A Conversation With David Auburn
Zachary Werner:
The second act of Skyscraper, your first full-length play published in 1998, begins on an extremely humorous note, with Louis, a 110-year-old man, recounting an actual disaster from the first person perspective. He says:
“A B-25 crashed into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building in 1945. Some people said hard liquor was involved. I want to state as clearly as I can that I had only had a few beers.
“Some said I hadn’t been paying sufficient attention to my piloting duties owing to the fact that I had a girl in the cockpit. According to these stories, this girl might have been a little ‘loose.’ ‘Easy,’ a ‘good time girl.’ The implication: I was dallying with a tramp when I should have been doing my best to avoid piloting the plane into the Empire State Building. Well, I say to these filthy god-damned liars: that woman was my wife.”
In reality, this was a horrible accident that resulted in the deaths of at least 11 people, yet you manage to inject comedy into the situation and reshape it. Can you comment on the human need and capacity to laugh at unfortunate events? On the thin line between comedy and tragedy?
David Auburn:
You neglected to mention that the central event of the play is a suicide. I’m not sure it’s right to say that there’s a thin line between comedy and tragedy, necessarily. It’s more that in any human situation there is the potential for humor and pathos, both. I like stories that surprise you with sudden shifts of mood or tone, so that as an audience member you never quite settle into complacency, feeling, “Oh, this is serious stuff, I’ll just sit here nodding,” or, “This is a comedy, there’s nothing I need to worry about taking seriously.”
ZW:
You wrote Skyscraper before the terrorist attacks of September 11th, which now force us to approach the play with new sensibilities and sensitivities. As I read Skyscraper, I had to set aside my 9/11-related anxieties in order to laugh at the previous passage because the idea of planes crashing into towers in New York City rips open fresh wounds. If you were writing Skyscraper today, would you be wary of recasting the Empire State incident in a comedic light? Can playwrights only poke fun at the past after a significant amount of time has elapsed, or do they have an obligation to find humor in the heartbreak?
DA:
Clearly some time passing after a traumatic event permits a different perspective. I wouldn’t write Skyscraper today, but not because of September 11. It was a student play—I wrote it while I was at Juilliard—and I was sort of throwing a lot of balls into the air, trying a lot of different things. For example, the monologue you cited above was the result, I think, of reading a bunch of the astonishing Peter Cook monologues from the 60s and wanting to imitate the way he’d take you down some long, long rhetorical path only to pull the rug out at the last second. (I realize paths don’t generally have rugs.) In any case, with Skyscraper what came out was this sort of surreal, rather schematic comedy. I still like it, but what’s missing that I think I found in some of my later work was an interest in, and an emphasis on, character.
ZW:
To what extent do you use writing to investigate your own anxieties? I noticed that in both Skyscraper and Proof, characters pester each other about the time and energy they have wasted. Are you, or were you once, worried about squandering precious opportunities or misapplying your talents?
DA:
Sure. I’m always fighting laziness.
ZW:
Similarly, what can your fans hope to learn about you by studying your characters? In Proof, for example, Catherine discusses doing math by “connecting the dots.” Does this metaphor apply to your writing process?
DA:
Not directly. I was always a little annoyed that, in some other depictions of the lives of scientists and mathematicians, their accomplishments were presented as somehow magical, products of pure inspiration requiring no hard work. I wanted to make sure in Proof that I emphasized the sloggy, dogged effort that goes into this stuff.
ZW:
This fall, Americans across the country got a glimpse of life in Hyde Park when Proof transitioned from the stage to the silver screen. Since seeing the movie, I’ve been wondering to what extent Proof is a University of Chicago story? Could Robert have been a venerable professor at, say, MIT, or were there specific aspects of his character that epitomize or evoke Chicago?
DA:
The story needs Chicago, I think. It needs the melancholy atmosphere that I often felt in Hyde Park. In coffee shops, wandering around the bookstores, you’d often see these people—usually men, middle aged, clearly not students, not faculty either; it was hard to tell what they were—they were these sort of perennial campus ghosts haunting the place. You got the sense that they’d slipped off the tracks somehow. Sometimes there would be little legends attached to them—you’d hear that this guy or that one was a brilliant prodigy who cracked up spectacularly. I suppose any big University has these figures, but it feels like a particularly Chicago phenomenon to me. Robert in the play is one of these types.
ZW:
How have your own experiences as a Chicago student influenced your work? Do you think that you would have written a play about math if you had not first studied calculus to satisfy the Core?
DA:
What Chicago gave me, and I guess I have to credit the Core with this (though not my 130s Calc directly—God knows I didn’t distinguish myself there) was a basic belief that I could teach myself enough about a strange subject to say something interesting about it and to dramatize it convincingly.
ZW:
Can you describe how your career in theater began with the improv group Off-Off Campus and the Maroon?
DA:
I had always done a lot of theater, going back to childhood, when I acted in shows at community theaters. Later, in high school in Arkansas, I worked for the local professional companies as a stage hand or assistant to the lighting designer or whatever position I could get. But I had no particular interest in becoming a professional myself. I thought I wanted to study international relations. I think I imagined myself working for an international aid agency or something. In any case, I auditioned for Off Off Campus (then in its second year of existence), got in, and began writing sketches for the company. The group when it started was much less an improv group than it later became. The emphasis then really was on fully scripted scenes. I found quickly that I enjoyed this writing and, perhaps more to the point, found I needed to put real effort into writing good parts for myself if I wanted to come off well in the shows, since I was not a naturally gifted performer.
The Maroon theater reviewing came out of an equally selfish impulse—wanting to get free tickets to plays.
ZW:
Proof investigates the notions of creative integrity and authorship. Interestingly, the question of artistic ownership must have been involved in the process of adapting Proof for film. Can you describe your collaboration with the screenwriter Rebecca Miller, the daughter of the famed playwright Arthur Miller? Was it difficult to share control over the presentation of a story that had been yours alone?
DA:
I didn’t work with Miller. As a result of disagreements with the director about how the movie should work, I left the project and she was brought in to do some of the work he wanted. Needless to say, this was not a happy experience. I suppose some large percentage of the final film is in some sense mine, but I can’t say I’m particularly enthusiastic about it.
ZW:
I’m especially interested in how setting almost operates as a character, or at least as an entity with its own force. In the play, the characters are stuck on the porch in much the same way that they are stuck dealing with the consequences of Robert’s death and its implications for Catherine. Why did you decide to confine the action to one particular place? And why the porch as opposed to the living room or the kitchen?
DA:
The porch came out of a visual impulse—it was simply where I “saw” the first scene happening when I sat down to write it. The larger decision to confine the play to one set had to do with my wanting to see if I could write a traditional “well-made” play, to see if I had the craft to work within those constraints.
ZW:
Your most recent play, The Journals of Mihail Sebastian, is an adaptation of an actual diary kept by a young, Jewish writer struggling against an increasingly threatening political environment in Bucharest around the time of World War II. Which of his themes or ideas did you find especially captivating? What inspired you to turn his writings into your highly-anticipated follow-up to Proof?
DA:
I didn’t think of it as a follow-up to Proof. I read the journals and badly wanted to do something with them. I managed to get the stage rights. At the same time, a director friend of mine, Carl Forsman, who runs an Off-Broadway theater company, had been badgering me to write something we could produce together. I said, “How about a one man show about the Romanian Holocaust?” Carl said, “Great!” Making him unique in the history of theater-company managers.
I was compelled, first, by Sebastian’s voice on the page—this immensely sly, witty, sensitive, clear-eyed observer. It felt like a voice that would play beautifully in performance.
Then, the situation seemed inherently dramatic and tense. He’s an outsider in this hothouse world of Romanian (gentile) literary intellectuals, trying to cling to his very hard-won position as a minor literary celebrity while his entire milieu is turning viciously against him. I was also intrigued by the technical challenge of compressing seven years’ worth of events into a two hour play. I liked the idea of designing something that would hurtle the audience (and the actor) through this very rapidly and drastically shifting historical landscape.
ZW:
How did the process of adapting Sebastian’s journals differ from your experience adapting Proof for film? Does your approach change when you are working with someone else’s writing?
DA:
For Proof to film, see above. For Sebastian—I felt I needed to learn a lot before I did the play. I knew nothing about interwar Bucharest, nothing about the literary scene he came out of. I went to Romania, I spoke to anyone I could find about Sebastian, dug up copies of his plays, commissioned translations of his work, etc. That process was the chief challenge and pleasure of the adaptation.
ZW:
In addition to Proof, you mention mathematics in Skyscraper, and both plays point to an artistic appreciation of numbers on your part. Can you comment on what you find compelling about the intersection of math and human passions as well as the ultimate impossibility of arriving at empirical truth in real life?
DA:
I had forgotten there was some math in Skyscraper. I wish I could say there was some larger thematic intention on my part. You have impulses when you’re writing. You try to follow them when you can.
ZW:
Proof is not the only play that you have set in Chicago. Skyscraper also takes place in the city of broad shoulders. Is there a reason why you live in New York but write about Chicago? Can we expect more original productions from David Auburn to examine the passions of this city? What’s your next project?
DA:
Well, my last play was about Bucharest. I was born in Chicago but I only lived there for about 6 years (my first two, and college) so I’ve probably used up my right to pretend I have anything authentic to say about it. My next project is a film that I wrote called The Girl in the Park. And it’s set in New York.
Otium
