Pavement Group Asks Questions And Debate Society Answers Them
Meet Hannah, Paul & Oliver from The Debate Society. They created Buddy Cop 2. We are performing Buddy Cop 2. Now we are asking them questions.
One of the first things that drew Pavement Group to your work is that what you do is fairly unique in the landscape of contemporary American plays, in that you develop and write plays as a company. Can you tell us a little bit about how that methodology and the company came about?
Hannah: Paul and I are both Midwesterners (I’m from Evanston, actually) and we met at Vassar College. We became best friends and wrote our college thesis together which was a play called A Thought About Raya. We performed in a squash court. When we both moved to NYC, Oliver saw a reading of the play and approached us about working together. We ended up developing the piece all together into a longer piece and performed it in a tiny theater that we paid for with a chili cook-off and a stoop sale. One thing led to another and here we are 10 years later with 8 or 9 plays (Buddy Cop 2 was play number 6) and a really solid collaboration.
Oliver: We make our plays during a development process that can last anywhere from 2 to 5 years. We begin with an extended period of research and discussion, focusing on the development of the mythology and mood of the world. As we work on this core, we are responding to our earlier work; developing concepts we’ve previously discovered as well as pushing against the form of what we’ve done before. After this initial, more intuitive/amorphous phase, we branch off into more traditional roles: Hannah and Paul as playwrights and me as a director . . . but we’re always working together, trying to figure the play out.
Paul: During the development of "Buddy Cop 2" we started fixating on “the moments before” or “the moments after”. Instead of the “big events” that are the focus of many plays, we were looking at all the other stuff. The vivid nostalgia and sadness you feel, for example, when you think back on the silly details of the day you spent BEFORE receiving life-altering news. It’s something we’re increasingly interested in: the idea that THOSE moments are worthy of being theatricalized. So that's something we discovered along the way that we like and are excited about and now it's sort of become part of our vocabulary.
Hannah: Our plays are colored by our slow‐bake process, intensive attention to detail and our cache of shared experiences . . . like our research trips to Chicago while developing "Blood Play" and "The Light Years".