About the Play:
In a small interview room, in a large airport, Aviation Safety Investigator Connor attempts to find out what went wrong on Flight 238.
About the Author:
EM Lewis won the 2009 Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award from the American Theater Critics Association for her play Song of Extinction, which premiered in Los Angeles, produced by Moving Arts at [Inside] the Ford. The play also won the Ashland New Plays Festival, University of Oregon’s EcoDrama Festival, the Ted Schmitt Award for the premiere of an outstanding new play from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle, and Production of the Year from the LA Weekly Awards. It was published in Dramatics Magazine in January, and in an acting edition from Samuel French in March 2010. Lewis also wrote the Iraq War hostage drama Heads (winner of the 2008 Primus Prize for an emerging woman theater artist, and Best of 2007 from the Los Angeles Times) and Infinite Black Suitcase (about grief and redemption in rural Oregon). Lewis is a member of Moving Arts Theater Company, the Dramatists Guild, the International Centre for Women Playwrights and the Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights. She is originally from Oregon, lived in Los Angeles, California for quite a while, and is now headed for Princeton, New Jersey, where she has received a 2010-2011 Hodder Fellowship in playwriting.
EM’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?
EM Lewis (EML): I’ve always written, ever since I can remember — poetry and fiction. But I didn’t start writing plays until after college. I took a class in my old graduate writing program at USC six or eight years ago – a two week intensive with Paul Zindel, then the rest of the term with Lee Wochner. It was a wonderful class, and all the lights went off in my head. This! This was what I wanted to do with my life! I’ve written almost nothing but plays since then.
Some of my proudest accomplishments as a playwright: each production is such a gift — all these people, coming together in the darkness to bring to life a story that I thought up in my head and struggled to put down on paper. I’m particularly proud of winning the 2008 Primus Prize (for Heads) and the 2009 Steinberg/ATCA Award (for Song of Extinction), both selected by the American Theater Critics Association. Winning Production of the Year at the LA Weekly Awards was amazing — what a wonderful night of celebration! Having Mr. Edward Albee, whose work and life in the theater I respect so much, see a reading of my play “Heads” at the Great Plains Theater Conference. The publication of Song of Extinction in Dramatics Magazine, then by the wonderful folks at Samuel French. And the Hodder Fellowship, which is allowing me to quit my day job and concentrate on my writing for the 2010-2011 academic year at Princeton University.
OOB: Congratulations on your Hodder Fellowship! For those readers who might not be familiar with the fellowship, can you talk a little bit more in detail about it? What do you hope to achieve during your time as a Hodder fellow?
EML: Thank you! I am amazed, honored and delighted to have received a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University for the 2010-2011 academic year. From the website: “The Hodder Fellowship was created for artists in the early stages of their careers…Typically, Hodder Fellows are poets, playwrights, novelists, creative nonfiction writers and translators who have published one highly acclaimed book and are undertaking significant new work that might not be possible without the “studious leisure” afforded by this fellowship. Hodder Fellows spend an academic year at Princeton pursuing independent projects.” Basically, they are giving me a year to write. I am very, very grateful. Beginning in September, I’ll be living in Princeton, New Jersey and working on a new full-length play called “Magellanica: A New and Accurate Map of the World,” which I already have well underway. I hope to continue to research the play, write like crazy, and finish a draft I can be proud of while I’m there.
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?
EML: I started writing The Incident Report in an airplane, with one arm covering what I was scribbling, so as not to worry the person sitting next to me. I’d been doing a lot of flying, and experiencing everything that goes along with flying these days: the security procedures, the anxiety, the heightened awareness of the other people in the plane with me. I found myself planning what I’d do if something happened on the plane. If someone tried something. Ridiculous. Right? But it’s what I was thinking. It’s much easier to think up what you’d *want* to do if something happened, though, than it is to deal with the messy reality of a situation gone wrong.
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?
EML: The Incident Report is a fairly new play. It received its world premiere in the fall, when my home theater company in Los Angeles, Moving Arts, produced an evening of my one-acts that we entitled Flight. I worked with my director, Lee Wochner, and my wonderful actors throughout the rehearsal process — re-writing and re-working the play — to bring it to its present form. I’m looking forward to delving back into the rehearsal process with it.
OOB: At Samuel French, we are mostly familiar with you as a writer of long form plays. Do you write many short form works? What is it about the story to THE INCIDENT REPORT that made you decide to pen it as a short work?
EML: I’ve written quite a few short plays — mostly ten-minute plays, but also several one-acts — that have been read and produced across the country, and as far away as Canada, China and South Africa. Award-winners include The Edge of Ross Island (UMBC IN10 at University of Maryland, Baltimore County — and just published in Eleven Eleven Literary Journal), The Last Four Things My Father Held Against Me (Fire Rose Productions’ Ten-Minute Play Festival in North Hollywood, CA) and Partners (SLAMBoston at Another Country Productions in Boston, MA). Lend Me a Mentor is my most produced and most well-traveled ten-minute play — it’s a comic and literary two-hander about a struggling young woman writer who is trying to force a curmudgeonly old writer to be her mentor at one of his book signings.
Short plays are fun to write. I wrote a lot of them as I was learning how to write, because they allowed me a space where I could try things out to see if they worked — bold, theatrical things. Crazy ideas, political rants, scary ideas, physical impossibilities, what-ifs that were driving me crazy, writing challenges set by others (can you set it in a bar? can you set it in a car?). I continue to write them while I work on longer plays, and in between full-lengths. It’s good to always be writing something. Maybe three or four things. Playwrights in motion tend to stay in motion. The story itself decides how long it should be, not me. And something about The Incident Report felt sharp and fast and intense to me. A single moment in time, unraveled. A single decision, weighed against morality and consequence.
OOB: Tell us a little about your producer?
EML: Being both playwright and producer also allows me to select people to work with who I love and trust. I’m delighted to be working with director Darin Anthony on The Incident Report. He helmed the world premiere of my Iraq hostage drama Heads at the Blank Theater in Hollywood, CA (Best of 2007, Los Angeles Times), and we’ve worked together regularly ever since. I’ve worked with all of my actors before, too. Stephanie Erb acted in Leonard’s Voice in the Car Plays at Moving Arts. Peter James Smith has worked with me on multiple projects, including workshopping a full-length called Catch. Michael Shutt — well, he’s one of my usual suspects, for sure. He was one of the four directors on my very first full-length play (a workshop production of Infinite Black Suitcase at Moving Arts), and he’s been a go-to director, producer and actor for me ever since. He played Ellery (a biologist) in the world premiere of Song of Extinction. All three actors were in the premiere of The Incident Report, and we’re very pleased to be bringing our Los Angeles production to your New York stage.
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?
EML: I remember very clearly working on my first full-length play, Infinite Black Suitcase, with the folks at Moving Arts, my home theater company in Los Angeles. The artistic director at the time was Paul Stein — and he’d asked me if the company could do a workshop production of the play, even though I wasn’t quite finished with it yet — even though it was a big sprawling Our Town sort of play — even though it was my very first play, and I didn’t really know what I was doing. When we had our first read-through, we could barely fit everyone into our little black box theater — the artistic director, four directors, fifteen actors and me… I went to rehearsals, I wrote and re-wrote different passages, I took notes from all my directors and tried to figure out what to do with them. It was exhausting and absolutely amazing. The ending wasn’t right for the longest time… and I remember driving along the 10 Freeway in Los Angeles, struggling with it, struggling, and then… a moment of clarity and mystery and wonder, when I knew, suddenly, what to do. It would be a moment of magic, in a play that had been very much in the real world, but I knew it was right. I asked for a rehearsal between the actors who would be in the last scene, now. As I showed them the new pages, as I tried to explain, as we worked together to make it happen… I think maybe that’s the moment I became a playwright.