In his first play, ‘Imaginary Comforts,’ the man behind Lemony Snicket confronts dread with his usual wicked wit.
Sept 20, 2017. Some excerpts:
Handler didn’t set out to write a play, he explained. He began writing after his father died (“a little bit every day so as not to go crazy”), but he didn’t know what form the piece was taking.
“I was not up for hard work. I didn’t know what I was doing, and that was liberating. It was a raw and unfounded thing.” Still, the unknown rattled him: “I’m used to knowing at least partially what I think I’m doing. And then I went, ‘Uh oh, this is a play.’”
This discovery came from understanding the piece’s structure. “It moved between scenes rather quickly,” Handler explained. “And I wanted that to be jarring and funny as scenes bumped up against each other.” He found that effect difficult to achieve with prose and thought perhaps that the story was a screenplay, but he soon realized it didn’t flow like one.
Having never written a play, he did some research. Playwrights Joe Tracz and Joshua Conkel, who had worked with Handler on adapting A Series of Unfortunate Events for Netflix, suggested playwrights to read. He said he also read a lot of Annie Baker and Caryl Churchill.
(...) The play emerged from an incident after Handler’s father died. When a rabbi came to talk to him, Handler appreciated how well she handled the emotional weight of the situation. But being a writer, he started to imagine a different scenario: What would have happened if the rabbi had been horrible? Then he realized that on his calendar he had written “rabbit” instead of “rabbi,” and a rabbit character emerged from that silly error.
Rabbits, of course, make regular appearances in both literature and drama. But Handler’s rabbit character would be different. “Much like A Series of Unfortunate Events rebelled against cheerful children’s books, this play rebels against things in theatre that I don’t like,” Handler said. One thing he doesn’t care for: people pretending to be animals onstage.
But as he continued writing, he decided to face his fear head-on by making the rabbit a character. In fact, creating something he disliked so much was a way of dealing with his central resistance.
“I dreaded that I was writing a play,” Handler explained. “So much of theatre is so terrible—not a higher percentage than any other form, but bad theatre is so immediate that you feel it more. If a book is bad, you put it down. If it’s bad theatre, you’re stuck there.” That’s why, he said, his play “opens with someone wearing a rabbit mask. I thought maybe that would shelter me.”
Read the whole article over at the link. (A transcript of the article can be found here.)
