A Conversation with Playwright Madeleine George
Before heading into previews, playwright Madeleine George joined Brief contributors, Vanessa Reyes and Nicholas Shannon, to discuss her first introduction to theatre, her career as a playwright, and her process creating Hurricane Diane.
Nicholas: Where are you from, and were you involved with the arts or theatre growing up?
Madeleine: I’m from Western Massachusetts, and growing up I was a sort of theatre nerdy kid. I wanted to be involved and I was terrible as an actor, so I just threw all of my heart and soul into the hyper-nerdiest parts of theatre. I was on every single kind of running crew (terrible at it, so bad!), damaged a lot of materials, wasted a lot of time, flirted with a lot of deadlines.
I started to write plays as a high school student because I had a teacher who read a piece of fiction of mine and was like “you know, if you just took out the ‘he said, she said’ this would just be a play.” So then I was like, “Oh, interesting. Maybe I can just you know combine these things.” I wrote a play and sent it off when I was like sixteen to the Young Playwrights’ Festival, which used to produce professional Off-Broadway productions for writers under the age of 18. They gave that play a reading in New York City. I was so unbelievably excited. I took a Greyhound bus to New York by myself, and was in a professional process with Camryn Manheim, Danny Jenkins, and Katherine Hiler, and learning what it was like. Being involved in that was just intoxicating. I was like, “Oh, I’ll never go back.”
N: Are there similarities that you notice when you look back between the plays that you wrote then and the plays that you write now?
M: I have been thinking about that a lot! Particularly right now with Hurricane Diane. The play I wrote when I was 18 which was in the Young Playwrights’ Festival is called The Most Massive Woman Wins, and it’s a one-act play about four women in the waiting room of a liposuction clinic. It’s kind of an expressionist piece, so it’s a little bit naturalistic in the dialogue, but it’s happening in some weird other plane of time. That theme where it’s like four female, or female-of-center people are in a funny relationship with each other that is not quite familial, and they’re trying to work out how to live? Almost all my plays are like that. Also, the play deals with multiple kinds of source materials. It pulls from nursery rhymes and fairy tales. That thing where I’m like “oh, some old text is making me think about something in this contemporary moment, how can I fuse those two”? That’s also going on in Hurricane Diane. Almost all my plays have some relationship to the past in text.
Vanessa: Do you ever feel like your identity as a queer woman playwright brackets the type of art or work you can do?
M: I mean I always feel like female or nonbinary universes are legitimate human universes. There’s no reason why we can’t play out all of our questions about what human problems are interesting to us in those environments. That’s obviously how patriarchal art has always functioned. And so my plays have always been like that. I mean they also have like lots of weird characters in them - like there’s a god character in this one, there’s like a computer character in another play, there’s a gorilla character in another play. They’re often characters that are sort of off to the side of humanity.
V: What have you learned in creating Hurricane Diane?
M: Well this is our second whack at this play. It premiered in New Jersey at the theatre that commissioned it initially in January 2017, and most of the same cast and creative team have come forward with the production. So we have this very deep relationship with each other, which is really great.
It’s startling how different this version is even though of course it’s the same. Like all the pieces are the same, but they’re doing a much more honed and focused thing now. We’re trying to be extremely clear about what the relationship is, what the god is trying to do, what this play has to do with climate change, and what it means to have the characters in this play succumb to the god, or fail to succumb to the god.
I really feel like most plays that are new need two productions at the minimum to figure out what they are. Almost no plays are ready and done after one draft, right? You draft in production. A play is a thing that happens in time, not a thing that happens on a page. So we feel very lucky to get to do this here.
N: Is there a teacher or another writer who’s had a really big influence on your writing?
M: I was part of a playwrights’ collective called 13P, 13 Playwrights, from like 2002-2012. We were a collective of 13 writers that came together to produce one play by each of us. At that time, we were having trouble getting produced so we were like, “We’re gonna change the game for ourselves.” A number of those writers that I was in that group with are really important to me in a bunch of different ways. Rob Handel - he currently runs the playwriting program at Carnegie Mellon University - his writing is extraordinary. He has taught me so much about not waiting for somebody to give you something in your career, how to take a jump forward. Plus, he’s just a genius. He knows everything there is to know about plays. Anne Washburn is another one of the writers in that collective, and she’s like one of my favorite living writers. I just go to her plays over and over again for their exquisiteness and her insane ear. She’s so fearless in her writing. So those people are my friends and then they’re also my heroes artistically, which is so lucky! That’s a really good thing for young artists to do is keep their eye out for the people who can be both.
V: Earlier you mentioned a trend you had of looking back at the past, specifically in terms of text. Why do you think that is, and why specifically for Hurricane Diane did you look at The Bacchae?
M: So trying to write about climate change is dicey because nobody wants to think about it or talk about it. It’s just so unbearable, you know? Also, the problem is so huge, no one person can deal with it. I guess I felt like a sort of warped comic take on the Greeks was a way into the problem, because the Greeks deal with problems. The vastness of fate? All the time in their writing. So I felt like it was kind of a good antecedent. Also, I just felt like it was going to be good for jokes. There would be lots of good jokes if like a god could come back to New Jersey. That’s just funny.
When you use an antecedent text to address a contemporary problem, you could nitpick the history of that antecedent text, but I feel like that is so missing the point. It’s a contemporary revisioning of an old set of texts. And, frankly, this is how all of the great writers have always worked! The Greeks are in Athens, but they’re not writing about Athens. They’re writing about Thebes, which is the mythological origin city. Shakespeare says he’s writing about Henry V. He’s not - he’s writing about Elizabeth! He’s using the past’s story, the myth, to illuminate the complexity of the present. That’s what we do with myths! That’s why we have them. I feel like using texts gives you scope. It gives you a springboard, and it connects you. It braids you into a conversation that goes back thousands of years. What could be more gorgeous? Whenever I teach playwriting, I often ask people to adapt because re-making is innovating. It’s being original.
Photo credit: Marielle Sloan
