Rebecca Lynne Fullan (RLF): One of my early life ambitions was to be the first actress-who-wrote-her-own-plays on the moon. I haven’t yet reached that goal, but in 2005, my play Professor Dilexi Presents Dramatis Personae of the Apocryphal Menagerie was chosen for that year’s NY Fringe Festival, and was produced there and at the Philly Fringe Festival by Uncut Pages Theater Company.

One of the things I am proudest of as a playwright is that two actors have told me that their favorite parts were ones I’ve written.  Any time an audience member responded personally to me is also very special—really, anything that makes concrete the connections that have been forged and illuminated by my writing is something I take pleasure and pride in.

Also, one time a woman told me that the metaphysics of Dilexi (with that title, there have to be metaphysics, right?) corresponded to some kind of established alternate dimension in New Age circles.  I don’t know if I was proud of that or not, but it certainly stuck with me!

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?

RLF: I started writing The More-Than One as part of a writer’s workshop with other playwrights in Uncut Pages.  I wanted to explore how tough, passionate connections with other people change shape over time, and are both strained and maintained, and I wanted to do this with people who aren’t necessarily confrontational, with whom at least some of the politics of their relationship would be implicit.

I also wanted to explore the fullness of identity, and what happens when you relate to others outside of the boundaries of your every day self—that’s kind of what theater is, too, I think—and the character of Jack nimbly volunteered as said explorer.  I hope those in the festival audience will go home and play with their own wandering Jacks!  It is worth the risk.

OOB: The More-Than-One raises a lot of questions about gender, love, and sexual identity in relationships.  Did you have an agenda or particular message in mind when you began writing this play?  Was there any research involved in terms of developing the character of Maggie/Jack or is this a character that comes from a strictly fictional place?

RLF: Well… I guess I’d say that I had a lot of questions and hopes and fears when I started writing this play, about how deep connections between people work over time, and how they weather (or don’t weather) changes in the people’s lives.  And those connections and changes include, always, I think, multiple iterations of identity and selfhood, although they may not often manifest themselves so concretely in a Maggie/Jack kind of situation.  There’s also the idea that any close relationship is full of branching paths of possibility, more than can ever be explored, some of which contradict each other, but that the paths you don’t take contribute to the relationship as it grows and changes.

The fear, of course, which Maggie and Jess and Jack all share in different ways, is that none of this will work, and that somehow you will lose what you have had and what you could have, or maybe lose all the other bits of your life if you try to stay engaged in this important, somewhat mysterious connection.  The hope is that no matter what changes, it will work, you won’t lose what you’ve had.

As for the whole Maggie/Jack thing… which hopefully will also get us to your questions about gender and sexual identity and all… I didn’t look into any particular topic particularly for writing this play, nor do I see Maggie/Jack as some specific, nameable, perhaps pathological phenomenon.  The question of what they are and how they relate is an open one, one that for its own life and breath must, I think, remain somewhat open.  On the other hand, I have paid lots and lots of attention, in various contexts, to the questions of selfhood that underlie this kind of relationship, and I am utterly fascinated by the multiplicity of even our most straightforward selves.  Think about what you name as yourself, the characteristics you put all together and present as you.  They cover a lot, and they can change all the time, when you start doing or liking or being something a little different… but even so, no matter what you say and do, no “self” can cover everything, be everything that you are.  Most presented selves can’t be more than one gender, for example, but many people experience a multiplicity of gender in themselves.  I venture to say that everyone has had a surprise or two in terms of how they define their own sexuality– that sudden person or desire that has no place in how you have imagined yourself to be.  The question, then, I think, is “Who are we, really?” And there’s a sense in which that question is completely unanswerable.  But there’s also a sense in which Jack and Maggie, and Jess, too, taken together, provide a mysterious answer to that question.

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?

RLF: The More-Than One has been read a lot by the other playwrights in the writer’s workshop I discussed above, and that is about it so far!  I definitely hope to hone it as rehearsals progress, and I am sure that the wisdom and playfulness of the actors and director will shape the play in various new ways.

OOB:Tell us a little about your producer. How did you come to form your relationship together?

RLF: My producer is Uncut Pages Theater Company, of which I am co-founder and executive director.  Uncut Pages was founded in my last year of college at Bryn Mawr—basically, a group of us who had done theater together throughout college were excited by the power and delight of the all-female, student-run productions we had been doing on campus, and wanted to explore that kind of theater in a larger context.  Since 2004, we have performed in the Philly, New York, and D.C. Fringe Festivals, with original work and reinterpretations of classics.

Self-producing, which I have done before, is a process of sometimes blissful insanity!  The level of responsibility is ridiculous, but the show gets into your blood in a very particular way, and allows for a full-immersion, extremely collaborative experience.

OOB: Uncut Pages is a female-run theatre group that promotes artist creation by women.  There’s been a lot in the news recently about disparities in term of the number of female theatre artist to male theatre artists—Do you find there are certain challenges with being a female-run group?  Advantages?

RLF: Yeah, I’ve thought a lot about this, too, and Uncut Pages has thought about it as a group, since we started out as all-female more or less by default, having all gone to Bryn Mawr College and done all-female theater there.  And then when we got out into the big world, we had to ask ourselves the question of whether this approach was still a good one, whether we had a reason for it besides just going to a women’s college and liking to play the male parts.  We decided we have those reasons, though they can be a little tricky to describe.  What you mentioned about disparities in theater, especially in off-stage roles, definitely contributes to our ethos.  In a small group like Uncut Pages, by necessity, people participate in all different aspects of different productions, and this gets each of us involved in things she wouldn’t be otherwise, trying out different creative and structural roles–and the fact that we are all women means, by default, that women will be doing all sorts of things in each production that are more rare for women to do in mixed-gender productions.  That is both a challenge and an advantage, I guess.  I do think in some cases people take us less seriously, in subtle but real ways, but I also think sometimes people are more generous, also in subtle ways.  But that’s just the weird deal with gender, generally, isn’t it?

Another really important thing, I think, is that single gender productions can throw gender issues in a play into high relief.  It’s not so much of an issue in The More-Than One, which is written for two female actors and does its own highlighting of gender, but in some of the more classical plays we’ve done, it makes a difference.  What you see when you look at violence or sexuality through a single gender lens can really shake up the whole vision of what violence or sexuality means, and how each relates to gender.  It doesn’t have to– all-female performance is not inherently more subversive or interesting or world-changing than mixed-gender performance–but it can.  The potential is there for something special.  And that, too, is both a challenge and an advantage.

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?

RLF: I have so many favorite memories, but I think they all relate to the magic of an essentially unreal experience becoming surpassingly real to those who are participating in it, onstage or off.  That particular alchemy nourishes and connects the participants, because each person becomes a co-creator with each other person involved.  I remember right after my senior year in high school, I saw a production of Hamlet at the Stratford Festival in Canada, and suddenly in the middle of Hamlet’s messing around in the graveyard something clicked for me, and I looked around at the other people in the audience, all abuzz with the understanding of our absolute relatedness through the impenetrable fact of death, of the idea that we would all be skulls someday.  And this sounds like an absolutely horrible experience—but it wasn’t, it was deeply engaging and not frightening at all, because it was grounded in the creative connection I was experiencing with all the other people in that theater.  This kind of co-creation is also at work in every favorite funny horror story of theater, like when I fell and cut my hand open in a production of Comedy of Errors and had to somehow conceal the bleeding, have a sword fight, and finish the scene—because what matters in these stories is the shared transmutation of even the most ridiculous experiences.