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A behind the scenes peek at rehearsals, artistic choices, artist interviews, and the daily business of running a theatre.
Chicago Tribune
American Theatre Magazine
Playwright's Horizons
Playwright's Horizons
Q: What inspired the play and how do you explore the relationship between laughter and grief?
A: The play is not inspired by true events. Nothing in the play ever happened. I wish I’d had a steamy sex scene in a bathroom. That has yet to happen to me, but it’s on the bucket list. Basically what happened was my mother, who is in wonderful health today, did have a hysterectomy to treat ovarian cancer a little over ten years ago. I was a college student at the time, and while I was in the hospital caring for her, I remember thinking, “I don’t know how to show up for my mother the way that I want to.” I was 20 years old, drinking really heavily, and just a profoundly selfish young person.
I remember looking at the curtain that separated her side of the room from her roommate’s and thinking, “God, wouldn’t it be great if there were some cute family member of her roommate, say her son, who I could flirt with and that would help make all this pain and fear go away.” And then because I’m not a 100% sociopath, I realized it was a very fucked up thought. But I filed it away to write about, because I did think it was a funny premise for a play.
In a way, that situation perfectly captured what that experience is like; that you at once want to show up and be useful for your loved one and, because we’re human beings, we’re filled with selfishness – we also want to escape.
It’s really interesting as you get older and meet more people and have more in-depth conversations, you realize that your way of going through the world might not be the way that everyone does. I’ve always chosen humor to cope with anything really. It just comes naturally to me; both my parents are incredibly funny people. That’s how I was raised and it’s in my blood. So I’ve found myself making jokes at the most inappropriate moments. I’ve also found it rather pleasantly surprising how healing it can be – and how responsive others may be to it too, in ways that you might not expect. Even in the most painful of circumstances, it really is, in my experience, the most effective tool to move through with compassion and lightness.
*full interview (conducted by Clare Drobot, Director of New Play Development at City Theatre) at http://www.citytheatrecompany.org/a-conversation-with-a-funny-thing-play...
Q: You, like your character Karla in A Funny Thing... are both writers - she is an aspiring stand up comedian and comedy writer while you yourself are a playwright. In the rehearsal process, are you finding any other striking similarities between you and Karla? And conversely, in what ways to you think you are quite different from your character?
A: The first moment of the play is maybe my favorite, when Karla is workshopping a new “dirty” joke. Partly because as an actor it’s fun to say the word “vibrator” that many times onstage, but also because as a writer I know how exhilarating it is to circle a scary-funny-honest-taboo idea, finally hone in on the exact right words for it, then launch it at an audience and make them deal. One of the biggest differences between Karla and myself is how, while we both like watching people squirm in response to our creative work, I am not great at watching people squirm socially. There are so many moments in the play where I would jump in and fix something that Karla doesn’t, whether preemptively letting someone off the hook when they’re trying to apologize, or even just simply listening to someone tell a story without actively nodding and affirming them the whole time. While Karla has her own grab-bag full of emotional dysfunctions, I’m sure she wouldn’t find herself politely held hostage by a stranger telling a story in line at CVS as often as I. We also both have single moms that mean the world to us, though Karla’s crass/”my artist daughter is selfish”/social worker mom is kind of exact upside-down to my devout/”everyone should come to my daughter’s new play”/special education teacher mom.
