Cuban Theater Digital Archive

Interview with Beth Whitaker

 (This document was composed by Harrison Hill and Maurya Scanlon as part of an advanced seminar on María Irene Fornés held in the Department of Drama, New York University, Spring 2008.)

 Harrison: How did you get involved with the Fornes season in 1999?

 Beth: I had actually just started working at Signature then. In fact, I started part-time at the end of the season before, and I was away that summer working somewhere else. I wasn’t that involved in the first production, which was “Mud” and “Drowning.” So I don’t have a lot of insight in terms of the process for that show. I kind of switched from part-time to full time during the course of that season. I worked very intensely on “Letters from Cuba,” and I was sort of around for “Enter the Night.”

 It was a transition time for Signature, in its ninth year then.  Jim [Houghton], who was the artistic director, had wanted for quite some time to have a literary person or a dramaturge on staff.  It was still a small company and that wasn’t something they had had. I met with him, kind of for another position for someone else—another company he was working for, and he decided to bring me on part time.  And that snowballed into a fulltime position during that season, so that’s how I got involved. 

Like I said, I was working more intently in rehearsal and most intently on the last show.  But Irene was very much around all the time during that season. I think that one of the great things about Irene, as an artist is she is very open to input from anyone. At the same time she is not—she knows what she wants to hear and rejects what she doesn’t want to hear, in a really great way, I think.  She doesn’t judge people on “you don’t know what you’re talking about because you’re inexperienced” or “you’re too experienced” or “you don’t know my work.”  She was very much, or at least I always found, open to hearing anything and either absorbing it or deciding it’s not the right thing for her.  So, it was very easy to get to know her and to get to know the work that we did.

H: You graduated with an MFA from Columbia in dramaturgy.  Did you come here soon after graduating?

B: Yes, in fact I was still finishing my thesis as I was working here. It’s a three-year program at Columbia where you do 2 years of course-work and then technically you’re supposed to write your thesis in the third year. It took me a few years to finish it. So I had just finished my first two years of coursework when I started working here.

H: Do you know what the thinking was behind choosing Irene for that season? Do you know why she was chosen?

B: You mean in general for a season at Signature?

H: Yeah.

B: Traditionally Signature has featured the work of an established playwright with an extensive body of work for each season. Irene is definitely one of those people.  I think Irene is someone whose work is probably better known to off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway audiences. She’s produced so often in universities and that sort of thing.  So, relative to some of the playwrights we’ve done, she kind of had a different following, but certainly she’s chosen like anyone else: because she’s a great artist who had a really rich body of work to draw from.

H: A lot of the reviews from that season talk about how she’s underappreciated.  Was that an element that Signature took into consideration when choosing her, thinking, “this is an artist we like and we would like to give her a bigger platform”?

B: Absolutely, definitely. We don’t want to say that from that point of view of “look at this great gift we are bestowing upon Irene.” But yes absolutely … I also think she deserved that somewhat rare opportunity to be able see what ultimately was four of her plays, in a sequence like that. But [she was] definitely [chosen] in the hopes of exposing her work to people who may not know it already.

H: What went behind the choice for those four plays/ three productions?

B: Well, I think for “Mud” and “Drowning” it was sort of along the lines of what you were just talking about. Part of our mission and tradition at Signature is to not necessarily do the best known plays of a particular writer unless there is a special reason to do so. We’re trying to add to the experience; add to the audience’s knowledge. Most people, if they know Arthur Miller’s work (he’s one of the authors we did), they have certainly seen “Death of Salesman,” they’ve certainly seen “The Crucible.” So, there’s not a really compelling reason to do one of those plays. In that season, for instance, we did a lot of lesser-known one-act plays. Or the play “The American Clock”, which had only been done in New York one time as a major production.

In the case of Irene, since her work was not necessarily as well known to some of the audiences that we might be reaching, we picked “Mud” as kind of a quintessential play of hers, if such a thing exists. I would say it was—and I know that she agreed with this at the time—part of the core of her body of work.

There was just something compelling about the idea of the “Mud” going together with “Drowning.” “Mud” is about an hour long and so it’s not totally a full evening, and so we felt like it would be nice to have something else. That was a chance to show another aspect of her work throughout the season.

“Enter the Night” was a play that was wildly different from “Mud.” It was also something that she had done, but it was still very much in progress. I don’t think it had ever been done in New York at the time. It was something that she was still interested in working on some more; something that was new and still in progress. 

Our hope is always to do a new play by our writers, and so we basically said, “Write us a new play” for the new slot.

H: You said you were heavily involved in the production of “Letters from Cuba.” What kind of involvement was that?

B: The play, as you probably know, is based on some actual letters from her brother that she received from him over the course of many years. I was the production dramaturge for that show, but at the time Irene was working in a very interesting way. And so, as we were starting rehearsal, she really did not have a complete script.  She had some of the letters that she had chosen and edited, and then she had some scenes. Her idea was that she would combine these letters from her brother with her own experience of when she was first living in New York in the 60’s and finding her way as an artist, and the people that were around her. 

So she had some scenes that were based on that and she had these letters from her brother. That’s what she came to rehearsal with, so a lot of rehearsal was reading those scenes and reading those letters, figuring out what this world was that allowed both of those things to live dramatically. And then—Irene tends to really work and edit on her feet in a very specific and detailed way—she really used the actors and the space to play a lot and rewrite, edit, and pair down the scenes.

In terms of my role, I was helping her do that and helping her keep track of where we were and when we needed to put these scenes in order and make them into a play. The designers were all really great in terms of providing a really creative space and a kind of magical world in which these things could happen. The letters that she actually had, I think, spanned over 40 years, at least.  So the events that were being described in the play weren’t necessarily happening in real time relative to the scenes that in the “present day” New York City.  So, [my role was] just looking at that, working with her, looking at the big picture, and really shaping it into what finally appeared on stage.

H: We were able to see the video of it up at Lincoln Center’s Library for Performing Arts Billy Rose Theatre Collection.  I loved it.  It was so beautiful.

B: Yeah… Irene is very precise. That’s the word that keeps coming to mind.  You’re in rehearsal, she would get two actors reading a scene and they’d be reading. They’d say a line and she’d say, “Okay, can you say that line again? And turn your head a little bit to the left. Okay, say it again, just a little bit more to the right.” She was kind of doing the same thing with the text at the same time. You know, like, “This time, say blue. This time say brown.” Those are very pedestrian examples but it was the kind of precision that could make the actors crazy. But it also ultimately results in something that’s very specific and very beautiful and very thought-out at the same time.

Maurya: Did you read any of the critiques or articles written about that season?

B: Yes I did.

M: Did you by chance run across John Simon’s Upstairs, Downstairs article?

H: It’s a review of “Mud” and “Drowning.”

B: I’m sure I read it at the time. It’s been so long. I know he’s not always the most supportive reviewer.  I don’t remember what it said at this point though.

M: I have a quote from that article, and I wanted to know how you would respond to this. He says, about “Drowning” that it is “a very short, totally nonsensical, certifiably affectless play.”

B: I definitely was familiar with that play. I would agree that it’s short, and I would agree that it’s certainly nonsensical, not completely nonsensical, but I found it—and I know many other people did as well—incredibly affecting, almost devastatingly so. I think that play in particular, when you read it on the page it’s really hard to get a sense of the effect that it can or did have on stage. In particular, I think that it was a really beautifully staged rendering. We did it after “Mud,” which is pretty devastating and affecting on its own right. The set was on a mud-like floor and there was a wall behind the set, and as “Mud” ended the set split in half and moved to the side. Then the set for “Drowning” came forward. [Beth goes to get a mask piece from the office.]

The actors had all this makeup on them. This is actually a cast of the actor’s makeup and heads, so it already takes on the image of a world. You really got the sense of oozing of emotion out of this world of “Mud.” It was very moving and nonsensical and abstract.  I felt it was a very emotionally full and charged production and you really got a sense of the despair of the character and his longing for Jane Spivak. No one had any idea of who she is, but somehow it was able to be endowed with really great depth.  That’s part of the genius of her work, definitely.

B: [Indicating the mask] We have it in this case because the costume designer entered it in a contest. She actually won an award for the design for this costume. It was pretty intense for the actors; they had a long pre-show makeup session.

M: What specific research went into “Enter the Night?” In working with that show, what did you come across that was particularly memorable?

B: I don’t know that there was a lot other than the basic stuff. One of the characters was a nurse, so there was basic research on whatever it was that she was doing or might have been doing. I do remember Dallas Roberts was the male actor in the show, and he read some materials about the underworld of gay-nightlife, but other than that, the scope of the story is personal. Having Irene/the playwright around cuts [the work load] in half. She’s able to help access…

H: Is that level of research different from, say “Letters from Cuba,” where you might have had to do a lot of research on Cuban…

B: Not really, because I think I think it’s so much more about the emotional journey of the characters. Irene and Chris De Oni (who played her brother) had a short hand in terms of what their cultural backgrounds were, but it wasn’t the kind of research where we did a lot of, “Here’s what’s happening in Cuba.” It was such an intense period of the formation of the play, and not having a complete script… that wasn’t that kind of research to be done.

H: How involved with the director and actors and designers were you?

B: I was definitely involved with all of them. My role at Signature tends to be dramaturge for the shows, but I’m also doing other stuff producing wise, in terms of casting and working with designers. It all overlaps.  If you were just hired as the dramaturge for the show, I’m not sure if you would necessarily be involved in casting.

I think that dramaturges can be involved in a very interesting way in the design process.  I don’t think that they always are because they aren’t always brought on early in that process.  Especially with “Letters from Cuba,” for instance, when it’s not so self-evident from the script what the world of the play is. Just defining that on the most basic level… I think designers are some of the best dramaturges if there are, in terms of helping tell the story of the play.

M: How did your relationship with the plays change from the page to the stage? Did it affect you more after having been put up?

B: Well, definitely. I think “Drowning” is a perfect example.  It’s so simple and spare on the page. It’s 4 pages long or something, but when it’s performed its about 20 minutes long and an incredibly moving piece of theater. Hopefully that’s always the case. Her plays can be so poetic and their worlds can seem so foreign or naturalistic on the page, and to see them take life with living breathing people is a really exhilarating experience. Also, getting to know Irene throughout that process makes that a richer experience.

M& H: Thank you so much.