Contemporary American Playwriting: The Issue of Legacy

Despite proclamations to the contrary, there is a surge of new writing in the American theatre. Not plays masquerading as films or TV shows, but serious plays written by writers with a passionate commitment to the stage. But since this new generation of theatre artists is less centralized than previous ones, working in cities and towns across the U.S., it is hard to talk about a specific movement or scene. For those working in New York City, Off-Off Broadway no longer adequately describes the theatre that these playwrights create. Such writers do not want to be defined in relation to Broadway, for Broadway ceased to be a venue for adventurous new writing decades ago. This conversation is an attempt by four playwrights to define some of the identifying characteristics and concerns of this new writing. The starting point is the issue of legacy: How do the historical avant-garde, the Language Playwrights of the 1970s and 80s (Mac Wellman, Jeffrey Jones, Len Jenkin), and the classics influence contemporary playwriting? To gain a better sense of what is happening now, it proves beneficial to look back.

The conversation featured Jason Grote, Caridad Svich, and Anne Washburn. Jason Grote is the recipient of the 2006 P73 Playwriting Fellowship and co-chair of the SoHo Rep Writer/Director Lab. He is writing The Wal-Mart Plays for the Working Theater in New York. Caridad Svich is a resident playwright at New Dramatists and editor of Trans-Global Readings: Crossing Theatrical Boundaries and Divine Fire: Eight Contemporary Plays Inspired by the Greeks. Some of her translations are published in Federico García Lorca: Impossible Theater. Anne Washburn is a resident playwright at New Dramatists and the founder of the Pataphysics Playwriting Workshops at the Flea Theater in New York. Her play Apparition recently ran Off-Broadway at the Connelly Theatre, and is published in New Downtown Now. Playwright and director Ken Urban moderated the discussion, which was conducted on September 27, 2005, in New York City.

URBAN: I want to begin with the avant-garde. The avant-garde has taken a beating in the past decade. For some, it has become a synonym for the incomprehensible or willfully obscure, while others have argued about its presumed demise. But if we understand the avant-garde as an artistic project that seeks new forms of expression and challenges received ideas, then it remains very much alive, even if the time of the historical avant-garde—dada, surrealism, and futurism—is long past. How does this legacy of the avant-garde influence contemporary American playwriting?

SVICH: Historically, the avant-garde is against commodified trends in the arts, against works that live happily in an audience's comfort zone. Instead, it explores and experiments with the new or the not-yet-known. If the works of the theatrical avant-garde are primarily marked by experiments in form, it is because the works are seeking a "truer" expression of life: a more "real" realism. The American avant-garde is also interested in older forms of performance, for example, melodrama, vaudeville, and the burlesque. American theatre, especially for the past 20 years, has been asking itself, "What is American writing?" Originally, American writing was imported. Early American works mainly copied British dramaturgy. Around the 1790s, there was the development of the Yankee character and the beginning of a theatrical vocabulary that was uniquely American. But even so, there has always been a tension between homegrown work and English models of writing. American theatre has a complex that it is not good enough. You can see it in the kind of work that is imported or translated. We have practically no access to the contemporary theatre, for example, of Spain, Argentina, Mexico, or Venezuela. We still are under the burden of the Brits. But the avant-garde helps us ask...