The Presence of Options

Rinne Groff's plays are set throughout the past century and follow very specific and diverse sets of characters, but always with a language that torques English to serve its divergent dramaturgy: the broken English of the Eastern European, Muhammad Ali-obsessed nanny in Inky; the rat-a-tat of mathematical proofs in Five Hysterical Girls Theorem, which is set at a mathematical conference at the turn of the twentieth century; and the magician's patter in Orange, Lemon, Egg, Canary, which follows the romantic and professional switchbacks between a magician, his former assistant, and the woman who takes her place. Add to that the urgent cacophony of air traffic controllers landing planes in Jimmy Carter Was a Democrat as the PATCO strike simmers around them.

I met with Groff on April 21, 2002, to discuss her most recent production, her writing, and her life in the theater.

ADRIEN-ALICE HANSEL Why write a play about air traffic control?

RINNE GROFF My father and both my brothers fly small planes. When I was growing up we would fly all the time, so I was used to hearing that air traffic control talk: "November one-zero-eight niner-lima turn right heading ... ." The first impulse of the play was to have that kind of language on stage: What would it sound like? How would you stage it? I went to the library to look at books on air traffic control and I found The Air Controllers' Controversy: Lessons from the PATCO Strike. I also went to the Museum of Television and Radio, trying to find a transcript of Reagan firing the controllers, and that's when I came across the commentary on the hostage crisis. The play came together through the research.

Why did you give the narrator, Sammy Shostakovitz, the vantage point of 1986?

The PATCO book was written in 1986, and I knew I wanted to use that text and be true to it. So much has happened since then that if I were to set the play in the present without acknowledging what's changed it would make Sammy's point of view untenable. He believes that PATCO's still fighting. They never went back to work. It's still not too late to support them. That certainly isn't true any more. The play is set in 1986 to give some credibility to his arguments.

It was striking to hear Jimmy Carter say, "We're no longer dominant."

It's a line that really jumps out at everybody. It's taken from a transcript of a Sixty Minutes interview. The director's father actually remembered hearing Carter say that, and thinking, "It's over. It's over." People hear it now and think, "What does that mean, and is it true? Are you allowed to say that now?" You certainly weren't allowed to say that immediately post-September 11, when so much of the rhetoric was "We are dominant. We're going to root out evil."

One of my lessons from September 11 was about humility. There are many people who do not have the assumptions I have, and who live with a state of fear that I am only now discovering.

I was just starting to make plans for the production at P.S. 122 when the September 11 attacks happened, and suddenly even saying the word "airplane" seemed to be problematic and loaded. It felt like nothing was ever going to be the same. There's a truth to that; nothing is the same. But it's creepy how six months pass and you're already thinking about petty things again.

By setting it in the past you save yourself from needing to account for September 11 specifically. It will resonate without feeling exploitative.

It all comes back to the decision to place the piece in a definite historical period in the past. In this production, the line that always gets me is when the two...