ANDY DRACHENBERG: What do you look for in a piece of work that you are hoping to be a part of?
TRACY LETTS: Well, I suppose the first thing I look for is quality of writing, that the writing is of a certain baseline quality, it’s got to be good, it’s got to be well written. And I think, with plays in particular, you really know a dramatist when you see one. Somebody who has just got a way with taking a certain aspect of the world that we know and shaping it in a dramatic fashion, presenting it to the audience in a dramatic fashion. I sometimes think dramatist are born and not made, honed certainly, but that instinct for dramatizing stories, I think, is instinctive and I think that Will is really good at that. So those are the first couple of things, good plays that dramatize life. I think that I also look for something unique about a piece as well.
AD: What was that unique quality that you saw in The Realistic Joneses?
TL: Will’s particular sense of humor is very individual. He has a way of focusing on minutia but in a way that makes minutia seem universal. So he has a way of writing about really small things and really big things. It’s interesting, you talk to people and some people will say, it sounds so stylized the way we speak, and you talk to other people and they say, oh, I find myself speaking exactly like a Will Eno play. I just find his dramatist’s voice very distinctive. Even the way he kind of disguises the drama. Detractors of this play say it’s not about anything and yet, those of us who love it and support it believe it’s about everything, it’s about everything there is, it’s about life and death, it’s about all the big stuff.
AD: Is that what you feel is at the core of this show?
TL: Yeah, absolutely! The other night at the Drama Desks when he was getting his award, Sam was introducing him and Sam said he gets credit for a lot of things but one of the things he doesn’t get much credit for is his heart. There’s aching, sorrowful heart sort of in the center of it. You know I had done Middletown, Will’s play before, at Steppenwolf, that’s where I first met Will and got to know his work and it was true in that play as well, though some of the behaviors are arguably eccentric of some of the characters, the truth is the kernel at the center of it is deeply human.
AD: A lot of people who have seen the show have said it is one of the most realistic things on Broadway. What do you think it is about the show that makes them say that?
TL: Will’s identification with humanity is very basic and it’s very genuine. You know, the truth is, you sometimes go and see plays and as soon as the lights come up, you sit there and your real life starts flooding back to you go, oh that’s right, I have a sick relative or I have these concerns in my life that had gone away for a couple of hours. I think Will’s play is about those concerns that you have as a real person, a person walking around. Big picture concerns. We’re not always just focused on what is in the 24-hour news cycle, we’re also, as people, focused on what’s going on in our lives. There are no topical references in Will’s play, it’s very universal in that sense. I would imagine it translates very into different languages and I imagine it will be just as current fifty years from now as it is just now because it’s about human beings in a large way.
AD: Going back to the beginning in the rehearsal room, how do you, as a team, work towards finding how to take that from the page and put it up on its feet?
TL: You know, he’s got certain linguistic challenges. Will’s plays aren’t particularly easy to learn, characters don’t sound like they’re speaking to each other, you know, in the way that you’re sometimes in conversation with people and you’re responding to something someone said five minutes ago; the conversation can sometimes exist on different tracts so it’s hard to learn in that sense. But what you ultimately wind up learning is that the play has a very specific rhythm and, if you have any sort of comic sensibility, there’s a comic rhythm that has to be attended to and the best way to present it is just as straight and as humanly as possible. The shortest line to the best performance is always the truth, you know, and that certainly applies in Will’s case.
AD: For your character, was there any particular piece or something that was the open door that you were first able to go through and find who he was?
TL: I don’t know that I had an ‘aha!’ moment, I think a lot of it was intuitively very recognizable to me. I know that it helped, when the first time we staged the piece, to find myself looking out at the very beginning and to find myself, when we we’re performing the play, that when the play begins, I’m looking out over the heads of the audience into the lights, into the ether.
AD: Do you believe in coming prepared to the theatre, and if so, what should people be coming prepared with to The Realistic Joneses?
TL: Oh, I don’t necessarily think so. There’s a moment with any play that I see where the house lights start to go down and that’s the moment when you start to divest yourself of all of your daily worries. It’s kind of a magical moment where it’s like, okay, now my focus is completely on what is going on on-stage. And if the thing’s well done, if you’re in good hands, they’ll take you there right from the first moment. And I often feel that with this play. Having done Middletown, which begins with a cop strangling a townsperson as opposed to this, which begins with this couple sitting out in their backyard, the recognition for the audience is almost immediate. People really seem to recognize that couple right from the jump so they’re able to get on and follow this oddly syntactical world that we’re living. You always have a moment with any play, whether it’s Shakespeare or Will Eno, where you adapt to the sound and the rhythm of the voices. Because we’re, people always use the word ‘quirky’ with Will, sort of a quirky comedy, sometimes what we don’t advertise is the very real stuff in here about illness and mortality and I’ve had any number of people come up to me and say, wow, I was not prepared to be punched in the stomach by this play the way I was. Some people are very affected by it and it’s beautiful.
AD: We are now four weeks before the finale, what one thing has been the highlight or the greatest part of this entire production for you?
TL: The greatest part, well just seeing Will’s work reach a larger audience. It deserves to be heard and seen by more people. It’s such a unique voice, it’s one we haven’t heard and it shouldn’t be reserved just for downtown theatre elites, it really is a voice that does appeal to everyone. And you know, we have eight hundred people here tonight because Will’s voice is so distinctive Any number of people in any given audience, somebody’s going to hate the show, believe me, I’m a playwright, I know. People are going to walk out going, I hated that. But part of the deal is that you also have seven hundred people walking out going, that was fantastic. And to be able to introduce Will to that larger audience is great, it’s really exciting.
TRACY LETTS (Bob Jones). Ensemble member and Artistic Associate at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. Broadway: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Tony, Drama Desk). New York: Orson’s Shadow at the Barrow Street Theatre. He last appeared at Yale Repertory Theatre in The Realistic Joneses. Previous Steppenwolf credits include Penelope, American Buffalo (also the McCarter), Betrayal, The Pillowman, The Pain and the Itch, The Dresser, Homebody/Kabul, Glengarry Glen Ross (also in Dublin and Toronto), many others. As a playwright, he is the author of Killer Joe, Bug, Man From Nebraska (Pulitzer finalist), August: Osage County (Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award for Best Play), and Superior Donuts.