About the Play:

At a private girls school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, one student’s behavior leads to a series of escalating acts of violence.  In the aftermath of the scandal, three mothers and a guidance counselor try to come to terms with their confusion and anger, struggling to understand what went wrong and who can be held responsible. RUNNING TIME: 17 minutes.

About the Author:

Daniel Pearle grew up in Los Angeles, California.  He earned his BA from Harvard College and is entering his third year as an MFA candidate at The New School for Drama.  Plays include: Plunder (winner of the 2008 Loeb Drama Center’s Phyllis Anderson Prize); Moon Watch (St. Fortune Productions); Alone Upon the Earth: A Love Song (New School for Drama); Three Women Against the Sea (New School for Drama); Freefall (New School for Drama).  His play, Bel Canto, was given a reading at Primary Stages as part of their Primetime Reading Series. Residencies/Conferences include: Blue Mountain Center, New York State Summer Writers Retreat, UCLA Writers Studio.

OOB Festival: Where do you come from (home state, state of mind, or both)?

Daniel: Los Angeles, CA.

OOB Festival: Give us five words that describe who you are as a playwright.

Daniel: Can I skip this one?

OOB Festival: 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?

Daniel: I just finished my second year at the New School for Drama.  During the school year I work part-time as a private tutor for high school students who are enrolled in some of Manhattan’s most competitive private schools.  I help with SAT prep, college essays, etc.  This play was written in November, when the writers in my class were asked to come up with Christmas-themed plays that the actors would perform in December.  At that time I was working with several students to get their early college applications ready.  I was constantly talking to these kids—and more importantly, their mothers—about the competition at these schools, the stress, the anger, the frustration they felt at any perceived injustice (despite the fact that these were, of course, families of extreme privilege).  I had one student who had a huge blowup with his mother over the subject for his college essay.  She was convinced his idea was no good; he insisted she was just trying to force her own ideas on him.

Around the same time I read an article about Rifqa Bary, the daughter of two Muslim immigrants from Sri Lanka who secretly converted to Christianity and then ran away from home, telling authorities her parents would kill her if they knew of her faith.  Her parents vehemently denied this, and told reporters their daughter had been brainwashed by fundamentalist Christians she’d met on the internet.  It was the kind of story where you really couldn’t tell what was going on because no matter who you believed the pieces didn’t quite add up.  The story in the play is not that of Bary, but certainly she was on my mind when I was writing it.  I guess I was thinking about how a teenager can suddenly become a mystery to his or her parents and how terrifying it must be to look at your own child and feel like you don’t recognize them.

OOB Festival: What is one thing you hope audiences will take away from your Festival piece?  Is there any information you would like them to know before they watch your work performed?

Daniel: I never quite know what I hope an audience will take away from any play I’ve written.  I always hope an audience is moved in some way, that the play stays with them after they leave the theater, but I don’t have a specific goal in mind for what I want them to think or learn.  When I sit down to write I’m not really thinking about a message I want to send as much as a world I want to create.  That said, I do think that uncertainty is one of the scariest things we face in life and that we are constantly creating meaning and searching for answers when, really, they may not exist.  This particular play has a lot of ambiguity and plenty of unanswered questions.  There’s no real catharsis, no final verdict.  I guess I’m hoping an audience will experience the fundamental unease of the play and not feel cheated.

OOB Festival: What/who are some of the major influences on your writing?  What’s the most unconventional place/thing that you’ve taken inspiration from?

Daniel: I came to playwriting relatively late (it was about midway through college).  Before that I wrote mostly fiction and creative nonfiction.  So I think a lot of my greatest literary heroes are prose writers—Woolf, Joyce, Proust.  I’m always more interested in the internal world of a character than anything else, which can be a big challenge to dramatize in a way that’s honest but still theatrical.  My biggest theatrical influences probably are Chekhov, Churchill, John Patrick Shanley, Craig Lucas, Christopher Shinn.  As for unconventional sources of inspiration… I saw a subway ad once that sparked the idea for a play.  I try to keep my eyes and ears open for anything that’s weird, funny, or mysterious.

OOB Festival: What is your “dream play”–that is, if the more restrictive elements of production (budget, space, casting, and technical elements) were not a consideration, what type of theatre piece would you create?

Daniel: I grew up studying as a musician—classical piano and voice—then did some composition as an undergraduate.  I’ve always hated traditional musicals but I do love music and I would love to experiment with the form to include it somehow (in a way that doesn’t make me cringe).  I think if budget weren’t an issue, I’d try to write a piece with a chorus or an orchestra accompanying the action.  Or maybe write a piece that’s partially spoken, partially sung, so that the actors would do both.

OOB Festival: If someone saw you on the street, what’s one fact that they would never guess about you?

Daniel: I can fly.

About the Producer:

The New School for Drama has a legacy of vision. Artistic voices as distinctive as Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando found their singularity here, under the wing of founder Erwin Piscator and a faculty including Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg. Since 1994, the university has offered the MFA degree in dramatic arts.

With theater in the air and on its streets as surely as on its hundreds of stages, New York City provides an unrivaled curriculum in observation and a wealth of professional opportunities. Through its interrelated program of acting, directing, and playwriting, The New School for Drama is creative in its simplicity and original in its vision.

The New School is forging the next generation of artists capable of meeting our expectations of storytelling, of seeing ourselves as we truly are, and of touching what is human about art.