We sat back down and then there was a Q&A afterward. I was too embarrassed to ask anything, but there was this one girl in my class who asked David Mamet why he didn't write more roles for women. He looked at her and said, “Why don't you?” And I was like, why don't I? If all we do is bitch about the lack of roles for women our age that are actually good, then there won't be any. So I started to write. That's the first time I wrote anything, my senior year of college. I wrote a one-act play that I adapted into a full-length play that I adapted into a movie. And that's the first movie I made, The Four Faced Liar. So that's how I started writing.

 

Then, one of the executive producers on the film - her girlfriend called me. She's a struggling actor and she's really good and she's done a lot of theater. She said, “you really write the way I speak and I was wondering if you could write me something.” I always have a docket of loglines of unwritten material – and I happened to have this one logline: a forty year old suburban woman comes out of the closet. That's all I really knew about it, but I knew I wanted to make it a play. So, I said, “yeah, I think maybe I can do something for you.” So I wrote it with this woman's voice in my head and with all the restrictions that make something a play and not a movie.

 

 

Well, one of my favorite things about writing plays is trying to figure out how it all happens in the kitchen. I know not all playwrights abide by that. But one of my favorite plays is Brighton Beach Memoirs. The fact that all of this drama happens inside a house is an unbelievable accomplishment to me. But when you're a kid like the lead character, that's all you have; that's your whole world. So I wanted to make this play about this woman's whole world being in the kitchen and having that symbolize something. And the one scene that she has outside of the kitchen is the scene she has with the already-out gay character. I was playing with the symbolism of the whole world existing in the kitchen except for this one person who can take you out. In a movie, it doesn't work like that. I had to struggle to get the Four Faced Liar characters out of their apartment and out of the classroom and out of their jobs because you need the movement, you need the imagery.

 

 

I think I prefer writing for theater because I'm much more interested in character development than I am in plot development.

 

 

I had just written a movie about my peers – four twenty-somethings in New York City, in college, gay. So I wanted to write something that wasn't me. But I also wanted to stay somewhere within my comfort zone so that I didn't fall flat on my face. So Mary's struggle is a struggle I can relate to in some ways, though not on the same scale.

 

 

Just after The Four Faced Liar got released, I had the opportunity to go into meetings with crazy big people. The one question that came up repeatedly was “what kind of work do you want to do for the rest of your life?” The first time someone asked me that, I answered it so truthfully that I shocked myself. I said, “I just want to write dark comedies for women that don't ostracize a male audience.” And then I kept saying it and I kept getting this positive response from all these guys. And I think that's what I'm trying to do. I think that being who I am in the world, for whatever reason, call it God or Mother Earth or fate, I think my personality sort of straddles the fence of man/woman – and I feel like I should use that to the best of my abilities.

 

 

She does have some moments of anger. But in real life, when you're alone, it's very rare to be screaming in the house by yourself. But it's not so rare to be mopey or sitting in bed and crying. And when you're in front of people, the natural thing to do when you're not feeling quite right is to calm down. People are full of censors. I wanted to keep it as real as possible. In the same vein, this is a work in progress.  There's one scene in which Mary's by herself onstage and I would like to look at that – even though I love how it is was played at a reading.

 

 

It's one of my least favorite reading moments and one my favorite watching moments.

 

 

One thing I learned from doing that film, though, is you never want to leave it up to someone else to fix something if you can fix it yourself. You don't want to leave a mediocre scene in your play and be like, “Oh, but a good actor could pull that off or a good director will fix that.” You don't know who your actors will be and who your director is going to be. So, fix as much as you can fix. That scene was starred, as in “fix this,” for me since before the first reading of the play.

 

 

I did a staged reading over the summer – and the big note that I got was that nobody liked her. And I was like “fuck. I really fucked this up.” Everyone felt really bad for her husband and was not on her side at all. But ultimately, it was a really minor adjustment. I think in the earlier draft, it wasn't clear that she had been thinking about this, or that something had been very wrong before this day began. I made minor changes – like, when anyone leaves the room, the stage directions now say “she breathes” or “she slumps over the sink” or “she collects herself.” Without those beats, those moments, if she's just moving from one person to the next, it’s easy for us to lose her. So those little moments really help.

 

 

It's sort of a shame that I live in Los Angeles and I'm going to do the play here, because I wonder how different the reaction would be if I put it up somewhere where it isn't the norm to chase your dreams.

 

 

But I think passionately mixed.

 

Right, because it's a really good play.