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[0:07] Gordon Cox: Welcome to Stagecraft, Variety's Theater Podcast, bringing you backstage and behind the lockdown with theater's biggest movers and shakers on Broadway, off Broadway, and streaming to a device near you.

[0:17] Gordon Cox: On this episode of Stagecraft, I'm talking to Sarah Ruhl. She's the award-winning playwright of Eurydice, The Clean House, and In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play, among many others. She's also a poet and essayist, and her work has won her a MacArthur Genius Grant, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. She is also the co-founder of Three Views, a new theater website that originated in the minds of its creators as one thing, and then pivoted to something else, as it became clear that Three Views was going to launch during this extended period when theaters have been closed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Ruhl is in the virtual studio with me to talk poetry and presence in the theater and what she hopes Three Views can offer as we all wait for theaters to reopen. Hey Sarah, thanks for joining me.

[1:02] Sarah Ruhl: Hi, happy to speak to you.

[1:04] Gordon Cox: Yes. So tell us about Three Views. What was the original idea behind it? And when did you first have it?

[1:11] Sarah Ruhl: So the original idea was sort of spawned by a large cohort of theater makers around three years ago. And the initial idea was to start some kind of online journal or publication that would have multiple perspectives on one piece of theater. And part of the impulse was to make the gatekeepers as diverse as the people making the art. You know, that we needed more women critics and we needed more people of color as theater critics. Um, so that was the impulse. Uh, and also, I mean, diversity in that sense, but also diversity of opinion, aesthetic, genre. We were interested in all kinds of multiplicity. And I think we realized creating this thing together, just how hard it is to do something like that.

I mean, it's incredibly hard, it's a huge labor. Uh, and we were sort of slowly trying to put together a model that made sense. And then the pandemic happened, and we decided to pivot, or I love in Michelle Obama's autobiography, she talks about swerving, you know, when you have an idea or you're on a path and you have to swerve. Uh and so the new notion during the pandemic was what if we use the website that we were building instead to really create community in the theater by mourning productions that were canceled, archiving those productions somehow, offering prayers and reflections and elegies and sort of meditations by people in the theater community. So I think of it almost like a Zen garden where you kind of keep putting a stone in front of a stone, thinking that we'll keep posting these reflections until the theater reopens. Um, and right now it's kind of a way to hold space in the community.

[3:22] Gordon Cox: Where does the name of the site come from?

[3:25] Sarah Ruhl: Gosh, I can't even necessarily remember how we came up with it. It was a group effort. Um, I mean, I guess it was from the notion that we might have three views of one piece of art. Um, at some point, we were also thinking of sort of three sections, one that was reviews, one that was um previews, and one with something that we were calling purviews. So we were just kind of playing around with the idea of multiple perspectives, and uh we ended up, as it turns out, posting 13 reflections to start with, because I was thinking of the Wallace Stevens poem, 13 Ways of Seeing a Blackbird. And I guess we'd always thought if there are 13 ways to see a blackbird, there must be at least 13 ways of doing one piece of theater.

[4:15] Gordon Cox: Right. And when was this? When did the first batch of posts go up?

[4:20] Sarah Ruhl: Uh I think it was a week ago.

[4:22] Gordon Cox: Yeah. And so when, how often will that continue to be updated with new um content?

[4:29] Sarah Ruhl: I think we will have a new reflection every week. So this week, Octavio Solis has a beautiful poem that's been posted. And then we have three um canceled or closed early productions probably every two weeks. Uh, and right now the editor Melissa Crespo is focusing on a different city every two weeks. Uh so she started with New York, uh, and then I think in two weeks, Chicago will be featured.

[4:58] Gordon Cox: And these are little excerpts for at least from what I've seen, these are little excerpts with there's sometimes a little video or an excerpt from the play on the page and you know, maybe some other information about it. Is that right? Is that basically what those what those remember uh what those I don't know, kind of um memorials of those productions will be?

[5:17] Sarah Ruhl: Yes, exactly. I mean, I think we're hoping to get some kind of talisman for each production, you know, whether it's um there was an interview with a singer in intimate apparel and she sung a song in the interview.

[5:31] Gordon Cox: Yeah, this is the Lynn Nottage opera.

[5:33] Sarah Ruhl: Um would have happened and will eventually, but not for a while. Exactly. Um I mean, we're hoping to get, you know, just a little bit of texture flavor, but it was also really important to me that there be an excerpt on the page. So there should be 10 page excerpts for each production. And I guess the reason that was important to me was that I think in the time of pandemic, you know, there's one impulse to go digital, which I totally understand. But I think there will also be an analog need to go back to the page, you know, to see how these things live on the page before we can make them in three dimensions again.

[6:13] Gordon Cox: Yeah. And how is Three Views funded? Where does the infrastructure come from, just financially speaking?

[6:19] Sarah Ruhl: So we are a project from the Lilies, which um Julia Jordan is the fearless leader of the champions women in the theater. Um but the money really comes from a Kickstarter. We did God, I mean, is it been two years now? It's really taken us a long time to put this together. So it's really some grassroots donations that fund the site.

[6:44] Gordon Cox: Yeah. And what were the main obstacles as you were putting this together? What was the thing that that kept that slowed you down so much?

[6:54] Sarah Ruhl: I think it's that it's very hard to create a new credible model for criticism. There are pitfalls actually everywhere you look. And um Is this uh is this an aesthetic model or a financial model, or what what in particular were you everything?

[7:10] Sarah Ruhl: I mean I think you know, funding is a big deal. I think what we were trying to do was really ambitious, and to be completely candid, I don't think we could have done it without a huge um fund from the Ford or the Mellon or something like that, and four full-time employees to really make it a going concern. I mean, I think we were a scrappy little group, but with a kind of big idea. Um, and I think no one realized just how much time and effort uh you would need to create three views of one production and actually um in a timely fashion so that those could have an effect on the life of the production.

[7:55] Gordon Cox: Right. So, you know, I think it was an education for all of us um coming from the theater and thinking I think um rightfully that it's wonderful to expand the idea of who can write about the theater, and and I think that continues to be wonderful, but of course, when you don't have a background in journalism or um uh publication or startups, there are gonna be a lot of learning curves that hit you with speed and velocity, and you know, you feel like you're holding a firecracker that blows up in your face.

[8:34] Gordon Cox: Do contributors get paid?

[8:36] Sarah Ruhl: Yes, they do. They are they're also free to donate back um to the site, so a lot of folks have donated, uh, and then we can pay a hundred dollars otherwise for a contribution.

[8:48] Gordon Cox: Right, right. And what's surprised you about some of the work that's come in in these initial weeks and that um reviews has been posting these days?

[8:58] Sarah Ruhl: Well, I think one thing that's really heartened me is feeling like there is a need for secular prayer and and mourning and elegy. I mean, we've lost a lot of all of us have lost our livelihood. So there's that um many of us have lost a uh a project that we're passionate about in a in a profound spiritual way. And we've lost people who we love. Um so Mark Blum, Jessica Hecht wrote an elegy for Mark Blum that's really beautiful. And we hope to have more elegies. I think Julia will write one about Terrence. Um and I think I think a lot of publications have been doing a beautiful job covering these losses. Um I think we're making the distinction between obituary and elegy, thinking elegies, you know, slightly more personal.

And I think the reason we felt there was a deep need for this is that normally we'd be gathering for funerals, um, and we're not. I mean such a strange time. I I saw my own father-in-law's funeral on a Zoom, you know, his memorial was in Los Angeles. So all of us in our own ways are grappling with how to mourn privately, and I guess our thinking was that the written word um could be uh a place of intimacy um between reader and writer in the community right now.

[10:31] Gordon Cox: Is it your intention that when things return to whatever normal will look like uh in the future that Three Views will swerve back to what its initial sort of plan was?

[10:31] Sarah Ruhl: I don't think we know yet. I mean I think one thing that's so hard is none of us can really imagine the future.

[10:52] Sarah Ruhl: Yeah, uh right now I think as far as we're getting is thinking let's let's make this little Zen garden this plot, you know, stone in front of stone until we get to the theater's reopening and let's do it as a practice until then and see what we have. Um, I do think there will still be a pressing need for more diversity and criticism once the theaters open up, but I also think there'll be such other pressing needs, you know, like the health of the audience, the health of the actors, um, all the people who've been on unemployment, all the people who haven't been eating, all the children who are starving, you know, so um, so getting funding for that becomes I think really far down on the list of um priorities to keep our community safe and functioning.

[11:46] Sarah Ruhl: So I think we'll see where we are at that point. Let's talk a little bit about what else has been keeping you busy these days. You recently released a book of poetry. Have you always written poems?

[11:58] Sarah Ruhl: I have. I've always secretly written poems, um, from the time I was pretty little and it was Bella Vogel, my teacher, who encouraged me to, uh, the this the swerve word again to swerve from poetry to playwriting, but I've always written them parallel to the plays, sometimes slipping a poem or two into a play. Um, and at some point I felt like I had enough poems for a book.

[12:24] Sarah Ruhl: And I had this student, Max Ritpo, who was a poet at Yale, and he really encouraged me to publish my poetry, uh, in a reversal of the usual.

[12:39] Sarah Ruhl: Yeah. Um, and that was the beginning, I think, of me publishing, and I lost Max to not just me, I mean the world lost Max to cancer, uh, about four years ago. Um, so, uh, anyway, I had published a correspondence with Max called, um, Letters from Max, that some of the poems are in, and then, um, I had this new book called 44 Poems for You that came out in March.

[13:09] Sarah Ruhl: Yeah. And pretty soon after New York City and the theater world went on lockdown, uh, you wrote in the Times that in lieu of theater, people could be writing and reading poetry to each other. Why is that and what is the connection for you between verse and theater?

[13:28] Sarah Ruhl: I think they're deeply connected, and I think it's something to do with voice and voicings. You know, the idea that poems really come alive when you read them out loud, that they're meant for the human voice in the way that plays are, and that there's all this white space on the page of a poem where the imagination kind of takes flight, where metaphors have, um, you know, a shimmering extra life in the silence, in the same way that in a play, all that white space near the dialogue is meant for, um, for another visual life that you can't read on the page or for the body of the actor.

[14:11] Sarah Ruhl: So, um, I think they're both forms of distillation and voice, and I do think I find poetry really comforting right now because it slows us down, um, and we're in a time of slowness and retreat and you can't get sick by reading a poem, you can't, they're not contagious. Um, and we have the attention span for a poem, uh, and so it's also been lovely I think on three views seeing some playwrights who are also poets like Octavio, you know, to share a poem and his is about the natural world. It's kind of has an amazing last couplet about, and it kind of goes into the animal world taking over, um, the natural world right now and then talking about how in the mind of the animal world, um, we are the virus actually, this reversal of danger.

[14:11] Sarah Ruhl: I'll have more with Sarah right after the break, and now here's more with Sarah Ruhl.

[15:32] Sarah Ruhl: Um, I imagine there's also in your head some connection between theater, verse, and opera. I ask because you worked on the libretto of an adaptation of your play Eurydice as an opera that we will see eventually. Um, another, I imagine another production that has been, uh, postponed, um, here in New York. But, um, how do those three things or have you enjoyed working on the libretto?

[16:03] Sarah Ruhl: I loved working on the libretto, and part of it is my great love for this composer, Matthew O'Coyne. So we had a really seamless collaboration, and again, it was mostly distillation. I think it takes about, you know, three times as long to sing something as to say something.

[16:19] Sarah Ruhl: So there was a lot of cutting and a little restructuring, but a lot of our collaboration was just Matt calling me from a field somewhere and saying, talk to me about this moment, and I would, and then he would score it.

[16:33] Sarah Ruhl: So, um, I think, you know, again, thinking about that extra space around text, whether it's the body of an actor or the space metaphor occupies in a reader's brain or a space for an, um, amazing soprano to sing.

[16:50] Sarah Ruhl: Um, I think it's very joyful for me to see that that empty space get filled.

[16:57] Sarah Ruhl: Um, and in this case, for it to be filled by song.

[17:01] Gordon Cox: What does what do those songs bring out of the text? Have you found?

[17:07] Sarah Ruhl: I mean, I think the scale of opera is just so, it's so epic, it's so daunting in its way, and some of the most magical moments for me were sitting in rehearsal across from these astonishing instruments and getting to be that up close to the power of their voices.

[17:24] Sarah Ruhl: So there's one aria, um, this is what it is to love an artist. The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight.

[17:36] Sarah Ruhl: Um, and it goes on from there, and it ends with this is what it is to love an artist, this is what it is to love. Um, so the repetition was added in the opera, and um, I don't know to hear, to hear an actress sing that.

[17:54] Sarah Ruhl: I mean, it has, um, the same emotional valence, I think, as a soliloquy, but it just, um, it just kind of pierces me to hear it sung.

[18:07] Gordon Cox: Does the story mean anything to you? Mean something different to you now than it did before back because you wrote that play. That play was written in 2003, right?

[18:17] Sarah Ruhl: Yeah, I mean, I was 26 when I wrote it, and I'm 46 now, and suddenly Matt, when he started working on the score, was 26 also.

[18:26] Sarah Ruhl: I mean, I think now I'm generationally I'm in the position of the parent rather than the child, you know.

[18:33] Gordon Cox: Yeah, your work has always been highly theatrical, and I know you've thought quite a bit about sort of what defines theater as theater and the importance of presence and the quality of experiencing something live, even before all this happened. What is your definition of theatricality?

[18:51] Sarah Ruhl: Well, I mean, since post-pandemic, I've been writing these little haikus as a practice, and one little haiku ended up being about the theater, and I can see if I haven't memorized it's something like you can't fast forward it, you can't take a crap while watching it.

[19:11] Sarah Ruhl: And yes, you must be dressed. You know, it's like these rituals of presence that we take for granted, but that suddenly when you're watching Zoom theater, you realize the ritual no longer applies.

[19:27] Sarah Ruhl: Like you don't have to be dressed, you don't have to be on time, you don't have to sit through it. If you, if an emergency calls, you can tend to it. Whereas in the theater, we are all, I mean, it's remarkable when you think about it.

[19:40] Sarah Ruhl: We as a group have all decided to train our attention on this stage for this moment in time, and nothing else matters outside of that attention.

[19:50] Sarah Ruhl: To me, the Zoom um theater, while it has kind of wonderful craft, wonderful charitable impulses.

[19:58] Sarah Ruhl: Um, it's funny, the homebound project that I was part of, which I think they produce beautifully and have raised $60,000, uh, for no kid hungry, which is so great since you know one out of five kids is starving right now.

[20:12] Sarah Ruhl: Um, but there's an intermission built into it, and I just found that hilarious.

[20:17] Sarah Ruhl: Um, great touch, and I really enjoyed the intermission too. You know, it's these rituals that we long for, these ways of dividing time up.

[20:28] Gordon Cox: Yeah, why do we long for them? What's important to you to preserve in the whole, uh, ritual of it?

[20:37] Sarah Ruhl: I think it's very mysterious. I think I find it hard to put into words.

[20:42] Sarah Ruhl: Like I had a neighbor friend invite me to a Zoom um end of Shabbat ritual that does with, um, her Jewish school community, and I found it so moving that everyone was marking the time, the end of the week ritually in this way.

[21:01] Sarah Ruhl: And I had done the same ritual at her house once. Um, and I'm, I'm, I wasn't raised Jewish, so I don't know all of the particular rituals, but there's this moment where you pass sweet spice around and you smell it, um, as a way to mark the end of Shabbat in the beginning of the week, and I love that so much and of course on Zoom you can't smell, right?

[21:05] Sarah Ruhl: Um, so people can wave these herbs but you can't smell them, and I guess that to me that's where the mystery is, you know, those intangibles, um, you know, you think of Catholic mass and the wafting of the incense or you think of Maurice Maeterlinck, crazy Belgian who wanted to have smell machines at turn of the century theater. It's that I think, I think of smell because it picks up on those intangibles of ritual and presence, um, you know, when you meet someone over Zoom you can't smell their pheromones.

[22:03] Sarah Ruhl: So what does that do? And then of course I don't know why I'm going down this old factory um back right now but of course with COVID people lose their sense of smell and taste um so it feels like we are in this very strange era of um lack of flavor, you know, lack of differentiating moments. As you mentioned, you're a lecturer at Yale and I imagine this is a very hard time for everyone, of course, but I'm sure it's very hard for those who are hoping to make a career in the theater. How are they feeling about what's going on right now?

[22:46] Sarah Ruhl: I think the students at Yale are coping all in very different ways. And I'm incredibly worried about the third years who are graduating into this barren economic ecosystem. Um they're remarkable writers, and I'm sure they'll weather it, but I really feel for them. And they've had their productions canceled, they don't have the ritual of graduation. Um some have had productions that were planned, professional productions canceled. So, you know, some of them have been planning to work on writing short stories for a while. Some of them might, you know, try to dust off a TV pilot. Um, I mean, they're coping and they're packing. Um, but I think the theater community really needs to wrap their arms around this whole generation of young artists who are emerging into this very weird moment.

[23:44] Gordon Cox: Yeah. So as we had talked about a little earlier, the URGC opera was supposed to play the Met in 2021, which, you know, we're coming up close on the start of that season. That's been, I imagine, that's been delayed until further notice.

[24:04] Sarah Ruhl: We haven't heard that yet. But who knows? It was supposed to be fall 2021.

[24:10] Gordon Cox: Right. Which, I mean, seemed like such a long way away, and now feels like a blink of an eye away, but um, I don't know yet.

[24:21] Gordon Cox: And your work is also the focus of one of the residency programs at the Signature Theater. Just what season was that set for and has that been postponed at all?

[24:31] Sarah Ruhl: That's been postponed. Um, you know, again, unclear. I think everyone, it's like a big Sudoku puzzle.

[24:40] Gordon Cox: Yeah.

[24:41] Sarah Ruhl: How and when these seasons will get rearranged. Um, but yeah, I have um, you know, hopefully have a new play with them and two revivals.

[24:50] Gordon Cox: Have you thought about yet which revivals are you, are there any plays in particular of your own that you're anxious to return to and look at again?

[24:50] Sarah Ruhl: Yeah, um, we've talked about Eurydice, uh, and obviously I don't want to overlap with the opera. Um, thought about The Clean House, I've thought about Orlando, um, and I think it'll be interesting to get on the phone with Signature in the coming weeks also because I might choose differently post-pandemic and I don't even know what that means or how I would choose differently.

[25:31] Gordon Cox: Right.

[25:31] Sarah Ruhl: But um, but one might, I don't know. How far along are you on the new play that you mentioned? Is that something you can tell us about?

[25:36] Sarah Ruhl: Sure, um, so I have a play Becky Nurse of Salem that was just done at Berkeley Rep.

[25:48] Gordon Cox: Yeah.

[25:49] Sarah Ruhl: Um, oh and that even wasn't for Signature but uh, it's funny, I was supposed to be in rehearsal at Lincoln Center this week for it. Um, I guess it wasn't even announced yet, uh, and now it's indefinitely postponed. But uh, it is about a woman who works at the Salem Witch Museum um and she is kind of a truth teller and she's a descendant of Rebecca Nurse of Salem who was one of the oldest so-called witches to get put to death and she loses her job um and she goes to see a witch in town and then her life just kind of goes from bad to worse. Um, but it's sort of my rant about The Crucible, which the play I think is incredibly masterful, uh, but I learned at some point that there are a couple slight fabulations in it and one is that John Proctor never met Abigail in real life and she was 11 and he was 60.

[26:49] Gordon Cox: That's surprising, I didn't know that.

[26:49] Sarah Ruhl: Fascinating, yeah. I guess Arthur Miller really had a crush on Marilyn Monroe at the time he was writing it and he says in a New Yorker article that he put some of that desire into the play. And so I, when I learned that, I just found it fascinating that our whole understanding of this sort of massacre of women um is based on the desire of one older man for Marilyn Monroe.

[27:19] Sarah Ruhl: So because it's so canonical and not only is it canonical but the historical footnotes make you think you're reading a real historical document. But the kind of emotional heat of it, which is that love affair, right, or that seduction is totally fabricated.

[27:39] Gordon Cox: And so that will be at Lincoln Center.

[27:43] Sarah Ruhl: Yeah, and I suddenly am like should I be announcing this because it was never announced and now it's indefinitely postponed but I, but that is a new play that you're working on and but that we will probably see somewhere um but that is, that's a different new play than the one that you, than the one that you will write for Signature.

[28:01] Gordon Cox: Signature.

[28:02] Sarah Ruhl: The Signature play I'm working on is an adaptation of my book Letters from Max, which I was telling you a little bit about, which is um a correspondence between me and this remarkable poet Max Ritvo.

[28:16] Sarah Ruhl: Um, so it's in epistolary form.

[28:21] Gordon Cox: Yeah. And what else is fascinating you these days about your life uh in the current time of COVID-19? What are the things that are really sort of keeping you um interested uh and excited and things that might show up in your writing in the future?

[28:40] Sarah Ruhl: Well, I love that you're telling me, reminding me to be interested and excited. I feel like we all need the reminder, you know, because there's such despair also.

[28:55] Sarah Ruhl: Um, how do you maintain your wonder and curiosity in the midst of that despair? I mean, this week I just feel in such despair about the racial politics of this country, and you put Corona on top of that, and then you put the White House on top of that, and it's enough to just not want to get out of bed, much less write a new play. But um, uh, but I am writing, um, I am, you know, writing poems, prose.

[29:30] Sarah Ruhl: I recently wrote a prose piece about um going to the bookstore for the first time and browsing, which I did the other day. I'm sheltering in place in Rhode Island and their book opened yesterday, and they had five people in at a time, and I was person number one.

[29:50] Sarah Ruhl: And you carry a little thing around with you, and I was so just undone by the pleasure of browsing in a bookstore again. It's like all these things will feel so vertical again, like the first ice cream sundae that someone else makes for you again, the first book you buy with your hands, and you bought because it surprised you and leapt out at you and a person collected it and put it on a shelf.

[30:16] Sarah Ruhl: Um, so I guess that's one thing that interests me is how we will come to appreciate all these first things again and how we will appreciate being with family and friends in person again, how we will appreciate caretaking um in real time and place again.

[30:37] Gordon Cox: Um, did you buy something at the bookstore?

[30:41] Sarah Ruhl: I did. One book I found that I was so excited because they had a pretty small drama section was 84 Charing Cross Road. Do you know that play?

[30:50] Gordon Cox: Oh, yeah.

[30:51] Sarah Ruhl: Uh-huh. I mean, I must have been a pretty strange child that I saw a community theater production of that play in Illinois, and I loved it.

[31:01] Sarah Ruhl: And so it doesn't make sense. I've written these epistolary dramas. Um, I bought that for myself, which I didn't own. And I bought Heidi for my daughter Hope, and Auntie Maim for my daughter Anna.

[31:18] Sarah Ruhl: Oh. And um, I bought War of the Worlds for my son. And uh, Breeding Sweet Grass for my husband.

[31:29] Gordon Cox: Well, that sounds like a good collection of books to keep you occupied for a while.

[31:35] Sarah Ruhl: Good haul.

[31:36] Gordon Cox: Yeah. And uh, I look forward to the time that I can see one of your new plays uh sometime soon. So thanks so much for joining me, Sarah. I really appreciate it.

[31:46] Sarah Ruhl: Well, thank you. It was really a delight to speak to you and brought some light to my day, so thank you.

[31:52] Gordon Cox: I'm glad to hear it. Thank you.

[31:58] Gordon Cox: That was Sarah Ruhl, the playwright and co-founder of the new theater website, Three Views. Her book of poetry, 44 Poems for You, was released earlier this year. If you like what you're hearing on this and other episodes of Stagecraft, you can rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and you can subscribe and find past episodes there and on all the other pod places, including Spotify and on the Broadway Podcast Network, which is a great place to find more theater for your ears. I'll be back next week with another new episode. Thanks for listening and see you soon.