ANDY DRACHENBERG: What do you aim to achieve in your work?
WILL ENO: I believe you have to make a play that is specific and real enough that audiences can plug into it and go along with it, while also having some space left for an audience to have their own thoughts and feelings. The audience needs to move along in the same story as the play, but also feel free to have their own associations. This progression is different from other art forms. A play has to be a self-contained, real and self-sufficient piece of art, but also has to have some room and silences for people to engage in their own way.
AD: Are there other playwrights and writers that you feel have influenced your perspective in writing?ç
WE: I definitely have a bunch of writers that I love and admire. Some of those writers include Samuel Beckett, Thornton Wilder, Edward Albee and Don Dellilo, who is known as a novelist but is also an amazing playwright.
AD: What was the inspiration for writing The Realistic Joneses?
WE: The inspiration for The Realistic Joneses is basically everyone I know and how everyone deals with these absolutely undealable-with situations. That’s what a lot of life is, and so that, in a very plain and real way, was the inspiration for this play. I wanted to create a specific problem in the play that is real and explicit enough so it is meaningful on its own. On the other hand, I wanted to leave some room around the story so that it might stand for any of the very difficult and seemingly insurmountable things that human beings tend to face on a day-to-day basis.
AD: How has the play changed and grown since your first draft?
WE: It’s probably been six years or so that I’ve been working on The Realistic Joneses, in one way or another. On the one hand that can be discouraging and it can seem slow to work on something over a bunch of years. On the other hand you hope that you’re getting a little bit wiser as you’re getting older and that you take a little bit more energy from the amazing things you see in the world. I hope that that has somehow made its way into the play over the last few years.
AD: Why is the play titled “The Realistic Joneses?”
WE: Many things have changed in the play over the last few years, but the title came to me early on and has stayed. This play is about people dealing with this almost impossible situation and how there is no correct or totally incorrect way to deal with it. We face these impossible circumstances and come up with these different and crazy solutions, which in some way are our personalities. Also, there is that phrase to “jones” for something-you could call it a yearning-so I like the idea that the title could mean “the realistic yearnings.” In their own ways the four characters are all facing what it feels like and doing their best to participate in reality. This is a play that mostly lives in a realistic and naturalistic tradition, so that gave me some drive to have that as a title.
AD: Is calling these characters “realistic” a commentary on how you view other characters you’re seeing in theatres today?
WE: Some people might find some of the characters in The Realistic Joneses kind of crazy and mysterious, but I think that there’s actually plenty of realistic behavior. In some ways I think they’re doing things that are a realistic response to the great mystery of being alive. There is probably no wrong way to respond to the mystery of being.
AD: In your eyes, what is the importance in these four characters having the same name?
WE: I felt having everyone named “Jones”-which I always thought was a lovely name- seemed to allow for the possibility that this was a factual representation of both a random and coincidental grouping of people, but it also stands for all of us too.
AD: How did you approach characters in this world? What qualities were you interested in capturing?
WE: The four characters started in four very general ways which were almost mathematical in how they were created. The characters were either pluses or minuses. In other words, I knew at the beginning that one character would respond one way and one would respond another way. Right away that formula begins to create a character in terms of relating to the world, to other people, to language, to the inner monologue that we all have and to the outer monologue that the world has. Like with all things, which begin in simplicity, we all start off as one cell for about forty minutes and then that cell splits and off we go. I imagine the process of creating most things is similar to that: where you start with one simple thing that somehow has the end and expression in it, and that just keeps growing and refining itself.
AD: What is the significance of the dead squirrel?
WE: This never occurred to me until this very second, but I grew up on a pretty quiet street and squirrels would get hit by cars. I remember I would bury the squirrels and make little Popsicle stick crosses for the squirrels. I’m sure this particular memory is somewhere in my figuring as to why there is a squirrel in The Realistic Joneses, but I hadn’t thought of it ‘til now. There’s also the adjective “squirrely” which people use with some disdain but, if you think about it, squirrels as a species are doing just fine. So “squirrely” behavior is in fact amazingly efficient and effective, so my thought process associated human beings with squirrely behavior: we scurry from place to place, collecting food to store. The squirrel also stands for nature, mortality and unexpectedness.
AD: The play lets audiences experience mystery of the “great unknown” in a unique way – particularly the opportunity to examine these people’s fears and choices in relation to it. Can you discuss this?
WE: Theatre is something that is more capable of helping us approach thoughts about the “great unknown” and the great mystery of life, just in the simplest of ways because it has light and dark in it. There’s so much about theatre that is mysterious and very real and human. I hope The Realistic Joneses encourages people to face up to and think about their own feelings about the Unknown or the mystery of life. That’s what I want the play to do for people: to give them both a specific story about real people while also providing time in darkness with other people to think about the very biggest things that we all think about from time to time.
AD: Can you tell me what the collaboration process has been like in working with director Sam Gold and the cast?
WE: Sam Gold is a really great director. That means he’s really specific, he works really hard and he’s a great reader of a play. He has a confident sensibility of what a play looks, sounds and feels like. Within that he is very free and open to the collaborative process that eventually comes out in a rehearsal room. It has not only been an absolute pleasure and joy to work with them, but also a real excitement and really intellectually interesting to be in rehearsal with the cast and with Sam. They’re a perfect bunch of people who are the right combination of easy-going, fun and funny, and then incredibly introspective, serious and grounded. They are aware of the larger spectrum of life that the show deals with and that all humans reckon with.
AD: How do you create humor out of such large circumstances?
WE: There’s a CD called “Comedy plus tragedy equals time.” And there’s that saying, “Tragedy plus time equals comedy.” Over the ages those things have been mixed together. I try not to reach for a comedy. I think the four actors in the show are incredibly hilarious in a real and grounded way, and I hope that’s a reflection of real live people who are trying to deal with real life difficult situations. One of the ways the characters try to deal with this is humor. There’s not strict joke-writing in the play, but there are funny moments. The idea of extremely sad, tough and discouraging moments sitting right next to very funny moments has always, for whatever weird reason, worked together.
AD: Do you believe in “coming prepared” to a show? What should audiences for Realistic be “prepped” to experience at the show?
WE: With this play I think whatever people need to know before the show starts they probably already know. And just by reason of the fact that they got a ticket and showed up at the right place at the right time means they understand the beautiful and cruel mechanics of time and place. With that understanding comes a pretty good understanding of what human life is, so I think people don’t need to know anything except what they know from living and breathing.
WILL ENO (Playwright) Will is a Residency Five Fellow at the Signature Theatre. The Realistic Joneses had its premiere at the Yale Repertory Theater. The Realistic Joneses and Title and Deed (Signature Theater) were on the New York Times’ “Best Plays of 2012” list. Gnit, an adaptation of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, premiered at the Actor’s Theatre of Louisville in 2013. Middletown, winner of the Horton Foote Award, premiered at the Vineyard Theater and was subsequently produced at Steppenwolf Theatre. Thom Pain (based on nothing) was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize and has been translated into over a dozen languages.