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Dialogues: Finding the Point Where Chaos Seeps In by Martha Wade Steketee
DIALOGUES FINDING THE POINT WHERE CHAOS SEEPS IN
MARTHA WADE STEKETEE
Jasmine Batchelor (Solvay) and Joe Curnutte (Peter). Photo by Gerry Goodstein.
This piece by Martha Steketee was originally published as "Will Eno’s Theatrical Rhythms" on HowlRound Theatre Commons, on Dec 10, 2015. It has been edited with the author's permission.
Small Town-ish in a Really Good Way
For a heady period of time in the spring of 2014, playwright Will Eno had two productions running simultaneously in New York City, which inspired a 2014 Drama Desk special award for both ensembles and for the playwright. “To the Ensembles of Off-Broadway's The Open House and Broadway's The Realistic Joneses and Will Eno,” the award inscription reads, “Two Extraordinary Casts and One Impressively Inventive Playwright.” Eno recently reflected in conversation that the Drama Desk joint ensemble award was “fun and exciting and a huge surprise and felt really sort of small town-ish in a really good way.” The Open House, which in addition to the compound 2014 Drama Desk special award also received 2014 Obie and Lucille Lortel best play honors, has now joined Eno’s other TCG-published works in a spanking new 2015 TCG edition. The clustering of recognition for this play in particular, among Eno’s growing body of produced and published work, is worth some analysis and reflection. Is this a cumulative awareness of, or a giving into, Eno’s view of the world? Did 2014 reflect a kind of final critical understanding of Eno’s subject matter? Are we all finally ready to experience with him, according to his rhythms and speech patterns, the gentle devastation of small town family life? Perhaps yes to all of the above.
And with his many accolades, this newly minted fifty-year-old is self-effacing and delightfully appreciative that he’s understood and his work
is well received. We exchanged emails then met on the phone for an extended chat on a recent afternoon about his new publication, the unfolding of his career, and the gentle and provocative stage worlds he creates.
A New England Athlete with Day Jobs
Eno is a child of New England with a “sort of a normal background” who thought for a long time he was going to be a professional biker. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts and reared in a set of nearby towns, he went to UMass Amherst after high school (leaving just short of graduation) and was involved in bike racing seriously enough from ages twelve to twenty-two that he trained at the US Olympic Training Center in Colorado. “I think it saved me from doing all the stupid adolescent things I ended up doing in my twenties, anyway.”
Writing was something he worked on around intense day job hours. In his late twenties he worked on Wall Street “making cold calls for six bucks an hour” and would write at night, which influenced his approach.
"I was usually so exhausted (the hours were from 7:30am-6:00pm, at the least) that I couldn't really maintain whatever pose of a human I had usually presented in writing, so I was able to write some new and sort of strange things, that seemed separate from me, but that still had some weird connection. I then studied fiction writing with Gordon Lish and he taught me about writing at the microscopic level and about how to carry yourself as a writer, as a human being."
A short play called An American Lies Dying on American Ice, about a hockey player who is seriously injured in the middle of a game and the time-filling response of the announcers, was an early step into his unique style and authorial voice. Small and large tragic things happen, and small and large reactions occur as a result. Eno’s plays are not about explosions (verbal, technological) but about rifts in conversations and human lives, where the chaos stealthily seeps in.
Stage Doors and Chance Encounters: London to New York and Back Again
Eno found his way onto US stages through an unsolicited script left at the National Theatre stage door in London. Whether this was 1999 or 2000 is murky in his memory. At the time he was employed as a proofreader of psychology textbooks.
"I dropped Tragedy: a tragedy off at the stage door of the National. I wrote some crazy note on the first page of the script with my left hand, and I’m right handed. A month later Jack Bradley, then the literary manager at the National, called up and said: “We’d like to do a reading at the Studio and can I send it to a BBC radio producer?” Christopher Campbell, now the Literary Manager at the Royal Court, was working at the National then too. This whole great life over in London started up from that. The Gate production happened out of the reading at the National Studio."
Produced at The Gate in Notting Hill in 2001, Tragedy: a tragedy is about television journalists on-air navigating a twenty-four-hour news cycle covering a sunset that may go on forever. Two years later, The Gate produced Eno’s The Flu Season about inmates and staff in a mental institution. (Both plays are published by TCG in The Flu Season and Other Plays.)
Eno’s plays have now appeared on stages in many areas of the US including: Thom Pain (based on nothing) (“stand-up existentialism” at DR2 Theatre in 2005), Middletown (a small town story of neighbors, “delicate, moving and wry amble along the collective road to nowhere,” premiering at the Vineyard Theatre in 2010), Title and Deed (“a haunting and often fiercely funny meditation on life as a state of permanent exile” in 2012, the first of Eno’s Signature Theatre Residency Five productions), The Open House (a conventional living room drama with several twists, his second Residency Five production in 2014) and The Realistic Joneses (a four-hander with suburban neighbors all named Jones, commissioned with a
premiere at Yale Repertory Theatre in 2012 and produced on Broadway in 2014).
Rhythms on the Page and on the Stage: Stillness and Solitude
Will Eno’s plays Thom Pain (based on nothing), a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and Middletown, recipient of the 2010 Horton Foote Prize for Promising New American Play, both deal with daily life’s gentle and devastating interactions. While these awards engendered national and international attention for Eno’s quirky talent, the American first found audiences in England.
British audiences were exposed to Eno first, as were the British press. Responses by The Guardian’s Lyn Gardner moved from finding a play “both potentially profound and tedious” (a 2001 production of Tragedy: a tragedy) to “smartalec games with form and style [that] are very witty, youthful and enormously engaging” (a 2003 production of The Flu Season) to “vicious stuff, written in a language so deceptively innocent, so full of platitudes, that you don't realize it has cut you deep until you feel the warm seep of bloody despair” (a 2004 Edinburgh Festival production of Thom Pain (based on nothing)).
Reviewers often comment upon the role of stillness, silence, pauses, and nonverbal moments in Eno’s work. Many reviews of his work are full of comparisons to stylistic and linguistic innovators. An enthralled Charles Isherwood reflected in his 2005 review of Thom Pain (based on nothing) on Eno’s language and tone as “jaggedly quirky, crisp and hypnotic.” In a slightly disappointed but still engaged review of Eno’s The Open House in 2014, Isherwood again underscores language and rhythms, pauses, and parsimony:
"Wryly humorous and deeply engaged in the odd kinks and quirks of language and its fuzzy relationship to meaning, his plays are also infused with a haunted awareness of, and a sorrowful compassion for, the fundamental solitude of existence." What is Eno’s sense of space around the words, pauses and stillness, and his lack of fear of silences?
"I think it might come from being a sort of anxious person, with a sort of anxious background, so that there was never any such thing as stillness, really, in my childhood. A room full of still people is almost the most tense and energized thing I can imagine, and so maybe that idea, that stillness is just a different kind of motion, has made it somewhere into my plays."
Journeys to Eno’s work
The journey of bafflement to quiet entrancement is replicated in a number of critical and personal interactions with Eno’s voice.
I asked him whether he found this experience common for those who see his work.
"I don't know what journey people take, over the course of a couple plays. Maybe what seems willfully ambiguous, at first, starts to seem like a gift of space to think and feel, later. Something like that? I don't think it's generational. People always get worried about weekday matinees, but I sometimes think people who are a little older can laugh harder at the hard parts of life.
Someone said that [The Open House] was about evolution in this real absolute sort of dramatization of Darwinian evolution, in both its gentleness and sort of brutal indifference. Something happening gently is good by me."•
MARTHA WADE STEKETEE is a dramaturg, critic, researcher, and theater adjudicator (Chicago’s Joseph Jefferson Awards 20082009, and current chair of New York's Drama Desk nominating committee). She works with playwrights, reviews scripts for programs and competitions, and currently serves as chair of the American Theatre Critics Association executive committee, She was a founding editor of Chance Magazine (“looking at the world through the lens of theater and design”) and serves on two design award committees (Henry Hewes and the new regional ATCA Glenn Loney). Critical and feature writing appears in a range of publications including her own site UrbanExcavations.com. Steketee lives in New York City with an indulgent husband and too many books
