Bonnie Metzgar On Suzan-Lori Parks

Bonnie Metzgar is an award-winning producer, director and playwright. She served as Artistic Director of About Face Theatre in Chicago, Associate Artistic Director of Curious Theatre Company in Denver, founding producer of Joe’s Pub (Public Theater) and Director of the graduate playwriting program at Brown University. Metzgar has collaborated with Parks since 1988, including her early plays at BACA Downtown and, later, 365 Days/365 Plays. This interview occurred on 1 February 2013 by telephone with a subsequent conversation in August. Harvey Young

What circumstances led to your first collaboration with Suzan-Lori Parks?

Bonnie Metzgar

I am a student of Paula Vogel. Not just because I studied with her at Brown, but also in a more cosmic way. Paula Vogel and Mac Wellman were young theater artists in New York together. I had started my graduate work in 1987 at the University of Iowa in the Graduate Playwriting Program after having studied with Paula. It was a terrible fit—because the type of experimental work that I was writing was not the type of work that was going on at Iowa back then in the late 1980s. That year, Mac Wellman was one of the festival guests and I had a piece in the festival. He said to me, “This is not the right place for you. You should really come to New York. Jeff Jones and I have this workshop of young artists that had first started at New Dramatists as a class and now it’s at BACA Downtown. You should come to New York and you can join this group.” So, I left graduate school because Mac Wellman told me that I should come to New York and join this group [laughter]. Suzan-Lori was one of the people at the New Works Project at BACA Downtown when I arrived in fall 1988.

New Works Project. Basically, you signed up—I believe it was— every other week for slots to show new work. What made it interesting was the mix of artists working in hybrid forms—it was writers and directors and performers and designers. It was multidisciplinary— dance, alternative composition, visual art—but at the heart of it was experimental theater. Mac Wellman and Jeff Jones kind of presided over it—Mac used to command us to make as much strange and joyful noise as possible. The NWP was run by a committee structure. Each week a different artist would host. Usually, we would present two works in progress or something like that. That was really dynamic. It stayed at BACA until BACA closed, 1991. That was when JoAnne Akalaitis took the New Works Project to the Public Theater. She hosted it for a while during her tenure.

I became the Artistic Director of BACA Downtown. Greta Gundersen, the painter, had opened [BACA Downtown] and had a gallery downstairs and a theater upstairs. She decided to leave in fall 1989, after I was in NWP for a year. I was the only one around who had grant writing [experience]—I had raised $5,000 for the New Works Project. She was like, “Clearly, this person knows how to raise money.” My day job was working at the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive at Lincoln Center for Betty Corwin. I wrote grants as part of my job. Even though I want to say that it was because I’m a brilliant artist, [the artistic directorship] was also because I had experience raising money [laughs].

I was the Artistic Director there for Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World. Greta had produced Imperceptible Mutabilities the year before I took over. Death of the Last Black Man was the first project of Suzan-Lori’s that I ever produced.

HY

How would describe that first production relationship?

BM

At that point, Suzan-Lori and I lived upstairs/downstairs on a fire escape. We lived right above each other in Brooklyn. We were in each other’s everyday lives. When we moved, we moved around the corner from each other. This continued for years. We had this—I think of it as a 19th century neighborly [relationship]… I don’t know what it was. “Come on over for some tea…” or something. She would write certain things and she would just come up and read them. She liked to read them out loud and I liked to hear them. I think it started with her just reading her plays to me usually at home, out loud.

Death of the Last Black Man. There was lots of drama. Beth [Schachter] will remember this better than me. Did we lose an actor? There was something that happened just prior to going into rehearsal. Maybe it was a designer. I can’t really remember. I think it had something to do with the electric chair?

Watching the collaborations that SLP had with both Beth Schachter and Liz Diamond from a producer’s standpoint, it was very clear that Suzan-Lori had a unique vision. This has been true throughout all the projects that I have done with SLP. That vision was on the page back then but she also already had a very strong idea of how her work was going to come out of the mouths of actors, how it was going to manifest itself in terms of space and time. And as smart directors, they listened to her. It was a very open room. Suzan-Lori could speak freely which is not always the case in a new play situation. The directors function[ed] as interpreters of her intention. As a piece would develop in real time and space—as there was an actual electric chair, they would hear from her how she felt it was living. I don’t want to go so far as say it was a co-directing situation but in a certain way as far as staging and as far as language, Suzan-Lori acted like a co-director.

HY

How did audiences respond?

BM

Suzan-Lori was anointed by the alternative press from the second she started. She had this piece, Dust Commander, that was done at a gas station on Avenue B with Laurie Carlos. A lot of the right people who were tracking experimental theater saw that piece. So, when Immutabilities happened, it was the thing to see. It got “[Village] Voice Choice,” which at the time really made things happen to you. Erika Munk wrote this big [article] about Suzan-Lori. Alisa Solomon supported her work. It started to build… For people interested in alternative art, it became known that the work that she was doing everyone needed to see. We were in downtown Brooklyn. People were not used to coming to Brooklyn at that time. This was right off of Fulton Mall and Fulton Mall was not glamorous. And now you had limousines pulling up with fancy people coming to see the show. Audiences, they were very excited. The thing about Suzan-Lori’s work… it’s funny. There may be some kind of cultural critique buried deep inside of it but the experience of it—it was really on its own terms. People really dug it. It was exciting.

HY

As a person who has produced and directed her works? What did you do differently when you were wearing those hats?

BM

When Suzan-Lori was in a venue like BACA Downtown which was created for experimental and hybrid works, audiences who were coming to it—they’re adventurous, they are cultural adventurers. That’s what they want to be doing—going to the borderlands. My job at BACA was to really push so we achieved the full extent of the vision. Flash forward to Venus. Here I am now, the Associate Producer at the Public Theater. Different reality. Also, it was a co-production with Yale directed by Richard Foreman. All three of those entities—Richard Foreman, Yale, and the Public Theater—they all have their huge legacies and visions. Very different situation for Suzan-Lori Parks. In particular, and most interestingly, Richard Foreman as a collaborator. I still think that was an extraordinary piece even though people hated the production. A lot of people hated it. I remember it was quite difficult for Suzan-Lori as a collaboration, given the active role she had up to that point in staging her works. Mostly because Richard wasn’t used to working with a playwright who isn’t himself. My job in that case was to identify the torturous aspects of the process that could be addressed, then to try to get folks at the Public Theater and Yale all onboard, then finally engage with Richard Foreman, all without undermining the project. It was hard. It was hard to have a world premiere be so shaped by someone outside of Suzan-Lori. I think it was her first experience with something like that—collaborating with another artist whose own aesthetic, to some degree, was overpowering her own. In a really simple way, at the front of the stage there’s all that string, right? That shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. That’s who we hired to direct the show, to collaborate with SLP. I was supportive of the idea of Richard as director. I believe that disturbing the process is one of the most powerful tools a producer has to use. Collaborating artists forced to work outside their comfortable rhythms—that is when something incredible gets born. But in this particular example, Suzan-Lori was not prepared to be on the outside and it was very difficult. Once we were on the road at Yale, my job was to take care of her needs as much as possible, and to help communicate those needs to Richard Foreman when I could.

Each of the projects, from a producing standpoint, was very different. When you’re directing, it’s a craft. The role of the director is so much simpler than producing. Producing—you’re deciding who to put in the room to make this thing happen. You also have to manage all the relationships at these big institutions where thousands of people are involved and they’re run by artistic directors with huge personalities like George [C. Wolfe]. For instance, Marcus Stern was supposed to direct In the Blood. He fell down in the middle of the street when we were casting and he broke his knee and he couldn’t move. We ended up replacing him. Whatever people think about that decision, David Esbjornson came in. He inherited the cast. We moved the show into a totally different theater like three seconds before we started. It was a crazy mess. Now, the show ended up being great [laughter]. Each production, there’s a certain amount of, “Yes, I planned for this to be brilliant in this way,” and there’s the other thing—called producing— which is when we respond to all the things that happen in real time when people fall down and we make the show anyway, in all its broken glory.

Here’s the thing that makes Suzan-Lori’s career really strange. From the second she starts writing, she’s basically anointed into the canon of work that’s important. But then her work does not get widely done. She is not Lynn Nottage. Her work is not done at every single regional theater. That’s not what happens. She gets taught at every university. She speaks all over the world, at conferences. Then she goes to LA to write screenplays or whatever. But it’s not really until Topdog that people pay any attention or really know her work. So, when you think about the Public Theater, it’s not like she does the Public Theater then she goes away and does four other big productions then she comes back to the Public Theater. She didn’t get a lot of production experience as a playwright. I don’t know. It’s strange to her that she never really had these many, many productions of her major works when they were first produced.

HY

In terms of the play script, is the play complete when rehearsals begin or is it developed as part of the production process?

BM

As you amass a body of work, like me, where you’ve worked with seventy different playwrights, what you end up having to accept is that that answer is very different depending on the writer. In these MFA programs, they don’t teach writers to know their own process. Writers can’t even narrate to you what they need. They don’t know if you put actors in a room for a two-week workshop if it will help them rewrite the play, so that each night they can go [home] and come back with pages for the next day. They don’t know if they can do that. Or if they work better to hear a one-day reading, then go off on their own for two weeks to do a rewrite, and come back for another reading of their new draft. These are two very different processes.

Suzan-Lori is very protective of the play. She will rewrite herself on her own. She will do that internally before she shows it to anybody. And then she will secretly, really on the DL, show some of it to one person and then maybe she will give it to the person who is supposed to produce it. Very secret. I don’t even know if she tells herself she is doing it.

Suzan-Lori really believes in actors in the rewriting process. When she’s hearing the play with the people who are actually going to do the play in early rehearsal and they have the words in their mouths and they are saying it for the first time—that’s when she might make changes. We did this epic read-through of 365. We did it because we were publishing the play before it was ever produced. She wanted to hear it come out of the mouths of actors before it was published. It’s in that moment— either with an actor saying, “Wait a minute. This doesn’t… or what’s the rhythm here… or something’s missing,” that she’ll be like, “Oh, I see what you’re talking about,” and she’ll write the line that’s missing right then and there. That’s when it happens.

HY

I know of playwrights who will go away after rehearsals and will return having rewritten parts of a scene.

BM

I would say—to a large degree—that’s the norm. With Suzan-Lori, that’s very, very rare. She might cut a line. She might add a few words or add a line. The big radical thing that I remember happening is that in Topdog/Underdog she switched the order of two scenes but they were fully written. She didn’t change anything [laughter]. That’s not really her deal. That’s not really her thing except in that first read-through, first couple of days, when she’s with actors.

HY

How did you become part of 365?

BM

I was the producer on Fucking A at the Public. We were in rehearsal in early 2003. We were just hanging out—that’s when she was writing 365. She’s like, “I’m doing this thing that at the end of the day; I write this little play. Ha, ha, ha.” I was like, “Ha, ha, that’s cool.” It was not a big deal and she just mentioned it like that. Fucking A was the last show that I did at the Public Theater. After I left, I spent a lot of time in Colorado and I was working at Curious Theatre in Denver. Suzan-Lori contributed [a] song to this War Anthology project that I did out there, a long ballad which is very cool. She would come out every couple months and I said to her, whatever happened to that play-a-day thing? She said, “Oh yeah, I finished it. I did it for a year and then I stuck it in a drawer. It’s done.” “Let’s do it. We gotta do it.” She was like, “What are you talking about?” and I said, “Oh yeah, we’re going to do that thing. Pull that thing out.” It was like that.

We got theater and we got show business. It’s heavy. We got the show business and we got the art that we are making. Here’s something that was not written for show business. It was written as art. At the time, I was not attached to an institution or working on a Broadway show. So since I didn’t have to care about show business, or the ego of any institution, there was a space for this big glorious sprawling weed to take root. If we just squint and ignore the system of delivery of theater to the masses—the resident theater movement and Broadway and all that—and just say, “What is theater? What is art? What role does it have in our lives?” Lots of new things can grow. SLP and I took this piece that was not written like other plays, not shaped like anything we usually put on as theater… It was a completely impractical thing that she did, writing this huge cycle. Is there room for this? What could it look like? I convinced SLP it was important that we produce it in a new way.

HY

What is the most memorable experience of 365 that you frequently revisit when looking back?

BM

365 really lives with me. So many people’s lives intersected with the project. The moment that I most visit… was in New York. I really remember being in this room at the Public. Let me just say that New York is not good at building community in general. Plus, joining a community art movement is the antithesis of cool in New York. I remember being in a circle of all these 365 participants who are introducing themselves. These are artists who spend everyday of every year making theater in the same town and many, many, many of them said, “Oh, I don’t think I have ever seen you before.” Really? Wow. And through 365 I got to be in the room where they started to invest in each other. Those kinds of moments where lots of artists came together and were able to share their experience while making something. This was just before everyone was on Facebook every day and connected in that way on social media. I feel like now we have a daily way that we’re all connected which may be more sophisticated. But we were in the same room. Not visiting each other’s pages. I’m happy that we didn’t wait.

HY

How would you describe Suzan-Lori Parks’s influence on your life?

BM

She’s one of my closest friends. Suzan-Lori Parks the person has deeply impacted me as a human being. As an artist, she inspires me, my language, my loves. And our professional lives have been so intertwined in our careers. We share so many different and profound things. Both of our fathers had Parkinson’s. Things that are not apparent to other people. We used to think that our lives were a reality TV show. We live in New York together. I’m white and gay. You’re black and fabulous with dreads. Whatever. We’re theater people. We’re groovy. When you look back on it, her impact… she’s an incredibly focused friend in the same way that she’s an incredibly focused artist on her own work. She is very aware of her light. Sometimes, she has enough light for herself to hear the voices and have them come through her and what’s leftover she wants to share with other people. Those other people might be students, those other people might be the people who come out to hear her speak, they might be her friends. Her first priority is her light, which I think she thinks is spiritual. A feeling. That’s like understanding and creating a relationship with a higher power: you may not recognize it as God but you recognize it as a life force. Before Suzan-Lori, I don’t think that I would have believed it. She lives it every day. That’s been a really powerful inspiration to me.