INSIDE VOICES

Robert Gwaltney and Jeffrey Dale Lofton introduce essayist, playwright, and cultural critic, Gwydion Suilebhan

Gwydion Suilebhan is a cultural critic, essayist, and playwright. A lifelong arts advocate, he serves as both the Executive Director of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and the Project Director of the New Play Exchange for the National New Play Network.

A founding member of The Welders, a Helen Hayes Award-winning playwrights collective in Washington, DC, Suilebhan previously held the position of Director of Brand and Marketing for Woolly Mammoth. Earlier in his career, he worked as a brand and communications consultant for arts and culture organizations.

Suilebhan currently serves on the board of the Alliance for Jewish Theatre. From 2017-2020, he was a member of the Council of the Dramatists Guild of America. He speaks widely on the intersection between the arts and technology in the 21st century.

Jeffrey: Gwydion, Robert and I have featured, for the most part, fiction authors during the last year, But we’re committed to highlighting all things literary. You describe yourself as an essayist, playwright, and cultural critic. Tell us why you identify as each of these.

Gwydion: Really and truly, I identify as a writer. I’ve worked in so many different genres over the years that I can’t really settle on a single label. (I have a master’s degree in poetry, and I worked my way through college as a journalist, and I’ve even written for film and television, too.) At the moment, I write with a co-author about comedy for Salon and a few other venues, and I’ve also worked as a book reviewer, so that’s why I’m a cultural critic. That same co-author and I write longer essays as well, on everything from politics to philosophy, and I’m also working on a memoir, so that’s why I call myself an essayist. For the last 20 years or so, though, I’ve mostly been known as a playwright, and if you Google me, I suppose that’s what’s likely to come up first.

Robert: In which of these three areas do you feel most at home?

Gwydion: Let me tell you, when I first discovered playwriting, after about ten years of chiseling granite, basically, as a poet, that really felt like coming home. All the impulses I’d had as a writer up until then, going all the way back to writing skits for my friends to perform in my basement when I was 12 years old – suddenly made sense. But lately, the longer I work in non-fiction, the more I feel connected to myself as a writer. The work I’m doing now feels the truest.

Jeffrey: As authors, we use the narrative arc to shape our long-form writing, especially in fiction. What’s the process like for writing a play?

Gwydion: I may be atypical among playwrights, but I definitely don’t have a single process. The first draft of my play LET X was written in one mad three-week, eight hours-a-day sprint at a diner in DC. (They must have thought I was crazy coming in day after day and drinking coffee like it was going out of style.) I developed THE BUTCHER over nine long years, the first year of which was spent devising scenes with actors doing guided improvisations for me one night a week. I took the exchanges they improvised, chopped them up, re-wrote them, threw various bits together, knitted it all up, and made it my own. One of my more recent plays, TRANSMISSION, started as a seven-page fragment that I shared with a friend who works as a sound designer, and evolved out of our conversations about the possibilities I was raising in those first few words. I suppose what I should probably say is that for me, the process I rely on is deeply entwined with my subject matter, and I’m never following a formula when I make art.

Robert: You have a writing partner. Tell us about that relationship.

Gwydion: I’ve known my writing partner Steve since we met in Mrs. Tompakov’s class in first grade. We’ve been dear friends for decades… so much so that he even officiated my wedding ceremony. He’s a professor of philosophy who focuses on wide-ranging subjects, with books on Einstein, comedy, and the Grateful Dead. He’s deeply impressive.

Steve has immense gifts as a researcher, and he has a tremendous ability to write first drafts very quickly, whereas I’m much better at structure and revision and sentence-level composition. He is also able to detach himself emotionally from his writing. He is precious about nothing he writes, which allows me to say “Steve, we need to scrap this bit and start over here and try a new angle there” without affecting him one bit.

Honestly, neither of us have much of an ego in that way; as you might have gleaned from my description of my work as a playwright, I’m an avid collaborator. (Really, in the theater you have to be.) We have intellectual disagreements from time to time, but it’s not hard to resolve them. In fact, it’s not only not hard, it’s fun. We enjoy each other’s company a great deal. We meet once a week to review our work and set goals for the next seven days, and it’s usually an hourlong (or two-hourlong) laugh-fest. And then of course we text back-and-forth all week.

Generally speaking, when a piece of ours is done, it’s hard to identify which parts came from him and which came from me. We sometimes say that at the end of the day, 75% of the ideas are his and 25% are mine, but 75% of the words are mine and 25% are his, but that’s probably too neat and tidy. It all belongs to both of us.

Jeffrey: What’s your research process like?

Gwydion: For the most part, when I’m collaborating with Steve, I outsource the broad strokes to him, then help to fill in the fine details and missing bits. We also spend a great deal of time interviewing people. (Steve Martin and Randy Rainbow have been two of our favorites.)

When I’m writing a play, my research is haphazard. I know so many writers to research first, then write, relying on the heap of facts they’ve amassed to fuel their work like a cord of wood chopped for a winter-long fire. Me, I like to write until I need to know something, then go figure out whatever I don’t understand. I begin with the creative impulse, then reach for facts when I need them. Of course, very often those facts then derail what I’ve written by being stubbornly different than I expect, but that’s just an opportunity to try a fresh direction.

Robert: You’re an artist, but you also support artists as the director of PEN/Faulkner. What is that organization and what is your role?

Gwydion: PEN/Faulkner champions the breadth and power of fiction in America. Now that I’ve fulfilled my obligation and shared our mission statement…

We are a 40+ year-old literary nonprofit that is most well known for giving out the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. We also hold public literary programs in DC where we’re based, virtually, and (starting this year) in other cities as well. Here at home we also bring free books, author visits, and writing instruction into under-served DC schools. In fact, that’s the largest share of work: ensuring that young people have access to fiction and can see themselves represented in culture.

As for my role: I’ve been the Executive Director for about five years now, which means I do, well, a bit of everything. Drumming up financial support for the organization (which is jobs one through nine), representing PEN/ Faulkner in various public capacities, and a lot of nuts and-bolts stuff, from insurance to legal to accounting, that takes up more time than I ever expected coming into the job.

Jeffrey: You’re also the project director of the New Play Exchange for the National New Play Network. What is that and who are the Welders?

Gwydion: The New Play Exchange is the world’s largest database of scripts by living writers and a platform for connecting theater makers to each other and to the resources they need to do their work. At the moment, our library includes about 56,000 scripts by more than 12,000 writers living in 30+ different countries, as well as profiles for almost 30,000 theater professionals and organizations.

The NPX, as we call it, is a project sponsored by the National New Play Network, and I serve as the director of that project, which really means I’m the chief architect and evangelist. (The NPX was inspired by an article I wrote back in 2012 calling for a database of scripts to serve the theater field.) I oversee the development of new features, and I travel all over teaching people about how to use the NPX and benefit from what it offers. I am very proud to say that more than two million people all over the world have access to the NPX, and over the 9+ years since we launched it, it has completely changed how theater professionals work and connect with each other.

The Welders is a DC-based nonprofit playwright collective that I co-founded (with four other playwrights and one creative director) about ten years ago. When we established the organization, our mission was to produce one play by each of us over three years, then give The Welders away—website, board of directors, bank account, and all—to a new generation of artists. (Three years, five plays pass it on. That was our motto.) That second generation gave it to a third generation, and the third generation gave it to a fourth group just a few months ago. (My cofounders and I had great-grandchildren!) Our most fervent wish when we started was to create a lasting platform to support DC playwrights who came up after us, and so far, I think we’ve succeeded.

Robert: The intersection of the arts and technology. Are we getting into AI territory here? And if so, do you have misgivings about how AI may change the cultural landscape?

Gwydion: Oh, definitely not AI. Mostly what I speak about nowadays is the New Play Exchange, though for a while I gave talks about social media, the way that agile software development principles might inform the making of theater, and digital branding.

I try not to be reactionarily or reflexively opposed to new technologies. In fact, as might be obvious, I’ve been inclined to embrace technological change my entire life. Having said that, something about AI just scares me. Perhaps it’s a fear exacerbated by ignorance, but I worry about AI diluting our culture, making it more bland and universal and functional, less rich and complex and diverse.

Jeffrey: A little literary bird told us that you’re guffawing over your keyboard these days writing a book about the rich tradition of Jewish comedy. We want to know more. Please, fill us in.

Gwydion: This is my big project with Steve. We’re working on a book about the history of Jewish American comedy from Rube Goldberg to the present day, and we are having a great time. Steve and I have been thinking and talking and laughing about comedy our entire lives, so the work is coming so naturally.

It’s also an opportunity for the two of us, as Jews, to represent our culture in a new way. Comedians have been the most exhaustive chroniclers of Jewish American life, we think, over the last hundred years, and you can learn a lot (and have a ton of fun along the way) by comparing Fanny Brice and Randy Rainbow, Lenny Bruce and Lena Dunham, the Marx Brothers and Mel Brooks and Mrs. Maisel. In all that time, Jews have been using comedy as a way of greasing the social skids of acceptance, moving from outsiders in the American hierarchy to a kind of off-White privilege (at least for those of us who are White), then in some cases abusing that privilege. There’s an immensely important story to be told, and we’re hopefully telling it.

“…for me, the process I rely on is deeply entwined with my subject matter, and I’m never following a formula when I make art.”