tgeist Performing a human miracle An interview with Denis O’Hare
Partners apart
Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare are impossible to get into a room together—and they know it. But their method of collaboration miraculously works around their temporal and spatial differences. Whenever they happen to be in the same city, they grab a few hours to power write. They Skype every week, taking screenshots of each other in an attempt to capture their time together visually. Their face-to-face time happens during intensive workshops and residencies scattered over the years. Lisa and Denis perfected this unconventional yet fruitful process as they worked on An Iliad. Their creative time grew into a more solid endeavor with The Good Book. True to form, we could not find a way to talk with them together for a dual interview. Literary Manager Sarah Rose Leonard found some time with Lisa, and Literary Fellow Madeleine Rostami spoke to Denis on the phone. What follows are excerpts from their conversations.
B Y M A DE L E I N E RO S TA M I
Connor’s tape recorder was taken from your own life, right? I was born in ’62, so when I was 8 or 9, I had a tape recorder, and I would make audio recordings of movies I loved like Funny Girl, Fiddler on the Roof, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, and, of course, The Sound of Music. (laughter) I would fall asleep at night listening to the movies. I listened to those movies over and over, like bedtime stories, reliving them through my ears. I also would tape record book reports for school. I remember doing one where I had to be Robert E. Lee and General Grant, and I would interview them and I would figure out a way to be one voice and then the other. Tape recorders back then were the only thing we had, so you did a lot of creating that way. My friends and I would put on little horror plays or little science fiction plays all on the tape recorder. Like a radio play. Writing a play about the Bible, and about faith, is such a personal process. What is it like to write a piece that has so much of you in it? I think like any writer, you both are attracted to and repelled by using yourself as your material. At the same time there is something about authenticity: if something is true, there’s probably a better chance that someone else will relate to it. The funny thing is that it’s not just me in the play, Lisa’s also in the play and it doesn’t scan the way you’d think. There’s a great section of the play called “Note to my Future Self,” which Connor writes, which is pure Lisa. We’re both really, really deeply in the play, but it’s all mixed up. It’s not necessarily that all of Connor is me, there’s a good amount of Connor that’s Lisa, and not all of Miriam is Lisa or me. The characters begin to take on their own lives, and they begin to tell us who they are.
miracle How does the Bible manifest itself in The Good Book? We wanted the Bible to be shown and we’ve played with a lot of ways of doing that. Ultimately, we’ve come up with five actors who don’t necessarily enact the book itself, but they enact characters from the making of the book. Part of what we’re biting off is the idea of “what is truth?” and also the idea of how transmission affects content. These are all related to the questions of what is a meaningful life and what is the
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