360° Viewfinder: DES MOINES

360 ° SERIES

TABLE OF CONTENTS

3 Biography: Denis Johnson

4 Depth Chargers: Intervirew with Arin Arbus and Hari Nef by Alisa Solomon

12 Dialogues: The Tears of Denis Johnson edited by Aaron Gilbreath

19 Poems: "Man Walking to Work" and "Quickly Aging Here" by Denis Johnson 21 Quotations: Thoughts on Denis Johnson by Zadie Smith, George Saunders, Jonathan Frazen, Philip Roth, Elizabeth McCracken, Karen Russell, Anthony Doerr, Don DeLillo, Louise Erdrich 22 The Production: Cast and Creative Team About Theatre For a New Audience

Our 2022-23 Season is dedicated to Celebrating the Memory of Peter Brook.

From 2008-2019, TFANA was honored to present seven New York premieres of works by Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Beckett and new plays by Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne directed by Peter or co-directed by Peter and Marie-Hélène.

Notes

Front Cover: Art by Paul Davis.

This Viewfinder will be periodically updated with additional information. Last updated December 22, 2022. Drawings of Denis Johnson by Sam Messer on pp. 13,15, 19, 20, and 21 are used with the kind permission of the artist. Biography of Denis Johnson is republished from https://denisjohnson.com, retrieved December 1, 2022.

Credits

Des Moines 360° | Edited by Nadiya L. Atkinson

Resident Dramaturg: Jonathan Kalb | Council of Scholars Chair: Tanya Pollard | Designed by: Milton Glaser, Inc.

Publisher: Theatre for a New Audience, Jeffrey Horowitz, Founder and Artistic Director

Des Moines 360° Copyright 2022 by Theatre for a New Audience. All rights reserved.

With the exception of classroom use by teachers and individual personal use, no part of this Viewfinder may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Some materials herein are written especially for our guide. Others are reprinted with permission of their authors or publishers.

BIOGRAPHY DENIS JOHNSON

Denis Johnson (July 1, 1949 – May 24, 2017) was an American writer best known for his short story collection Jesus’ Son (1992) and his novel Tree of Smoke (2007), which won the National Book Award for Fiction. He also wrote plays, poetry, journalism, and non-fiction.

Tree of Smoke won the 2007 National Book Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It takes place during the Vietnam War, spanning the years 1963–70, with a coda set in 1983. In the novel, we learn the history of Bill Houston, a main character in Johnson’s first novel Angels, the latter novel set in the early 1980s.

Train Dreams, originally published as a story in The Paris Review in 2002, was published as a novella in 2011 and was a finalist for that year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. However, for the first time since 1977, the Pulitzer board did not award a prize for fiction that year.

Johnson’s plays have been produced in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Seattle. He was the Resident Playwright of Campo Santo, the resident theater company at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco. In 2006 and 2007, Johnson held the Mitte Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. Johnson would also occasionally teach at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.

Altogether, Johnson was the author of nine novels, one novella, two books of short stories, three collections of poetry, two collections of plays, and one book of reportage. The final book he published while still alive was a novel, The Laughing Monsters, which he called a “literary thriller” set in Uganda, Sierra Leone and Congo. It was released on November 4, 2014. Johnson’s final work, a book of short stories titled The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, was published posthumously in January 2018.

Denis Johnson. Photo by Cindy Johnson.

INTERVIEW DEPTH CHARGERS

Midway through rehearsals, Alisa Solomon sat down down with director Arin Arbus and actress Hari Nef to chat about the mysteries of Des Moines, their approaches to the play, and, of course, depth chargers.

ALISA SOLOMON Denis Johnson has a devoted following for his poetry and novels, but is less wellknown as a playwright, especially on the East Coast. How did you come to be interested in Des Moines ?

ARIN ARBUS Jeffrey [Horowitz] went to a reading of the play and came back interested in and haunted and baffled by it. I was working full-time at TFANA then, and he got a copy and gave it to me. I read it and had a similar response—interested and haunted and baffled—and we did a two-week workshop with Denis at TFANA. This was around 2015. It was a really gratifying experience. I loved working with Denis and I felt like my understanding of the play really grew. I staged the whole play, which was a dumb thing to

do because when you stage something complicated in a hurried fashion it can’t land properly, so we put it aside. But I kept thinking about it for years. It just felt so urgent to me. During the pandemic, we did a Zoom reading and the play worked in a powerful and visceral way. So, the Theatre decided to move ahead with a full production.

ALISA SOLOMON What did you find so interesting and haunting?

ARIN ARBUS The play resonates on so many different wavelengths, but when I try and articulate what I think the play is actually about at its core, it sounds very general. I think it is about being alive in a body. And therefore, one must confront the “gales of God” [as Marta puts it]. I think it’s about our country. The event of the play is a bizarre ritual. The characters are so alone in their predicaments, their grief, their sorrow, or their paralysis. There are

AN INTERVIEW WITH ARIN ARBUS AND HARI NEF BY ALISA SOLOMON

Hari Nef (Jimmy). Photo by Gerry Goodstein.

DEPTH CHARGERS ALISA SOLOMON

barriers between them that they can't break through. And yet, the event of the play for me is that through karaoke and through alcohol, they come together and have an amazing ritual of communion.

ALISA SOLOMON For a play that's about what it is to be alive, there's an awful lot of talk about death and people being on the edge of the abyss of mortality. It almost seems to take place in a liminal space between night and day, between life and death.

ARIN ARBUS Purgatory.

ALISA SOLOMON Yes. And at the same time, the setting is highly realistic. Hari, as an actor, what it is like to inhabit a theatrical space that is at once hyperrealistic, surreal and even mythic?

HARI NEF I think that's what attracted me to the text originally. I saw this play as an unprecedented

synthesis of many different kinds of theater. You're seduced into a sense of being at the kitchen sink again. You walk into the theater, and you see this middle-class dwelling from somewhere in America and these people at this table. And slowly, you are destabilized from that naturalistic mode, going into moments of dream play, going into moments of absurdity, going into a Lynchian, Freudian nightmare, going in and out of things that you might recognize, but prove almost hallucinatory or psychedelic. And I've never played with a text quite like that, especially on stage.

ALISA SOLOMON How are you enjoying working on stage, which is rare for you?

HARI NEF I thought that theater was going to be a bigger part of my life when I graduated from school almost a decade ago, but I kind of got sucked into

Hari Nef (Jimmy) and Michael Shannon (Father Michael). Photo by Gerry Goodstein.

DEPTH CHARGERS ALISA SOLOMON

the Hollywood thing a little bit. Being invited to do work like this, I had an appetite for it. [The fact] that this play is so much about the body resonated with me, because I feel simultaneously galvanized and restricted by the body that I bring to work like this. And I felt that this play, in contrast to almost anything else that I have encountered, lives in a dangerous place about bodies. It lives in a dangerous place about tricky bodies or broken bodies or imperiled bodies or othered bodies. It doesn't provide easy answers for the souls that live in those bodies, but it doesn't let anyone else's body off the hook. I think this play is maybe something that other girls in the casting conversation might have looked at and gone, “Eew, I'm not doing that.” Or, like, “This is problematic,” or “This isn't good representation.” I'm not concerned with that [ laughs ], especially if there are other things going on in the play that are more interesting. And that's how I felt about this. There's something mischievous going on here, which appeals to me.

ALISA SOLOMON What you just said suggests how there are some sensitivities, justifiable sensitivities, around representation and who it is who does the representing, in all aspects of the cultural sphere these days. This play could raise some questions and even hackles: you know, here's a play written by a cis-hetero able-bodied white man, with a lot of characters who do not share those characteristics. Like Jimmy, the character you play: a white trans woman who uses a wheelchair.

HARI NEF I haven't actually thought about it that much. I think the play is good, and so it doesn't really matter. That's where I come to it from. I'm interested to field audience questions and talk to friends about it, for sure. I understand that I came to this character because of the surface level things that I can bring to it, but that's not the context in which I view Jimmy. Playing Jimmy, I get to be a through-the-looking-glass version of a Tennessee Williams ingénue and I get to be a monster. I get to

Left to Right: Hari Nef, Arin Arbus, and Michael Shannon in rehearsal for DES MOINES. Photo by Hollis King.

DEPTH CHARGERS ALISA SOLOMON

be the optimism, I get to be the abjection, I get to be the voice of the future, and I get to be the voice from somewhere else. There's so much about her that is contained in her identity politic. But if you actually sit with the play and turn the Twitter-feed part of your brain off, there are people's souls on the line here: the punishment of the damned, or grace. The body is transcended in this play, and that's the mission I'm on.

ALISA SOLOMON Your reference to Tennessee Williams makes me think of how this play fits into a certain realm of American drama. The first time I read it, it felt to me like a play from the late sixties, like something you’d have seen at Caffe Cino or La MaMa back then: early Sam Shepard or Lanford Wilson, with a dash of the Theatre of the Ridiculous. How do you see it in the landscape of American theater?

ARIN ARBUS As Hari was saying, you see the set and expect a certain thing and you aren't going

to get it. Even if you look at how these characters change through the course of the play—and they do, profoundly—the way that change is expressed is not like other plays. Denis doesn't give each character a long speech about what they have discovered about themselves and their relationships.

ALISA SOLOMON But they do have their karaoke moments, which is, perhaps, a substitute for, or even exaggeration of, that sort of speech. This might seem far-fetched, but those moments remind me of the fantasy numbers in Sondheim’s Follies .

ARIN ARBUS Somebody said that the characters in Des Moines break into song because, like in a musical, they can't express themselves in speech. But I don't know. Even the karaoke numbers are not tracing a traditional arc. I do feel like Denis is leaning on Tennessee Williams, Shepard, Chekhov, and other playwrights and all our expectations that we have built by watching all those plays.

Left to Right: Heather Alicia Simms (Mrs. Drinkwater), Michael Shannon (Father Michael), Hari Nef (Jimmy), Arliss Howard (Dan), and Johanna Day (Marta). Photo by Gerry Goodstein.

DEPTH CHARGERS ALISA SOLOMON

ALISA SOLOMON Based on just the bit of rehearsal that I saw yesterday, it seems you’re teasing the audience with those expectations: characters take their time making coffee on stage, for example, rinsing out the pot, setting up the coffeemaker, and so on. I could practically smell the coffee just by suggestion in the bare rehearsal room!

ARIN ARBUS Yeah. I guess that's true.

ALISA SOLOMON So, is it fair to say that you're emphasizing the stylistic contrast?

ARIN ARBUS Yeah, but that's in the play. That’s not me.

ALISA SOLOMON Though, of course, you do bring a lot to it! And TFANA audiences might see a trajectory in your work at the Theatre over the years with Shakespeare and, especially for this play, in the surreal aspects of The Skin of Our Teeth and the emotional intensity of Strindberg.

ARIN ARBUS To me, it's all the same stuff. I think of Shakespeare as being the most experimental playwright, always building new forms. And in a similar way to this play, relying on an audience's expectations and then frustrating them. To me, it’s all the same task.

ALISA SOLOMON One of the strong images in the play, tied to behavior of course, is the depth charger—a shot of booze poured into a glass of beer that the characters drink quite a lot of. I think of Jimmy as being a depth charger of the action. Does that resonate for you at all, Hari?

HARI NEF Yes. It was early in rehearsal when we all realized that one of the central dialectics of this play is awake versus asleep. Each character goes in and out of his or her own states of wakefulness and slumber through the whole play. But Jimmy emerged in our early table work definitively as the play’s ambassador of wakefulness, the person who is present, the person whose eyes are open, the person who is looking forward, who's both most of the body and most constricted and othered by her body…but also the person most equipped to use that body to go somewhere.

ALISA SOLOMON Despite, as the character Mrs. Drinkwater points out, the absence of ramps that would enable her to leave in her wheelchair.

HARI NEF Well, we witness the miracle of her potentially being able to walk again, which I think is one of the definitive moments of the show. Jimmy’s first line is, “I woke up.” As soon as I was able to wrap my head around that, I understood Jimmy as an accelerationist figure in the play: somebody trying to speed everything to its logical conclusion, with the hope that that conclusion is going to leave things better for her and for her family. But also, if that conclusion is kaboom, I think Jimmy is at peace with that as well. Charging the depths.

Jimmy's the only character to peek through the fog of the play and directly address anything. One of my favorite lines of Jimmy’s is when she is in the scene with Father Michael. He starts speaking cryptically about the street and the corn, and she looks at him and goes, “What are we talking about?” [ Laughs ]

Jimmy is going right into the core, into the depths of the situation, because she is unfettered by the minutiae of her immediate surroundings. She feels freed from all of that. As soon as you want to peg her as a guide or a narrator or some kind of shaman, she does something extremely alienating and difficult to square, and potentially left field. You don't know whether she's four steps ahead, four steps behind, or four steps to the side. And I get to decide that, and you get to decide that. And that's really fun. These are not things that I get to plumb when I'm doing a studio comedy or something like that. I'm here to get weird and have fun and work with people who are very cool and very experienced.

ALISA SOLOMON Going back to Jimmy’s question, “What are we talking about?” That’s a great line for Denis Johnson to have put in the mouth of a character. The audience may be wondering the same thing! At rehearsal yesterday, some of the cast was joking about how obscure or confusing the play is. Do you want to leave the audience in a place of mystery, or is there something that adds up in this play?

DEPTH CHARGERS ALISA SOLOMON

ARIN ARBUS There is something that adds up. And there's mystery too.

HARI NEF In the era of the streaming binge, people get very uncomfortable if they do not have a firm grasp on the who, what, where, when, why, and how within the first five minutes. And if they feel destabilized in that regard, they're going to change the channel. But you can't do that in the theater. People have got to sit with it. That's what I love about live theater. There is a ritual aspect to it and a devotional aspect to it. I would hope that if you sit with this play and open your eyes to it and sit with its ambiguities, it can play on feelings and allow you to draw conclusions that you might not recognize.

And I don't feel like we're totally out to sea here. As these characters charge deeper and deeper, there are bits of texts and gestures and things that happen on stage that get to the depth of what’s going on with them, and these things are existential, historical, and emotional. There’s a relief and a release that happens as these characters burrow deeper and deeper into their cups, where potentially the audience is going to

lean in closer and closer and get hotter and hotter. And then the tablecloth is literally pulled, and everything goes onto the floor. Then you have to pick it up the next day.

ALISA SOLOMON As much as the audience may have to work to see connections—or have the patience to let the connections emerge—the characters themselves seem to speak in non sequiturs and digressions and from inside their own dreamscapes. And yet they communicate with each other, in the codes of people whose lives are intimately interconnected, which don’t sound like the distilled language of crafted dramatic dialogue, and can seem incomprehensible to outside people.

HARI NEF Jimmy is the character pushing against the myopia and obtuseness with which people relate to each other in this play. During her first scene with Father Michael, she's telling him about the terrible thing that happened to her. And he goes, “I see.” And she's like, “Don't say you see, don't give me that. I just showed you my big ugly.” And in the morning-after scene, everybody's off in

Left to Right: Arliss Howard, Johanna Day, and Arin Arbus in rehearsal for DES MOINES. Photo by Hollis King.

DEPTH CHARGERS ALISA SOLOMON

their own little worlds and Jimmy's the one who brings it to you.

ARIN ARBUS You sort of think that at the end of the [karaoke] scene, they’re going to wake up, that everybody's had a catharsis, everybody's had this communion. They've expressed things that they've never been able to express to anyone ever before. And you want, then, for there to be the logical resolution the next day that satisfies, that is the effect of that purging. But what happens the next morning is that everybody's hungover and sleepwalking. Except for Jimmy. It isn't like a fifth act where people are transformed. I think Denis is frustrating that expectation: that’s how life is, much more so than a traditional dramatic structure. It's also 6:00 AM and who knows what happened after the end of the first scene. They’re all kind of a mess.

ALISA SOLOMON Given your uses of words like ‘ritual, ‘communion,’ and ‘miracle,’ let's talk about the religious layer in this play. Sometimes it feels like

religion is mocked but there’s a way it is also taken profoundly seriously. I love the line when Marta tells Father Michael about her prognosis, and he responds by saying there’s little one can say about the prospect of impending death, and she replies, “But to have a priest be the one who says it—that says something.” In a play that's not in the slightest sentimental, that is strangely touching.

ARIN ARBUS I think part of what is operating in the play is a sort of shattering or exposing of the true reality of institutions like the church or the family or marriage. And yet I do think that there is a sense of something spiritual, or of grace, that the characters are grappling with. Marta refers to the “gales of God.” They’re trying to make sense of events that are incomprehensible and absurd and that are hard to have faith through. And then there is what I think of as a miracle, which is Jimmy standing up. Also, the ritual that they share has something ecstatic and connected to spirituality in it.

Left to Right: Hari Nef (Jimmy), Heather Alicia Simms (Mrs. Drinkwater), Johanna Day (Marta), and Arliss Howard (Dan). Photo by Travis Emery Hackett.

DEPTH CHARGERS ALISA SOLOMON

HARI NEF I am aware that religion and spirituality-–and Christianity in particular—are recurring themes in Johnson's work. In this play, we are presented with images of American Christian spirituality. It's always Christmas for Jimmy, who is running around wearing a Santa hat and there's a Christmas tree, and yet she says that all priests are liars. Something's going on there. The usual image of a priest is as a Catholic ambassador, but here we have Father Michael, who doesn't seem particularly invested in the souls of the people around him. He reminds me of Dale Cooper from “Twin Peaks”—the private eye who has never once solved the case, but you loved to go on the journey with him anyway, or the American hero who has never once saved the day. Father Michael is the priest that has never once saved anybody's soul. I think Jimmy sees that and is trying to draw something out of him: What's really going on? What do you really want to do? Are you my friend? Are you someone like me? Jimmy is aware of where she is and who she's with, and I think that running around in the Santa hat is kind of punk to her. It's a middle finger.

ALISA SOLOMON Arin, you used the word ‘urgent,’ to describe the play. What makes it urgent?

ARIN ARBUS Some of these characters are psychically isolated, and they are, as Hari said, myopic. They are very limited in their views of other humans and that is exposed and a struggle in the play. Dan and Marta, who I think love Jimmy deeply, misgender her through the play. They have never encountered Mrs. Drinkwater, who has lived in the same town and when she mentions having gone to college, Marta says she didn't know so many Black people went to college. Myopic is a really good word. That kind of myopia is familiar to anyone paying attention. What’s amazing about the play is that the characters don’t change in that regard, but they do come together in a powerful experience of sharing.

ALISA SOLOMON What feels urgent for you, Hari?

HARI NEF I try not to think about these big thematic questions when I'm in rehearsal. But sometimes I can't help it!

What feels urgent is that being seen, being heard, and being understood on the level of the individual is put at such a high premium now. It is very fashionable to reveal yourself, to court people's understanding and their recognition, especially if you have papers and proofs and experiences that show that you deserve more recognition, you deserve more understanding, you deserve more validation. And my politics, I think somewhat surprisingly to a lot of people, are moving away from this obsession with the individual and thinking more about the collective, about this idea of communion, about this idea of pushing past these externalities of the flesh and experience and figuring out what brings people together.

I started thinking about that a lot during the last presidency when I realized that I was a part of something huge on a nationwide scale that I didn't even recognize. And how silly was it that I didn't recognize that? And what does that mean for how I'm thinking about myself and thinking about my community and thinking about my country? The idea of communion became really appealing to me, the idea of understanding other people with other points of view. Despite how separate and different each character in this play is from the others, they're able to come together in the twilight of that first scene to laugh at each other, to applaud each other, to get each other drunk, to listen to each other, to confess. And that's what feels true. .

ALISA SOLOMON is a teacher, writer and dramaturg living in New York City. She directs the Arts and Culture concentration in the MA program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Her criticism, essays and political reporting have appeared in a wide range of magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, Nation, Forward, Theater , and Village Voice (where she was on the staff for 21 years). Her book, Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender (Routledge, 1997) won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. She is the co-editor (with Tony Kushner) of the anthology Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Grove, 2003). Her latest book is Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof from Metropolitan Books (Holt).

DIALOGUES THE TEARS OF DENIS JOHNSON

EDITED BY AARON GILBREATH

This piece was originally published in Longreads on June 16, 2017, and is republished here with the permission of Aaron Gilbreath.

Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son is one of those books people collect in multiples, saving extra copies to give to friends. I used to joke about handing it out in place of Halloween candy. Fortunately, Johnson wrote so much more: two collections of plays, three books of poetry, two short story collections, nine novels, a novella, and a book of reportage. He was dedicated to his vision of the writing life and embraced the mystery of the creative process with his students. After his death on May 24 2017, there was an outpouring of appreciation for Johnson’s life and work from readers and writers, students and friends. We’ve asked for further thoughts from some of the people he reached through his books, his friendship, and the classes he led at various universities. We hope this collection adds further warmth and insight into the extraordinary work Denis Johnson gave to the world.

Aaron Gilbreath

In the end, for me at least, Denis was unknowable. We worked together in two different phases on a lot of books, but somehow I always felt he was over there and I was over here. It didn’t seem personal, more existential. He had a genial surface, a sunniness and generosity and humor that were joyful to experience. Who wouldn’t have loved basking in that warmth? But other waters were always running in Denis, and I don’t think many people, except his wife Cindy, got a look into them.

Our work together was usually easy. Denis wasn’t interested in editorial intervention, nor did he need it. But I learned that he could take what might have been an offhand remark much too deeply to heart. I believe Denis was greatly vulnerable always, and I suspect this was part of why he kept his distance from the saturnalia of literary life.

Denis told his students at Iowa that they should want to be Shakespeare, the only thing for a writer to want. That he certainly wanted it for himself and his work—not only in fiction and poetry, but in journalism and drama— shows the relentless drive of his ambition. Ambition is the noblest quality a writer can have. Fighting all the impediments to it, internal and outward, is the writer’s daily task. Jesus’ Son is about the force of addiction and the only thing that can overmaster it: the ecstatic experience of God. Train Dreams is about solitude. I think it’s arguable that these books, which are among his great achievements, speak to two poles of his experience. Readers will keep coming to them always, which tells you that here, as elsewhere, he hit the nail on the head.

LYNNE TILLMAN Novelist, essayist, cultural critic

Denis was gentle, funny, good-hearted; a sweet, impish, and concerned man. You wanted to be around him.

JONATHAN GALASSI Denis Johnson’s editor, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Denis Johnson. Photo by Cindy Johnson.

THE TEARS OF DENIS JOHNSON AARON GILBREATH

Maybe because in his early years he lost time to drugs, he felt life was precious. You felt that reading him, felt it being near him.

I was fortunate to meet Denis in 2011 in Kyoto. We were doing a week-long gig together. Riyo Niimoto, a writer and journalist, was teaching at the Kyoto University for Art and Design where he had recently started the first MFA writing program in Japan. He wanted Denis and me to discuss our writing with Japanese novelists and our experiences teaching in MFA programs. Denis hadn’t visited Japan since he was eight or nine, when his family lived there for a few years. He was full of joy retrieving Japanese words, pieces of his childhood. He was writing about it in his mind, you could see that. Denis embraced every experience, he was always observing life, and his beautiful sentences rose and fell with its rhythms.

Writing was everything to Denis. Writing and his wife, Cindy, his children, his close friends, they were his life. He had no time for bullshit. Award-winning, acclaimed, sure, but Denis was resolutely straight ahead. Writing was a calling, not a career.

I didn’t know Denis’s cancer had come back. We were talking by email about friends’ dying. His last sentences to me, sent on April 10: “Another day this side of the grass—I’ll take it. And it’s the only day there ever was—today. Every breath is sweet. Love, DJ.” It kills me—this glorious, graceful man gone from our world. A magnificent American writer. One of our best, ever. Denis Johnson had it all, and he took it to the limit.

SAM MESSER Painter, professor at the Yale School of Art

FEAR NOT are the words inscribed across the pinnacle of James Hampton’s Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly. In 1982, DJ and I drove from Florida to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC to see the throne. DJ had become obsessed with Hampton’s work after hearing me describe it as one man’s visionary sculpture of his dialogue with God, and he insisted we stop in Eloree, South Carolina, the artist’s birthplace. At the Stop-n-Go on the corner of Hampton Street, DJ asked everyone in the store if they had ever heard of the artist, but no one had. When we arrived at

the Smithsonian and DJ finally saw the throne, he said, “I couldn’t take it all in, and I was a little frightened.” Hampton’s lifelong work about redemption, a whalesized gold and silver tinfoil sculpture created all alone in his garage, brought DJ to his knees. That night in the motel DJ began writing a poem in the bathtub. Later, he bolted up in bed. “I have to go home right now,” he said. “It was too much for me.” So I drove him to the airport. As he got out of the car he snapped his fingers and said, “Fear not.” Five years later he finished the poem.

MARIE HOWE Poet, author of Magdalene and The Kingdom of Ordinary Time

When Denis Johnson came out with The Incognito Lounge in 1982, the world of poetry trembled. In that extraordinary collection is the poem titled “Now,” which is as close to perfect as anything I’ve ever read, and the central poem of my writing life.

The poem is an experience. It’s happening to the poet as he writes it—not a record of an experience, not a

Denis Johnson. Drawing by Sam Messer.

THE TEARS OF DENIS JOHNSON AARON GILBREATH

memory—the experience is occurring to him word by word—a stepping into space without a rope. A waking awareness, a contradiction of his own impulse ("Darkness, my name is Denis Johnson"), and a series of urgent questions lead him and us to the very brink of radical transformation.

Denis was the first sober writer I had ever met. He was almost bursting out of his skin with aliveness. I watched him in wonder. How could someone so alive walk into rooms without holding something in front of his face? The poem “Now” suggests how.

ALIX

OHLIN

Author of the novels The Missing Person and Inside

When I learned as a graduate student that I could take a workshop with Denis Johnson at the Michener Center, I was nervous to meet him and also electrified. Few books meant more to me at that time than Jesus’ Son and Angels . I loved his work because he didn’t write like anyone else—he was gritty and lyrical, sacred and profane. I guess it’s not surprising he didn’t teach like anyone else either. I think his process was intuitive, mysterious perhaps even to him. He was shambling, unguarded, and had no prepared speeches. He didn’t line edit your work or give lectures on structure, or whatever conventional workshop leaders might do— but a lot of the things he said have never left me.

Once, a young person in our workshop handed in a seemingly autobiographical story about a child. It wasn’t, to be honest, very accomplished. Denis’ main comment was “It’s good you’re writing about your childhood now, because when you’re older, you won’t be able to remember it the same way,” which struck me as both generous and nakedly sad.

When I went to his office to ask for advice on the novel I was just starting to write, Denis more or less shrugged at the impossibility of offering advice. “You have to learn to write this novel, and anything you learn won’t teach you how to write the next one.” It was infuriating to hear and also, I now realize, true. In class he talked about Raymond Carver, about what it meant to him to study with Carver at Iowa; how as a young writer, an

undergraduate, he just wanted to be in the library where Carver had been, to sit in the same chair. He wept as he said this. Later that semester a friend of mine, a literary agent, came to town and wanted me to arrange lunch with Denis. When I asked him about it, he blanched. “Do I owe her money?” “No, you’re one of her idols” I said stubbornly, and insisted they meet. (This makes me cringe in retrospect—I wonder how often he must have heard that, and what a burden it must have been.) We took him to lunch. He ordered a cheeseburger, and when it arrived it was not done the way he ordered it. He wept a little at this too. It made me smile, and now it amazes me to remember it—how little armor he had, how he chose to live without it.

KELLY LUCE Fiction writer, author of Pull Me Under

I was lucky to be in Denis Johnson’s workshop at the Michener Center two years ago. He was an unorthodox and beloved teacher. That first day, he told us he was a crier. But we shouldn’t worry, it usually passed quick. He cried three times that semester: One over Mavis Gallant’s “The Latehomecomer,” one over how hard writing is, always, but how beautiful to get it right, and one I forget.

He said that if we didn’t feel like submitting stories to workshop, we didn’t have to. “What’s best is to just sit around and talk.” One day he brought in two metal balls and made us all hold them and decide which was heavier. The difference in weight was very tiny but we found we could usually tell the heavier one if we didn’t think about it too hard. Denis was DELIGHTED by this. We spent an hour holding the balls; he was practically bouncing off the walls with excitement at how much more our minds knew than our brains. And he never said, “This is like writing,” or anything like that. He was just awestruck. We left class early that day and walked over to Crown & Anchor where he ordered a burger and gave the name “Elvis.”

I submitted two stories to workshop that semester. One was previously published, but I wasn’t happy with it anymore and unsure why. He knew. It was the ending. Who knows more about endings than DJ? “This sounds very END-Y,” he said of the final paragraph. “But it’s not really an ending.” But he liked the story in general,

THE TEARS OF DENIS JOHNSON AARON GILBREATH

which was good, because he HATED the next story I put up. It’s one of my most memorable Michener moments.

The second story was a shitty first draft with magic in it. I volunteered because no one else had anything. I thought I was being gracious. Denis hated that fucking story so much, it was shocking and, in retrospect, just as delightful as the metal balls. He hated it so much he gesticulated wildly with the pages, yelling “Is this your best work?” He knocked his Red Bull off the grand old table onto the blue carpet. I said, “It’s a first draft?” and blacked out. Afterward I tried to flee but fell off my bike in the road in front of everyone.

Another time he told us about going on a weeklong silent retreat. He thought he and his roommate liked one another and looked forward to talking. When the week was up, he eagerly greeted his roommate. His roommate quietly said, “I had a very expensive watch, and it’s gone.”

His joy and sorrow were on the surface. He didn’t give a shit about hiding them. So many of us hide them in

public and call them back when we write. As if they will continue to respond!

Now I remember the third time Denis cried. He was talking about what makes a story interesting; how it’s the little things, how all the tricks we try as writers are often bullshit. And he wells up with tears and says, “There’s nothing more fascinating than watching a guy trying to untie a knot from his shoelace. Nothing.”

There’s something wonderful about a teacher who insists he knows as little, or less than you. It makes you feel like maybe you can write.

ALEXANDER CHEE Author of The Queen of the Night and Edinburgh

In the spring of 1994, Denis Johnson was my workshop teacher and thesis adviser at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I remember he had the sort of charisma that is impossible to imitate or fake—everyone was either in love with him, or for the few who were not, annoyed

Denis Johnson. Drawing by Sam Messer.

THE TEARS OF DENIS JOHNSON AARON GILBREATH

that everyone was in love with him. He told stories of when he was a student there in poetry—of how this or that famous writer was not so beloved, he assured us, in workshop. But he made it more than gossip: “You don’t know what someone can do just from what they show you here,” he said of one poet who used to drive him crazy and was now one of his favorites. In that little anecdote was a story about the long game of writing, and the false intensity of a present that feels so permanent.

For me, he was important in several different ways. He was a poet who also wrote fiction, which I was too at the time—this was not so common then. I remember with one of my stories he said, “This has the feeling of a lit match carried through a storm.” He then spoke of the importance of guarding one’s original inspiration all the way to the end. That story was an experiment in writing about the queer punk scene in San Francisco in the early 1990s. (The writing of certain stories in the beginning of your career has the feeling of something that makes you as you make it—this was one of those for me.) It was not easy to present that kind of work in 1994, and so to be greeted like this by him alerted me to my own powers. It conferred the feeling of graduating from that place as nothing else did.

EMILY RAPP BLACK Author of Poster Child: A Memoir and The Still Point of the Turning World

I met Denis Johnson as a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin where I was a student in fiction in the early 2000s. On the first day of class we were nervous and star struck, but Denis was friendly, chatty, kind, and more than anything else, he was open. Within the first hour, Denis read aloud from J.D. Salinger’s A Perfect Day for Bananafish. In the middle of the story he stopped and wiped his eyes, his voice cracking with emotion. “Isn’t that a beautiful line?” he asked. I wish now that I could remember which one.

He could have entered the space of eager graduate students arrogantly, even cruelly, and we likely would have accepted it. Certainly his epic reputation made many of us assume he would be anything but kind, least of all so emotional. Instead he read aloud from one of

his favorite stories and burst into tears, as he continued to do throughout the semester. His great empathy and willingness to be vulnerable, not venerated and worshiped, made him a terrific leader of workshop. It is a model, I believe, of how to remain an artist—even when one becomes a kind of cult figure.

I also credit Johnson with giving me the greatest editorial gift, although at first it felt less like a gift and more like a massive moment of embarrassment. One day he announced he had hired actors to read aloud our stories for workshop. Hearing my overly long, overly lyrical story go on and on and on for more than an hour (Four metaphors per page! Overkill!) while I slashed phrases and lines taught me an invaluable lesson: The best way to edit is to read aloud. To this day, I read everything aloud, from short stories to essays to entire book-length manuscripts. So thanks, Denis. You are missed, and you will be remembered.

REBECCA BENGAL Fiction writer and reporter

It was my first fiction teacher, Michael Parker, who turned me onto Denis Johnson in undergrad workshops in Greensboro, North Carolina. Jesus’ Son was the gateway, the pocket-sized paperback with the blackboard cover that I read behind the counter at the bookstore where I worked, a place where I shelved serial romance novels and saved copies of Shotgun News and Hustler for regulars. Reading Jesus’ Son , I felt as I had when I’d first heard the Velvet Underground, from whose lyrics Denis had stolen his title. These were perfect sentences that sliced straight through to the core. Here was a writer acknowledging the things I’d suspected to be true of human beings and the world, confirmed and transformed into bleak, electric language. The words were simultaneously blistering and healing; they stayed with me like scars.

A few years later I was on a plane to Austin, Texas, a place I had never been. We whipped through dense clouds, landed with a sickening thump, and hurtled along the tarmac. I was disoriented and green when I arrived at the Michener Center for Writers as a prospective student. Down the stairs came Denis, whose sentences I knew by heart. He introduced himself, as if he had to,

THE TEARS OF DENIS JOHNSON AARON GILBREATH

and said, “I was thinking about making a pot of coffee. Want some?” We stood and talked in the kitchen and that day felt like a beautiful augur. In Austin, he was the first person who helped me.

Denis later returned as a visiting writer and I was a student in his fiction workshop. I had not expected the writer of Angels to wear Hawaiian shirts and drive a cherry-red convertible, but who was I to judge? I decided to think of it as a character he was maybe trying out, the Denis Johnson who lived in Austin. I knew that back in Idaho he lived in a remote part of the state near a place named for a local bar, the Good Grief. In class, he was grand and occasionally admonishing, prone to laughter and tears. He hired student actors to read our stories back to us, which I hated at the time. Sometimes he alluded to his past in a far-off way, or spoke of the war-torn places he reported from in Seek , or mentioned his teacher Raymond Carver. In private, talking over stories, he was serious, rigorous, and generous. We sat in his office at Michener and talked about language, the kind of words that exist between people thrown together in certain circumstances of place or misfortune; the kind of language that is never spoken aloud.

A few days after I first met him, Denis invited his students and the visiting prospective fellows over to dinner at his rental in South Austin. Denis and Cindy’s kids drifted in and out of the house, there were plates of spaghetti and salad, and there was a sort of languidness about everything. Off to the side of the kitchen, normally a pantry or a laundry room, was the place Denis wrote. The door had been left slightly open. When you are a young writer you are always looking for clues not only in how to write, but how to be. I remember seeing a small plain table, a stiff uncomfortable-looking chair, a pad of yellow paper, and a typewriter with an index card taped on the wall above. On it, I imagined the three rules he frequently dictated (“Write naked. Write in blood. Write from exile.”) or a quote from Whitman he often recited, though I didn’t let myself look long enough to tell. Some dirty clothes were tossed on the side of a washing machine. I saw Denis just a couple times after our workshop—the years in which he published Train Dreams and Tree of Smoke —and I still try to square

the image of that red convertible with the idea of that stark, demanding little room

SUSAN STEINBERG Fiction writer, author of Spectacle

In the early 1990s I lived in Boston and worked in a bookstore in Harvard Square. There was a night I went to a talk by T.C. Boyle, and during the Q & A someone asked what we should be reading. Boyle said Jesus’ Son. The bookstore I worked in was about to close down for good, so we didn’t carry Jesus’ Son . I couldn’t find it anywhere else and eventually I forgot about it. A few months later I was in Seattle helping my brother move and I was staying with a friend from college. There was a day my friend was at work and my brother and I were fighting, so I went for a long walk.

This moment is now personally significant, marking the first time I had walked alone aimlessly through a city I didn’t know. I ended up in a bookstore that had one copy of Jesus’ Son that I found while looking for something else. The next day I was in the Seattle airport. I was feeling bad about leaving my brother after our fight, I was feeling bad about a lot of things, so I started Jesus’ Son in a dark mood and read it in its entirety, sitting there, waiting. I’ve heard people say reading something great makes them feel less alone. But reading something great often has the opposite effect on me. With Jesus’ Son , I was acutely aware of my aloneness, even in that crowded airport. Coming out of the book, I remember looking up at the strangers around me. It’s hard to describe the feeling, but I’m thinking of a line from the first story in the collection: “…he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.” Something like frustration. Some beautiful awareness of our limitations. I still can feel it.

JASON DIAMOND Editor at Rolling Stone, author of Searching for John Hughes

A few minutes after I saw the news that Denis Johnson had passed away, I took down Angels , his first novel, off my shelf and started to read it for the first time in over a decade. This is something I find myself doing whenever somebody whose art I appreciate passes. A few

THE TEARS OF DENIS JOHNSON AARON GILBREATH

days earlier, I found myself revisiting Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger after Chris Cornell died, and I binged on more than a few of Nora Ephron’s films after her passing in 2012. This is how I cope.

Johnson’s books are scattered around my apartment. Like so many others, I read the stories in Jesus’ Son at the moment in my life when I found fiction really starting to impact my thinking. I’ve always kept a copy the way some people always have a Bible or specific bottle of Scotch in the house, but this night I decided to go back to the start of his career after reading a few of his poems to get warmed up. I reread the entire book in one sitting.

Angels was a novel that, when I read it at around 24 or 25, I told myself I had to read. Today, I realize maybe I was reading it the wrong way. I was under the influence of Jesus’ Son , and the idea that Johnson— like Lou Reed, who wrote the song the book gets its name from—was sketching a certain kind of person he had observed and wanted to write about; people living on the fringes, messed up people, criminals, junkies, and “weirdos,” as Matt Bell writes in his moving eulogy. I’d thought Johnson was commenting on those people, and nothing else. Like many other things in my twenties, I was so wrong. While he writes about people who are messed up, what becomes clear is that Johnson didn’t necessarily believe we were born sinners, his characters didn’t come out screwed up and weird. They’re victims of America, its weirdness and dysfunction; American dreams turned into nightmares.

the strange relatable and the relatable strange, and the weird humor that gleams beneath.

I began with the prose. When Jesus Son came out in 1992, I was stunned by the stories’ mix of beauty and harshness, and the way he wielded images. Then I backtracked to the poems. After that, I had to ask myself, how the hell was this guy so good at both genres? Had anybody ever written about being high, caught the glory, hilarity and crazy desolation better than him? When I read his work, I re-learn that writing about extreme states or violence or being under the influence never need be limited to just that, but can be a deep dive into the hallucinatorily human, into our wildest capacities. His fiction goes way beyond ‘poetic prose’ for me. Car Crash While Hitchhiking and Emergency are two of my favorite stories, ever. I’ve never read a poem of his that didn’t give me a wonderful shiver.

CHRISTIAN KIEFER Novelist, author of The Animals

When I first read Denis Johnson, his poetry and prose knocked the wind out of me in the best way, and his writing has never failed, upon frequent re-readings, to leave me breathless. On every level I love his work: the mind behind it, individual sentences or lines, how he humanizes “twistedness” and all that seethes within his characters, his dark grace in dealing with insane behavior and suffering (including the self-induced variety), his intensity on the page, his gift for making

I’ve been looking over my friend Denis Johnson’s writing in the silence after his demise, marveling anew at the moments of grace in his work, the way he turns toward the spirit, the divine, just when it seems that to do so would be, is, utterly impossible. Yet is it not true that whenever we reach those moments in his books and stories and poems and plays, what we come to understand is that he has been quietly, deftly, directing us toward our own souls with every scene, with every sentence, with every word? So that when the great surprise comes and we stand face to face with that bright light that is—what? God? the universe? our very selves?—there is no great surprise at all. He has been telling us all along that it is coming: a reckoning which is, in the end, deliverance itself. Oh how he hands you the great gift you think is a bullet, a feather, a small smooth pile of pills like tiny blue stones, a whole collection of objects which, when you look later, is only your own heart held wild and beating in your hands. What a marvel you were, my friend. And so what a marvel you will ever be. Godspeed. In those darkest of nights I will forever think of your light. You saved me. God knows you saved us all. .

AMY GERSTLER Poet, author of Dearest Creature and Scattered at Sea

POEMS

DENIS JOHNSON

"Man Walking to Work"

The dawn is a quality laid across the freeway like the visible memory of the ocean that kept all this a secret for a hundred million years. I am not moving and I am not standing still. I am only something the wind strikes and clears, and I feel myself fade like the sky, the whole of Ohio a mirror gone blank. My jacket keeps me. My zipper bangs on my guitar. Lord God help me out by the lake after the shift at Frigidaire when I stop laughing and taste how wet the beer is in my mouth, suddenly recognizing the true wedding of passage and arrival I am invited to.

Originally published in The Veil. Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.

Denis Johnson. Drawing by Sam Messer.

"Quickly Aging Here"

1 nothing to drink in the refrigerator but juice from the pickles come back long dead, or thin catsup. i feel i am old now, though surely i am young enough? i feel that i have had winters, too many heaped cold and dry as reptiles into my slack skin. i am not the kind to win and win. no i am not that kind, i can hear my wife yelling, “goddamnit, quit running over,” talking to the stove, yelling, “i mean it, just stop,” and i am old and

2

i wonder about everything: birds clamber south, your car kaputs in a blazing, dusty nowhere, things happen, and constantly you wish for your slight home, for your wife’s rusted voice slamming around the kitchen. so few of us wonder why we crowded, as strange, monstrous bodies, blindly into one another till the bed choked, and our range of impossible maneuvers was gone, but isn’t it because by dissolving like so much dust into the sheets we are crowding south, into the kitchen, into nowhere?

Originally published in The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New . Harper Collins, 1995.

Denis Johnson. Drawing by Sam Messer.

QUOTATIONS THOUGHTS ON DENIS JOHNSON

Denis Johnson. Drawing by Sam Messer.

“The God I want to believe in has a voice and a sense of humor like Denis Johnson’s.”—Jonathan Franzen

“He worked at a level different from the rest of us—a true master.”—Zadie Smith

“Our most poetic American short-story writer since Hemingway.”—George Saunders

“Nobody wrote with more brutality and mercy, more hilarity and grace. What a genius he was.”—Elizabeth McCracken

“Johnson brought news from the darkest, wildest depths of American life as Mark Twain did in chapters of Huckleberry Finn and Faulkner in a slew of novels... There was no one like him.”—Philip Roth

“When Denis Johnson is justly praised for his voice, I always think, just the one? He had an eerie symphony at his command.”—Karen Russell

“His prose tiptoes a tightrope between peace and calamity.”—Anthony Doerr

“Denis Johnson was and is and will continue to be one of our strongest writers. His work has an indigenous beat that marks it as unmistakably American.”—Don DeLillo

“Everyone who reads Denis Johnson comes away thinking he has spoken directly to some wracked and ragged, yet transcendent, aspect of their own secret heart.”—Louise Erdrich

THE PRODUCTION CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM

JOHANNA DAY ( Marta ) Broadway: How I Learned to Drive, The Nap, Sweat (Tony nom.), You Can’t Take It With You, August: Osage County, Lombardi, Proof (Tony nom.). Theatre: Peter and Jerry (Second Stage; Drama Desk nom.), Appropriate (Signature; Obie Award), Helen (The Public Theater), Choice (Huntington), Rainmaker (Helen Hayes Award). Television: “Bull,” “The Good Fight,” “Madam Secretary,” “For Life,” “New Amsterdam,” “The Blacklist,” “Elementary,” “The Knick,” “Fringe.” Film: Worth, The Post, Great Gilley Hopkins, How Far She Went, The Breatharian.

ARLISS HOWARD ( Dan ) Film: Full Metal Jacket, Natural Born Killers, Lost World, Amistad, Men Don’t Leave, Wilder Napalm, Ruby, Moneyball, Mank, The Killer (upcoming), wrote and directed Big Bad Love . Television: “Rubicon,” “Manhunt,” wrote and directed “Dawn Anna.” Theatre: Broadway: Joe Turner’s Come and Gone . New York: The Late Henry Moss (Signature); The Monogamist (Playwrights Horizons); Ode to Joy (Rattlestick); CQ/CX, The Shawl (Atlantic); A Number, Scenes From a Marriage (NYTW). Regional: How I Learned to Drive, In the Jungle of Cities, Ivanov, Uncle Vanya (American Repertory Theater); A Lie of the Mind (Mark Taper).

SAMMY LANDAU they/them (Assistant Stage Manager/Fight Captain) Credits include Sleep No More (Punchdrunk NYC); Seven Deadly Sins (Tectonic Theater Project); The World Goes ’Round (Manhattan School of Music); Kiss (ArtsEmerson); Bootycandy (Speakeasy Stage Co.); Moby Dick, Girlfriend, Cock, Unexpected Joy, Alabama Story (Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater). Additional stage management work on large-scale Halloween and New Years’ parties for Emursive Productions. BFA, Stage & Production Management, Emerson College.

HARI NEF ( Jimmy ) is an actress and writer in New York. Her roles include Alessia in Jeremy O. Harris’s Daddy (2019), Blythe in “You” (2018), Bex in Assassination Nation (2018) and Gittel in “Transparent” (2015), among many others. She will next appear in “The Idol” (HBO), “Extrapolations” (Apple) and Barbie (Warner Bros). Nef’s writing has been published in Artforum, GQ, L’Officiel USA, Dazed and Vice.

Left to Right: Hari Nef (Jimmy), Arliss Howard (Dan), Heather Alicia Simms (Mrs. Drinkwater), and Johanna Day (Marta). Photo by Gerry Goodstein.

THE PRODUCTION CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM

SHANE SCHNETZLER he/him (Production Stage Manager). TFANA: Soho Rep’s Fairview, The Merchant of Venice, Timon of Athens, Why?, Julius Caesar, The Emperor, Heart/Box, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Tamburlaine , Fiasco’s Cymbeline . Off-Broadway: Seven Deadly Sins (Tectonic); Noura, This Flat Earth, The Profane, Rancho Viejo, Familiar (Playwrights Horizons); Napoli, Brooklyn and Look Back in Anger (Roundabout); The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, The Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare in the Park); Detroit ’67 (The Public); Night is a Room, The Liquid Plain, The Old Friends (Signature).

MICHAEL SHANNON ( Father Michael ). Broadway: Frankie & Johnny, Grace, Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Tony nom.; Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle awards). Off-Broadway: The Killer (TFANA); Uncle Vanya (Soho Rep); Bug, Our Town, Mistakes Were Made (Barrow Street Theatre); Little Flower of East Orange (The Public/Labyrinth); Lady (Rattlestick); Killer Joe (SoHo Playhouse); Shoppers Carried by Escalators Into the Flames (Evenstar Productions). Film: Bug, Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter, 99 Homes, Revolutionary Road (Oscar nom.), Nocturnal Animals (Oscar nom.), The Shape of Water, Bullet Train, Jesus’ Son, Amsterdam, Elvis and Nixon . TV: “Boardwalk Empire,” “Waco,” “The Little Drummer Girl,” “Nine Perfect Strangers,” “George & Tammy.”

HEATHER ALICIA SIMMS ( Mrs. Drinkwater ). Broadway: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, A Raisin in the Sun . Off-Broadway: Fairview; Fabulation…; By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (Obie); Richard III; born bad; Barbecue Television: “The Kings of Napa,” “Luke Cage,” “Bull,” “Blue Bloods,” “High Maintenance,” “The Last O.G.,” “Seven Seconds” and “Law & Order.” Film: Red Hook Summer, The Nanny Diaries, Broken Flowers, Head of State Awards and affiliations: Obie Award, Fox Foundation Fellowship, Audie Award, Columbia University MFA.

DENIS JOHNSON (Playwright) is the author of nine novels, three books of verse, two short story collections, a novella and seven plays. He received many awards and honors including the National Book Award for Fiction (Tree of Smoke), the Library of Congress Award for American Fiction and the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from The Paris Review. Two of his works were adapted into films: his book of short stories, Jesus’ Son, starring Billy Crudup and Samantha Morton; and more recently Stars at Noon, directed by Claire Denis. His plays have been produced in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Seattle.

ARIN ARBUS (Director) is the resident director at TFANA, where she directed The Winter’s Tale, The Skin of Our Teeth (Obie Award), Strindberg’s The Father and Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in rep, King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, Othello and, most recently, The Merchant of Venice starring John Douglas Thompson. She directed Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (Tony nom. for best revival) with Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon on Broadway. Arbus spent several years making theatre with prisoners in association with Rehabilitation Through the Arts and in 2018, she directed an adaptation of The Tempest in a refugee camp in Greece for The Campfire Project.

RICCARDO HERNANDEZ (Scenic Designer). Broadway: Jagged Little Pill (Tony Award nom.); Indecent, The Gin Game; The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess; The People in the Picture; Caroline, or Change. National Theatre London: Elaine Stritch at Liberty. Old Vic: Topdog/Underdog. Royal Court: Bells Are Ringing; Parade (directed by Hal Prince, Tony, Drama Desk nom.); Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk; The Tempest. International: Théâtre du Châtelet, La Colline Paris; Avignon (Cour d’honneur Palais des Papes); Estates Theater Prague; Oslo, National Theatre; Abbey Theatre. Recipient, Obie Award for Sustained Excellence in Design. Hernández is an associate professor and co-chair of the Yale School of Drama. www.riccardohernandez.com

QWEEN JEAN (Costume Designer) is a New York City-based costume designer who has fully committed her voice to the advocacy of marginalized communities, emphasizing Black Trans people. She is thrilled to be collaborating with Arin on Des Moines . She recently designed Wedding Band at TFANA. Recent theatre: soft,

THE PRODUCTION CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM

Corsicana, Hound Dog, On Sugarland, Black No More, I Need Space, Macbeth in Stride, Semblance, Our Dear Dead Drug Lord, Siblings Play, Amen Corner, Rags Parkland Sings the Songs of the Future, Good Grief, Othello and the acclaimed What to Send Up When It Goes Down . MFA from NYU Tisch. Black Trans Lives Matter!

SCOTT ZIELINSKI (Lighting Designer). Scott has designed well over 300 productions throughout the world. They include the Broadway production of Oklahoma! and numerous other productions in New York and the United States. Work overseas includes productions in Adelaide, Amsterdam, Avignon, Beijing, Berlin, Bregenz, Edinburgh, Fukuoka, Gennevilliers, Hamburg, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Linz, Ljubljana, London, Lyon, Melbourne, Orleans, Oslo, Ottawa, Paris, Prague, Rennes, Reykjavik, Rotterdam, Rouen, St. Gallen, Seoul, Singapore, Shanghai, Shizuoka, Stockholm, Stuttgart, Sydney, Taipei, Tokyo, Toronto, Vienna, Vilnius and Zurich.

MIKAAL SULAIMAN (Sound Designer). Broadway: Death of a Salesman, Cost of Living, Macbeth (Tony nom.), Thoughts of a Colored Man. Off-Broadway: Evanston Salt Costs Climbing (New Group); Fat Ham (The Public); Sanctuary City (Drama Desk nom.), On Sugarland, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (NYTW); Fairview (Drama Desk nom.); Rags Parkland… (Drama Desk, Lortel noms.); Passage (Soho Rep); Thanksgiving Play (Playwrights Horizons); Underground Railroad Game (Ars Nova); The Institute of Memory (EMO); Skittles Commercial: The Broadway Musical. Recipient: Creative Capital Award, Henry Hewes Award and CTG Sherwood Award. Head of sound design MFA program at Yale University. www.mikaal.com

BRYON EASLEY (Choreographer). Slave Play (Broadway, Antonyo Award nom. & NYTW), X: Or Betty Shabazz V. The Nation (Lucille Lortel Award nom.), The Bubbly Black Girl for City Center Encores!, Langston in Harlem (SDC’s Joe A. Callaway Award and an AUDELCO Award). Regional: Signature Theatre: Gun & Powder; Olney Theatre: Matilda (Helen Hayes nomination); Yale Repertory Theatre: Twelfth Night; OSF: Unison, The Wiz, A Comedy of Errors; Arena Stage: Five Guys Named Moe (Helen Hayes nom.); Alliance Theatre: Jelly’s Last Jam (Suzi Bass Award), Sophisticated Ladies (Suzi Bass Award). Associate arts professor at NYU/Tisch.

ANDREW WADE (Voice Director). The Royal Shakespeare Company: 1987–2003 (voice assistant), 1990–2003 (head of voice). Since 2003: The Acting Company, Guthrie Theater, Stella Adler Studio (master teacher voice and Shakespeare).

Arliss Howard (Dan) and Johanna Day (Marta). Photo by Gerry Goodstein.

THE PRODUCTION CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM

Currently: TFANA (resident voice and text director), The Public Theater (director of voice), Juilliard (adjunct faculty Drama Division). Broadway: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts One and Two (U.S. head of voice and dialect), King Lear with Glenda Jackson (voice coach), Matilda (director of voice and national tour), A Christmas Carol and tour, A Bronx Tale the Musical. Film: Shakespeare in Love. Workshops and lectures worldwide. Fellow of Rose Bruford College.

JONATHAN KALB (Resident Dramaturg) is professor of theatre at Hunter College, CUNY. The author of five books on theatre, he has worked for more than three decades as a theatre scholar, critic, journalist and dramaturg. He has twice won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism and has also won the George Freedley Award for an outstanding theatre book from the Theatre Library Association. He often writes about theatre on his TheaterMatters blog at jonathankalb.com

J. DAVID BRIMMER (Fight Director), Fight Master SAFD, has choreographed some stuff (selected Broadway: Pass Over, Hangmen, American Buffalo, Spring Awakening, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Grace, Speed-the-Plow, Thérèse Raquin, Long Day’s Journey Into Night; NY premieres: Socrates, Fairview, Is God Is, Yen, Gloria, An Octoroon, Blasted, Bethany, Blackbird, Bug, Killer Joe). “Walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone.”—G. Fox

JON KNUST (Properties Supervisor). Selected credits include A Doll’s House, The Father, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Winter’s Tale, About Alice, Gnit, The Merchant of Venice, and Wedding Band (TFANA); Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (Broadway); Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek, Big Love and Appropriate (Signature); and Peter and the Starcatcher (tour). Jon got his start in props at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and graduated from Eastern Connecticut State University.

MARCIAS POLAS (Occupational Movement Consultant). Alignment educator and private practitioner, Marcia studies bodies at work. She gives her occupational athletes the tools to care for themselves and go about their jobs effortlessly and pain-free. Marcia works to ensure that embodying a character’s body doesn’t damage that of the actor, allowing them to leave the character’s physicality behind nightly. Based in NYC since 2015, she has been teaching virtually and in person worldwide for over 18 years. Marcia uses and teaches contemporary Pilates practices, myofasical therapy, cranial sacral therapy and common sense in her work…because it shouldn’t hurt to do your job. @marciapolas

BLAKE ZIDELL & ASSOCIATES (Press Representative) is a Brooklyn-based public relations firm representing arts organizations and cultural institutions. Clients include St. Ann’s Warehouse, Playwrights Horizons, Signature Theatre, Soho Rep, National Sawdust, The Kitchen, Performance Space New York, PEN America, StoryCorps, Symphony Space, the Fisher Center at Bard, Peak Performances, Irish Arts Center, the Merce Cunningham Trust, the Onassis Foundation, Taylor Mac, Page 73, The Playwrights Realm, PlayCo and more.

ELIZABETH CUTHRELL (Evenstar Films) is co-founder of Evenstar Films. She wrote and produced the acclaimed film Jesus’ Son (Billy Crudup, Holly Hunter, Michael Shannon). Other award-winning films include The Same Storm (MaryLouise Parker, Elaine May, Sandra Oh), Meek’s Cutoff (Michelle Williams), Vara: A Blessing, The Sisterhood of Night (Kal Penn). Theatre credits include Tony-nominated Farinelli and the King (Mark Rylance), premieres of Shoppers Carried by Escalators Into the Flames (Will Patton, Michael Shannon), Slut: The Play, What You Will (Roger Rees) and Walt and Emily. With Mary-Louise Parker, Cuthrell wrote and produced the award-winning “Stop the Hate” public service announcements.

DAVID URRUTIA (Evenstar Films) is co-founder of Evenstar Films. He wrote the screenplay and produced the feature film Jesus’ Son based on Denis Johnson’s short stories (with Billy Crudup, Samantha Morton, Jack Black), produced Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (Michelle Williams, Will Patton), Vara: A Blessing, The Sisterhood of Night and, most recently, The Same Storm (Sandra Oh, Danny Burstein, Judith Light) and the Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award-winning film Blood. Theatre producing credits include Roger Rees’ What You Will, Denis Johnson’s Shoppers Carried by Escalators Into the Flames, Slut: The Play and Walt and Emily

EVENSTAR FILMS is a film and theatre production company. Films include Jesus’ Son, Meek’s Cutoff (both selected for NY Times Top 10 Films of the Year), The Same Storm, the recent Sundance-winner Blood, The Sisterhood of Night and Vara: A Blessing. Festivals include the Venice, Telluride, Sundance, London, Busan and New York film festivals, and the films have won numerous awards including The Little Golden Lion, Special Jury Award, Ecumenical, Signis and Best Actor awards. Theatre credits include Denis Johnson’s Shoppers Carried by Escalators Into the Flames, Roger Rees’ What You Will, Slut: The Play and Walt and Emily.

THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE . Founded in 1979 by Jeffrey Horowitz, this is Theatre for a New Audience’s (TFANA) 43rd season. Through its productions of Shakespeare and other new plays, humanities initiatives and programs in NYC public schools, TFANA creates adventurous dialogues with diverse audiences. TFANA has produced 33 of Shakespeare’s 38 plays alongside an international mix of classical and contemporary drama; promotes ongoing artistic development through its Merle Debuskey Studio Fund; and in 2001, growing from a collaboration with Cicely Berry, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s director of voice, TFANA became the first American theatre company invited to bring a production of Shakespeare to the RSC.

ACTORS' EQUITY ASSOCIATION (“Equity”), founded in 1913, is the U.S. labor union that represents more than 50,000 actors and stage managers. Equity seeks to foster the art of live theatre as an essential component of society and advances the careers of its mem bers by negotiating wages and working conditions and providing a wide range of benefits including health and pension plans. Actors’ Equity is a member of the AFL-CIO and is affiliated with FIA, an international organization of performing arts unions. #EquityWorks

STAFF FOR DES MOINES

Assistant Costume Designer.........................Ryan Wilbat Assistant Lighting Designer ...................Angus Goodearl Assistant Sound Designer..........................Brandon Bulls Sound Design Apprentice

Way Music Director...........................................Brian Walters Assistant Choreographer.............................Adam Munoz Associate Fight Director

Costume Supervisor.....................................Emily White Wardrobe Supervisor..................Ernest Terrelle Williams Hair & Makeup Supervisor....................Lasangra Aarons Costume Crafts........................................Hochi Asiatico Costumes Shopper......................Brynne Oster-Bainnson Alterations

Electricians.............................................Leon Axt, Victoria Bausch, Darcy Burke, Roy Chang, Parker Damm, Jimmy Dewhurst, Joseph Galan, Elsie Gomez, Akvinder Kaur, Tony Mulanix, Georgia Piano, Shawn Salick, Dana Sparatu, Shannon Stewart, Daniel Sullivan, Andrew Wang, Dajane Wilson Lead Carpenter.....................................................Leon Axt Carpenters

Axt, Victoria Bausch, Suneil Cohen, Joseph Galan, Clement Goodman, Daniel Sullivan Lead Rigger

Galan Riggers.......................................................Cory Asinofsky, Leon Axt, Victoria Bausch, Clement Goodman, Daniel Sullivan Truck Drivers....................Daniel Sullivan, Eduardo Tobon

CREDITS

Production audio services provided by Five Ohm. Lighting equipment provided by PRG and 4Wall Entertainment. Audio and video equipment provided by Five Ohm. Des Moines was rehearsed at the New 42nd Street Studios.

SPECIAL THANKS

Pascale Armand, Kevin Corrigan, Lindsay Harris, Daniel Ilan, Emily Cass McDonnell, Deirdre O’Connell, Will Patton, Linda Powell, Wallace Shawn, Signature Theatre’s Lay Hoon Tan

THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE LEADERSHIP

JEFFREY HOROWITZ (Founding Artistic Director) began his career in theatre as an actor and appeared on Broadway, Off-Broadway and in regional theatre. In 1979, he founded Theatre for a New Audience. Horowitz has served on the panel of the New York State Council on the Arts, on the board of directors of Theatre Communications Group, the advisory board of the Shakespeare Society and the artistic directorate of London’s Globe Theatre. Awards: 2003 John Houseman Award from The Acting Company, 2004 Gaudium Award from Breukelein Institute, 2019 Obie Lifetime Achievement and TFANA’s 2020 Samuel H. Scripps.

DOROTHY RYAN (Managing Director) joined Theatre for a New Audience in 2003 after a ten-year fundraising career with the 92nd Street Y and Brooklyn Museum. Ryan began her career in classical music artist management and also served as company manager and managing leader for several regional opera companies. She is a Brooklyn Women of Distinction honoree and serves as treasurer of the Downtown Brooklyn Arts Alliance.

Polonsky Shakespeare Center. Photo © David Sundberg/Esto.

Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage. Photo by Francis Dzikowski/OTTO.

ABOUT THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE

About Theatre for a New Audience

Founded in 1979 by Jeffrey Horowitz, the mission of Theatre for a New Audience is to develop and vitalize the performance and study of Shakespeare and classic drama. Theatre for a New Audience produces for audiences Off-Broadway and has also toured nationally, internationally and to Broadway. We are guided in our work by five core values: a reverence for language, a spirit of adventure, a commitment to diversity, a dedication to learning, and a spirit of service. These values inform what we do with artists, how we interact with audiences, and how we manage our organization.

Theatre for a New Audience Education Programs

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Board Chair

Robert E. Buckholz

Vice Chair

Kathleen C. Walsh

President Jeffrey Horowitz

FoundingArtisticDirector

Vice President and Secretary Dorothy Ryan Managing Director

Executive Committee

Robert E. Buckholz

STAFF

Founding Artistic Director

Jeffrey Horowitz

Managing Director Dorothy Ryan

Interim General Manager

Mott/Fischer Productions

Director of Institutional Advancement

James J. Lynes

Finance Director Mary Sormeley

Education Director Lindsay Tanner

Capital Campaign Director George Brennan

Director of Marketing & Communications

Edward Carlson

Facilities Director Rashawn Caldwell

Company Manager Molly Burdick

Theatre Manager Lawrence Dial Production Manager Brett Anders Box Office Manager Allison Byrum Marketing Manager Angela Renzi Associate Director of Development

Sara Billeaux

Artistic Associate Peter J. Cook

Finance Associate Harmony Fiori Grants Associate Emmy Ritchey

Development Associate Jake Larimer

Development Associate Olivia Laskin Coordinator, Administration & Humanities & Studio Programming

Nadiya Atkinson

Facilities Associate Rafael Hurtado

New Deal Program Coordinator

Zhe Pan

House Managers

Nancy Gill Sanchez, Nyala Hall, Regina Pearsall, Adjani Reed

Press Representative

Blake Zidell & Associates

Resident Director Arin Arbus

Resident Casting Director Jack Doulin

Resident Dramaturg Jonathan Kalb

Resident Distinguished Artist John Douglas Thompson

Resident Voice and Text Director Andrew Wade

TFANA COUNCIL OF SCHOLARS

Tanya Pollard, Chair

Jonathan Kalb, Alisa Solomon, Ayanna Thompson

Theatre for a New Audience is an award-winning company recognized for artistic excellence. Our education programs introduce students to Shakespeare and other classics with the same artistic integrity that we apply to our productions. Through our unique and exciting methodology, students engage in hands-on learning that involves all aspects of literacy set in the context of theatre education. Our residencies are structured to address City and State Learning Standards both in English Language Arts and the Arts, the New York City DOE’s Curriculum Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in Theater, and the New York State Common Core Learning Standards for English Language Arts. Begun in 1984, our programs have served more than 135,000 students, ages 9 through 18, in New York City Public Schools city-wide.

A Home in Brooklyn: Polonsky Shakespeare Center

Theatre for a New Audience’s home, Polonsky Shakespeare Center, is a centerpiece of the Brooklyn Cultural District.

Designed by celebrated architect Hugh Hardy, Polonsky Shakespeare Center is the first theatre in New York designed and built expressly for classic drama since Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont in the 1960s.

The 27,500 square-foot facility is a unique performance space in New York. The 299-seat Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage, inspired by the Cottesloe at London’s National Theatre, combines an Elizabethan courtyard theatre with modern theatre technology that allows the stage and seating to be arranged in seven configurations. The facility also includes the Theodore C. Rogers Studio (a 50-seat rehearsal/ performance studio), and theatrical support spaces. The City of New York-developed Arts Plaza, designed by landscape architect Ken Smith, creates a natural gathering place around the building. In addition, Polonsky Shakespeare Center is also one of the few sustainable (green) theatre in the country, with LEED-NC Silver rating from the United States Green Building Council.

Now with a home of its own, Theatre for a New Audience is contributing to the continued renaissance of Downtown Brooklyn. In addition to its season of plays, the Theatre has expanded its Humanities offerings to include lectures, seminars, workshops, and other activities for artists, scholars, and the general public. When not in use by the Theatre, its new facility is available for rental, bringing much needed affordable performing and rehearsal space to the community.

Constance Christensen

Jeffrey Horowitz

Seymour H. Lesser

Larry M. Loeb

Audrey Heffernan Meyer Philip R. Rotner

Kathleen C. Walsh Josh Weisberg

Members

F. Murray Abraham*

Arin Arbus*

Alan Beller John Berendt*

Bianca Vivion Brooks* Ben Campbell

Robert Caro*

Sharon Dunn* Riccardo Hernandez* Kathryn Hunter* Dana Ivey*

Tom Kirdahy*

Harry J. Lennix*

Catherine Maciariello* Marc Polonsky

Joseph Samulski*

Daryl D. Smith

Susan Stockel

Michael Stranahan

John Douglas Thompson* John Turturro*

Frederick Wiseman*

*Artistic Council

Emeritus

Francine Ballan

Sally Brody

William H. Burgess III

Dr. Charlotte K. Frank Caroline Niemczyk

Janet C. Olshansky

Theodore C. Rogers

Mark Rylance*

Monica G.S. Wambold Jane Wells

THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE MAJOR SUPPORTERS

Even with capacity audiences, ticket sales account for a small portion of our operating costs. The Theatre expresses its deepest thanks to the following Foundations, Corporations, Government Agencies and Individuals for their generous support of the Theatre’s Humanities, Education, and Outreach programs.

The 360° Series: Viewfinders has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the Human Endeavor. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this Viewfinder, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

A Challenge Grant from the NEH established a Humanities endowment fund at Theatre for a New Audience to support these programs in perpetuity. Leading matching gifts to the NEH grant were provided by Joan and Robert Arnow, Norman and Elaine Brodsky, The Durst Organization, Perry and Marty Granoff, Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia, John J. Kerr & Nora Wren Kerr, Litowitz Foundation, Inc., Robert and Wendy MacDonald, Sandy and Stephen Perlbinder, The Prospect Hill Foundation, Inc., Theodore C. Rogers, and from purchasers in the Theatre’s Seat for Shakespeare Campaign, 2013 – 2015.

Theatre for a New Audience’s Humanities, Education, and Outreach programs are supported, in part, by The Elayne P. Bernstein Education Fund. For more information on naming a seat or making a gift to the Humanities endowment, please contact James Lynes, Director of Institutional Advancement, at 212-229-2819 x29, or by email at jlynes@tfana.org.

Deloitte and Bloomberg Philanthropies are the 2022-2023 Season Sponsors.

Theatre for a New Audience’s productions and education programs are made possible, in part, with public funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts; Shakespeare in American Communities, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.partnership with the City Council.

Additional funding is provided by the generosity of the following Foundations and Corporations through either general operating support or direct support of the Theatre’s arts in education programs:

PRINCIPAL BENEFACTORS

($100,000 and up)

Bloomberg Philanthropies

Jerome L. Greene Foundation Fund in the New York Community Trust

The SHS Foundation

The Shubert Foundation, Inc.

The Thompson Family Foundation, Inc.

U.S. Small Business Administration

LEADING BENEFACTORS

($50,000 and up)

Deloitte & Touche LLP

The Howard Gilman Foundation, Inc.

The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust

The Whiting Foundation

MAJOR BENEFACTORS

($20,000 and up)

The Arnow Family Fund

The Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation

The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation

The Great Island Foundation

The Hearst Corporation

The DuBose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund

Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP

Latham & Watkins LLP

The Polonsky Foundation

The Seth Sprague Educational and Charitable Foundation

The Starry Night Fund

The Stockel Family Foundation

SUSTAINING BENEFACTORS

($10,000 and up)

Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, LLP

The Howard Bayne Fund

Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc.

Debevoise & Plimpton LLP

The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation

Sidney E. Frank Foundation

Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP Hughes, Hubbard & Reed LLP

The J.M. Kaplan Fund

King & Spalding LLP

McDermott Will & Emery Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP

Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison

May and Samuel Rudin Foundation Inc.

Sarah I. Schieffelin Residuary Trust

Select Equity Group, Inc.

Sidley Austin LLP

The Speyer Family Foundation

Michael Tuch Foundation, Inc.

PRODUCERS CIRCLE—

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR’S SOCIETY

($5,000 and up)

Axe-Houghton Foundation

The Bay and Paul Foundations

The Bulova Stetson Fund

The Ettinger Foundation

The Claire Friedlander Family Foundation

Litowitz Foundation, Inc.

Marta Heflin Foundation Richenthal Foundation

PRODUCERS CIRCLE—EXECUTIVE ($2,500 and up)

Foley Hoag LLP

Irving Harris Foundation

Lucille Lortel Foundation

Proskauer Rose LLP

Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles The Venable Foundation

PRODUCERS CIRCLE—ASSOCIATE ($1,000 and up)

Actors’ Equity Association

The Grace R. and Alan D. Marcus Foundation

Asha and D.V. Nayak Fund

The Bernard and Anne Spitzer Charitable Trust