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Richard Greenberg.
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Richard Greenberg's A Naked Girl on the Appian Way is a comic view of one family's affairs
An Interview by John Istel
It's early August and Richard Greenberg has taken some time to speak with Front & Center about A Naked Girl on the Appian Way, a buoyant comedy that begins performances in September at the American Airlines Theatre. But Greenberg keeps getting interrupted by the phone ringing. “Excuse me, I'm really sorry, but everyone's calling about this...this newspaper article.”
The mid-40-something New Yorker is being pestered with phone calls about an announcement that Julia Roberts will make her Broadway debut in a revival of his play Three Days of Rain. But Greenberg won't broach the topic. He insistently deflects attention from himself or his accomplishments as if he's monitoring the air quality for any hint of braggadocio or self-congratulation.
The fact is that when Roundabout opens A Naked Girl... it kicks off what's sure to be a “wanderjahr” for one of America's most gifted and prolific playwrights. It will be the first of two Broadway productions (the other being Three Days of Rain), in addition to the opening of new plays at Lincoln Center Theater and Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. Remarkably, Greenberg's had practice with two productions running simultaneously in New York. Recently, Take Me Out, about the effect that a gay star ballplayer's “coming out” has on his teammates and friends (Tony Award® for Best Play) was still running when The Violet Hour christened the refurbished Biltmore Theatre. Except for maybe Shakespeare, Williams or Miller, few writers these days witness more than one non-musical produced in New York at a time. Since the mid-1980s, the Yale grad has written about 20 plays, winning numerous awards, including the inaugural PEN/Laura Pels Award for mid-career playwright.
Greenberg's plays invite audiences into rarified, private and intimate worlds: the locker room of a Yankees-like team (Take Me Out); the early 20th-century townhouse of two eccentric siblings modeled on the Collyer brothers (The Dazzle, produced by Roundabout); upper-class resort areas in the Catskills or Hamptons (The American Plan, Life Under Water, Eastern Standard); or the quiz show scandals of the early 1960s (Night and Her Stars). Each seems the result of a wondrous obsession, a carefully crafted snow dome of dramaturgy to which we are whisked to watch a world much more fabulous than any we might imagine.
A Naked Girl on the Appian Way is a very high-spirited romantic family comedy set in the Hamptons. It's just not a completely “normal” family. The play takes place at the home of an accomplished mature couple, Bess and Jeffrey, who have adopted and raised three children to early adulthood. Jeffrey is a business genius, writing an opus about the ways in which art and commerce can be reconciled; Bess publishes successful cookbooks and appears on her own cable TV show. The “pro-family” platform, however, reveals itself in an unusual and idiosyncratic way when two adopted siblings return from a trip to Europe with a startling announcement that can't be given away here. No—a naked girl doesn't appear onstage, but her presence, once described, lends a mystery and fecundity to the festivities.
Asked why his work doesn't rely much on autobiography, the native of Long Island's suburbs once told Jerry Patch, his dramaturg at South Coast Repertory, where almost a dozen of his plays have premiered, including A Naked Girl: “I haven't had a life crowded with incident. There are some people I listen to, and I think, 'God, if I'd grown up in your family, I'd always have a plot.' Some people have these unbelievably gothic lives, but mine hasn't been. So I have to sort of make stuff up a lot... It's a kind of daydreaming, really, always daydreaming.”
FRONT & CENTER: What was the genesis of A Naked Girl on the Appian Way?
RICHARD GREENBERG: I usually write all my plays in these concentrated bursts of energy. I have four new plays being produced this season so I haven't written a play in about a year. For Naked Girl, the play I'm doing at Roundabout, it probably took about 11 days from typing “Page 1” to the day South Coast Repertory scheduled it for production. But you probably shouldn't say that because people will think I just dash these things off. I heard Noel Coward wrote Private Lives in three days; but that's Noel Coward and he could do it.
Well, your use of language, comedy, and character would make you seem as about as close to a Noel Coward that America has at the moment. Would you call him an influence?
I have no idea who is an influence. I don't write under the influence (laughs). It's indirect. You read and see theatre and it oozes from under the nap, but you're not wildly aware. Your writing persona just does it.
Tell me a little bit about that... what's your “writing persona”?
I try to keep a degree of unselfconsciousness in my plays. I don't read anything about myself or reviews of my plays or listen to what people tell me someone wrote about me. I don't want to be too aware of how I'm perceived. I'm afraid I'd start tending toward self-parody.
I do try to be very conscious of what I'm writing about. It's like actors who have bits or techniques-schtick-that come really easy to them. In my experience, it tends not to be their best work. If I ever thought I had a knack or facility for something, I'd come up with stuff that I'm sure would not be my best. Does that make sense? I'm sorry. I'm a bad interview. My sentences always double back.
“What the characters describe happening in the play actually happened to me when I was 13 and traveling through Italy with my parents. A naked girl did stand up from amid all the sculptures and ruins on the Appian Way as our tour coach went by.”
You're actually one of the most eloquent playwrights I've talked to, which makes sense because your plays so clearly demonstrate a love of the English language and verbal expressiveness.
They do. But I rewrite. I get a chance to correct myself. In an interview I become hyperconscious and I'm not most comfortable sharing.
Well, let's keep talking about your process. Some playwrights see a scene and begin with a visual image; others are more auditory and hear a voice or a line of dialogue. How does your creative process begin?
I guess with both, although I find it difficult to remember the provenance of any one of my plays. I wrote one, Safe Houses, which has not been produced in New York, because I wanted to see a character who was very still, downstage in front of the audience, and simultaneously someone was doing something very intense and active upstage. There was a line that had to do with a misunderstanding one of them had about a word.
Other times I just start with the desire to write a play-I write with a rush and believe that just getting a draft out is the most important thing. I liken it to Jackson Pollack's action painting. I just try to get a draft out. And that process of creation, of writing, becomes part of the play.
Do you remember anything about the provenance of Naked Girl? Did anything in particular jumpstart the play?
For a long time I was interested in the notion of adopted siblings who fall in love. I happen to know some gorgeous adopted siblings. And I have friends who've confessed an attraction to their true siblings. If they're adopted, it's a taboo but not a taboo. There's something discomforting about that, but you're not sure what. Then last year I was kind of absorbed with a global anxiety. The Republicans were in town. I was reading disquieting literature: W.G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction. It's about the bombing of Hamburg, and it's incredibly lucid and horrifyingly neutral in its reportage, and that, combined with the Republican convention, put me in a really bad state. The only way I could deal with it was to write.
So I wrote The Well-Appointed Room, [which will open at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago in January], and I felt I had negotiated some mastery of the situation, temporarily at least. Better than that, I was writing. But the play that came out was more disturbing than the reality! So I wrote Naked Girl to cheer myself up. I wrote about the most cheerful thing I could imagine.
The biggest question that audiences may have about A Naked Girl on the Appian Way is what does the title mean?
What the characters describe happening in the play actually happened to me when I was 13 and traveling through Italy with my parents. A naked girl did stand up from amid all the sculptures and ruins on the Appian Way as our tour coach went by. And it was in the kind of light that I describe, and it was a beautiful pagan image. It was chimerical. Everyone saw it; the entire bus howled. And there we were... I wanted a sense of something antique and abundant in the play, not Martha Stewart-y or anal retentive. There's this lush moral and physical landscape.
What would you say the play is primarily about?
It's really about a quest to find “the problem.” What is the problem in this family? It's a probe into a family, a social history, and the nature of commitment. The irony buried in the play is that the situation is the most extreme realization of everything that the parents believe in: freedom from conventional thinking and so on. It's a play in which almost everyone has good will. That's the thing that's cheering to me. It's a farce of good intentions.
Many of your plays feature characters in love with the English language and with word play. In this one, there's a whole little dialogue on “edamame” in one scene and in another a character points out that “humaneness” and “humanities” are just a few letters from each other. Do you collect words? Do you do crossword puzzles?
I can't get through a crossword puzzle to save my life. My dear friend, the actress Patty Clarkson, and I played “The Pyramid Game.” She was brilliant and I was awful. She even told people I was terrible.
Your vocabulary is so rich that it's hard to believe that you never stayed home and just read the dictionary.
No, I don't read the dictionary, but when I was young I was accused of that by other children. I remember they'd say, “What? Did you eat the dictionary or something?” But actually, now I read through it more often. It's actually a good read.
Your characters are often defined by the way they speak-some stutter, use similes too often, or lisp. Did you ever have a speech problem? Or is a person's speech something you're just very aware of?
I never had any diagnosables. I hear the characters' voices. It's sort of ventriloquistic. Is that a word? Or is it ventriloquistian? I can feel characters talking.
Will you make significant changes to Naked Girl during the production process at Roundabout?
There aren't going to be any new surprises or significant plot changes—just some internal rewriting and amplifying and clarifying. It depends on what's needed. Sometimes I'll work on a play up to the press preview and on others I'll barely do anything. It can be exhausting and yet it sort of carries you along on its own momentum. There's such an “eventual” quality to writing. By that I mean playwriting is so often tied to an “event,” but with all these plays opening at once, it becomes more... well, like a job. I like that.
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