About the Play:
A fiercely stubborn mother and daughter gambol in and out of each other’s memories, each searching for light.
About the Author:
Josh Sohn has been writing for as long as he can remember. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Saltmag.net, Gelf Magazine, and various other publications. His plays have been performed by Flux Theatre Ensemble, Packawallop Productions’ The Pack, Tip My Cup’s 24 Hour Quickie Festival, Young Playwrights’ Group, and the Where Eagles Dare studios. Last summer, his play, Jump, was a finalist in the Strawberry Festival and was performed in the Awards Ceremony at Symphony Space. He is thrilled to be participating in the Samuel French OOB Festival. He currently lives in Brooklyn.
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?
JS: I studied fiction in college. Dark, brooding, conflict-based short stories mostly. It was depressing. And lonely. So one day I decided to try something else. Something more collaborative. Something that allowed me to sit inside the audience and laugh, wince, fidget right along with them. It’s the worst and the best and the most brutal and electric and stirring when it works and also when it doesn’t. I hope to continue at it for a very long time.
My proudest moment as a playwright came during a festival I participated in recently. The play was supposed to be funny, but people weren’t laughing. Not enough. So without thinking things all the way through, I rewrote the better part of the play. Convincing the actors to believe in the new material wasn’t easy, but in the end they agreed. The play went on to achieve enormous international acclaim! (Well, not really, but I do think it was funnier.)
OOB: We’ve had several playwrights come from strong fiction backgrounds. How do you think being first exposed to fiction informs your work as a playwright? Is there any cross-over in terms of the way you approach a new work or idea? Have you abandoned fiction and poetry altogether for playwriting, or are your still working in multiple-genres?
JS: I do still play with short stories I’ve written from time to time. And, uh, poems, if they can even be called that – napkins and receipts bearing little chunks of momentary inspiration, mostly rendered incoherent or worse over time. With few exceptions, the stories stay carefully hidden in the nether-regions of my computer. I figure they’re safest there, tucked away, out of sight.
The initial lure of playwriting as an alternative to fiction came out a fear of solitude. I mean, the actual writing will almost always happen alone no matter what form you’re working in, but staging things, collaborating etc. scared me less, I suppose, than doing all that work on my own. Any writer will tell you that even when things are at their best creatively, one struggles to silence the inner voices. That characters don’t shut up when you ask them to. (Frankly, it only seems to rile them.) Being alone with one’s constructions can be invigorating, but it’s also usually enervating. And sometimes terrifying. Maybe that’s most true when the words are flowing. And so with theatre there seems to be more of an opportunity to unload. To let go of material. Perhaps it’s that when actors/directors read words I’ve written, the words are no longer mine. The people I’ve made up or, well, appropriated to say things truly forget their parentage the second someone else speaks for them. So try as I might to hang on, it’s just not possible. And I like that. Frankly, I need that reset button or I go crazy.
With fiction, I never felt that. Plus the tinkering could never really end with stories in the way that it has to with plays. I suppose there’s a thrill that comes with actually seeing your syntax exactly as you conceived it, but to me that sensation pales in comparison to sitting amidst an audience and feeling them feel you. Or feeling them feel nothing. Or watching them experience something antithetical to what you intended. You just can’t get that in fiction. Well at least, I never figured out how.
On a more technical level, I still struggle mightily with exposition in my plays. People mostly tell me they’re confused as to what’s going on in my plays. Sometimes they’re intrigued, determined to piece it all together, fill in gaps on their own, but sometimes they’re just irritated. I’ve always assumed that confusion comes out of me being used to being able to add chunks of prose as necessary. Those all important clarifying expositional passages. The glue. That’s much harder in theatre. Unless you’re one of those monologuers. Stage direction too. I get lost sometimes and then come to with a start when I remember that directors mostly redact all that crap anyway.
But I definitely still see the plays more than I hear them and I’m sure I write to that end to some extent. Maybe that’s having started in fiction, maybe that’s me not yet knowing how theatre works.
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 audiences will take from your play?
JS: Laid Plans began as a monologue. It was Wilkie alternately recounting and reenacting her oh-so-arduous life. With each round of revisions, the characters she described grew more vivid until, one day, Mom exploded forth into a speech of her own. The choice was simple: either concoct a series of interconnected monologues or find a way to bring the characters themselves, in all their glorious awkwardness, into Wilkie’s tale. To me, it’s a play about missed connections and the lengths we go to in order to avoid taking responsibility for our actions. And ego-fortification. I hope that it rattles people enough to reconsider, however briefly, the costs of isolation.
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?
JS: Laid Plans has never been formally staged or produced, but it has been read and workshopped a handful of times in its various iterations. I love these characters and can’t wait to unleash them still further.
OOB: Tell us a little about your producer? How did you come to form your relationship together?
JS: Boomslang, my producer, is the theater and literary wing of the Brooklyn-based arts and media collective, Goddamn Cobras. Their aim is to connect with innovative creators in other fields (video, photography, food, dance, music) to harness a spirit of community and interdisciplinary collaboration in North Brooklyn (Greenpoint, Williamsburg). Largely, they try to create performance experiences that are equally accessible to non-theater folks by finding non-traditional theater spaces and evoking an organic, yet unconventional aesthetic.
I met two of the founding members, Elizabeth Nolan Brown and Katie Henner, during a 24-hour play festival last fall. They invited me to their bi-weekly writer’s group in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and over the last several months it’s become a space in which to take risks and experiment with our work. Every week is a chance to focus and develop our projects further.
OOB: Your producer, Boomslang, is used to producing theatre works in non-traditional spaces. How curious as to how this production philosophy can translate to a more traditional theatrical space. Can you talk a little about how the production process has been, thus far? Have you explored non-traditional spaces in your own writing? Do you have any plans to?
JS: I can’t really answer this one yet as production hasn’t begun in earnest. But the teaser is amazing and not at all what I envisioned while still somehow being exactly right. I’m excited about Laid Plans specifically because it’s wackier than most of what I’ve written, and probably harder to stage too. Boomslang will absolutely breathe fire into it.
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?
JS: Big River. [The musical based on the adventures of Huckleberry Finn.] Seeing it at ripe age of 10. Singing along with the record at home later in my blue-footed pj’s. Wanting to write something one day that could excite people in that way… And also playing the Centipede in a 6th grade production of James and the Giant Peach.
Watch a Video Trailer for Laid Plans:
“Laid Plans” Teaser Trailer from Boomslang on Vimeo.
