About the Play:

In Christians Having Sex in Silence, two neighbors dare to reach out to each other, searching for common ground in a dystopian future.

About the Author:

Paul David Young won the Kennedy Center’s 2009 Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and was runner-up for the 2009 Kendeda Fellowship of the Alliance Theatre, Atlanta. His play Times and Places was performed in Icelandic in Reykjavik and in English in the La Mama E.T.C. “Experiments” reading series.  New York Theater Workshop (dir. Adam Greenfield, director of new play development, Playwrights Horizons), the Alliance Theater (dir. Freddie Ashley, artistic director, Actor’s Express), Primary Stages (dir. Carlos Armesto, associate artistic director, Ensemble Studio Theatre), and the Kennedy Center have presented readings of No One But You.  His play David & Ira will be produced in New York in 2010.  His play Aporia was given a public reading at the Living Theatre in December 2008, won third in the New Works of Merit International Playwriting Competition, and was presented in a reading in April 2009 at the Kennedy Center, where it was a finalist for the Cauble Short Play Award. Waking Up With Strangers was produced at the Kraine Theater, New York, June/July, 2009.  A collaborative performance/installation piece, Balcony Scene, was produced at the New York art gallery LMAK Projects in December 2008.  Fireplace Poker, a ten-minute play, premiered at the Kraine Theater in May 2010. He was the Berilla Kerr Foundation Fellow at the Millay Colony for the Arts in September 2009 and has been named a Djerassi Resident Artist for 2010.  He graduated from Yale College, Columbia Law School, and The New School for Drama, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Germany.  He has studied with Michael Weller, Christopher Shinn, Frank Pugliese, and Edward Allan Baker, among others.

His theater commentary includes “Advanced Forms of Emptiness: Handke and Jelinek in Berlin,” “Performing the Novel: Elevator Repair Service Reads The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner,” ”Technosurfing in Bloomsbury: Katie Mitchell’s The Waves, based on the novel by Virginia Woolf,” and “Picnic Realism: The Use of Comedy in Serious German Theatre” — all in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (MIT Press).  He is a regular performance critic for PAJ. He has been commissioned by the chamber orchestra The Metropolis Ensemble to write the libretto for a cantata to be composed by Raymond J. Lustig, 2009 Charles Ives Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Letters, to be presented in New York in the 2010-2011 season.  A portion of the libretto is published in the spring 2010 issue of Bomb magazine in a collaborative project.

Next up: The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) PS1 presents Balcony Scene 2010, a mixed media performance with the artist Franklin Evans, on September 11, 16, and 23, 2010.

Paul’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?

Paul David Young (PDY): I started writing plays when I was a child, organizing performances by the neighborhood kids in our garage.  Later, in grade school, I annually wrote a school play and commandeered the class to stage my creation.  My first was a scandalous, age-inappropriate Christmas satire.  I wrote a pro-British epic about the American Revolution that had a cast of fifty fourth-graders, whom I regularly took out of class to rehearse.  I’m not sure what the school was thinking, letting me get away with this.

My play No One But You has been given several readings, both in New York (New York Theater Workshop and Primary Stages) and other cities.  It has been wonderful for me to see how strongly and personally people have responded to the play, which deals with the trauma of surviving the AIDS epidemic.  Though the play is often funny and has the structure of a romantic comedy, its subject matter is unavoidably grave.  Survivors, whether of a disease or a war or a natural disaster, are left with holes in their lives and incomprehensible feelings of guilt and confusion that prevent them from going forward.  Many people have connected with the story of the play, straight and gay and of a variety of ages.  They have talked with me extensively after the readings and shared their stories about death and survival, sometimes for the very first time with anyone.  I received the Kennedy Center’s Paula Vogel Playwriting Award for the play and had the honor of receiving the award from Paula Vogel on the stage at the Kennedy Center.  It was also chosen as a runner-up for the Kendeda Fellowship of the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta.
 

 I co-curated an art exhibition called “Perverted by Theater,” about the intersection of theater and the visual arts, at apexart in New York.  The curatorial proposal was selected out of 250 submitted.  The show took as its theme the assertions by the critic Michael Fried who claimed that theater was the “perversion” or “negation” of art.  Negatively embracing his polarizing view of the epithet “theater,” we selected art for its theatricality and deployed it in the exhibition space using dramaturgical principles.  The show was commented upon in the New York Times which also recommended the show in its weekly listings, as did Time Out New York.  The show produced a lively dialogue about art, theater, and criticism.

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?

PDY: The play evolved from notes I made for a completely different project, the libretto I was writing for a cantata that will be performed in tandem with a Bach cantata (BWV No. 178: “Wo Gott der Herr nicht bei uns hält”), to which my libretto is a response.  While Bach’s music is ineffably beautiful, the text of his cantata is bad Baroque religious verse that stridently asserts the triumph of Lutheranism against the Catholic Church.  The divisive tone reminded me of the self-righteousness of some current religious factions and the suppression of speech and loss of civil rights in the era of terrorism.  I began to envision a possible future in a totalitarian Christian state and to think about what effect that would have on the transmission of culture and personal freedom.  I thought also of the analogous situation of the Taliban-controlled areas of the world and the kind of justice and attitude toward free speech that prevail under religious authorities guided by a literalist interpretation of a holy book.  With bombing attacks an increasingly frequent event in the contemporary world, I could well imagine an escalation of conventional warfare and terrorism that would destroy modern telecommunications and cause the collapse of the governments on a world-wide scale.  Characters began to emerge, inspired in part by an art installation I had seen a couple of years ago, which mocked the ideal of the white-picket-fence suburban ideal as a chilling falsehood, an appearance of perfection and values masking darker truths and much more complicated relationships.

I want to look at religion and spirituality from a political point of view and to provide an opportunity to consider the consequences of the compromises to ideals and rights that we seem to have accepted as a necessary evil.  I am specifically interested in thinking about what is happening to the values of the Enlightenment, which formed the philosophical underpinning of modern democratic societies and their educational systems.  At a meta-theatrical level, the play is also a commentary on the trend toward a nonliterary theater.  As a corollary, I am also concerned about the decline of literacy generally and the disappearance of a sense of political and cultural history.

OOB: Talk about your libretto a bit; is this your first venture into musical work? How is your approach to this type of project different to something like Christians Having Sex in Silence? What are some of the challenges you are facing with this project and how are you working to overcome them?

PDY: Yes, the libretto was my first venture into music. There was a very steep learning curve for me coming into it. I found that I began to listen to music differently, separating the text from the sound in order to see what the writer was doing and how the text related to the rhythms and duration of the music. It sounds quite obvious. I like to listen to music, like everyone else, but it became a different experience when I started thinking about how the text and music were put together and how they could be taken apart. When I go to the theater, I always perceive the experience, in essence, falling apart into its constituent elements as I analyze what happens and how that shapes the experience of the audience.

It was entirely new to me to look at vocal music this way, as a thing to be constructed. It was also an unusual writing experience, in that the text in a musical work plays most often a subordinate role, somewhat the opposite of its general primacy in theater. One extra difficulty for me is that I have an acute inability to hear sung text clearly and am often in the dark about the lyrics of any piece until I hear it several times. Remarkably, I share this peculiarity with the composer for the cantata, Ray Lustig. Although in writing for the theater, I sometimes write “lyrically,” it was another thing entirely when I realized that I would be writing lyrics. Though musical lyrics are a different animal entirely, the formal similarity led me to re-read some of my favorite poets and work my way through the English-language cannon of poetry. I researched the cantata form, when and how it evolved, and Bach’s use of that form. I was drawn to the project in part because of the interesting mixture of texts and musical settings that is characteristic of the cantata. I also read many libretti at the Lincoln Center library, e.g., Mozart, Haydn, Berg, Britten and others over a range of time. It was startling for me to read the libretti of major musical works and realize how short they are, and often how banal. The libretto for the Bach cantata (BWV 178) to which mine is a response is rather dreary and strident Baroque religious verse written in an arcane form of German, though, of course, when sung, the thing is glorious. The process required a lot of research and generated an abundance of random thoughts and misfires and the occasional good idea. I quite enjoyed it and am looking forward to hearing what Ray will do with the text.

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?

PDY: The play is relatively fresh.  I wrote it earlier this year.  I have been working further on it since I submitted it to the Festival.  I have taken the story and expanded it in various ways and look to make a full-length out of it.  It has not been produced.

OOB: Tell us a little about your producer? You are self producing; please talk a little about that process—have you ever mounted your own work before?

PDY: I have created performances for art spaces that may be said to have been self-produced.  In fact, I was director and writer and producer.  I also co-produced a play last summer, which I found to be painless.

OOB: Your bio also tells us that you are a regular performance critic with PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. How has your work as a critic and scholar impacted the way you approach your own work? What was the evolution of your work as both a playwright and critic: did you start as a critic and then move to theatre-creating or were you a playwright first? Did these two things evolve together?

PDY: Playwriting clearly came first, since I started as a child. The first criticism I can recall writing was for my home town newspaper, for which I worked as journalist and wrote movie reviews. In college, I took up criticism in a formal sense, immersing myself in literary theory. I started writing for PAJ a few years ago. I hope that it makes me a better playwright to look critically at performance and to analyze what appears to be working for me, the performers, and the other spectators. I have been especially drawn to “downtown” theater and theater that I have seen over the years in Germany, both when I was a Fulbright Scholar there and more recently in Berlin, where I spent some time at the Institut für Theaterwissenchaft. I enjoy writing criticism. It lets me write in a different way and think more analytically about making theater. It’s a truism to say that it’s easier to see the faults in someone else’s work but in a certain sense I always find seeing bad theater particularly edifying. The worse it is, in a way, the better, because it offers more examples of what can make the experience deadly. I also find that writing criticism has taught me a greater appreciation of the roles of other artists involved in the creation. Much of what I have written about is theater that is driven not by the writer but by the director or the collaboration of the company. Theater is a social medium in so many senses. It always exists in a social context and is the result of the collaboration of the artists and the spectators. Writing criticism is another aspect of this social context, and I am happy to have the opportunity to grapple with where the discourse about this medium is taking place and how my writing plays a role.

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?

PDY: I was once in LA and went to the theater, curious what that would be in Hollywood.  Brian Friel’s Faith Healer was being put on in a fairly small, nondescript, black box theater.  There are three characters in the play, and there were only five of us in the audience, seated in the round.  The atmosphere was immediately strangely intimate and collaborative.  We in the audience at once fell in league with the actors and the actors rewarded our support with immensely powerful performances.  It was an unexpectedly moving experience in such unpromising circumstances.  The memory is something I often come back to when I consider why theater survives as an art form.