interest in the arguments in the play does not necessarily have to do with what I believe, but with what I don’t understand. I don’t understand Nora’s initial argument; I have a hard time relating to it. When I’m writing, I try to find examples of people who very convincingly make some of those arguments. George Bernard Shaw wrote a play called Getting Married. Shaw often has a cluster of essays in front of his plays. Getting Married has a couple of essays that very strongly inform Nora’s big opening speech about marriage. I often try to find arguments that I don’t really agree with, try to put those arguments in my own words, and try to make them as convincing as possible. That tends to be the relationship between the plays and what I do or don’t believe. In one interview Lucas gave he said that Nora asks herself at the end of A Doll’s House, “If I’m left to myself, what do I want for myself?” What is your current answer to that question for yourself? Lucas: Oh, yeah! It’s so funny, I was actually just re-watching My Dinner with Andre last night. I feel like that question is the big question of that movie. Wally [Wallace Shawn] more
I just found the writing very exciting and rather ferocious. Lucas sometimes talks to me about things that he’s thinking about writing, but they always surprise me. That’s terrific because most things aren’t surprising. With Lucas, I never know what’s coming next. —LES WATERS, DIRECTOR or less argues, “You have to want something,” and Andre says, “But what if you don’t? What if you can just not want something or not try to be doing anything?” I’m very, very happy to just always be spending my time making something. I’m more in the Wally camp. I want to be writing a play. I want to be in the rehearsal room. My least favorite thing is actually watching any of my plays because then I’m not getting to actually do anything and having to just sit there passively. I’m happiest when I’m writing, and in the rehearsal room, and in the midst of making or rewriting. Les, do you have an answer to that? Les: I just left a very big job. I was artistic director of Actors Theatre of Louisville for six and a half years. That was one of three big jobs, one after another after another. At the moment, I don’t know. I’m perfectly happy not knowing what it is. You’re in the Andre camp right now? Les: I think so. It’s strange. I’m fine not knowing.
Response Plays One could think of A Doll’s House, Part 2 as a straightforward sequel. “Part 2” is in the title, after all. But the play does much more than extend the action of A Doll’s House: like so many plays that respond to classic texts, it was provoked by an urge to continue a conversation. What exactly makes a play a “response play” (a term we at Berkeley Rep mostly made up) rather than an adaptation, sequel, backstage drama (where a known play is happening in the background of a new plotline), or a work that’s “inspired by” another play? The lines get blurry, but below are some examples of notable plays that grapple with an original work in ways that feel like more of a response than a remake: Afterplay by Brian Friel plucks two characters from Chekhov’s plays—Andrey, the brother from Three Sisters, and Sonya, the dutiful niece from Uncle Vanya—and gives them closure during a chance encounter in a Moscow tearoom in the 1920s. An Octoroon by Branden JacobsJenkins examines the racism in one of America’s most popular historical melodramas, The Octoroon by Dion Boucicault. Beneatha’s Place by Kwame Kwei-Armah continues the life of the daughter in A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, but sets it in the same time periods as Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris, which is itself a response to Raisin.
Afi Bijou and Jasmine Bracey in Berkeley Rep’s 2017 production of An Octoroon P H OTO BY K E V I N B ER N E
Desdemona, a Play About a Handkerchief by Paula Vogel asks, what would Desdemona be like if Othello’s suspicions about her faithfulness were true? In this play she is, in fact, sleeping with everyone. Fortinbras by Lee Blessing imagines the Norwegian prince, fresh from the battle at the end of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, seizing power, much to the dismay of the recently deceased ghosts of Hamlet and Horatio. Lear by Young Jean Lee places the theme of mortality in Shakespeare’s King Lear in the in the hands of Lear’s daughters, all cast as black women, and the brothers Edgar and Edmund, one of whom dons a Big Bird costume at one point.
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