About the Play:

In Play #4, dreams of marital murder inspire the reinvention of physical love between an older married couple. But when a neighborly coitus interruptus threatens their re-discovered love, their lust become bloodlust as they must choose to answer society’s norms and fight to stay together or go back to sedate retirement.  

About the Author:

As an actor, Harley Adams has worked on Broadway: Les Miserables, A Thousand Clowns, A Christmas Carol; National tours: Ragtime, Les Miserables. Film: The House is Burning (prod. Wim Wenders), Spring Breakdown; TV: SNL, Late night with Conan O’Brien, Sesame Street. Solo singing at Kennedy Center. As a playwright, 2006 winner of Samuel French OOB Festival with Play #3, as well as winner of the National Young Playwright’s Award. He would like to thank the cast and crew for this experience. Harley is currently a student at Stanford University where he is finishing up his B.A. in Art History and M.A. in History.

Harley’s Forty Days to Forty Plays Interview:

OOB Festival (OOB): Tell us a little about your playwriting career. When did you start writing plays? What are some of your proudest accomplishments as a playwright?

Harley Adams (HA): I started writing plays sitting on the floor of the New York public library reading Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet. Just knowing that you could use language that way, set me off on a track I’ve never turned back from. I would say that really cracked my head open, changed the way I sat on the subway. But it happened again and again from Albee to Pinter to Ionesco to Lonergan, and even in the audience at the Samuel French Festival.

I love feeling that the way you understand or hear language has been reformatted by these writers; it makes it exciting to go out into everyday life, as an observer, a listener. I grew up in the theater as an actor, so for me to start trying to critically understand how I could create language and character instead of just recreate them was a great new adventure.

The greatest accomplishment I could ever think of would be not be to be considered like these writers, copying them, but rather to be among them. So far though, I consider my greatest accomplishment to be every time someone in the audience really and truly laughs, but then feels slightly disturbed for laughing, but then laughs again and then erases, at least for the remainder of the show, what their definition of disturbing is.

OOB: You are, to my knowledge, the youngest OOB winner in history (I’ve heard that you were 17 when you won, is that correct?). To other playwrights in the pre-18 age bracket, can you give some advice as to how to go about producing a play? What kind of resource did you use?

HA: I think that all you need to playwright is good people around to inspire you. Usually I find these people are playwrights, and I always say that writing occurs for me in two settings, sitting alone in my room at night, and sitting around a small table of playwrights with a script. I was lucky enough to find a wonderful place for that when I first started writing, which was Manhattan Theatre Club’s Write Now! program, which was a writers workshop but for kids my age. This program can’t come under any higher recommendations from me, and I thank David Shukhoff, Chris Ceraso, and David Auburn for giving me my start in writing, in the most exciting way possible. Whether or not you find this resource around you though, as a young playwright, just go see theatre. Go see anything you can, good or bad, and just soak it in. And go to your library and check out every play they have. I think one thing that’s easy to forget when you start playwriting is to read plays; to see what drama looks like on the page, to immerse yourself in the format in which you venture, and to see what the spoken word looks like typed out. After all, when you are at your desk writing, your words will not come out of actors’ mouths; they will come off the page. So I think making yourself comfortable with this representation is important, and often inspiring.

I think you can make a writer’s group anywhere, that aspect of playwriting is so wonderfully simple and requires so little. Go get some friends together who like to write and say let’s sit down together every week and read each others work. No pressure, no performance, just fellow writers. For myself I need that kind of discipline, an outlet. When I’ve been living in a place where I couldn’t find a writers group, I have done exactly that, even if it means convincing friends to be playwrights when they weren’t before. If you’ve got the spark, go out and do it.

As far as producing a play, for new or young writers like me, I suppose this too comes organically out of the situation and those around you. It may seem like such an unmanageable burden at first, but it really is the last concern. If you work on the play first, and work passionately with those around you, I think you always find people that want to get involved and that you want to be involved with, the right people for the show, and suddenly it’s not your play, but our play. This is a wonderful transition, and I think if you have the right intentions with your art, it happens unfailingly. So when the time actually comes to carry the burden of the show, your not on your own, but surrounded by people. And then it’s real theatre.

OOB: Talk about your entry to this year’s festival. How did you come to write this play? Was there a particular inspiration behind its creation? What do you hope festival audience will take from your play?

HA: I wrote this play in India, over many nights sitting in the café in the bottom of the Taj Mahal hotel in Bombay. I wasn’t staying the hotel, but I would go there to drink coffee and write as it was open all night. Occasionally guests of the hotel would come up and ask me what I was writing, and after telling them the subject of the work they would usually leave immediately, which was very convenient. I’m not sure how this influenced or inspired the play, but I’m sure it did somehow.

It started with a scene about a dream, by which I suppose I was interested in a sort of anti-Freudian dream analysis-effect, whereby perhaps dreams have an effect on real life not by an imbedded psychological inevitabilities, but because someone is so freaked out by the possibility of dreams meaning something in real life, that they make it mean something.

I guess the best thing for a festival audience to take from this play would be to go home and fall back in love with their loved one, in the weirdest, most bizarre way possible. That I think would be a real accomplishment.

OOB: What is the history of your festival entry? Do you plan to hone and further develop the play in upcoming rehearsals? Has it already been produced?

HA: So far this work has a very virtual history; it was written alone and wasn’t shown to  anyone, sitting on the computer for a few months before being brought to light, and since then only a handful of people have read it. It was read and edited in a small writer’s group, and I owe a great deal of gratitude to Chris Ceraso, for his help and guidance, and the writers in the group for bearing with it. It has not been produced in any form yet, and perhaps more than anything else I’ve written, I’m really excited to see it.

OOB: On two of your submissions this year as well as your published Play #3, you’ve opted not to conventionally title your plays, and in this year’s festival selection, Play #4, you do not name your characters either: they are called “1”, “2”, and “3”. Please talk a little about the logic or thought behind this. Is this a conscious decision? Have you always titled you plays by number?

HA: When most people ask about that, I just say ‘why not’. It does stem from a real place, but as you observed it’s been a habit for a while, so I feel a little temporally removed from the original intentions. But albeit, I still love the blankness about it; I love the idea of coming into the theatre and sitting down in your seat and not knowing what’s going to happen when the lights go up. More than that though I think especially when I first started writing I really believed in words. And I really wanted to challenge myself to only trade in words, to only use that as my medium of expression. I thought, and still think, that any play should be able to stand only on its dialogue, on its very language. This is at base the playwright’s debt to the stage, words for actors’ mouths. So I really wanted to see if I could challenge myself to learn in this way, I felt that if I could get the words down, if I could make that work, then everything else would follow. No stage directions, no character descriptions, no set design, no blocking, no emotional instruction, just words. I really enjoy the experience of reading Greek plays, where even though we don’t know how they were written down, when presented to us they come so bare, so minimal. No directions or intentions, just words.

I also think in a more practical way that those things are better left up to the people you produce the play with, as there are certainly more talented people than me out there to tell a character what to wear, or tell an actor where to move, or where to put a sofa on the stage. I guess I followed that strict love of minimal creation to an almost humorous point with the lack of titles or character names. I also I think was taking something from people that inspired me; one of my favorite artists in high school, Robert Raushenberg, had titles his pieces “combines”. El Lissitzky the Russian avant-garde artist had numbered them as well. The Japanese experimental noise-band the Boredoms had titled their tracks with symbols. I felt maybe that this was waiting to happen in theatre, that we were holding on to our names too strongly, letting them mean too much. I probably will have titles someday, I don’t think I feel as militant about now as I did before, or as resistant. It was never a very violent rebellion for me though, it was much more casual—I just sort of like the ring to it: play number so-and-so. And it’s always fun to hear people invent their own titles, I love that. Because of course they never use your abstract minimal non-title system, they just want it to be comfortable, whether they call play of mine “the one with the—” or they call Rauschenberg’s work “the piece with the yak and tire”.

In a way this lets them tell you what your play is about, and who knows, maybe the audience is a more entitled party to give a name to something than its author; maybe in a way because of their relationship with it, they know more about it than you do. And keeping no character names offers an anonymity I really like, where you feel like the characters could be anyone. But really that just comes from what I started doing when I first began writing, which I think is one of the best exercises you can do, to begin your session by sitting down at your desk with a blank page and writing words between two people, about whatever first comes to your head, with no names, no setting, no anything, just dialogue. It’s not only a fantastic warm up, but even now this is how most of the plays I have written that make it to the stage were started. Even with all the others dressings upon them in their final presentation, at their heart this is always what they are, words shared between two strangers on a page.

OOB: Tell us a little about your producer? How did you come to form your relationship together? If you are self-producing, please talk a little about that process—have you ever mounted your own work before?

HA: I believe that theatre is a fiercely collaborative art, and thus I relish in the distinct pleasure of retreating into the background as much as possible during rehearsals and production as a playwright. I very much love having it become someone else’s baby. This is for two reasons: first, I think the only way for a play to become great, and not just good, is for it to be freely given to someone else’s vision. As a playwright sitting at a blank page, you have complete and utter freedom of vision. I think that a director and producer also deserve and need this, looking at a blank stage. Secondly, it is much more fun to see it and be completely surprised when it comes out. This is a wonderful playwright’s joy. I am so grateful for the hard work and artistry of the director and cast, and nothing brings me more excitement than to work with fantastic people on some crazy vision from a café in India, until it’s their vision and not my own, and they’re showing me what I didn’t know was there all along.

OOB: Looking back over your personal history in the theatre, what emerges as your favorite memory? Is there a particular story you’d like to share?

HA: For me my favorite memories in the theatre range from watching rats running across the stage in a curtain call off-off-off-Broadway, to seeing Les Miserables in the West End for my 8^th birthday, to getting a signed ukulele from my castmate Tom Selleck, to going to Shakespeare in the Park every year, to watching my sister’s plays performed. But in this context one of my favorite memories is a little simpler, and fittingly something that OOB gave me.

A couple of years ago, when my first play was in the Samuel French Festival, it won that night it was in, but I was not there to see it unfortunately; I was in California. I got a message on my phone the next day when I woke up, from the director Paul J. Michael, who said, “Hey Harley, you’re now a published playwright”, and the smile it brought to my face I don’t think has ever been wiped off. To me the most exciting thing today is the opportunity to present again this year, and see great theatre.