 |
Steven Dietz
| |
An Interview by MISHA BERSON
Steven Dietz is the rare exception to playwright Robert Anderson’s oft-quoted quip, “You can make a killing in theatre, but not a living.” With more than 25 plays to his credit, the Seattle-based playwright and director has supported himself through his stage craft for years—even though he has yet to see one of his plays land on Broadway. A few of his plays have enjoyed quiet Off Off-Broadway outings. The Roundabout Theatre Company mounting of Fiction at the Laura Pels Theatre in the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre marks his first major Off-Broadway production since 1995, when the now defunct Circle Rep produced Lonely Planet.
Dietz may, in fact, be the most successful American dramatist you’ve never heard of. His scripts are commissioned by, and regularly performed at, such prestigious regional playhouses as the McCarter Theater (where Fiction had its successful debut in 2003), Seattle Repertory Theatre, Arizona Theater Company, the Old Globe Playhouse in San Diego, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and the Actors Theatre of Louisville. And though he occasionally writes for television, it’s on a very limited basis because, he advises, “It’s not my world.”
The epicenter of the world for the 45-year old, Denver-bred Dietz is the theatre, where his versatility and eclecticism are prized. He would be the first to admit there is no trademark “Dietz style,” either of dialogue or dramatic format. His plays genre-hop like mad—from topical docudramas (the award-winning God’s Country uses transcripts from the Pacific Northwest trials of white supremacists), to children’s plays (such as Go, Dog, Go! and The Rememberer). His time-warping, serio-comic explorations of modern relationships, including the thoughtful, often-performed play about a male friendship in the age of AIDS, Lonely Planet, is a tonal solar system away from his literary adaptations (most recently of novels by Goethe and P.G. Wodehouse).
If you look hard, though, you’ll find the most recurring theme in Dietz’s original work is the enigmatic nature of intimate relationships, a theme that resurfaces again in Fiction. In this story a married pair of writers, one of whom is dying, decides to read each other’s private diaries for the first time—with jolting and unpredictable consequences. Recently, Dietz sat down in Seattle (where he lives with his wife, the playwright Allison Gregory, and their young daughter, Ruby), to discuss Fiction before Roundabout offers it a New York premiere.
Front & Center: What was the initial impulse behind Fiction?
Steven Dietz: I was asked by Liz Engerman, who was the literary manager of ACT Theater in Seattle at the time and is now at the McCarter Theater, to write something for a Seattle play festival, FirstACT. I’d just been working as a story editor on this TV series, "Thieves," and what I most wanted to write was an actual conversation—something other than TV stuff like, “Her skirt flies up as the Russian thug chases her down the street.” I got this notion of a couple well into their marriage who decide to share each other’s diaries. And the first scene was clearly ready to come out, so I just let myself write it. Liz knew if I wrote a good first scene, I’d have to finish the play. I’m a completion freak!
Fiction unravels the secrets, real and imagined, that a seemingly devoted couple has kept hidden from one another for years. Like some of your other plays, there’s love here but also suspicion, deceit, and betrayal.
Dietz: When I go to the theatre I want to be lied to, frankly. I want to be deceived, I want to be tricked. A graduate student once wrote in a paper about my work that “every Steven Dietz play comes down to memory, identity, and deception.” Maybe he’s on to something because I always am wondering, who are we really? Who do we tell people we are? And who do we think we want to be?
“When I go to the theatre I want to be
lied to, frankly. I want to be
deceived, I want to be tricked.”
Fiction toys a lot with the slippery boundaries between fantasy and reality, first-hand and vicarious experiences. And yet it is carefully plotted, and planted with twists and surprises. Is a strong narrative essential to you?
Dietz: Yes. I’ve experimented a lot with narrative, but I’ve never abandoned it. I think in the end, the hunger for story wins out. As a writer you must acknowledge that the audience is going to make a story out of whatever you give them. It’s hard-wired in our brains. I didn’t trust that when I was younger. I thought the audience was a blank slate. I used to think: how much do you need to tell them? Now I think, how little?
The strange games people play and lies they tell in marriages is a favorite topic of modern drama, from Ibsen and Strindberg to Albee and so on. Do you worry that it’s getting played out, so to speak?
Dietz: If we’re honest with ourselves, it should be an inexhaustible subject. As writers, how dare we believe we’ve exhausted the possibilities of passion and romance and betrayal! It’s very easy to write an ironic play about marriage, or a mean one. The harder play to write is a messy, rich, ambivalent, complex play. When I see it done, like in Edward Albee’s The Goat, it just blows me away.
Fiction has just three characters. Is that becoming a functional cliché—if you want your work to be produced often, keep the cast list small?
Dietz: Actually, as much as we playwrights complain about writing small-cast shows, the intimacy of the experience is precious, and something only the theater can do. Having that sort of proximate contact with the words and the actors... it’s amazing. To me, it’s as attractive as writing large-cast things.
Is it a major moment in your career to have a Steven Dietz play open at such a high-profile and respected New York theatre?
Dietz: Sure. And the advantage of this happening at age 45 is that I know where I do my work, where my work is. I have these theatres that have believed in me and commissioned me for years—I’ve outlasted a lot of artistic directors! Getting a hit in New York is a little like winning the lottery. I feel, more than anything, like I’ve had the really good fortune to be able to invert that Robert Anderson adage. I’ve never made a killing in the theatre. But I have made a living.
Misha Berson is the theatre critic for the Seattle Times and a frequent contributor to American Theater.
BACK
|
|
