About the Play:
In the volatile lands of the Palestinian Territories and on the night before his life is changed forever, Jaul is confronted by his dead lover, who raises questions about masculinity and honor in times of war.
About the Author:
Hailing from Cleveland, Andrew Kramer is a proud recent graduate of Ball State University’s Department of Theatre and Dance in Muncie, Indiana where he was the founder/president of Busted Space Theatre Company, Ball State’s student-run theatre company specializing in new works and non-conventional theatre performances. His original productions of Let’s Talk About and Medea were performed with Busted Space last year. He was a 2009 WordBridge semi-finalist and is a 2010 Core Apprentice Writer at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis.
Andrew’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?
Andrew Kramer (AK): Though relatively new to the world of playwriting, I’ve been a storyteller for as long as I can remember. I’ve always been an obsessive writer – every moment of every day scribbling fiction pieces and poetry in the notebooks in my pocket, but as a theatre lover, I always thought I’d like to be onstage. As I got older, I found myself drawn to the rhythms of organic poetry in people’s words and wanted to examine how we articulate, bury, exploit or solve our problems through words and actions.
Two of my plays, Swearing it Off and An Old Irish Blessing, got some attention in the Northern Ohio area and early in 2008, my play Bridge, was a part of Cleveland Public Theatre’s “Little Box” New Play Reading Series. From here, I started absorbing theatre. I saw all the plays I could and got my hands on every piece of writing available. Continuing onto Ball State University for my undergraduate degree, I was able to (with the help of many talented and amazing mentors) dedicate myself completely to the writing of plays. I plan to continue playwriting through to an MFA program.
As for accomplishments, I’d like to hope the best is yet to come, but since I’ve had a long-standing love-gaze on the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis because of all the bold work they offer to the theatre world, I was incredibly honored and very proud to be selected as a Core Apprentice Writer with them for the 2010 year.
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?
AK: The most intelligent woman/playwright/director/professor/mentor I know, Jennifer Blackmer, always says: “theatre lives within the question,” so whenever I begin thinking about a new play, I ask questions about the world in hopes that these questions may inform the piece. It’s the best advice I’ve ever received. Fueled by my passionate advocacy for Palestinian rights, I’ve always been interested in, inspired by, and curious about the survival muscles of those men and women living in the territories. I knew I wanted to write about this but I also wanted to explore the situation through a contemporary gay lens. What would life be life for homosexuals in such volatile times?
There are numerous accounts of homosexual men and boys being put to violent deaths because they are considered “perverted” and “disgusting.” Specifically, the story of the execution of Ayaz Marhouni and Mahmoud Asgari, two fifteen-year-old Arab Iranian boys (who may have been gay or may have just been sexually curious) is particularly startling. But most importantly, I had questions about the way masculinity always seems to be permeate the atmosphere of war, duty, honor and violence. Map of Our Country became my exploration of these things. I guess in a way, this play is a response to the current “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy as well. Why are men and women expected to sacrifice their lives for a country that won’t let them openly serve as homosexuals?
OOB: Your play deals with a difficult topic: the persecution of homosexuals in conservative Muslim countries. Ball State and Muncie, India are worlds away from your play’s setting; what kind of research did you do for your script? What was your journey in terms of finding a voice for these characters?
AK: The topic is pretty controversial, yes, but one that needs to be explored on stage. One of my goals with this play was to create such an intimate and compelling relationship between these two men that the story doesn’t get weighed down by heavy-handed politics. There’s a nice blend of the political being revealed through the personal and I think that makes the story accessible to people. Especially those people unaware of the real-life events the play addresses.
I know myself as a visual/audial writer, especially when beginning to write a new play, so for research, I listened to a lot of Arab music during preliminary work and would just stream-write monologues and scenes to the sounds. I needed to hear the voices of these men before I could start to chew on them and write them so I read a lot of personal accounts from Palestinians, especially those young men who become involved with Intifada uprisings or had been accused/tried/punished for homosexual actions. I’m also very lucky in terms of resources: my cousin is of Palestinian descent and a good friend of mine lives in Jordan with her Palestinian boyfriend. We’ve been in frequent contact (a HUGE help- thanks guys!) I really just immersed myself in the world that Jaul and Khaled, the two men of the play, would have lived in, so something I hope audiences pick up on is the rhythm of this piece. The Arab culture and language is so beautiful, it’s stunning poetry, and I wanted to incorporate a lot of the rumblings of that throughout the play.
But even further, I’ve been a long term advocate for Palestinian rights so I was pretty knowledgeable about the history and specifics of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict for some time. I still did a TON of more in-depth, story-specific research though, because I wanted to find the personalities and complexities of these characters so that they didn’t become avatars for political flag-waving. It’s not my intention to glorify, blame, condemn or bless any political cause or action, but to present some of these issues in a theatrical and dynamic way so that people are exposed to them. In many ways, I feel that the major conflict of the play isn’t culture or ethno-specific at all. It’s a question about the masculine connotations that accompany war and violence. It’s about honor, about betrayal, and about struggle.
OOB: Congratulations on your selection as a Core Apprentice Writer with the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis! Can you tell us more about this apprenticeship? What is expected of you during your time there? Are there any projects you plan on developing during your residency?
AK: I know I’m young and still have much more to experience in my theatrical endeavors, but The Playwrights’ Center is my current “happy place”. I’ve worked with them twice now and there’s just absolutely no experience like it. Everyone there- actors, dramaturgs, directors, staff, crew- has a real appreciation and passion for creating new works and it shows in everything they do. It’s incredible.
The Core Apprentice Program selects five emerging playwrights and provides them with an extensive workshop/development process for one of their works in progress. Before arriving in Minneapolis, the PWC asks the Core Apprentice writers to honestly evaluate their play by articulating goals and objectives of the workshop. This process alone is revealing enough, but then given a team of talented, dedicated actors and director, just really opens the door to so much creativity and collaboration. I love their process. While there, I worked with a team of incredible theatre artists on my play, The Dog(run) Diaries.
What I love most about the PWC is their willingness to accept the play on its own terms. Never once do the artists there tell you what to write, how to write it, or attempt to steer your play into some foreign direction. They work with you to support your vision of the play. The Dog(run) Diaries is a strange drama-sort-of-comedy about a young boy who sexually and intellectually pursues his older, resistant neighbor while using his imaginary pet dogs to deal with his father abandoning him, and the death of his sister, who appears to him in swim-gear and fears her death (that’s already happened). It’s a whirlwind. The team the PWC assembled for me was so supportive, diving right in, asking specific questions, discussing plot, character, action, convention and really supporting the piece with genuine interest and support. It was encouraging and collaborative and totally, absolutely necessary for the development of the piece.
The program is great because not many young writers get that kind of support- many theaters claiming to be “playwrights’ theatres” or theatres for “new work” often produce the same ten playwrights but Playwrights’ Center supports new work and gives you the resources necessary to really develop the play you want to write. You can’t possibly articulate the benefits of hearing actors read your play out loud and then discuss it with a creative team. This stage of development is vital to new work and the PWC offers it to emerging writers who may not have the opportunity otherwise. They take a real, genuine interest in new plays and it’s fantastic. I really look forward to working with the PWC again.
OOB: What is the history of your festival entry? Do you plan on to hone and further develop the play in upcoming rehearsals? Has it already been produced?
AK: A Map of Our Country finished in the final four selections at the playwriting competition at Western Michigan University earlier this year but has never been fully produced. The play actually began life as a short, two-page scene written for a playwriting class in which Character 1 and Character 2 deal with an item in a way that reveals something specific about their relationship: Jaul and Khaled emerged in an abandoned Israeli settlement building, arguing over a map. This catapulted into a whole complex system of questions that resulted in the play today.
The play, though a “finished” script (what does that even mean, really?) will undoubtedly undergo changes throughout the rehearsal process. I actually have the play open on my desktop now as I work on these questions, and am already change things here and there. Theatre is collaborative; I really respect (read: creatively thrive on) the opinions of directors and actors.
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?
AK: I had been working pretty intensely on a play that was very important to me for quite some time called The Dog(run) Diaries. The play concerns the emotional and sexual relationship of an older man/younger boy and is told through a post-modern gay lens involving summertime blizzards, talking dead sisters and imaginary canine friends. The play went through about 2,302,345,234,823 drafts before I thought there was something “there”. Upon sending it out to various places, I was given great feedback on the play and many great people said many nice things. The play went on to be accepted by The Playwrights’ Center Core Apprentice program to be further developed with actors, a director and a dramaturge and is currently looking for a production home!
