Theatre History Studies

Playwright and historian Jeffrey Sweet anchors his collection of interviews What Playwrights Talk About When They Talk About Writing around the simple observation that "playwrights don't talk about writing with each other much" (xvii). Marking the tenth anniversary of the Yale Drama Series and the David Charles Horn Foundation Prize for emerging playwrights, the series of one-on-one interviews with past judges for the series offers insider insights to the playwriting process, as well as a broad oral history of the past three generations of British and American playwriting. [End Page 321]

Sweet begins the collection with a reprint of a 2010 article he wrote for Dramatics about Edward Albee, who he frames as the father of contemporary play-writing. Sweet then presents the sixteen interviewees in a chronological fashion from Arthur Kopit to Nina Raine, bookending the Albee article with a previous interview with Lanford Wilson. While Sweet touches on many topics with every writer—What's your process? Who inspires you? Where do you get your material?—Sweet does an admirable job crafting uniquely individualized questions for each playwright. As with any such collection, as the interviews progress and are taken in totality, several themes emerge.

The most prevalent theme in the book is the difference between British and American theatre. Sweet posits to nearly every writer that British playwrights create large-scale "state-of-the-nation" plays, whereas American playwrights write smaller-scale plays seen "through the lens of the family." Kwame Kwei-Armah, a British playwright of émigré parents who is now artistic director of Baltimore's Center Stage, most eloquently sums up the contrast: "The British playwright has been schooled in the art of state-of-the-nation plays. We're trained by critique, by reaction, and production history that the role of the playwright is to be the person who says, 'This is our country right now—from a political as well as a social as well as a sociological perspective.'" On the flip side, he argues, American playwrights have been pushed into working "through the lens of metaphor, and using the family as metaphor" (187). Within this larger question, the differences in training as well as mediums weave their way through the interviews. Donald Margulies and others argue that in the theatre playwrights are "constrained" and that the big, epic, political type of writing is taking place within the world of television. Margulies continues: "The theater has its limitations economically. You can't tell big stories onstage, or you can't tell them in conventional or realistic ways… . I like getting my plays produced. And the reality is that plays with smaller casts or more manageable-sized casts get produced more readily than larger, fiscally unwieldy plays" (126–27).

While most playwrights agree with Sweet's appraisal, David Hare pushes back, providing one of the only contentious moments in an otherwise charmingly friendly book. Hare argues that the difference is artificial, after all: "Tony Kushner wrote Angels in America for a theatre that did not exist. That theatre came into being because he wrote this great play" (55). In an exchange about A. R. Gurney's negative reaction to Stuff Happens being produced in America (in short, why aren't American theatres putting resources behind American writers?), Hare says American dramatists "don't have the courage to write that play" (55). If anything, one wishes that Sweet pushed back more often with his subjects to create more moments of discord and resultant debate. Similarly, there [End Page 322] is room for Sweet to push his subjects further in terms of the training of playwrights and its relationship to the type of work being created in the American theatre. While it is suggested that the American MFA model and the current economics of New York theatre are creating a generation of small-scale playwrights, there is room to dig deeper.

Sweet does delve into pedagogy with several of the playwrights, with Marsha Norman's and Lynn...