OUTzone talks to Playwright Adam Bock!

October 13, 2006

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OZ: You once wrote the play wherein a guy goes on a date with an actual shark.
I did. The actor was Logan Marshall Green. I have a total crush on him. And he knows it.

OZ: You really seem to enjoy the writing of these things.
I like to play with form. I wrote this play called Swimming in the Shallows. And I was staying at my aunt and uncles house in Berkeley and they had a stack of National Geographics. So the rule I gave myself was when I got lost, I had to read another National Geographic. So one was about landfills and dumps, so that’s in there, another magazine was about Tibetan monks, so that made the play. So whenever I got lost. I’d open another National Geographic and say, “Okay now that has to go in?” So it became a very rich, I would say, as rich as a pile of National Geographics can be. Good writing in those magazines.

OZ: Theater is expanding in a few new directions, what are you loving right now?
Something that’s really interesting that’s going on right now is that there are a lot of new and cool young voices who are looking at language in an entirely new way. I like spectacle. I like event. It seems like that’s going pretty well, we’re not writing the “everybody is in the living room play” anymore. Ithere are so many different kinds of plays now.

There’s this woman named Young Jean Lee who’s doing a play at Here, that’s incredible. She’s Korean American and she has these Korean ladies in it that are amazing. They have the Korean national dress on, these big, beautiful, gorgeous colored dresses. She has them dancing to a Mariah Carey Christmas song while committing suicide gesturally. Over and over. Like one of them is pulling out her eyes, and there’s another with a … all with Mariah Carey singing, you know “It’s a new Christmas” and you’re just like … wow. Huh? She’s great.

OZ: New York seems to be a great place for playwrights who don’t feel like writing TV. Do you live in New York City?
I do. I used to live in San Francisco but I ‘ve lived here for four years. I like it here, it’s hard. People are really ambitious, and that was hard to get used to. In San Francisco, they’ll hate me for this, but I’ll say it anyway. You do yoga and in San Francisco they’re like, “Good job.” And here, you do yoga and they’re like, “Did you finish your screenplay?” No, but I did yoga, come on.

And plus my apartment is really small, and that’s a little shocking. I live in Hell’s Kitchen, so I’m right near a lot of theaters, so I actually get to see a lot of stuff.

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