Indian Summer Bulletin by Playwrights Horizons

MAINSTAGE THEATER BULLETIN

IN THIS ISSUE

PLAYWRIGHT'S PERSPECTIVE

THE LIVIN' IS EASY

SOCIAL DISTORTION

Gregory S. Moss pens a love letter to Rhode Island with Indian Summer.

The carefree spirit of summer suffuses art and literature of all disciplines.

Adam Greenfield on the ecstatic and totally singular writing of Gregory S. Moss.

Page 3

Page 4

Page 5

FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

DEAR FRIENDS, Daniel: I thought Comedies ended in marriage. Right? Isn’t that the like Significant Difference between Comedy and Tragedy? In Tragedy people die and the Horrible Truth is revealed— Izzy: what horrible truth Daniel: about, like, how powerless human beings are about how like we think we’re in control of our lives and destiny and meanwhile the Gods are like: “Fuck You, Mortal. Fuck You, Mortal, Fuck you—” I guess this is a Tragedy with a Comic ending. Or a Comedy with a Tragic ending. —Gregory S. Moss, Indian Summer Greg knows what he’s doing when his primary characters, Izzy and Daniel, stumble into their uncertain final scene and seek to define their story in literary terms. As audience members, we have been pleased to have been set up for a romantic comedy. Two teenagers from different worlds start off stubborn and angry, then give each other a second look. And what opens them up — and this is true of all the great comedies — are the flecks of idealism and self-definition they find in each other’s eyes. But this being 2016, all does not end well. The lines between genres blur. And actually, when you look closely at the great comedies and tragedies of Shakespeare, the lines between his genres are not as impermeable as they seem. In both, humans often seem like fools before nature and time. Time knocks us off our pedestals, exposes our foibles, and quite frequently lays us low. But comedies end with beginnings, where characters acquiesce to the laws of nature. Tragedies end with endings, endings that allow us better to understand our relationship to nature and time. In Indian Summer, all these things happen, but in the least ostentatious way. Indian Summer yields its pleasures almost immediately. Its vivid, pugnacious characters deliver the play’s smart, breezy banter effortlessly and draw us in. Yet the further we get into it, the deeper it gets. Plays about young characters, at their best, come with automatically high stakes. Shakespeare surely knew this too. Everything is high drama for the young. That’s why we love them and laugh at them. Greg’s Playwright’s Perspective also hits upon this truth as he describes the inexhaustible permutations young brains spin out in trying on potential relationships. This violent collision of teen ego and empathy accounts for both the ludicrous posturings and the poignant, stormy, beauteous yearnings of teen romance. There is a grace and, yes, an inherent theatricality to these romantic exercises of the young. Greg’s play artfully dramatizes this “playfulness” in a developing trope of play-acting throughout the play. Characters frequently volunteer to role play awkward scenarios for each other. The initial scenes like this are mainly just fun. But as the trope continues, the commonality they discover and the empathy they engender draw them closer together. These scenes also inferentially celebrate the theatrical event that contains them and allow the play to stray further from the reins of realism that seemed initially to tether the play to its distinct Rhode Island backdrop. Daniel’s grandfather, George, who serves as the play’s de facto narrator in many respects, leads us beautifully into a reflective consideration of the play’s dawning lyricism. The term, “Indian Summer,” he tells us, refers to a dreamy period of time carved out between summer and fall, a time that seems to stand still and live forever. (His description of it reminds me of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.) In a way, the play itself seems similarly carved out of time: etched in our memories, resonating with our own stories, the kind of play I can’t wait to see over and over. I am pleased to serve it to you as our last play of the season and for it to linger in your thoughts through the summer.

TIM SANFORD

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR The Mainstage Bulletin is generously funded, in part, by the

LIMAN FOUNDATION 2

Photo by Zack DeZon

PLAYWRIGHT'S PERSPECTIVE There are certain corners of America that, in spite of increasing homogeneity, retain their regional customs and culture. New Mexico, where I currently teach, is one of these places. Rhode Island, where I went to school, is one too. Nestled between Boston and Manhattan, looking from above as if it were about to be forcibly ejected from the continent and pushed out to sea, Rhode Island maintains an identity defiantly independent of the surrounding states. There are words, concepts, certain kinds of food, and local lore that exist only in Rhode Island. There are secrets only Rhode Islanders know. It is, as locals say, “The smallest state in the union — at high tide.” I started writing Indian Summer on a writing retreat in Red Bank, New Jersey — which, in retrospect, seems like an odd place to retreat to. Red Bank has the quality of a quaint seaside vacation spot circa 1985. There are nearby beaches, pizza places with video games, a one-screen movie theater. It resembles the town in Jaws before the shark shows up. It reminded me of the budget vacation destinations of my childhood — the drive two hours north to Lake Winnipesaukee with my father in late July. My housing for the retreat faced out onto a shallow bay. It was a hot, humid August. I wanted to write a play about love and the ocean and the summertime. The characters came along the way someone walks towards you down the beach — you see their shape, the color of their clothing, the rhythm of their gait abstracted in the distance — and you start to get curious about that person, you wonder what they're like, where they come from, the way you might see people when you’re staying some place away from home, as a kid, or an adult, the way you see strangers who you might be sharing space with for a brief period, for a few days or a week, you might see them again, every day, until you nod or even say hello, and perhaps talk about something innocuous while waiting in a line somewhere, and maybe underneath that you might ask yourself, “Could I fall in love with this person?” and “Am I falling in love with this person?” You might hope you run into them while following the routines you’ve developed, routines that aren’t your routines at home. You have temporarily become a different person. A thousand possibilities are available to you that weren’t there before. And probably none of those possibilities will come to pass, perhaps they’re just imaginary possibilities, but regardless, the world is suddenly huge and full of air, and you’re aware, too, that this feeling is going to pass, very soon, that on Friday you leave, and once again your familiar habits will reassert themselves, and you’ll be yourself, just yourself, again. There are certain circumstances — love, and the end of love; the deep unfairness of time passing; death and loss; why some people are born into luck, health, and money, and others are not — that resist logical rationalization. Theater provides a place to bear witness to these things. It allows for a gentle, communal acknowledgment of our own powerlessness, as animals caught between social structures, the natural world, and our own mortality. Everyone in the play is looking for a home. Most of them are home already. But their home, as they imagine it, is somewhere else. They're waiting for their lives to begin, even as their lives are going by. The play was continued in various coffee shops in Albuquerque, and completed, appropriately enough, in a workshop in Providence. It remains a love letter to Rhode Island, and to other similarly insoluble places and insoluble people, whose paths cross for a short time, and who make homes for each other, for a short time.

GREGORY S. MOSS FEBRUARY 2016

Special thanks to the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs for supporting all of the productions in Playwrights Horizons’ 2015/16 season. Indian Summer is the result of a Playwrights Horizons / Kate and Seymour Weingarten commission. Photo by Zack DeZon

BACKSTORY

THE LIVIN' IS EASY

Summer, that enchanted season, overflows with romance, mischief, and joy. The sun shines down, signaling an escape from the confines of everyday existence. We throw off our clothes and leap into the waves, leaving all our cares and worries behind us for three glorious months. But sometimes we are blessed with an Indian summer, a “margin of sun-lit warmth after the end of August that always feel exceptional, like a pocket of unexpected time, a little reprieve between seasons,” as the character George says in Indian Summer. Whether prolonged or not, summer flits by so quickly it imbues everything it touches with ephemerality, such that artists have long tried to trap this elusive season in prose and song.

And then there is that occasional meteorological blessing: an Indian summer, granting a few extra weeks of swimsuits and hot dogs and bliss. It is into this blip of the seasonal calendar that Gregory S. Moss ventures in his new play. Diving deeper than the traditional trope of a charmed summer clashing up against the harsh reality of autumn, Moss asks us to ponder what lies in the liminal space between. In Indian Summer, the seemingly limitless stretch of possibilities grows hazy on the horizon as a cool breeze threatens and a school bell rings, and we’re asked to wonder how long the reprieve of summer can last in our mercurial world.

The belovedly ubiquitous granddaddy of summer stories is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, during which the confined and regimented drudgery of Athens breaks open into the freedom of the enchanted forest with few rules and even fewer expectations. Think of Lysander, Hermia, Demetrius, and Helena as students on vacation, unbound from homework and free to pursue their various and fleeting passions while the mischievous Puck flits in and out as if he were the spirit of the summer itself. The sprite says it best, calling this lovers’ romp a “weak and idle thing/no more yielding but a dream,” a description that could just as easily be attached to the very season.

DYLAN PICKUS LITERARY FELLOW

Perhaps no one in the modern era has captured this weak and idle thing as well as Ingmar Bergman in his sun-soaked sex comedy Smiles of a Summer Night, adapted brilliantly by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler into A Little Night Music. Pushing the idea of summer trysts to their entertaining extreme, both the film and the musical take place on a freakishly endless Scandinavian summer night, when passion has no moon to guide it. The upper-class lovers and lusters trapped in this infamous weekend in the country bake in tight dresses and stiff jackets — “The atmosphere's becoming heady/The ambiance thrilling/The spirit unsteady/The flesh far too willing.” But not all summer love stories have such a comedic bent. Perhaps the greatest love tragedy of the past century, The Great Gatsby, is set during one impossible, party-filled, boozed-soaked summer. As Gatsby reaches across the water to that green light, he imagines a life outside of his own lonely reality, full of the possibilities of a never-ending summer romance with Daisy. But the cruel realities of fall set in and Gatsby’s bubble bursts; the night that Daisy decides to abandon Gatsby “had made a sharp difference in the weather and there was an autumn flavor in the air.” And before the butler drains the pool to keep falling leaves from clogging the pipes, Gatsby takes one last fateful swim.

Jasper Francis Cropsey, Indian Summer on the Delaware River, 1862

CASTING UPDATE AS OF MARCH 1 OWEN CAMPBELL

as Daniel

PH debut. NEW YORK THEATER: Recall, Nocturnes. FILM: As You Are, Conviction. TV: "The Americans," "Boardwalk Empire."

ELISE KIBLER

as Izzy

PH debut. BROADWAY: The Heidi Chronicles, This Is Our Youth. OFF-BROADWAY: London Wall. TV: "Daredevil," "The Affair."

MICHAEL OBERHOLTZER

as Jeremy

PH debut. BROADWAY: Hand to God. OFFBROADWAY: The Talls, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, Drowning of Natalie Wood.

THE AMERICAN VOICE

SOCIAL DISTORTION

The picturesque New England coastal town of Newburyport, Massachusetts has plenty to brag about. Dotted with charming shops, snug cafes, and historic lighthouses, Newburyport (“Birthplace of the U.S. Coast Guard”) was home to the first Tea Party rebellion, and today it boasts the second oldest Homecoming Festival in America as well as one of the country’s oldest choral societies. And as noted on page 106 of the publication Legendary Locals of Newburyport — it cultivated the deviant, insubordinate, ecstatic, darkly weird, and totally singular writing brain of Gregory S. Moss. “I was an outsider from an early age, but an outsider without any real social definition or categorization,” he said in a recent interview with Capital T Theatre in Austin. Considering Greg’s collection of plays to date, and their loving focus on the bewildered freaks of society, the clash between his hometown’s veneer of traditional Americana and his teenage isolation within it strikes me as a way of locating the common threads. “I’m drawn to writing adolescents a lot,” he continues. “I really empathize with them. It’s a period of deep skepticism, as well as naivety and innocence. …At that age you are being told, ok, this is the way the world works, these are the laws of the land, these are the rules, and because it’s new to you, you’re like, ‘What?? You expect me to get on board with this insanity?’” The characters who populate Greg’s plays are as diverse as his anthology itself, but at heart they all seem to share an inability to live in the world, a struggle to reconcile its realities and institutions with their idiosyncratic and instinctual urges, with their ids. “People who are caught between identities or caught between conventional modes of functioning, those are my people,” Greg said in a Brooklyn Rail interview. Unable to fit neatly into the available choice of roles, they fall into the margins: the estranged, depraved, bewildered underbelly of American society. It’s hard to draw all of Greg’s plays onto the same map. Each one is a distinct, vividly imagined play-world that operates on its own system of logic, like a poem. But when you zoom in, the crisis of growing up, the romance of youth in collision with the more complicated realities of adulthood emerges as the driving force of each story. His earlier plays focus somewhat directly on the traumatic state of adolescence. The audacious, nightmarish comedy House of Gold (2008) considers childhood trauma and white American privilege as it tells the story of JonBenét Ramsey in the afterworld, reenacting her story over and over in hopes of finally getting it right. Billy Witch (2012) is a whirlwind romp through a day in the life at “Blue Triangle Nature Fun Time Summer Camp,” where ghost stories mix with confused teenage hormones to create a profoundly demented tale of sexual awakening. punkplay (2009), Greg’s brilliant reflection on growing up and feeling like an outsider, follows Mickey and Duck, two suburban teenage misfits in the '80s who cling to the unbridled, defiant energy of punk (and to each other) to survive. At the end of the play, their friendship inevitably declines, and Duck’s dad sends him off to “that army school.” Before he goes, he gives Mickey an album: “Guy at the record store said it’s the best fucking record he’s ever heard, but I can’t hear it… Just sounds like noise to me.” But through the noise, Mickey’s able to hear a voice, and it calmly prepares him for the life ahead: If you hear my voice right now, then you have been chosen to receive certain information. …There is a secret America under the skin of America; there is a secret history running counter to history; there is a secret language hidden inside language. There is a secret country underground of which you are a patriot. It’s exactly like the one above, only everything is weirder. Blink twice if you understand. And as the play ends, Mickey “steps outside into the static of a bright and hot and unmade world.” Duck is able to fold into the dominant culture, but Mickey will always be aberrant, an outsider. Because disaffected kids grow up. They become the disaffected adults who populate many of Greg’s more recent plays. His astonishing, dark fable Orange, Hat & Grace (2010) centers on Orange, an “almost old” woman who lives isolated in a cabin in the midst of a dying forest. Abandoned decades ago by her first love, she shuns the world outside and stubbornly obeys the

strict rules of proper society that her mother taught her — that is, until a new man, wild and untamed, arrives at her doorstep. In Reunion (2014), Greg imagines what became of his high school cronies, crafting a hellacious 25year reunion in which three friends obsessively recreate a graduation party (in the same hotel room, even) in order to make sense of the distorted routes their lives have taken. And in his weird and hilarious La Brea (2013), Leah, a 40-ish kleptomaniac who breaks into strangers’ houses in the dark of night, is on a mission to rescue her long-lost brother, an out of work actor in L.A. who’s on the cusp of becoming a Scientologist. In each of these plays, we meet adults who are still children in a sense, living in the shadow of a romantic worldview they lost in their youth, in the hole that was left there — a condition of loss and disaffection that has hardened into fact, keeping them in the murky edges and in-between zones of the culture. …Hmm. I’m suddenly overwhelmed, though, by the inadequacy of what I’ve written so far. Because while, yes, all of the above notes about the themes and similarities of his plays are, I think, true and relevant to Indian Summer, what I really want to do is jump up and down and point your attention toward his writing — by which I mean — just — the breathtaking, painfully ecstatic combination of words he’s capable of laying down. Before Greg was a playwright, he was an actor, and before he was an actor, he was a poet; and his writing seems to borrow from each of these modes to make a killer cocktail from all three : his plays are pulsing with theatricality, written in the most exacting, razor-sharp language, informed by a deeply intimate familiarity with his characters. And I can continue to wrack my brain for the right words to describe his writing, but anything I can say pales next to the stuff itself… From Orange, Hat & Grace, here’s Orange remembering the love who abandoned her 20 years ago: He reads to me from the bible. His voice is the voice of an angel. The words released like fireflies, the curves of vowels and horns of consonants lit bright. His mouth a hidden cave. From House of Gold, here’s JonBenét’s father, about to send her onstage for the Tiny Miss Pageant: I want you to be apocalyptically beautiful – a beauty that sheds a killing light on the world. A beauty that strips the skin off of every other little girl. Your face will make them gnaw their own hands off, sinking their tiny lipstick caked baby teeth into their own tiny wrists, tiny veins tearing, tiny drops of sugary blood. Blood like butter cream frosting. ...They will die dry hags, wither to dust under you gaze — Oh, but you — You will never die. From La Brea, here’s Leah, having broken into a stranger’s house: I pull your door open wide. It’s beautiful in there. I knew it would be. So clear, with moonlight coming in from two windows to my right, laying two bright rectangles against the white of the duvet, flat and clean and perfect, troubled only by the dual extrusion of two bodies turned away from each other in sleep. Like pharoahs in sarcophagi. That's what a mom looks like. That one's a dad. And then there’s Indian Summer in which Izzy and Daniel, two alienated teenagers, sit on the New England shore, not far from where Greg was raised, and dream of another life somewhere else. I’m dying to quote everything that’s racing through my head from this, his latest play. But I wouldn’t dream of taking that away from you.

ADAM GREENFIELD

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

ANNOUNCING OUR 2016/17 SEASON

REMEMBER YOUR FIRST LOVE?

“Where would the American theater be without Playwrights Horizons?” —Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times

Just as you never forget your first love, alumni of the Playwrights Horizons Theatrical Fellowship Program never forget their first experience here. Sam Gold (Fun Home, The Flick), Bobby Lopez (The Book of Mormon, Frozen), and Jordan Harrison (Marjorie Prime, Netflix’s "Orange Is the New Black") credit their success to their Fellowships at Playwrights Horizons.

Your gift can help foster the next generation of young artists and theater administrators.

From left: Adam Bock, Hannah Bos, Oliver Butler, Kirsten Childs, Julia Cho, Zayd Dohrn, Dan LeFranc, and Paul Thureen.

We are thrilled to share another exciting season of new American plays and musicals! First up is Aubergine by Julia Cho, then in the Sharp we stage A Life by Adam Bock. Next, Dan LeFranc returns with Rancho Viejo. The Debate Society kicks off 2017 with The Light Years, written by Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen and directed and developed by Oliver Butler. Following that, we present The Profane by Zayd Dohrn and conclude with a musical, Bella: An American Tall Tale by Kirsten Childs. Renew as a subscriber by April 12 and receive two FREE guest passes! Visit PHnyc.org or call (212) 279–4200 to order.

PERFORMANCE CALENDAR SUN

MON

For more information on the Fellowship Program and how you can support these talented artists, please contact Eva Rosa, Associate Manager of Individual Giving at (212) 564–1235 x3144 or ERosa@PHnyc.org.

INDIAN SUMMER

TUES

WED

THURS

FRI MAY 13

8:00 PM

15 22 29 5 12 19 26 6

2:30 PM 7:30 PM 2:30 PM < 7:30 PM 2:30 PM 7:30 PM 2:30 PM 7:30 PM 2:30 PM 7:30 PM 2:30 PM 7:30 PM 2:30 PM 7:30 PM

24 31

30 6 13 20

7:00 PM

7 14 21

7:00 PM

18 25

7:00 PM <

8:00 PM

19 26

8:00 PM

7:00 PM

30&UNDER NIGHT

JUNE 1

7:00 PM

8:00 PM

8 15

7:00 PM

16 23

3 10

8:00 PM

17 24

8:00 PM

8:00 PM <

8:00 PM

28 4 11 18 25

SAT

POST-PERFORMANCE DISCUSSIONS

8:00 PM

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

2:30 PM 8:00 PM

MAY 18, 22 (following the matinee), and 27

2:30 PM 8:00 PM

We hope you can take part in this important aspect of our play development process.

2:30 PM 8:00 PM

2:30 PM 8:00 PM 2:30 PM 8:00 PM

Post-performance discussion

2:30 PM Open Caption performance

We recommend Indian Summer for ages 15+ Please note performance dates and times are subject to change

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

and click on BUY SHOW TICKETS to log in and select your seats for Indian Summer. uBY PHONE: call Ticket Central at (212) 279–4200, Noon–8pm daily. uIN PERSON: visit Ticket Central at 416 W. 42nd St. (9th/10th Aves). MEMBERS Tickets (reg. $75) are $45. YOUNG MEMBERS 30&Under Member tickets are $25; Student Member $15. PATRONS & Gen PH MEMBERS Reserve your house seats by calling the Individual Giving Assistant at (212) 564–1235 x3143.

GUEST TICKETS subject to availability u SUBSCRIBERS: You may order one guest ticket for $50 each per package. u FLEXPASS HOLDERS: You may use tickets in your account to bring guests. Add tickets to your account by calling Ticket Central, while supplies last.

u MEMBERS: Order one guest ticket per package per production for $50 when you reserve your own. u YOUNG MEMBERS: Order one guest ticket per package per production for $35 when you reserve your own. 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 The following 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.

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.