JON ROBIN BAITZ: Which playwrights or plays influenced you as a young playwright? Did you actually make a decision to become one?
STEPHEN KARAM: I never made a conscious decision to be a playwright, mostly because I never thought it was possible. There are no artists in my family. I was a good student, but didn’t have a particularly cultured childhood. In Scranton, the only straight plays I saw growing up were by Neil Simon. Our high school trips to New York City were always to see big musicals like Phantom and Miss Saigon. But on one of those trips I discovered the Drama Book Shop. After that, my mom would take me there twice a year (this is when it used to be above Lace: A Gentleman’s Club, off of Times Square) and those were the best days. We’d come home on the bus and I’d have five new plays—I’d always go for the acting editions, with those plain colored covers. I read them so often I can actually tell you the color of most straight plays (A Fair Country, light lemon; The Crucible, marigold). Discovering new writers toward the end of high school was world-rocking: The first time I read Joe Orton my head was split sideways—same goes for Kushner and a parade of other writers. And then my second wave of influence came after college; it wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I began to actually understand the genius of Wilder and Chekhov.
How many incomplete/failed plays are in your drawer? I have a dozen or so. Sometimes they come alive again, which is scary and cool.
I have just one or two. I have a dark farce of a play that I’d love to see done in the city, but it’s been rejected by so many people at this point that I think maybe I’m the only one who finds it funny. I might try to self-produce the thing with talented friends if I can work up the courage.
In the years between your prior play Speech & Debate and Sons of the Prophet, what work did you do?
For the past seven years I was working as a legal assistant for 30 hours a week (I quit in February 2011); I adapted Speech & Debate into a (still unmade) film; wrote the libretto to an opera, Dark Sisters, with Nico Muhly; and since 2008 I’ve been writing and rewriting drafts of Sons of the Prophet. The play was difficult to hatch.
Do you have a process? Like picking up a grab bag of ideas and melting them together, slowly?
Speech & Debate came swiftly; Sons of the Prophet, slowly via grab bag. I was coping with my own medical drama and came across that line in The Cherry Orchard: “If there’s any illness for which people offer many remedies, you may be sure that particular illness is incurable…” I thought about how the state of not knowing what’s wrong with you physically extends nicely to a metaphor for the human condition. This took the shape of a story about a man coping with an undiagnosed illness (but not a disease-of-the-week play) in the midst of a slew of other life problems. I wanted Pennsylvania to be a character. I wanted the play to be episodic, leaping time, trusting the audience to fill in the blanks.
The crises of trying to fit in culturally and of sexual politics play such a large a part in this piece, which at the end of the day is about assimilation. Assimilation into what?
Well, a lot of this wasn’t conscious—but for my grandfather (who was born in Zgharta, Lebanon, and arrived in the U.S. around 26 years of age), assimilation was the priority. He died speaking only broken English when my dad was a teenager. My dad’s the ninth of ten siblings, and the Arabic proficiency in the family has a funny sliding scale; when you get to my father, his Levantine Arabic consists of phrases like, “Hey, go get me a glass of water” and “Stop doing that.” So I grew up in Pennsylvania with a father who was assimilated, which allowed me to focus on the joys of being the first gay member of a devout Maronite Catholic family.
The play also has great empathy for the young, black football star, despite his actions.
And can I just say how bizarre it was, following the entire Penn State/Joe Paterno scandal while the New York production was running? Some of the first lines of the play are about Pennsylvania football and the preferential treatment athletes receive. People’s responses to Vin and the scandal in Sons shifted based on what was going on in the news.
In a play that seems to explore different modes of compassion, there’s one little corner of almost unforgivable behavior: the journalist. What do you think has happened in American life that it requires commentary from outside on virtually all subjects? And is this young journalist as cravenly unforgivable as I think?
I love all of my characters; I could forgive all of them. I think Joseph and Timothy have a fair fight in the end. It’s interesting that you mention our obsession with outside commentary—that was discussed more directly in earlier drafts. Joseph had speeches about Timothy’s proclivity toward grief porn. But that was the problem: Joseph had speeches that felt written. And Joseph isn’t an orator. He’s an athlete. There was even a monologue about Facebook, in which Joseph—someone who grieves alone—attempted to understand his friends’ desire to share every second of their pain, via status updates like: “Pam’s having a rough afternoon”; “Bob got a bad haircut.” In Boston I amused myself by imagining Joseph’s status updates if he were on FB: “At Dad’s funeral”; “Knees R arthritic, might have rare auto-immune disease.” “Elderly Uncle moves in today!”
What work happened on the play between the Boston and New York productions?
I abandoned a subplot: Gloria used to be Timothy’s mother. I was proud of that plotting (and the reveal elicited gasps every night!), but suffice to say, having two family dramas on stage was weakening the spotlight on the Douaihys. Breaking up the mother/son relationship helped focus the play on Joseph’s journey. I also killed the intermission (which killed the act ending I wrote). While this sounds like a huge overhaul, both productions were quite similar at their core. The biggest difference was a lot of judicious cutting, really.
One area where I didn’t budge (but thought long and hard about): telling a story about two gay brothers. Some advised I consider making at least one of them straight. I stuck with my gut—but it wasn’t some noble decision. I just realized the heartbeat of the play doesn’t revolve around the brothers’ sexuality, so I felt sure that people who dislike the play would still dislike it even if I switched their sexuality. I’ve heard gay writers on occasion talk about doing the opposite—defending their decision to write mostly straight protagonists because they want to reach the largest possible audience. But that thinking is outdated, right? I mean, I’m moved by straight characters all the time. The Three Sisters moves me every time—and I’ve never once thought “If only Masha or Olga were a little lez, I might have an in to this narrative…” So I just trusted that straight audiences could relate to a family with two gay siblings.
Kahlil Gibran and his philosophical writings—many of which are centered on a kind of beautifully restrained humility, and quietude—can seem like an almost comic ghost in your play, hovering over the characters. What actually is your relationship to Gibran?
It’s love/hate. I love Gibran’s life story. He pulled himself out of poverty, came to the U.S. and ended up one of the most successful authors of all time. His poetry is often too Hallmark Hall of Fame for me, and yet the structure of Sons—using Gibran’s chapter titles to form a Brechtian frame—pays homage to the mind-blowing comfort his work has given to millions. Joseph’s life ends up exploring many of the same subjects that populate The Prophet. Gibran’s writing offers a big, cosmic, warm, hopeful picture of God and the reason for human suffering; I’m more interested in how to write about specific people with specific problems and still get a big, cosmic payoff. Gibran is interested in helping people cope with the despair that can creep into everyday life. So we’re similar in that regard—and we’re both fairly optimistic. I think one reason audiences root for Joseph is because—even though he’s in the middle of a shitstorm—he doesn’t feel sorry for himself. He just wants to feel better.
Jon Robin Baitz’s plays include The Film Society, The Substance of Fire, Three Hotels and A Fair Country, as well as Other Desert Cities, which is currently running on Broadway.
