Interview with Carlyle Brown (American playwright) for the Antioch Record
10/07/98

Carlyle Brown sits next to me on the stone stairs of the theatre building. He's smiling but behind his glasses he watches me thoroughly. Together, we are waiting for one of his actors to show up for rehearsal of his play "A Big Blue Nail" which will be performed in November. We use the waiting time for an interview. Carlyle Brown, 52 is a recognized, award-winning playwright who belongs to the "New Dramatists" of the contemporary American theatre. He is a professional writer who came back to Antioch College after a one year leave. Outside, the rain is pouring down and it's chilly in the entrance hall.

Q: Carlyle, you've been to Antioch before, why did you come back for this term?

A: You know, I came back because I liked it. John, Karen and Louise are great and it's those theatre artists who run the program. It's not like a conservatory, it is theatre in a more relaxed environment. And that's good for any creative work.   Theatre is an artform and here it's an artform that works just for its own sake as opposed as to being made into a product.   And I liked the students here. They are a lot more active and open and earnest than students in other universities. I've been in other places and talked to students and sometimes you can't tell if it's a group of people or an oil-painting.

Q: So do you think of Antioch as a creative environment, an experimental ground?

A: Antioch obviously has a mission to cultivate that kind of individuals for society. And that has value. There should be more places like that. And I think it's good to have them.   People who don't know what they want are unhealthy for society.  

Q: You're directing your own play this term. "A Big Blue Nail" is the title and it will be performed from November 12^th-15^th as a workshop performance. What's it about?

A: The framework is about the discovery of the North Pole which leads to the question of who discovered it; Admiral Peary or his Negro servant Matthew Henson. But it's really about desire and ambition, and what a beautiful trap that is.

Q: How is it to direct your own play?

A: You know, I've done that before. The only time I directed a play which wasn't mine was last year and it was the "Triumph of Love" which was quite a lot of fun. When you write a play you eventually have to give it away. Directing your own work or letting it be directed by somebody else are just two different ways of giving it away.   If you can be honest with yourself, you can direct your own work. Then you can see it as close as you'd imagined it;   whether you throw it away or not. If somebody else does it, it's another temperament, another mind, another being.

Q: Does it happen very often that you have to rewrite while you rehearse?

A: There is a certain kind of regularity to it. When a play gets to a certain place then it becomes obvious how the threads of one moment go into another. Problems may be easy to see, but they are difficult to fix. The key is to know how to fix them. When you work collaboratively, there's less guessing. You can ask actors to approach a scene in different ways and then you may finally come to the conclusion of what doesn't work. At least you discover it's not the actor. <laughs> My play is not finished, but I think it's very close. There's one moment that I don't know how to fix and maybe it'll come to me. But I won't allow this play to be produced until I have fixed it and that may happen while the rehearsal performances go on or when the lights will go on... <laughs>

Q: What is more important to you, the play itself, the actors or the major theme?

A:   Ultimately you are heading for a point in time   and the point in time is when people come into the theater with their diverse lives and they sit down on the chairs and the houselights go down and the stagelights go up. That's what it's all about, this kind of moment. You can't take one thing away from the other, it all goes together.

Q: Did you always want to be a playwright?

A: Ahm, no <pause> well,I always wanted to be a writer...

Q: So why did you want to be a writer and why did you turn out to be a playwright?

A: I don't know if you'd consider this as a motive, but when I was a kid I went to see "Rising in the sun" on Broadway and in the play one of the daughters says to the mother, that she doesn't believe in God and then for the first time in the play the mom gets really pissed and she gets really big and says: "In my house there is still a God." And she made this girl who tried to show herself as being an atheist to say a line that was something like: "Say after me: There is still a God in my house." It was so powerful that all of us kids were repeating it! Wow, that's powerful stuff! So I guess all the writers are attracted to that kind of thing. Why that is... I'd leave that to my therapist if I had one.

Q: When did you first get recognition for your work?

A: Oh, in 1991 a play (The African Company presents Richard III) of mine got done in a big regional theater, and there was a lot of press and I also got two major grants. Well I got grants before, but that was actually money that I could live on.

Q: You work here as a professor and you can go home and write. Is this "job sharing" something you're interested in? Do you prefer having one foot standing and the other one swinging, for the standing being the professor's and the swinging being the writer's leg?

A: I like being a guest artist. I don't think I would like to teach all the time. I won't teach next semester, for example. There are times when I like to have both legs swinging. You have to settle some place to write.   There 's a big wanderer in my character and I have to control him somehow. But sometimes he has to go for a walk and then I take him for a walk.   <laughs>

Q: How do you write? Do you sit down every day and write from 9 to 5?

A: Yes, you're right! But it doesn't mean you're always typing. In fact, there's very little typing. <laughs> It depends on what I'm working on. If I wasn't here I'd be working four or five hours a day. It's a bloody job. And if you are a professor you have two jobs, but that's just the reality of an artist's life. The teaching may be an opportunity for some artists but it's also time I'm not writing... It's my job and I like what I'm doing, I do it everyday and hopefully I do get better.   If I could afford it, I wouldn't do anything else - except to come back to a place like Antioch,   because here you get something back. There are students in my playwriting class and in my cast where I have the feeling that they give me something back and most of the time I think it's something honest and in art that's where learning occurs.   Art is not like math, there are no concrete answers. You learn by experience and if you don't do anything you don't get anything.   So this environment is stimulating. In a lot of places you give and you don't get anything back.

Q: Has there ever been a time when you wanted to give up writing?

A: I don't think so. Why would I have wanted to do that?

Q: Well apparently, there seem to be writers that are afraid of a blank page...

A: Oh, I think that's just a lot of crap. It's like I said, it's just a job. There are things like that but that's just part of the artist's problem solving. I think that's ridiculous! A person like that is not much of a writer. There's something about writing which is an art, which is a way of life. It has absolutely no guarantees. The actual process of the working is something that the worker really enjoys. It's a place where the worker wants to be. Yeah, I can see that he doesn't want to be there, but if the blank page is like a gory beast to him, then he shouldn't be a writer!   I think if you can afford to - which I got lucky enough since - to sit down in the theatre and distill the universe through your imagination, that's an opportunity   and I'm writing great now. It's the opportunity to really sit still and contemplate. And most people don't have that.

Q: So where do you get your inspiration from?

A: That's what I'm just saying, inspiration is a bunch of trash. Artists are problem-solvers. Michelangelo didn't do the Sistine Chapel, Picasso didn't paint the paintings because of it.   All the paintings Picasso painted, do you think he could have painted those things if he were just sitting around with heavy breathing? You have to get to work!  

Q: But you couldn't always live from writing, what did you do before? Did you teach?

A: No, I did something totally different. I was an outdoor adventure instructor on 19^th century sailing ships. And I really enjoyed it. I stopped around twenty years ago. You can't write when you're working. And it was hard work. At the end of the day you just lay down. There was no time to write. At a period when I was helping out a lot on other ships, I took this as an opportunity to stop going to the sea while I was not going to miss it.

Q: Let's take a look at American drama these days: Terence McNally, Tony Kushner, it seems that contemporary American theatre is very much gay oriented. I don't think that's all there is, I mean there's you... How do you see it?

A: I don't know why that is. It does seem that there are more writers who are gay that have success than not and then... maybe not. It's certainly right, Tony Kushner and Terence McNally stand out because they are not like the white WASP-Train that is the rest of theatre. Because they stand out so much from the rest of the crowd. And because they are different, their ideas seem different and of course they are, they are big! They are certainly good writers. I think the question is, whether or not the public that fuels the theatre, that creates and responds to a Tony Kushner and Terence McNally, is a certain kind of middle-class theatre going public and I certainly don't think these writers cater to that. But that public seems to be able to tolerate if nothing else... the level that Tony and Terence put out there. It's a very interesting question. There certainly is that presence. What it means as opposed to others, I can only speculate. Perhaps its easier to accept because they are still white males. Maybe their distance, their stance - just from that point of view - might be something that the white middle-class world that attends and subscribes and supports those theaters accepts. But then I feel in terms of my own work that this is not entirely true. Audiences that I thought would not be receptive to my work have been highly receptive to my work.   The problem is, since the theatre in this country is so engaged in the product that the theater itself, the institution, which stands between the audience and the artist, has become a kind of a middle man as opposed to a facilitator.   The problem is how those people are educated and how they perceive the world which determines what's there, as opposed to what the audience may want.

Q: Do you see yourself in a disadvantage to white writers?

A: Oh, certainly. A lot of them have better careers. But you know, good writing is good writing and it's so individual and it's hard to compare on that level. It's a question of the material. People want to hear that or whatever. A lot of that is not just controlled by the theatre people but the conventions of the time, where society might be at the moment. I was talking to a friend of mine about a "Streecar named Desire". Nowadays they are very unattractive characters and what was once considered a great play is only a good play today. Although a good play is still hard to do! Society and humanity has moved to a certain level where the characters in this play are only pathetic assholes. <laughs> It's certainly not a piece of trash, but it's certainly not a play like the "Crucible" by Arthur Miller which continues to have meaning and where the people continue to be real. So what is that? The selection of the material? I don't even think the writer can take credit for that. It's shit that's out there in the universe. Writers just collect it.

Q: Since the rehearsal has already started and I know you want to go there, let me close the interview here and thank you very much for your time. And we're looking forward to seeing your play in November.