About the Play:
In Dance Lessons, diner employees Sue and Norm get ready for another dreary day of dreary work in a dreary world — until Norm reveals that he’s secretly been taking dance lessons.
About the Author:
Josh Koenigsberg’s work has been produced/developed at The Public Theater, The Atlantic Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, 2econd Stage, Ars Nova, Naked Angels, The Old Vic, Center Stage NY, Collective:Unconscious and the 2009 Broadway Pink Campaign at the American Airlines Theater. He is a founding ensemble member of At Play, the resident company for the 24-Hour Plays Off-Broadway, as well as a member of the Old Vic New Voices Network and The Dramatist’s Guild. His most recent play, Al’s Business Cards had an extended run at Theatre Row, was a New York Times “Critic’s Pick”, and named one of the 10 Best Off-Off Broadway Plays of 2009 by Nytheatre.com. It’s published in Plays and Playwrights 2010 edited by Martin Denton. He is currently one of the writers-in-residence in The Living Newspaper, as well as one of the staff writers for “Naked Radio” a new radio show produced by Naked Angels Theater Company. Josh holds a M.F.A. in Playwriting from Columbia University and a B.A. in Philosophy and the Arts from Bard College.
Josh’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?
Josh Koenigsberg (JK): I wrote my first play in high school with my really good friend Simon. I went to this very progressive New York City private school with a great theater program where they let the seniors direct plays as “senior projects” in the black box theater. But they wanted us to direct the work of established playwrights, so I lied and said the play was written by a Swedish writer named Yan Putzenberg. They knew I was lying though because the title of the play was Relatively Funny Or Mr. Nipple and The Tushie Brigade, which didn’t sound particularly Swedish. Thankfully they let us do it anyway.
As for my proudest accomplishment thus far, it definitely has to be seeing my play Al’s Business Cards go up this past summer off-Broadway at Theatre Row. It was especially meaningful for me because I wrote it for my good friend Azhar Khan who was the star of both Mr. Nipple and The Tushie Brigade and Al’s Business Cards. So we came full circle.
OOB: Can you talk a little bit about your current work as a writer for The Living Newspaper, as well as your work as a correspondent for Naked Angels. How did you come to work in these positions? What kind of work are you reporting on? How have these theatre-journalist roles affected your own work as a playwright?
JK: Yeah writing for both the The Living Newspaper and the Naked Angels radio show has definitely influenced my work as a playwright just because both outlets forced me to write in forms I never had before. Laura Savia (who had previously directed a couple of my plays) and Anthony Francavilla asked me to join when they started the project a year ago. Their goal was to dramatize real-life news stories without pushing some sort of pedagogical agenda about them. This was difficult for me at first because I didn’t know what the word “pedagogical” meant. But once I looked it up, the process became really exciting as it forced me to write about some strange and unusual stories that posed these compelling ethical dilemmas. One of my favorite pieces that we did was based on this horrifying true story where a teenage girl committed suicide because she was bullied on myspace by a teenage boy, who wasn’t a teenage boy at all, but actually her friend’s mother. It was just this really bizarre, really emotional story that we did massive amounts of research about to try to do it dramatic justice. We’re supposed to have a full-production later in the year at A.R.T. in Harvard, so check out The Living Newspaper Facebook page for more info.
As for Naked Radio, I was lucky enough to be asked to join when my friend Andy Donald was named associate artistic director for Naked Angels. He immediately wanted to start an emerging writer’s group, but one that offered something different from all other writer’s groups. So he and producer Brittany O’Neill came up with this idea to do an old-fashioned variety radio show because it was cheap and it allowed playwrights to work quickly and collaboratively as if they were in a professional writer’s room. Some pieces run 30 seconds while others run 30 minutes.
But what’s really great about it is that it’s not just an exercise — it’s a real show that will have real consequences for us if it does well. So please go to www.nakedangels.com and download the podcast. There will be new episodes starting in June.
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 the festival audience will take from your play?
JK: This particular play was inspired by an exercise that Chuck Mee had us do in my playwriting class at Columbia’s M.F.A. program. Chuck used to come in with these great exercises where he would tell us to think of an artist or a piece of art from another discipline – it could be painter, a sculpture, a chef, whatever – and use it as inspiration for a play. Mine was this Merce Cunningham dance piece that I had seen awhile back during college.
I didn’t really ‘get’ it at the time, but then it just sort of stuck with me and I would keep seeing images from it reflected in my everyday life, and finally about five years later I had this revelation where I thought “Well what’s there to ‘get’? I clearly loved it,” and so I tried to write a play about this unexpected weird little beautiful dance interlude in an otherwise normal dreary day that completely changes the outlook of the characters involved. Hopefully an audience will feel that journey and who knows? Maybe in five years they’ll even decide they liked it.
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?
JK: It was originally presented as a showcase for my writing class at Columbia in a very barebones way. But the thing was there’s only a man and a woman in it and my male actor had to drop out at the last minute so I had to play the part which meant I had to dance in front of people which meant I had to grow a beard for the show so that as soon as it was over, I could shave it off so people wouldn’t recognize me and go, “Hey, you’re that horrible dancer guy that was just miscast in that play.” So I’m really excited about this production. A good friend of mine is a fantastic dance choreographer so it’ll be super exciting to hone and craft the dance sequence with her. I could never be a dancer and I could never be a blacksmith.
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?
JK: My “producer” is actually this company called At Play which I’ve been a part of since it got started about three years ago. We got together by chance – we were all selected to do a 24 Hour play (where you write, rehearse and mount a play in the span of 24 Hours) at The Atlantic Theater back in July of 2007. There were about forty writers, directors, actors, and producers chosen by the 24 Hour Company and The Old Vic New Voices program and we all liked each other so much that we decided to keep making stuff together. Whenever I write something I immediately think of casting At Play actors and of working with an At Play director, all the while wondering what the other At Play writers and the producers will think of it. It’s a great support group. We’re now the resident off-Broadway company of the 24 Hour Plays, so we do one every year with special celebrity guests. This year we’re doing one on June 28th at Theatre Row. You should really come.
OOB: You’ve talked a little about At Play, which has obviously been incredibly positive; can you elaborate on the collaborative elements of the company? Do members ever team write and if so, what is that experience like? How would you advise playwrights to form or go about joining a group like At Play? What are some of the lessons you’ve learned from being a part of a member-based production company?
JK: So far we’ve only done one piece where we all actually wrote collaboratively. It was called “Work” and it went up at Ars Nova as part of the A.N.T. Fest last year. It was about different characters in different lines of work who are all in this weird support group that forces them to act out their daily work rituals in order to examine what their jobs mean to their identities. It was written by four writers and directed by two directors and was just a ton of fun. Even though we didn’t write in the same room, there was this sense of cohesion when it all came together because we had come up with a premise that was open to everyone’s very differing styles.
That’s sort of the most important thing and the hardest thing about writing collaboratively I think — coming up with an idea that is somehow specific yet all-inclusive. We’re planning on doing another piece like that called “The Gallery Plays” where all of our actors will do interrelated monologues in different parts of an art gallery, as if forming one large exhibit. But yeah, I would say most good ideas come from just drinking together and hanging out. So I would recommend that if a playwright wants to work collaboratively, he or she should find several other playwrights to drink with. I for one will be at the bar nightly.
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?
JK: So during one of my summers off from college, I went to work as an ASM/PA/General-errand-boy for this great little theater company in Rockland County, New York called Penguin Rep. They put up plays in this amazing barn that they renovated and turned into a beautiful theater. Well one day during the first act of a matinee, an elderly woman apparently lost control of her bowels and proceeded to defecate all over the rustic floor in a desperate attempt to make it to the bathroom in time. This really happened.
I, of course, was the one who had to clean it up. I actually didn’t mind that much because I knew that I would be telling this story for the rest of my life. But what really moved me about the whole thing was that she came back for the second act. I remember thinking to myself, “Man…no one would ever do that for a movie. Theater must be pretty magical if you’re willing to sit in your own stink just experience it.”
