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[0:07] Gordon Cox: Welcome to Stagecraft, Variety's Theater Podcast, bringing you backstage and behind the scenes with the stars and creators of the hottest shows on Broadway, off Broadway, and beyond.

[0:17] Gordon Cox: I'm your host, Gordon Cox.

[0:19] Gordon Cox: On this episode of Stagecraft, I'm talking to the playwright Lucas Hnath. He's best known for A Doll's House, Part 2, his sequel to the famous Ibsen play, which won Laurie Metcalf a Tony in 2017, and went on to become one of the most produced plays in America. He grabbed Broadway's attention again just last spring with his play Hillary and Clinton. But at the same time, he's also been producing a steady output of highly theatrical new work off Broadway and on stages around the country, with shows like The Christians, Red Speedo, and a public reading of an unproduced screenplay about the death of Walt Disney. Coming up next year, his autobiographically inspired show Dana H plays the Vineyard. But before that, he's got a ghost story to tell us in The Thin Place, now running at Off Broadway's Playwrights Horizons. Lucas is in the studio with me to talk about questioning what we know, mental remapping, and why in horror, less is more.

[1:12] Gordon Cox: Hey Lucas, thanks for joining me.

[1:14] Lucas Hnath: Thanks for having me.

[1:15] Gordon Cox: Um, so I feel like it was a few years ago now that you first told me that you were interested. It was probably around the time of maybe A Doll's House, Part 2 that you were interested in exploring like a ghost story or a spooky story on stage. Is this it?

[1:29] Lucas Hnath: Yeah, this is my version of a horror play. Um, which is to say it's not exactly a direct path to horror. Um, it's me thinking about what scares me more than anything else, and I think the thing that makes me really anxious is the thought that, well, it's very hard to know something. It's very hard to see the world, assess what's going on, and make a conclusion without other thoughts getting in the way.

[1:58] Gordon Cox: Right. Do you have a sense of what sort of inspired your thinking along those lines in terms of your interest in horror or that particular topic?

[2:08] Lucas Hnath: Um, I mean, a whole bunch of influences kind of collide on this play. Um, everything from the short stories of Brian Evanson to there's definitely a— the play's a little bit of an homage to Wallace Shawn because in many respects I think he's one of the best horror writers for the stage.

[2:35] Gordon Cox: Right.

[2:36] Lucas Hnath: Um, and you know, there's a little bit of late Ibsen floating around in there. A couple little winks and nods at him.

[2:47] Gordon Cox: Right.

[2:47] Lucas Hnath: When Ibsen was sort of playing around with the line between the literal and the metaphor and what happens when you start to kind of confuse the two.

[2:57] Gordon Cox: Right.

[2:58] Lucas Hnath: Um, so yeah, that's—I mean, there's so many different things swirling around that those are a couple of them.

[3:03] Gordon Cox: And do you believe in ghosts?

[3:08] Lucas Hnath: I have no evidence that ghosts exist. Which I think is sort of like the—that's sort of one of the ideas floating in the play is, well, okay, just check your beliefs, like really kind of question where are you getting that thought from. Um, so I would say that I—I've not getting the thought that you don't believe in ghosts?

[3:32] Gordon Cox: Well, I—any thought, just, you know, starting at the baseline of, well, I haven't seen anything that makes me think that they necessarily exist.

[3:41] Lucas Hnath: Right.

[3:41] Gordon Cox: Right.

[3:42] Lucas Hnath: And, uh, I mean, I'm open to saying something that might convince me, but there's always— you know, it's funny, I got very interested in how people tell stories of the paranormal.

[3:57] Gordon Cox: Right.

[3:57] Lucas Hnath: And there are a number of them in this play.

[4:01] Gordon Cox: Yes, yes, and that are told to us.

[4:03] Lucas Hnath: Yeah. And I always just sort of have a question of, okay, to what degree are you remembering what happened exactly? Um, because you watch a magic trick and you ask somebody what happened, the likelihood is they're going to misremember what happened in the magic trick.

[4:23] Gordon Cox: Right.

[4:23] Lucas Hnath: Uh, magic tricks are designed to make you misremember what you saw.

[4:27] Gordon Cox: Right.

[4:28] Lucas Hnath: And sometimes these paranormal experiences function in a similar way. Um, and then, you know, there are times where somebody will describe something and I'll say, okay, that's one possible explanation. There's another possible explanation. One is completely boring, the other is really interesting. And we all kind of agree that the really interesting one is a lot more fun.

[4:53] Gordon Cox: Right.

[4:53] Lucas Hnath: Right. And, uh, but I'm very suspicious of anything that's too much fun.

[4:58] Gordon Cox: Right.

[5:01] Lucas Hnath: And did you find it easy to tell—to sort of create that atmosphere of eeriness on stage? Is this stage particularly suitable to this kind of mood and story?

[5:10] Lucas Hnath: I think so. I—I—I found myself pulling back a little bit. Um, there are definitely—without giving away anything—pulling back from the scariness of it or the—

[5:28] Gordon Cox: Yeah, yeah.

[5:28] Lucas Hnath: That it—I mean, the principle that I sort of discovered is, um, it's better when you show less. It's better when you kind of plant the thoughts in people's minds and then walk away from it because people will run with it if you give them the room to.

[5:48] Gordon Cox: I—this—we'll do this after we turn off the mics, but I—I was convinced I was gonna see a thing in a certain moment and you—you did not a single thing with it. I—and I totally convinced myself of that. Had nothing to do with—you had sort of planted the seed for maybe a thing might happen here and it's gonna be really terrifying. And I filled that all in. I've got—had a whole event happen in my head.

[6:10] Lucas Hnath: Um, it didn't happen.

[6:11] Gordon Cox: But yeah, it was scary waiting for it.

[6:13] Lucas Hnath: And there was certainly v—at Humana when we did it, we did a little bit more there.

[6:20] Gordon Cox: Yeah.

[6:21] Lucas Hnath: And then I just—

[6:21] Gordon Cox: Is the Humana—uh, Festival of New Plays in Louisville?

[6:24] Lucas Hnath: And that—or was that earlier this year or the year before?

[6:26] Lucas Hnath: It was earlier this year.

[6:27] Gordon Cox: It was this year, yeah.

[6:28] Lucas Hnath: Right. And at Humana we played around with showing a little bit more, and I just felt like it was cheating.

[6:35] Gordon Cox: Right.

[6:35] Lucas Hnath: Like there—one of—you know, talking about influences, um, very early on in making this play, I started collaborating with Steve Schiffo, who's a magician, uh, that I've known for quite some time and people will know his work if they've seen Annie Baker's Antipodes.

[6:53] Gordon Cox: Uh-huh.

[6:53] Lucas Hnath: Or the object lesson.

[6:57] Gordon Cox: Uh-huh.

[6:57] Lucas Hnath: Or, um, and then we—we had worked together on my play about Walt Disney at Soho Rep.

[7:04] Gordon Cox: And okay.

[7:05] Lucas Hnath: So that was several years ago now.

[7:06] Gordon Cox: Yeah, and I've known Steve since college. We were undergrads at NYU back in the late 90s.

[7:12] Lucas Hnath: So, um, and we had been looking for an excuse to work together again and when I started thinking about this play I thought, well, I want to bring in Steve and he started sending me all of these—I actually am a big magic geek and, uh, own a lot of magic books, but he sent me even more specifically about, um, how to do your own séance and, um, uh, I believe it was Eugene Berger who's a great Chicago magician who passed away about a year ago, um, who had this principle of we all know that we're gonna build to the moment in a séance, um, where you—you plunge people into darkness and, uh, uh, he said everything leading up to that is just priming the audience for the moment where you send them out to see and, and if you do your job right they'll just run with it and you—you actually don't need the—the magician doesn't need to do that much. He's like if you're really disciplined you won't even do anything and, uh, so I took that as a kind of a challenge.

[8:21] Gordon Cox: Right.

[8:21] Lucas Hnath: Well that was actually my next question is what you found kind of the biggest challenge of creating or maintaining that atmosphere.

[8:29] Lucas Hnath: Um, you know, I'm very—if you look at my plays prior to this one, all of my plays are essentially argument plays. They—they propose an idea and then someone comes in, dismantles it, and then more points of view are added to the mix.

[8:50] Gordon Cox: Right.

[8:50] Lucas Hnath: And, um, uh, there's a certain degree—there's a certain degree to which I'm putting ideas in conversation with no resolution always, right? Like I kind of—but nonetheless I do explain a lot in my plays.

[9:07] Gordon Cox: Right.

[9:07] Lucas Hnath: And that was the biggest—that was the—that was the thing I kept on thinking about while working on this play, is I would have a desire to explain something or teach a lesson in a particular moment.

[9:22] Gordon Cox: Right.

[9:22] Lucas Hnath: And horror isn't really about teaching lessons, it's about, um, unraveling the thread, showing the frayed ends of an anxiety and, uh, giving voice to something that—that is actually really hard to resolve.

[9:43] Gordon Cox: Right.

[9:43] Lucas Hnath: Um, and so I had to sort of really discipline myself not to want to let the play psychoanalyze itself as it's happening, especially when things start to get scarier.

[9:55] Gordon Cox: Right.

[9:56] Lucas Hnath: Yeah. This leads me into another question that I had for you, which is kind of about your overall sense of what is theatrical and what interests you in plays. You talked about, uh, sort of argument plays. Um, and I do feel like a lot of the plays I've seen of yours, uh, there is always a sense of almost sometimes a presentational sense, you know, there's microphones, there's always an awareness that we are in a space that is a theater, and theater is being made, and there is an audience, and we are often addressed directly as in this play, actually.

[10:26] Gordon Cox: Um, I'd rarely see from you the kind of fourth wall, like there's a scene up there that is trying to be thoroughly realistic and would happen with or without us watching. And, uh, so what's important to you when you put something on stage and w how do you—what is it that hooks you as a theatrical idea?

[10:44] Lucas Hnath: Yeah, I think of plays as always engaging to some degree in an act of—I'm gonna sound really pretentious here—an act of mental remapping, right? You walk into a theater, and it doesn't matter if it's the most verisimilitudinous set or if it's a bare stage. The play has a moment where it's teaching you, I want you to accept that A is B. And a play is always teaching you all these rules about what the literal things on stage equal in our world. I think there's something really exciting about the verisimilitudinous set where it's like, oh my god, they recreated that on stage, and I'm gonna do one of those. Oh, I have one, it's just not finished yet. I had to put it over to the side this past year, but I do want to experiment with that.

I find it very exciting when the gap between what you're literally looking at on stage really doesn't match what the story is telling you. I'm excited by how that feels mentally. It can come to a point where it's a little bit like spinning plates. You're trying to manage a bunch of rules about the world and the space in your mind. Thin Place is one where I'm really messing around with that quite a bit, and then at times breaking it.

[12:39] Gordon Cox: And when ideas come to you, do they come to you as subjects you want to explore, or this act of sort of remapping an idea for a way to sort of remap something on stage that you are interested in sort of poking around at?

[12:54] Lucas Hnath: Well, I'll put it this way: when I go ahead and write the play, it's because maybe three different ideas in different categories come to me. So a theatrical conceit plus a character plus an argument, right? When I get maybe three or five ideas in different categories that all seem related, that's the point where I feel I'm ready to write the play.

[13:22] Gordon Cox: I'll have more with Lucas right after the break.

[13:32] Gordon Cox: And we're back with playwright Lucas Hnath. And you've got another new play coming to New York that's been done in LA and Chicago.

[13:41] Lucas Hnath: Yeah.

[13:41] Gordon Cox: And it's called Dana H. And that has a totally unexpected theatrical gambit to it. It's one I don't think I've ever seen on stage. The lead actor doesn't speak, if I have this right. I haven't seen it yet. Does not speak and lip syncs to a recording of a real person who is also your mother reciting the story of a traumatic time in her life or an event that happened to her. Is that—did I describe that right?

[14:09] Lucas Hnath: Yeah, yeah. It started as a commission from The Civilians, which is a very sort of documentary-based theater group.

[14:17] Gordon Cox: Okay, interesting.

[14:18] Lucas Hnath: Yeah, and Steve Cosson, the artistic director, interviewed my mother for several days and recorded them, presumably recorded it, and the play is composed from many days of interviews cut together into about 73 minutes and twelve seconds.

[14:43] Gordon Cox: Right, is it the type of play where you know down to how long it is?

[14:48] Lucas Hnath: Um, and it was just this idea that—I mean, the story is something that happened about 20 years ago while I was a freshman in college at NYU. The story—

[15:00] Gordon Cox: So you were not around for the story.

[15:04] Lucas Hnath: I was around for parts of it.

[15:05] Gordon Cox: Okay.

[15:06] Lucas Hnath: I was around for parts of it. But the story sort of quickly becomes something where I think people have the experience of feeling like it's kind of incredible. It's kind of—I mean, the stuff that happens is just unreal in many respects, and yet it was. I knew that if I—my mother was very interested in me writing a play about the event. And I mean, that's obviously one of my questions: how does your mother feel about it?

[15:36] Gordon Cox: She wanted it before you did.

[15:37] Lucas Hnath: Yeah, and my question, going back to where this train of thought even began, was like, well, we got a story, we have a character, I don't have a form for it. And then the thought occurred to me that the idea of it being a monologue that's lip synced seemed right because anytime I thought about writing a reenactment play or dramatization of it, people would watch it probably and think, well, okay, that part's written. That part's made. And it became—I thought it was really important to not have that question as you're watching. And so it being an actual recording that you're listening to—it's her actual voice—that seemed to answer the question.

[16:34] Gordon Cox: And so that's what that form allowed you as a writer to do. What does it allow—what have you found that it allows the actress to do playing your mother?

[16:44] Lucas Hnath: Yeah, so the actress is Deidre O'Connell, great actress. She's extraordinary in many, many off-Broadway shows and Broadway shows. It's funny, like, her experience of it is—she describes it as a little bit like being in a bubble. The method that we're using means that she has feeds going into both ears, so she can't even hear the audience. And then we have a bright light on her, so she can't even see the audience. Her experience of doing it is kind of this strange channeling. She describes the play as a little bit like having a brain tumor. I'm not fully sure what that means, but yeah, when she said it, I was like, yeah, I get it. I get it. Yeah, that makes sense.

[17:44] Gordon Cox: And does her performance recall your mother to you?

[17:49] Lucas Hnath: Like how much does it resemble—yeah, well, so there was a question about whether or not she should meet my mother even before we went into production, and she did not. She just relied on the recording. She syncs every breath that's on the recording. It's funny because my mother, when she recorded it, was wearing these jangly bracelets, so you actually hear the bracelets in the recording. So Didi moves her arms every time she hears my mother move her arms. And because she sort of—again, going back to the breath—because she synced so much even just with her breath, she makes the same mouth movements my mother makes. It's this very eerie thing. It's a different type of séance. This is my season of séance plays.

[18:38] Gordon Cox: You mentioned that your mother wanted you to write a play before you did. What was it that convinced you to write this play? Was it the form coming to you?

[18:38] Lucas Hnath: It was the form and also Steve Cosson. You know, when he came to me and said that he thought I would be a good match for documentary theater, and we had a really good conversation about it, I thought, yeah, this is the way to enter this play. This is the way to do it.

[19:17] Gordon Cox: And why did you want to—?

[19:17] Lucas Hnath: That's a good question. Why did I want to? I mean, I think the answer to that sort of changed as I worked on it. I think it started off as a feeling of obligation almost. You know, it's sort of like I felt like I had kind of left my mother out of my playwriting career, and that I wanted to bring her along, and she wanted to come along. So I think it started off as a feeling of obligation, and then as I got into it, the other thing that the lip syncing allows—my mother tells the story, the vocal intonation is not obvious. If you were to hand the actor the script for that play and say perform it, what an actor would likely do would be completely reasonable and not match my mother's tone of voice, which, you know, she's describing the most horrific events and laughing her way through them, or she's sort of weirdly kind of flat and expressionless at points where you would expect she would be more expressive.

I find it—I think sometimes we expect a certain kind of quote-unquote performance from people who have experienced trauma, and if they don't perform, if they don't express themselves in a way that matches our received notion of trauma or grief, then they're not credible. This is also my attempt to kind of maybe make a tiny, tiny, tiny dent in helping to reprogram our sense of what that experience could look like.

[21:20] Lucas Hnath: Because, you know, it is hard. A lot of received notions about grief and trauma are reinforced by storytelling and performance. And if you were to act a certain way in a play, people might say, "Hmm, that's kind of a... you really didn't get the emotion of that character." Or, you know, like you'd get that critique. So here I just say, well, I've got the actual document. So you can't contradict that.

[21:58] Gordon Cox: How hard was it to work on a story like this that was so close to you?

[22:04] Lucas Hnath: The actual work was a little... I mean, it was hard at points, but not at the points that you would expect, right? The writing of it was just story math. And by the writing of it, I mean that editing basically, so it's like taking her extemporaneous interviews and kind of assembling them. Is that... yeah, yeah. And it's the way I talk about it; it's heavily edited, right? Everything. And it's true, it's just that there's a lot of crafting of it because the way she tells, you know, in the transcripts, she moves all over the place, and it's fairly freeform. And so I've kind of composed it into a tighter narrative. That just became the quote-unquote writing of it, right? It became about story math and making sure that the character is legible in the structure and that you have a reasonable sense of why she does what she does when she does it, and all of that basic element of craft. But like, it was being in production, I think, is when it kind of... that's when I started to have lots of nightmares.

[23:37] Gordon Cox: Yeah.

[23:38] Lucas Hnath: You know, that's when it starts to sneak up on you. All your plays, because all your plays are sort of rooted in a theatrical kind of conceit. They all seem so specifically geared for the stage. Is writing for film or TV a thing that interests you?

[23:50] Lucas Hnath: I get a lot of interest from film and TV folks. I've not yet found the thing that I really want to do there. And it's funny, Dana H did partially ruin me for theater because I get to control every single breath in that way. And that level of control is deeply satisfying. I got the taste of editing.

[24:29] Gordon Cox: Right, yeah.

[24:29] Lucas Hnath: And I do kind of think that that screen is maybe a little more on the horizon. I think I would likely steer towards writing and directing. But, you know, it's tricky because with television, that's potentially many, many years that you're committing to something if it all goes great. And so that's just made me really, really picky about what's a world I want to live in for that long.

[25:05] Gordon Cox: Sure.

[25:06] Lucas Hnath: Yeah.

[25:07] Gordon Cox: And have you considered writing a musical?

[25:11] Lucas Hnath: It's come up a couple of times. Cesar Alvarez, writer of... he wrote a musical called Futurity. Oh yeah. We'd been talking about doing something for a while, and we still may do it. But, yeah, beyond that, I haven't considered it for the...

[25:27] Gordon Cox: Yeah, I was gonna say, is there a band for whom you would like to write the jukebox musical?

[25:40] Lucas Hnath: Be like Anthony and the Johnsons would probably be my great sign-off. You know, bombastic, operatic.

[25:49] Gordon Cox: Right.

[25:50] Lucas Hnath: Yeah. Were you always a writer growing up? When did you figure out that writing was a thing that you wanted to do?

[25:58] Lucas Hnath: Yeah, I really didn't like writing for much of high school. I was really... I had a lot of anxiety about commas. I didn't know how they worked exactly. There were some ambiguous rules about commas. So I was much more of a math and science person. I liked equations.

[26:20] Gordon Cox: Yeah.

[26:20] Lucas Hnath: The ambiguity of words made me really nervous, and any type of standardized testing that involved language and multiple choice, I did very poorly at because I could figure out an answer that worked for every choice. This is not unlike the point of this play that she... you know, okay, so in high school, it was sort of a problem. And then in college, I was on the pre-med track. I was gonna be a doctor; that was my plan. Where was this?

[26:44] Gordon Cox: Was it NYU?

[26:46] Lucas Hnath: Yeah, undergrad NYU. Okay, yeah. And in my first year there, we had this class called Writing the Essay, which was the mandatory freshman essay writing class. My teacher was Megan Abbott, who's a novelist who wrote You Won't Know Me. She writes on The Deuce now, but at that point, she was getting her PhD in literature, if I'm not mistaken, and she sort of encouraged me to... she told me that I was a good writer, which was a bit of a shock to me.

[27:46] Gordon Cox: And at what point in there was theater a thing that you discovered?

[27:51] Lucas Hnath: So I always was interested in theater to some degree. I did drama club in high school, and I did do musicals. I was in Little Shop. I played Seymour.

[28:01] Gordon Cox: Excellent.

[28:02] Lucas Hnath: There's tapes somewhere of that. And I would dabble. I would read those play collections that you could get at the local bookstore, like the Sam Shepard anthologies, or I would read a lot of Albee. And so I would kind of dabble in a notebook, and those were my first attempts at playwriting.

[28:31] Gordon Cox: And that would have been around college?

[28:33] Lucas Hnath: Well, it was high school that I was sort of dabbling. But the funny thing is I didn't really consider that writing. That was something else.

[28:40] Gordon Cox: Okay.

[28:41] Lucas Hnath: And, you know, because I think the thing that intimidated me about essay writing, for example, was that it all had to be my voice, and the play I get to divide up with different voices.

[28:59] Gordon Cox: Right. When you were starting out as a writer, what was it that you were sort of driven to explore in your writing, and has that changed over the years?

[29:08] Lucas Hnath: I still think all of my plays keep coming back to, from then and through now, some version of what do you know, how do you know it, and are you sure you know it? If you do, like one of those word clouds with any of my plays, "know" is the most common word that shows up.

[29:31] Gordon Cox: Okay.

[29:31] Lucas Hnath: Or one of the most common. "Okay" is probably the most common.

[29:35] Gordon Cox: Yeah, sure.

[29:35] Lucas Hnath: But I think that's remained true, even through I think some of the stuff I kind of vaguely remember writing in a little scrapbook in high school.

[29:51] Gordon Cox: Right. You've got Dana H coming up. What's next for you after that?

[29:56] Lucas Hnath: I have a number of commissions that I'm delinquent on, and half-finished plays, that realistic one that you told us about.

[30:07] Gordon Cox: Yeah, my attempt at that.

[30:07] Lucas Hnath: And a couple of others. So I think I need to, once I'm through the spring, I'm gonna go back and look at what's in my pile and see if I still feel as strongly about it now as I did then.

[30:31] Gordon Cox: Is there a thing that you hope to do on stage or a conceit you want to explore on stage that you haven't gotten to do yet?

[30:39] Lucas Hnath: Oh yeah, yeah. No, I have a long list of things that are kind of... be it forms I want to try, or even just sometimes it'll even start with a set design that I have an idea for. I'm like, this is a really interesting idea for a set. What can I do with it?

[30:55] Gordon Cox: Right.

[30:56] Lucas Hnath: But it'll stay on the back burner until I have other pieces that make it kind of pop.

[31:04] Gordon Cox: Right, right. Well, we look forward to hearing your next ghost story or whatever theatrical form you explore next.

[31:14] Lucas Hnath: Thank you, Lucas.

[31:15] Lucas Hnath: Thanks for doing this.

[31:17] Gordon Cox: Thank you for having me. That was Lucas Hnath, whose play The Thin Place is at Playwrights Horizons through January 5th. And his other new show, Dana H, begins a run at Off-Broadway's Vineyard Theater in February. If you like what you've heard on this and other episodes of Stagecraft, don't forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and subscribe on your Podcatcher of Choice. Next week's episode will come a little later in the week than usual, but it'll be worth it because I'll be talking about the new movie adaptation of Cats. Until then, see the theater.