OUTzone talks to Playwright Adam Bock!

October 13, 2006

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OZ: How big was your audience?
The class. And our teacher would let us … we did a site-specific “Harriet the Spy” and I played “Sport.” We did it outside and we were really kind of adventurous as third graders. Just determined that we were going to put these things on. And I almost always ended up writing plays when I got an assignment. You know, when a teacher assigns you to write a poem or something, I always ended up writing plays. I hear a voice when I’m writing, I can hear how voices create action.

OZ: Your work has been seen off-Broadway, it’s won several prestigious awards. How does it feel to be taken seriously as a playwright?
The good thing about where I’m getting, as I was talking about it with my director, Annie Kaufman, last night, is that as we do work, and as we get taken a little more seriously, it just means that we’re going to get to work again, and it means that we’ll get to work with better and better people. New York actors are so good, so good, like you can rarely complain about the actors, and the designers all do gorgeous beautiful work. And I just want to see if I can keep working. And do less non-theatre work.

OZ: If you had to nail down themes that interest you – things that your work is about – what would you say they are?
One is that I always write about people who aren’t normally on stage. So I write a lot about women. And it’s a question about where they are on stage – women are rarely the center of the play, they’re often supporting, they’re people who help support a central male character – so I like putting women in the center. I like putting gay men in the center, because we often have the sidekick role, or the comic role, or we’re dying and I’m less interested in that. I like to see what happens if that’s not the way we’re portrayed. I write a lot about people who wake up, I notice that’s a theme. They wake up and see something and realize that they can’t continue to live the way they did before, and how hard it is to push through that or work through that. And another thing I’ve started looking at is work, and how we treat people we work with. It’s interesting to me.

OZ: We spend so much time with the people we work with.
Yes. I mean, we work all the time, so I think, “how come we’re always writing about love and home, when we’re not there?” That’s interesting to me. And when I think of work, it’s like, we decide to do work, our work is actually telling the world what we believe in, how we work, who we work for, what we do at work is actually our politics.

OZ: Which writers first rang your bell? Whose writing do you love?
Chekov, I love. Caryl Churchill. Her play Far Away is gorgeous. I saw it around the time that I was writing The Thugs and this play is a little bit of an echo or an admiration of Caryl Churchill. She wrote a 45 minute play that is so rich and deep and gorgeous, it’s lovely.

Edward Albee is a wonderful writer. These guys I like a lot because they challenge form. They don’t think about the story they’re going to write, they actually try to change the shape of theater as they do it, which is fascinating. I love this guy named Robert LaPage, who is a Canadian director who actually makes work – that is so unbelievably beautiful. And Shakespeare.

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