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[0:06] Gordon Cox: You're listening to Stagecraft, Variety's Theatre Podcast, bringing you in-depth interviews with the people behind the hottest shows on Broadway, off Broadway, in London, and around the country.

[0:16] Gordon Cox: I'm your host, Varieties Theater editor, Gordon Cox.

[0:20] Gordon Cox: On this episode of Stagecraft, I'm talking with Beau Willimon, the creator of House of Cards, whose play, The Parisian Woman, opens on Broadway November 30th with a starry cast led by Uma Thurman.

[0:31] Gordon Cox: Beau's in the studio to talk about political drama in the Trump era, working with Uma, his next TV outing, and more.

[0:47] Gordon Cox: But you first wrote that play in 2013, right?

[0:50] Beau Willimon: Yeah, even a little bit before that. It began with a commission from the Flea Theater, a great downtown theater that produced my very first stage production, Lower Ninth.

[1:01] Gordon Cox: Oh, I didn't know that that was them, yeah.

[1:03] Beau Willimon: Yeah, and the Flea's always been great to me. I love that theater, and they had approached me to see if I wanted to adapt a 19th century French play by Henri Becque called La Parisienne.

[1:14] Gordon Cox: That was obviously one of my questions.

[1:15] Beau Willimon: I had never heard of Henri Becque before, so if you haven't, you're in good company. He's a pretty obscure playwright these days; it's a little more well known in Europe, but he was pretty influential in the late 19th century. He was taking well-known forms like the French Chamber play or the farce, the ménage, turning them on their heads, and his plays were very controversial as a result. He was also bringing those forms into the sphere of naturalism. So he was influencing playwrights like Chekhov and Ibsen and Strindberg. They were familiar with his work, even if we aren't today. I read this play and I loved it, and I thought it would be a lot of fun to adapt it.

[2:01] Gordon Cox: And what's that play about?

[2:02] Beau Willimon: So in that play, there is a ménage. The center of it is a character named Clotilde. She's the La Parisienne, the Parisian woman. Her husband is up for, I believe, a teaching position that he's trying to get and running into some trouble with that. She, as a sort of grand bourgeoisie, as this woman of society, is able to manipulate and steer things in order to help him achieve that goal. What was revolutionary about that at the time was that you're rooting for the married couple as opposed to the lovers. Oftentimes, the cuckolded husband is the one that is the sort of comic relief, the person that is kind of a villain in a way, and he turned that around. He portrayed this marriage in a way that was more realistic than had existed in the French theater.

[2:59] Beau Willimon: Now, as I began to adapt it, I thought it was just gonna be a straight-up adaptation that would exist in contemporary DC. What I found was that I wanted to make some significant changes. There were a couple of characters I wanted to either get rid of or change fundamentally. There was one or two characters I thought I might want to add. His play was a five-act play, very short acts, but five-act plays with monologues, and I wanted to get rid of the monologues. I wanted to have a one-act structure. As I began to flirt with these changes, I realized, well, I can't go halfway. I either have to go the path I want to go or stick closer to the play, so it's a more straight-up adaptation. I decided to go my own path, and that's why we say the play is inspired by Henri Becque's La Parisienne because it wouldn't be fair to Monsieur Becque to call it an adaptation.

I stole something shamelessly for sure in terms of some of the elements in the internal lives of these characters and in a few bits of plot, but beyond the first 10 pages or so, it really starts to veer into something completely different. It became a process of discovery for me as it became more and more my own play. Ultimately, Pam McKinnon and I did a production of it at South Coast Rep.

[4:22] Beau Willimon: This is the director Pam McKinnon, who is a Tony winner for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

[4:26] Gordon Cox: That's right.

[4:26] Beau Willimon: Yeah, she's wonderful, and I was very lucky that she was willing to come out to South Coast Rep and play around with us out there and put this production up. South Coast Rep does a great job in promoting new work and giving you a place with a pretty experienced audience when it comes to new work to try new things, and that's exactly what we did. I was really proud of that production. I thought that it certainly delivered in terms of what I set out to do, which was to take this play and make it my own and have it be thought-provoking and entertaining. But you're always sort of left wondering after a production, what could I have done better? Were there opportunities for improvement? Oftentimes, you let it go; you move on to the next play. That's what it was at that time, and then you're off to the next project.

[5:23] Beau Willimon: As a result of that production, we started to get some interest from the Broadway community. Tom Vertel and his partners said, "Hey, we'd like to try to put this up on Broadway." It gave Pam and me an opportunity to keep talking about this play, to keep investigating what it is and what it could be. We began the process of trying to find a theater and raise the money and put our cast together, and Uma Thurman came on board, and so this started to really look like it was gonna happen.

[5:57] Gordon Cox: And when did Trump show up?

[5:58] Beau Willimon: Well, we were pretty far along in the process. We had a fair amount of our cast, and the money was in place, and it looked like we had a pretty good lead on a theater. So, you know, the train— not the Trump train— our train was full steam ahead, and then Trump got elected. We had a reading for producers not long after the election, and I thought to myself, "Well, this play, which takes place in DC, that feels very much of the here and now, suddenly doesn't feel like the here and now because it's not in any way addressing this radically different landscape that we have politically and culturally as a result of this man being elected." So I approached Pam and the producers and said, "I would like to make some very substantial revisions to take advantage of this moment to see it as an opportunity to place these characters in this new world." I'm incredibly grateful that the producers were fully behind that, and Pam was excited about it for sure.

[7:09] Beau Willimon: So I did some substantial revisions.

[7:12] Gordon Cox: Substantial. That was gonna be my question is how much revision that entailed.

[7:16] Beau Willimon: 22.4%. No, it's difficult to quantify substantial, other than to say—and also I don't want to give too much away—but let me put it this way: at the center of the play is a woman who exists in the upper echelons of power circles in DC. Her husband is a pretty successful attorney. He has worked with a lot of people in the beltway. He has the potential to land a position of power, and she has been mostly a woman of leisure, of art, of beauty, someone who has been fascinated by politics but hasn't felt the need to exist sort of at the center of the dance floor. This is now taking place post-election with an administration that handles nominations and how power is divvied out in a fundamentally different way than we were used to, and certainly that existed in the play prior to the election.

So I thought if this is the milieu in which the play is set, there's an opportunity to ask myself and thereby reveal to the audience what are these characters' points of view about all of this, and has it in any way affected the choices that they're making? What I found was that it deepened all of their motivations, it sharpened the characters in terms of where they were on the political spectrum, and it added an entire new layer and depth to the play and a sharpness and specificity of the character that I don't think was there as much in the previous iteration. So I think in a strange sort of way, it gave me a great specific opportunity to make the play better.

[9:25] Gordon Cox: And then how did Uma Thurman get involved in the project?

[9:28] Beau Willimon: All the credit goes to Pam McKinnon for that. Uma was looking to do something on the stage, and she sat down with Pam, which makes sense because Pam is such an accomplished director. They were talking about things they might work on together, and Pam said, "Hey, there's this play that Beau Willimon wrote that I think you might find interesting that you would be great for." Uma read it, loved it, wanted to consider it seriously, which was absolutely thrilling moment for me to find out that Uma Thurman was reading my play. I admired her all the way back to Dangerous Liaisons, which I think was the first time I saw her on screen, and I thought, "Wow, this would be incredible for her to make her Broadway debut at all, but much less with my play."

So we sat down, and the first time we met for coffee, it was one of those moments where I felt subconsciously I had written this play for Uma Thurman because I saw Chloe sitting in front of me. I mean, it was Uma being Uma, but I could completely picture it. Before long, we were talking about the play regularly, doing readings, and moving towards putting her on a Broadway stage.

[10:50] Gordon Cox: It seems like very clearly you're drawn to politics and writing about politics and what happens in politics. You've got this and House of Cards and your breakout play Farragut North and so many of the things that you work on. What's the attraction for you?

[11:04] Beau Willimon: Well, it's interesting. I mean, I get asked that question a lot, and my answer is always the same, which is that I don't just write about politics. I've written 14 plays, in fact, and only two of them, Farragut North and this one, even exist overtly in the political world. It just so happens that the things that I'm a little more known for, whether it's Farragut North, House of Cards, Ends of March, which was the film adaptation that George Clooney made of Farragut North, we should mention.

[11:38] Gordon Cox: Yes, that's right.

[11:39] Beau Willimon: Take place in a political world. So that means one of two things. I mean, it's just sort of arbitrarily my luck that those are the pieces of work that have kind of broken out, or when I don't write about politics, it's not as good. I hope it's more the former than the latter. But yes, I certainly have returned to it. I didn't just write about politics once; I've written about it a fair amount. I think there's something about the political world that, when you do it right, allows you to access all the universal things that we experience—love, trust, betrayal, coming to terms with who you are and who you want to be—and it places it in an environment that has very high stakes. I mean, as we see in the real-life world around us, the decisions that people in power make affect all of our lives.

It's why I imagine Shakespeare was drawn to kings and queens because if you have Lady Macbeth, and you're seeing that sort of level of ambition that she has, we all can experience ambition to a degree, but in her case, people die. I think that it just takes these universal experiences and amplifies them. I will say about this play that while it takes place in DC and while there's certainly mention of politics, I don't know if I would call it a political drama per se. Its goal is not to be; its subject is not politics. Its subject is the journey of this woman at a moment of self-reckoning where she's looking at the choices she's made in the past, where she currently is, and the choice as to who she wants to be and what she wants her marriage to be. It collides with and intersects with politics, but the subject is her journey, not the politics that surround it.

[12:20] Gordon Cox: Have you found that it is easier to write about politics in the era of Trump or harder or neither?

[12:20] Beau Willimon: It's never easy to write anything. I guess this play is the first time I've written a play in the era of Trump.

[14:19] Beau Willimon: And you know, it forced me to ask a lot of questions about myself and also forced me to try to get in the shoes of characters that didn't share my political views, which is always a difficult thing to do because you're taking your own worldview and subverting your ego and making that disappear so that you can take on someone else's worldview. And at times, and particularly in this play, a worldview that I find abhorrent. So one of the things people will find in The Parisian Woman is that there is a spectrum of political views, of worldviews in this play. The extent to which I was successful portraying these multiple worldviews, well, that's really up to the audience. But it's certainly challenging.

[15:12] Gordon Cox: Right. And did you have roots in the theater? You studied the theater, you went to Columbia, is that right?

[15:19] Beau Willimon: Well, I really started playing Jim in To Kill a Mockingbird in eighth grade. That's where that really began. I actually bring that up because I had an incredible drama teacher in junior high and in high school out in St. Louis. He had us doing things like transcendental meditation and Meisner technique when we were 12 years old. Wayne Solomon.

[15:42] Beau Willimon: And in his very small school, so many of the students in that small school have gone on to have successful careers in theater, film, TV, Jon Hamm, for instance. I was in a playhouse. I was in Stage Door with him my senior year. There's a photo on Facebook somewhere. He was faculty. He'd come back to teach acting alongside Wayne, and sometimes we'd have faculty in the productions. Ellie Kemper was a couple of years below me. A lot of writers that are doing well. And also my principal's daughter.

[16:15] Gordon Cox: What school is this?

[16:16] Beau Willimon: This is John Burroughs in St. Louis. My principal's daughter, Liz, was the niece of Spalding Gray. So Spalding would come sometimes to St. Louis to perform, often at Washington University. I remember the first time Liz said to me, "Hey, my uncle's coming to do a monologue. Do you want to go see it?" And I said, "Sure, like a monologue? What do you mean?" She's like, "Just come, just check it out." And Spalding did Gray's Anatomy. It blew my mind that this man could just sit behind a simple wooden desk with a glass of water and some notes and create an entire universe just with his voice and body. And we went back to the Gray's house afterwards, and it's almost like he continued the performance in the kitchen, just sitting at a little kitchen table, continuing to spin his yarns.

And if I really think back, I think that's the moment where I wanted to become a writer even if I didn't know it. The idea that you string these words together, you three-dimensionalize them with the body and the voice, and you create magic.

[17:26] Beau Willimon: When I came to New York, I studied at Columbia undergrad, but as a painter. No, I know I'm much better at painting than writing. Writing doesn't come easily to me. I really have to struggle for it, which is I think why I veered towards it. I thought writing would force a discipline, a struggle that would help me get closer to honesty. And it has, I think.

[17:48] Gordon Cox: How did your roots in the theater serve you as you were creating House of Cards? And now that you've left it, how did House of Cards serve you as you were now working on this new version of The Parisian Woman?

[18:01] Beau Willimon: Well, my career in film and television is something that I still am kind of baffled and surprised by. When I started out in the theater, just to put it in perspective, I was interning at the Wooster Group and New Dramatists. I thought I would be perfectly happy if my entire life was spent somewhere like the Performing Garage, you know, forty or fifty people coming to see something really weird. We're talking about very alternative downtown theater for the listeners who don't know that space. I mean you must enjoy your Wooster Group.

[18:34] Gordon Cox: Absolutely.

[18:35] Beau Willimon: Yeah, and to be able to see Liz LeCompte work for two years on something, and I was sweeping the stage and answering phones, but I occasionally got a peek into this magic. Watch Kate Vaughn work. I love her. Well, Kate Vaughn, one of the great actresses of our time, you know, she can do anything. And at New Dramatists, I'm seeing readings of playwrights who were doing off-off-Broadway theater, and for many of them it was a huge deal just to have a reading that 20 people would come to. I thought this would be my life. And when I first started taking writing seriously, a bunch of friends and I would go to the basement of the Drama Bookshop on 40th Street, the Arthur Seelin Theater. I don't know if it's still called that, but it's basically just a basement with its walls painted black and a few lighting units.

I mean, you know, it's not much to speak of. In fact, it's really not that much bigger than the room that we're sitting in. You know, I know those of you listening can't see this room, but it's not very big. It's long and narrow and very fancy. There's a lot of amazing books, but this was just kind of like a dingy basement. The first reading I ever had of a play, Tommy Kail directed. Oh wow, he directed Hamilton and In the Heights and lots of other things. That's right. I think there were all of maybe twelve people there. Lynn Manuel Miranda was doing early versions of In the Heights and Freestyle Love Supreme, and it would be twenty people popping open tall boys and just watching him do his thing.

Billy Eichner was doing very early versions of a live talk show called Creation Nation, and he would have guests come, and it was sort of like his if he were Jimmy Kimmel or something, but a lot more ribald and ludicrous. But there were also early videos of Billy on the street that he would play during these that obviously became well, what Billy's so, you know, Liz Merriweather, who I think is a wonderful playwright, but also went on to create and showrun New Girl. We were all just in this basement performing for each other and a few dozen people at a time. I thought that would be my life. And I would have whatever my day job was. If I was very extremely lucky, maybe I would get to have a production one day at one of the more prestigious off-Broadway houses.

[21:29] Gordon Cox: So Broadway was not in your head at that point.

[21:30] Beau Willimon: No, you just can't fathom it as a possibility. You're like, how do I get an agent? How do I get a theater to even read my play? Can we get 40 people to come to this one-off we're doing tonight? You just have to accept, and I tell this to young writers when I speak to them. I say, you have to, if you're going to the theater especially, you have to accept the fact that you will never make money and no one will ever know who you are. Fame and fortune are not only not guaranteed, but it's a disservice to your own approach to what you're doing to even aim for them. The reason I love working in the theater and the reason I hire so many playwrights on my writing staffs is because the people that go into the theater and especially that write for the theater are doing it for no other reason than their love of story and performance.

They will crawl across a desert to tell a good story because there's just no notion that you're ever going to make a real living from it, or anyone will ever know who you are. So I got extremely lucky insofar as Farragut North, a play that 40 theaters around the country had turned down, somehow got into the right hands in Hollywood, and folks out there wanted to turn it into a movie. This is a play that hadn't even had a single production yet. And it was completely ass backwards. I mean, this play is moving towards becoming a movie before I've had any theater say we want to do it. In some ways, I think I only have a theater career because of that happening and drawing attention to that play, and I started to have productions after that.

[23:23] Gordon Cox: I feel like before we go, we should at least talk about briefly the TV project you're working on, which is exciting. Tell me a little bit about The First and what's going on with it.

[23:33] Beau Willimon: The First is about the first human mission to Mars set in the near future. We begin filming shortly, and it films in New Orleans.

[23:39] Gordon Cox: In New Orleans.

[23:46] Beau Willimon: Yeah. And are you on Mars? Are any of the locations Mars? Is that a spoiler?

[23:49] Beau Willimon: I don't want to give too much away, other than to say that if it's about the first human mission to Mars, it's not unreasonable to assume that at some point in the story we'll get there. But also New Orleans is a big part of the story for reasons I won't go into deeply here, but I've actually found living in New Orleans now for a bit of time and really infusing into the story, it's such a magical place. There's a quote on a street not too far from where I live in the Marigny that's been spray painted on the wall, and it's a Tennessee Williams quote. The quote is essentially there are only three cities in America, San Francisco, New York, and New Orleans. Everything else is Cleveland. And having spent a little time in all three of those cities, but particularly New Orleans of late, I can see where he's coming from.

It's a special place. It's filled with magic and mystery, and I'm certainly trying to work that into the show. Anyway, two of our stars are Sean Penn and Natasha McElhone, and we've got a great cast beyond that, which we haven't announced yet, so stay tuned. But it's a departure from House of Cards in a lot of ways, chiefly being that.

[25:08] Gordon Cox: But as you pointed out, sometimes you write about things that aren't politics, right?

[25:16] Beau Willimon: Often, more often than not, actually. Now that said, I actually think all writing is political. I think My Fair Lady is like one of the most political plays ever written. If you think of it through the lens of gender and class and self-identity, it's also got some great tunes. But if you really think about any meaningful piece of writing, it is offering a perspective. It comes from somewhere, someone wrote it, and whether they're explicitly sharing their political views or not, you can't as a writer divorce yourself from your own experiences and worldview. So it will end up in there one way or another, and sometimes it's just more on the surface.

[26:08] Gordon Cox: I think that's a great place to end this. Thanks a lot, Beau.

[26:10] Beau Willimon: Wonderful.

[26:12] Gordon Cox: Yeah, nice to talk to you.

[26:13] Beau Willimon: So much fun. Thanks for having me.