Antlia Pneumatica Bulletin by Playwrights Horizons

SHARP THEATER BULLETIN

IN THIS ISSUE

PLAYWRIGHT'S PERSPECTIVE

ANNE WASHBURN: A 15-YEAR TOUR

SUBMITTED FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

Anne Washburn discusses how the art of radio dramas helped her create Antlia Pneumatica.

Sarah Lunnie chronicles Anne Washburn's body of work with a visual timeline.

Adam Greenfield considers the work of Anne Washburn, and the mysteries of Antlia Pneumatica.

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FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

DEAR FRIENDS, Nina: Where? What am I looking at? Adrian: I’m pointing right at it but it doesn’t matter, you can’t see it. Not because it’s too faint — although it’s very very faint — but because your eyes can’t make sense of it it has no natural shape… Nina: I don’t see it. Adrian: You can’t see it. It took me hours to see it. Now I can’t not see it, when it’s in season, I can’t look away. Nina: Why are you showing me this? Thing which I can’t see? Adrian: Because when we see that four stars have been slung together and called an air pump we realize that really, the whole sky is up for grabs. We give things names. And that’s what they are. But they aren’t really. We make it all up, everything we believe in. And what we make, we can unmake. And remake. I find it… liberating. —Anne Washburn, Antlia Pneumatica “Art owes its continuing evolution to the Apollonian/Dionysian duality. Apollo is at once the god of all plastic powers, the soothsaying god, and the god of light. Dionysian rapture arises...through the powerful approach of spring, which penetrates with joy the whole frame of nature. In Dionysian music man is incited to strain his symbolic faculties to the utmost…to tear asunder the veil of Maya.” —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music Thinking about the collision of the rational and the irrational in Anne Washburn’s work, I found myself thumbing through my Nietzsche. There is a strong vein of verisimilitude in Anne’s work, from the dry, casual wit of her dialogue, to her clearly recognizable characters, and the graspable situations in which she locates them. When Anne turned her commissioned play, Antlia Pneumatica, in to us, we jocularly began to refer to it as her Big Chill play. A group of friends gathers for the funeral of one of their own. They reminisce, try to recapture the past, and try to keep their kids offstage. They prep and cook food practically nonstop, even as they get word one by one that most of their friends won’t be coming. Then things get interesting when one of their ex-boyfriends shows. He’s acting kind of strange, strangely candid yet laconic, sexy but diffident. He shows up in her bedroom at night but doesn’t really make a pass. The past hangs in the air. Gradually, things get spookier and spookier. Are they haunted? Like The Big Chill, time and memory seem totally accessible. In the movie, everyone felt acutely how time had moved on, but there was something comforting in their recognizability to each other. In Antlia, not just time, but existence itself feels more mysterious, more cosmic. In the end we’re not sure what we’ve experienced. Have these characters summoned the past through their subconscious? Or is the answer simpler and uncannier than that? I think it’s helpful in considering the many questions Antlia Pneumatica asks of us to think of it in Apollonian terms. In Nietzsche’s view, Apollo is the god of light and of dreams. He is the god of reality and of artifice. So the theatrical magic of an Anne Washburn play is not really irrational. She is acutely attuned to the palpable ways in which the theater can hold a mirror up to reality and the ways in which it can subvert it. As she says in her Playwright’s Perspective, the act of entering a theater and embracing its artifice requires a leap of the imagination that may feel odd, but certainly abides by rules. We learn the rules of the play as we interpret the rules of a dream to find a reflection of our reality. But there is, in fact, a Dionysian streak to Anne’s work as well. We enter the theater to have an experience. And the presentness of the play resides in the emotional ride it takes us on. The Dionysian impulse brings rapture and creepiness, pity and fear into a play. We give ourselves over to it as we give ourselves over to music. The music of Antlia asserts itself right away in the way so many scenes occur offstage; we hear them through speakers, as in a radio play (again, I refer you to Anne’s Playwright’s Perspective). We learn quickly to listen closely to these scenes, both for their content and their music. Later, a scene shifts mysteriously in time, and we realize we have jumped forward to the memorial service, and then we go back. Anne is not simply playing narrative hopscotch with us. These shifts ask us to look at the world differently. And they open us up emotionally. So the scene in which the strange title of the play is explained opens up the whole universe to us. It beautifully defines our artfulness and our humanity and then slips away and asks us to consider whether this scene actually happened in reality or not. Or maybe it just happened in the interstices of our longing. It’s an amazing play: generous and unique, a play that is sure to linger with you long after you have experienced it.

Photo by Zack DeZon

TIM SANFORD

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

The Sharp Theater Bulletin is generously funded, in part, by the

LIMAN FOUNDATION

PLAYWRIGHT'S PERSPECTIVE My grandfather once said that when he was a child people didn’t say that they were going to go “see” a play; they said they were going to go “listen” to one, and I always remember that. I believe I am a playwright, and not some other kind of writer, because I listened a lot to old radio dramas as a kid; boxed sets and also broadcasts from a local AM station: words in the air, and images made from words. I’ve come to sort of loathe the word “imagination” because it’s commonly used as though it were both inevitably positive, and harmless, and largely restricted to children; I’m always startled when someone describes themselves as “not imaginative” when really they’re almost certainly loaded with the stuff, and just not good at, say, crafts, or writing short stories. The act of sitting in front of a play — both watching it and listening to it — is always a fairly extreme act of the imagination; no one writes plays about strangers who file into a room one by one and sit in rows of chairs facing strangers pretending to be other strangers somewhere which is not a room full of rows of chairs… The whole event is always extremely implausible, and only the imaginative impulse of everyone involved keeps everyone from drifting away to do something “real.” I didn’t set out to write a play in which large sections are heard rather than seen, but in a play in which so much of the action is the re-creation of the past — the kind of storytelling we fall into when we’re with old friends we no longer have a life with — foregrounding the act of listening, which is an act of sympathy and imagination, seemed right. And I have a deep and ancient love for what seems to me to be the oldest and most satisfying form of storytelling: words in the dark.

ANNE WASHBURN DECEMBER 2015

Photo by Zack DeZonn

What a way to close out 2015! Thank you so much for supporing our new American plays this year. We are fortunate to have kicked off this season with three New York Times Critics’ Picks that have each enjoyed multiple-week extensions. We share these successes with you and look forward to more exciting works in 2016! “The first important new play of the fall season. This terric play about the mystery of faith is mesmerizing.”

“A beautiful trinity of Nielsen’s pained and profound performance, Mac’s script, and Smith’s direction.”

“This production keeps developing in your head, like a photographic negative, long after you’ve seen it.”

—Charles Isherwood, The New York Times

—Hilton Als, The New Yorker

—Ben Brantley, The New York Times

Linda Powell, Andrew Garman, Larry Powell, Philip Kerr, and the choir in The Christians by Lucas Hnath. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Kristine Nielsen and Tom Phelan in Hir by Taylor Mac. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Lisa Emery, Lois Smith, and Noah Bean in Marjorie Prime by Jordan Harrison. Photo by Jeremy Daniel. 3

BACKSTORY

ANNE WASHBURN: A 15-YEAR TOUR

Anne Washburn possesses an uncanny genius for conjuring theatrical worlds that arrest and fascinate, even on unfamiliar wavelengths. A master of the gradual release of information, she trusts her audience enough to disorient us, for a time, charting her course with quiet precision even as she leads us down the rabbit hole. Here’s a gloss of her projects to date.

Photo by Michael Lutch

The Communist Dracula Pageant (2001) American Repertory Theater (MA)

The Small (2010) Clubbed Thumb's Summerworks

“By Americans, for Americans, a play about the Romanian Revolution of 1989 with hallucinations, phosphorescence and bears.” Washburn puts 20th-century Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in conversation with 15th-century proto-Dracula Vlad Tepes to deliver a satire about national identity and revisionist history.

Described by the playwright as a story about “worlds opening up and closing in and turning inside out and shifting,” The Small chronicles the struggle of a man to assemble a reality from his dreams. Photo by Carl Skutsch

A Devil at Noon (2011) The Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville (KY)

Apparition (2003) Chashama Modern ghost stories told in fragments — and often in utter darkness — alternate with bouts of fake Latin in this bloodcurdling contemporary gothic.

Photo by Alan Simons

Photo by The Hinge Collective

Photo by David Gochfeld

The Ladies (2004) Dixon Place

Mr. Burns, a post-electric play (2013) Playwrights Horizons

A commission from the documentary theater company The Civilians, The Ladies illuminates the lives of first ladies Eva Peron, Madame Mao, Elena Ceausescu, and Imelda Marcos through gossip, tape recorders, torch songs, and spectacle.

What will endure when the cataclysm arrives — when the grid fails, society crumbles, and we’re faced with the task of rebuilding? A paean to live theater, and to the resilience of Bart Simpson through the ages, Mr. Burns is an animated exploration of how the pop culture of one era might evolve into the mythology of another.

Photo by Joan Marcus

The Internationalist (2004) 13P

Photo by Richard Termine

An American businessman traveling abroad expects to find romance and achieve personal enlightenment, but instead loses himself in a tangle of unfamiliar language and custom. Performed, in part, in a madeup foreign language, this was the first play produced by the built-to-implode producing collective 13P.

10 out of 12 (2015) Soho Rep.

Photo by Julieta Cervantes

I Have Loved Strangers (2006) Clubbed Thumb's Summerworks

Photo by Carl Skutsch

Orestes: A Tragic Romp (2010) Folger Theater (Washington, DC) Two River Theater Company (NJ) Euripides’ tragedy is rendered afresh for contemporary audiences in Washburn’s boisterous transadaptation. Photo by T. Charles Erickson

A troubled Valentine to theater and the people who make it, 10 out of 12 opens a window into that most tedious of theatrical traditions: the tech rehearsal. Under Washburn’s penetrating gaze, an obsessively detailed chronicle of painstakingly calibrated minutiae unfolds into something sacramental. Iphigenia at Aulis (2015) Classic Stage Company

True prophets, false prophets, and nonprophets battle for the salvation of Ancient New York in this stirring, paranoiac play, inspired by the Book of Jeremiah and the exploits of the Weather Underground.

Inspired by the life and writing of science fiction author Philip K. Dick, this vertiginous play plumbs the considerable depths of one writer’s dangerously powerful imagination, as he attempts to finish his book and understand why his refrigerator magnets are losing their cling...

Photo by Jody Christopherson

SARAH LUNNIE

LITERARY MANAGER

Staged in its premiere with original music by The Bengsons, Washburn’s piercing transadaptation hews close to Euripides’ text but resonates as though it were written yesterday. “He is our contemporary,” says Washburn of her ancient Greek collaborator.

THE AMERICAN VOICE

SUBMITTED FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

Q: Tell me a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer. A: I have a lot of vivid earthquake memories... —from an interview with Anne Washburn

they have so little in common. She’s a shape-shifter. Sly and lithe. And what we know about shape-shifters is that their elusiveness allows them to do the most audacious things.

Through a void so black it suggests the most remote reaches of space, a white line forms and then spins towards us revealing itself to be a white door, the door of an average suburban home; and as the door opens we hear that smooth, so-familiar voice. “There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man,” it says to us. “It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination.” (Say it with me.) “It is an area which we call The Twilight Zone.”

…But what I can say is that, in thinking about how best to introduce her gorgeous new play Antlia Pneumatica without totally spoiling it for you, I find this revelation that she’s a student of The “Twilight Zone” a useful vantage point. And a fact that makes so much sense, suddenly, that I can hardly believe I hadn’t made the leap before.

Before the genius Rod Serling turned this phrase, “twilight zone,” into household shorthand for what’s unexplainable or uncanny with his iconic 1960s television anthology, it was used as early as the 1900s to define the lowest level of the ocean that light can reach. After which it appeared as an aeronautical term, used by the US Air Force. “I thought I’d made it up,” Serling replied when asked how he came up with the title, “but I’ve heard since that there is an Air Force term relating to a moment when a plane is coming down on approach and it cannot see the horizon.” When I first came across this quotation on a “Twilight Zone” internet binge (okay fine, I admit it, I’m a junkie, I’ve watched every episode, I’m obsessed) I was captured by the terror and exhilaration this image conjures, the disorientation and lack of physics it suggests, and by how it so perfectly captures the state of watching Serling’s show. And my mind raced back to this image again, of descent with no view of a horizon, when I recently came across a 2009 interview with Anne Washburn in the journal Theater, in which she says she’s “most instinctively drawn” to “theater which is bent on examining what we do with information before our brain manages to package it into a tidy story.” Both ideas, Serling’s and Anne’s, seem born of a similar interest in the state of being suspended between understanding and its opposite, in the instability of physical reality, in exploding open the range of possible ways we can see the world. Of course, I can’t claim to have drawn the connection between these two writers on my own. Truly, one of life’s other consistent joys — in addition, I mean, to “Zone” Seasons One through Five (watch it on Hulu!) — is that moment which occurs about once a year when I learn, usually through the grapevine at some theater party, about what astonishing, unexpected-butperfect premise Anne’s wrangling for her next play. It never ceases to get my heart racing. “Have you heard about the new Washburn play made from transcriptions of tech rehearsals?” “…written in an invented new language?” “…about Philip K. Dick?” “…about Ceacescu and Vlad the Impaler?” “…that’s a musical adaptation of ‘Little Bunny Foo Foo’ with an anti-war message?” And, most memorably, “…about survivors of the apocalypse who reconstruct a 'Simpsons' episode?” (You can match these descriptions to the round-up of images from Anne’s anthology on the opposite page.) The in-process play I heard rumor of this past year: “Did you know Anne’s writing a play that riffs on 'The Twilight Zone'?” I wouldn’t presume to say anything more about this, or to hazard any guesses about what this play-in-progress might turn out to be. If there’s one thing one can point to about Washburn’s body of work up to this point, it’s the unique difficulty of locating any specific commonalities of content, narrative, form, style, or characters; in a way, what her plays seem to have in common is that

In the episode “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” The Major famously asks, “What’s going on here? Where are we? What are we? Who are we? Who are we?” Like Serling’s, Washburn’s stories delve headlong into the vast mysteries of the human psyche and the physical world, interested in undermining any illusion that we’re close to understanding either one. They share a great affection for the frailties and instability of our very makeup, casting their characters alone into unfamiliar territory; creating theaterscapes where the laws of time and space become unreliable, and where things aren’t as they appear. I’m reminded of Anne’s play Apparition, a series of harrowing sketches that explore the boundaries of spiritual and secular worlds; I think of the ending of The Small, in which the ambiguous contents of a health food store come to life; I recall how in A Devil at Noon one character becomes convinced she’s a character in the novel her boyfriend is writing; and I’m haunted by Gibson’s collapse in the second act of Mr. Burns: “It’s all broken open, you know it has!” But in each of these examples from Anne’s plays, the breakdown of physics isn’t irrational, and it isn’t meant to inspire fear so much as wonder. We’re asked to consider that what appears irrational is just the beginning of our awareness of what’s actually rational, which we can’t yet understand. We know it’s naïve to think there aren’t truths to discover beyond our intelligence, but how can we imagine what they are? Anne Washburn’s plays reflect a writer in love with mystery itself, rigorously pursuing patterns but perfectly content that the end of each pursuit only reveals more mystery. In The Small, her character Duncan imagines the splendor that will be revealed at the end of the world: “We’ll see crazy colors. Colors will break open and there will be new colors inside of them. We will see animals from other planets. And new music. For a moment everything will be so new that we’ll understand how limited our palate — of color, sound, form — was before this moment. All of those things where we’re like well this is so different from that…in that moment we’ll understand that everything that used to be miles apart (holds his hands out, a solid foot and a half apart) is actually this (forefinger and middle only a few centimeters apart) close from each other, in relation to all of this — (he spreads out his arms as far as they can go). Our minds are gonna boggle, and then they’ll end.” I want to write all about Antlia Pneumatica now, but rather than ruin it for you, I’ll do like Serling does and puff my cigarette and simply say, Submitted For Your Consideration, the story of this once tight-knit circle, who meet in a ranch house deep in Texas Hill Country to bury a friend.

ADAM GREENFIELD

ASSOCIATE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

Leadership support for the New Works Lab is generously provided by the Time Warner Foundation.

STARS ARE CONSTANT: THEY BURN BRIGHTLY FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS Did you know that you can have an impact on Playwrights Horizons that will endure for years? This year, we have inaugurated the Playwrights Horizons Legacy Circle to recognize those individuals who have included the theater in their wills or other estate plans. These legacy gifts will, for years to come, impact our ability to develop and produce new plays and musicals. For a private consultation about the Legacy Circle, please contact Liz Culp, Director of Development at (212) 564â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1235 x3140 or LCulp@PHnyc.org.

PERFORMANCE CALENDAR SUN

MON

ANTLIA PNEUMATICA

TUES

WED

THURS

MARCH 11

7:30 PM

13 20 27 3

2:00 PM 7:00 PM 2:00 PM 7:00 PM 2:00 PM 7:00 PM 2:00 PM 7:00 PM

10 17 24

2:00 PM 7:00 PM 2:00 PM 7:00 PM

7:30 PM

16 23 30 6

7:30 PM

17 24 31 7 14

7:30 PM

APRIL 1

7:30 PM

30&UNDER NIGHT

7:30 PM

SAT

POST-PERFORMANCE DISCUSSIONS

7:30 PM

PPDs with the creative team have been scheduled for the following dates:

2:00 PM 7:30 PM

MARCH 16 MARCH 20

FRI

7:30 PM

2:00 PM 7:30 PM 2:00 PM 7:30 PM

(Following the matinee)

MARCH 25 We hope you can take part in this important aspect of our play development process. Post-performance discussion

2:00 PM 7:30 PM

4 PM Symposium, see below for details

2:00 PM 7:30 PM

We recommend this show for ages 13+

2:00 PM 7:00 PM

Join us for our Symposium, a panel discussion where the playwright asks the questions. Reserve your seat to this event on April 16 at 4:00 PM by visiting PHnyc.org/Symposium.

Antlia Pneumatica is the recipient of an Edgerton Foundation New American Plays award. Special thanks to the Laurents/Hatcher Foundation and the Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater for their generous support of Antlia Pneumatica. Antlia Pneumatica is the result of a Doris Duke Charitable Foundation/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation commission awarded by Playwrights Horizons. 6

HELPFUL INFORMATION HOW TO RESERVE YOUR SEATS u ONLINE: visit our ticketing site TicketCentral.com/PlaywrightsHorizons

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u MEMBERS: Order one guest ticket per package per production for $50 when you reserve your own. u YOUNG MEMBERS: Guest tickets are $35. u PATRONS: You may order up to two tickets for $50 each. u Gen PH MEMBERS: A maximum of six membership tickets may be used per production. Two guest tickets per production may be purchased at the guest rate of $50 each. Additional tickets are full price.

TICKET PICK-UP AND RELEASE POLICIES We would prefer to hold tickets for pick-up at the box office to expedite ticket exchanges. If you request that your tickets be mailed, they will be sent out immediately, UNLESS your performance date takes place in fewer than 10 days, in which case they will be held at the box office. If you are unable to attend a performance for which you have a reservation, please call Ticket Central at least 24 hours prior to your performance.

NEIGHBORHOOD DISCOUNTS RESTAURANTS These restaurants have given generously to Playwrights Horizons. We encourage you to support them.

CHEZ JOSEPHINE 414 West 42nd Street French (212) 594–1925 Complimentary glass of house wine with dinner. Reservations suggested. WEST BANK CAFE 407 West 42nd Street American (212) 695–6909 Complimentary glass of house wine with entrée, per person. Reservations suggested.

OTHER RESTAURANTS 44 & X 622 10th Avenue New American (212) 977–1170 Mention PH and receive a free chocolate soufflé with dinner. ABOVE At The Hilton Times Square 234 West 42nd Street Contemporary American (212) 642–2626 10% off lunch or dinner. BANGKOK HOUSE 360 West 46th Street Thai (212) 541–5943 10% off purchase. BRAZIL BRAZIL 330 West 46th Street Brazilian Steakhouse (212) 957–4300 10% off when paying in cash, Sunday–Thursday. BROADWAY JOE STEAKHOUSE 315 West 46th Street American Steaks & Seafood (212) 246–6513 20% off lunch or dinner. EMPIRE COFFEE & TEA 568 9th Avenue Coffee and Treats (212) 268–1220 15% off all products excluding cups of coffee.

TAX DONATIONS SUBSCRIBERS AND PATRONS: If you are unable to exchange for another performance, PH will issue a receipt for a tax-deductible contribution at the conclusion of the run upon your request. If you do not release your tickets 24 hours in advance of your performance, we will be unable to provide seats for another performance or a tax receipt.

GETTING TO THE THEATER

The closest subway stop is 42nd Street on the A, C, and E, trains at Eighth Avenue. You may also take the 1, 2, 3, 7, N, R, Q, or S trains to 42nd Street/Times Square, or the B, D, M and F to 42nd Street/Bryant Park at Sixth Avenue. The M42 Crosstown & M104 buses are also available for your convenience.