Figure of Speech: An Interview with Mac Wellman

Figureof Speech An Interview with Mac Wellman Since PAJ Publicationsbrought out one of Mac Wellman's first plays, Starluster, in Wordplays 1 (1981), much has happened to the restless Brooklyn-basedplaywright.Formost of the 80s he was a well-kept secret, producedonly by smallNew York theatres like BACA Downtown, Shaliko, and Soho Rep. Predictably, the mainstream press neglected to review him. Few of his plays after Starluster saw publication,except those he included in the two importantanthologieshe edited,Theatre of Wonders and 7 Different Plays. Then, a few years ago, Wellman finally gained sustained,serious attention . For the first time a regional theatre produced his work: San Diego ReppremieredAlbanian Softshoe in 1989. A Guggenheim,and other lucrative awards came his way, and his first realcommercial successCrowbar , produced in 1989 by En GardeArts at the abandonedVictory Theatre on 42nd Street. This interview was conducted by MarcRobinson in April 1991, shortly before Wellman received his second Obie Award, this time for Sincerity Forever. ROBINSON: We should probably start with the reason we're sitting here tonight: the publication of Terminal Hip. Could you talk a bit about the genesis of this play? WELLMAN: TerminalHip is actually the second part of a project called Cellophane,which I began about six years ago. It came out of my interest in basic issues of writing and speech. As you know, a good deal of postmodern theory has to do with a reversal of the traditional priority of speech over writing. This comes as quite a surprise for most Americans, because people like Whitman and Emerson have told us that writing is a kind of cancer upon speech, and that if you want to find the "authentic" 43 you have to go back to speech. Everybody who's tuned into American poetry has regarded speech as the highest thing, even though none of us really can know what speech is. I began to look at H. L. Mencken and other people who actually studied American traditional speech and realized you could write with it. You could use all the tools that the writerly postmodern people applied to their own sense of language. But the more I began to study out-of-favor American speech, I began to understand how the American language got to be the way it is now. ROBINSON: What aspects of American language fascinated you most? WELLMAN: I'd come across a phrase in Mencken: "IfI hadda been"-which is bad language. There was another one -"if I mighta could." It's the kind of stuff that you'd hate if you thought about writing well every waking moment. These horrible statements are things you try to get out of your system. You just look at them and they make your skin crawl. But then I'd put them together-these two phrases-"If I hadda been I mighta could." I thought, how wonderful, this is something you cannot say in any European language I know, or even in English. I read three volumes of Mencken's The American Language. I looked at other books on dialect speech, which are all considered trash by the postmodernists, because they hate speech. But I began to think, well, what happens if I treat this stuff as raw material? As soon as language goes out of fashion, two things happen to it. For one thing, the meaning becomes richer. A word or a phrase has all sorts of associations, many of which are unpleasant. But it also rolls off the tongue. Old expressions, jazz-age stuff, anything that's been said by hundreds of thousands of people for over 20 years is far more speakable than anything you can ever write. It's like old wood: it has a texture and a grain to it. That is something that I've never been interested in until recently because I had always wanted to challenge actors, to make constructions that were impossible to say, which I realized I have a talent for. So I discovered that you can take things that are a little bit dated, and break them into pieces and put them back together in such a way that they're not dated anymore. They...