WITH DIANNA LEWIS
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SFR: What led you to be a playwright?
DL:
I had been various kinds of writer in the past. I had written sales literature, scientific literature, I edited. My career had always been writing. When my kids came along I stopped working because I liked to be with them best and I was writing poetry and short stories for them. Then I met a woman who owned a theater and she said, 'You know, you write this other stuff, why don't you write a play.' So I said, 'OK.' And I wrote three one-acts. I submitted them to a competition in New Jersey and one of them won. When I did playwriting, what I discovered is it was extremely freeing to me.
What themes do you find coming up again and again in your work?
The theme that is constant is truth. Sometimes knowing the truth is essential. Sometimes knowing the truth is completely destructive. Sometimes you think you'd like to know the truth, but you can't have it. So you have to make a decision and your decision becomes the truth. So it's truth and lies and all the permutations thereof.
How did Chamber Theater start?
Chamber Theater started with a couple who moved here from New York. Their names are Pat and Steve Kutay. They had a marvelous experience attending the Mint Theater in New York City, which made a habit of reviving really old plays-things written by AA Milne and Lewis Carroll and the likes. They also knew about Living Room Theater, which presented a different aspect of theater in New York, so they thought maybe they could combine those things here and do Living Room Mint-Flavored Theater. They were put on to [local actor] Lois Viscoli who called me and we had lunch together, talked about the possibilities and then Lois and I invited a bunch of theater people here to discuss it and what we found is none of them was interested in the work it would take to do anything of this sort and weren't interested in working in people's living rooms, so to make it worth their while, you're going to have to do some kind of a venue.
And then?
We came up with a template for this theater. We learned, because of the crash and burning of two theaters, that it would be good to not have big funding and expenses. The actors were saying to me, 'We'll be more willing to work if we don't have to memorize.' Particularly for short runs, which were all we could afford. We wanted to do it in a way where the audience would feel involved, so we wanted a part of every production to include a Q&A at the end because our feeling was if people are involved in what makes theater, they're more enthused to go to theater, and not just ours, but all theaters. And we wanted to keep ticket prices cheap, and make it as easy as possible. We then scoured plays of all sorts, picked out six plays, then we went to Mario Cabrera, asked if he would direct and asked him to select from this pool of six plays. He chose
The Circle
. Then the Kutays, Lois and I all put money in to get it going, did a playbill to sell ads and generate income and ticket sales, and you know what happened? It succeeded.
You have a new play coming out with Theaterwork [Pangloss and Pennypocket]. What's it about?
It is a four-character comedy. It is written by a friend of mine who lives in Boston and me. He is an eye surgeon. So Jay [co-author JH Kaufman] thought, 'Let's give this a try, how can we go about it?' We figured out that we could communicate by email, that he'll write in Boston, I'll write in Santa Fe, and what we send in emails will be the dialogue of the play. So you, Jay, create a character, I'll create a character and we'll have the characters speak to each other. And then in order to give these characters something to play with, we allowed each of the characters to create a character. So, the way you visualize this is: Here's a desk in Santa Fe and I'm at it, or my character, who's Pennypocket, and here's desk in Boston and his character's at it, and then there is a spotlight in the center and we each put a character in the spotlight so we can run this. The premise that I came up with was, the woman is a writer of a series of books for children. He is a physician and he writes articles about health that appear in The New York Times and elsewhere. So they very reluctantly come together and they're going to write a novel about love. And they're middle-aged curmudgeons whom love has passed by.
Give a quick diagnosis of theater in this town.
First of all, I think there are two audiences in Santa Fe. There's the year-round audience and there's the tourist audience. And I think one thing that both of those groups share is the people who go to the theater here and visit here also go to the theater in New York, London, Chicago, LA. They go to the big theaters and so they're fairly knowledgeable about theater. I do not think it is wise to put on plays here that can be seen in those larger cities where there is greater access to dollars and cents, where there's a larger pool of actors, because then we're competing with tough stuff. I think for the tourist audience, the smartest thing to do is brand new, cutting-edge stuff like the [visual] art. People are drawn here for the art because it's new stuff. And the opera has got all these young people. This is a place where young artists come to make their names. I think the same can be done with theater. So I think summer programs here, in particular, running from May to September, ought to really work to include brand new stuff. I think winter, when it's the homegrown audience, I think then you can do some really old stuff, or you can do new takes on things, but boy, yet another version of Chekhov's
Cherry Orchard
ain't it. I just think it's so tiresome to see the same old plays dragged out time and again as though there's some religion we're serving here with this canon of theater.
Why should people bother going to the theater? Why not just go to the movies?
Because truth is still being told on squatty little stages where 65 people huddle together in the dark.
