8 minute read
Q&A with Playwright Eleanor Burgess
Q&A Eleanor Burgess with Playwright
What inspired you to write this story?
I first read Death of a Salesman as a teenager, when I didn’t get it at all, and then read it for the second time in graduate school, when I admired it as a brilliantly crafted play. But I didn’t really connect with it on a personal level until I brought it along on a trip I was taking with my Mom, and my Mom read it, and said, “You know this is basically the story of our family, right?” And I had known that my grandfather was a salesman in Brooklyn in the years after World War II, but I hadn’t known many details, in particular about his marriage to my grandmother, which was loving but also turbulent. And that made me start thinking about my grandmother, who was someone who absolutely adored the theater and movies, but who (unlike me) never got to tell her own story. I started thinking about all the missing narratives... and about what happens to our understanding of society and our understanding of ourselves when the canon only includes some voices and not others. And that made me want to rip the canon open and force my way in.
Do you like Arthur Miller’s work? What issues do you see with his plays that we as contemporary audiences should examine?
I love Arthur Miller’s work. There’s no arguing with the fact that he was brilliant, both at analyzing American society and at crafting profound, wrenching drama. But I do think there’s an irony to his work, that’s encapsulated in the famous quote “attention must be paid.” Miller lavishes such wonderful, thoughtful attention on Willy Loman - he has such deep empathy for this limited and ordinary man. But he has much less interest in his female characters. Linda is a deep character, but her feelings are not central, not the thing “attention must be paid” to; with other female characters, including “The Woman,” Miller has no interest in their wants or their pain. And that’s fine, every playwright is interested in what they’re interested in. But when you have a play occupying such a huge place in the canon - a play that is considered THE definition of great American drama, THE definitive examination of the American Dream… that has a major effect on whose stories we think have weight, whose story we think is the “American” story, and whose feelings and needs are worthy of attention and care.
How do you think gender expectations/roles have changed over time? How have they not?
Haha, I think my answer to that question is at least 90 minutes long, and it happens in the play! Or, that’s a question the whole play invites audiences to think about. Obviously life has changed enormously for women (and men) since my grandmothers’ time, and mostly for the better. I went to a college that would not have admitted my grandmothers, and have a job that maybe 2-3 women used to get to have per decade, let alone per season. At
the time the play takes place, women couldn’t even open a bank account without their husband’s permission. So, things have changed. And they haven’t. You can look at the “second shift,” at Dobbs v. Jackson, at your own life, and see that our different expectations for women and men still permeate almost every aspect of our lives.
I think one other question the play is asking is, have we just replaced hyper-feminized expectations of women with masculinized expectations, or with expecting women to do everything? I certainly don’t want to be Linda Loman - but I also don’t want to be Willy Loman, basing my sense of self worth on how much money I bring in. And I don’t want to have to be simultaneously Linda and Willy, a perfect mom AND a striving worker. That’s just exhausting. And I think we’re seeing that everywhere right now. Mass burnout, and a sense that this is all unsustainable. That “having it all” just means “doing it all.” Am I glad I exist now, instead of a hundred years ago? Absolutely. But I hope for better things for my kids, and for anyone growing up a hundred years from now.
What was the process of development of the play like? Can you walk audiences through it a bit?
This play has had a long road, and each step along it has enriched it. I wrote the first draft in 2017 - that was before the pandemic, obviously, and also before I had kids. It was a simpler version of the play. I won’t spoil the twist here, but there’s a big twist that didn’t exist in the first draft. I was fortunate enough to have a commission from Milwaukee Rep, in association with Writers Theatre in Chicago, to support my working on the play, and I was able to workshop and hone it here in Milwaukee. And it was getting stronger and stronger, but something was missing.
Then two major things happened - I had a baby in 2019, and Covid hit in 2020. And like many women, I suddenly found myself with no childcare, stuck inside my house, taking care of the kid while my husband worked. Basically living the same life as my grandmothers. And that cracked something open for me, and a new, very different draft came out of that experience. And I was so lucky to then learn that Milwaukee Rep and Writers Theatre would both produce the play. That was such a lifeline, in the middle of the early days of the pandemic, when I had no idea when or whether theater would ever come back. That kept me working, and pushing forward, towards a newer, deeper version of this story.
It can be a really long road, to write something that’s worthy of people’s time and work and attention. I was so lucky to have support along the way from Milwaukee Rep.
How does this connect to your other work or other interests as a playwright?
A lot of my work seems to focus on that idea of narratives - canonical narratives, and what gets left out. I was actually a latecomer to theater; I majored in history as an undergrad, and I was a high school history teacher for several years after college. So, the idea of the stories we inherit about our past, and how they shape our present, is an obsession for me. I’m also very interested in exploding stories we think we know, taking familiar time periods or relationships and turning them around and around until the world starts to feel very, very complicated. I think this play is also pretty typical of my work in tone - namely, that its subject is very serious but the experience of watching it is very, very funny. I always hope that an Eleanor Burgess play means that an audience has a great time watching it, and then leaves with a lot to think about. Hopefully that was people’s experience with The Niceties and hopefully that’s what we’re doing again here.
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