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[0:00] Jeryl Brunner: From Shakespeare to Schwartz, from Fossey to Alvin Elley, from San Tom to Burelis, from McNally to Faye. It happened to the greats, it still happens every day. When lightning strikes is the moment you know when lightning strikes, where your mentor goes you can stand in Chalureka, do whatever you like. You'll never forget the moments when lightning strikes.

[0:25] Jeryl Brunner: Hi, this is Jeryl Brunner, and you're listening to When Lightning Strikes, when we talk about the tingly, heart-stopping, mic drop moments that led you to becoming an artist. Dan O'Brien is a playwright and poet whose work has been produced off-Broadway at Primary Stages, throughout the United States and in the United Kingdom. Some of his plays include The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage and The Body of an American. O'Brien has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama, the Horton Foote Prize, the Edward M. Kennedy Prize, and two PEN America Awards. Just this month, he published a collection of essays in his book, A Story That Happens on Playwriting, Childhood, and Other Traumas. O'Brien reflects on theater, family, what it takes to be an artist in a fractured world, and keeping hope alive. Welcome!

[1:35] Jeryl Brunner: How are you, Dan?

[1:37] Dan O’Brien: Thank you. I'm good. Thank you for having me, Jeryl. This is such a treat to be able to talk about the book and then I love your approach of this particular podcast to talk about those moments when things become clearer.

[1:53] Jeryl Brunner: Well, I love your approach to art and playwrighting and your sense of hope in humanity, and we'll get to all that. But let's talk about your lightning strikes moments, what led you to becoming an artist.

[2:11] Dan O’Brien: Yeah, there's so, I mean, I've been thinking for weeks now as I've been anticipating this conversation of different, you know, really many lightning strike moments and trying to think what would maybe what was the biggest lightning strike. You know, I always knew or I knew since I was a kid I wanted to be a writer in some fashion. So it started pretty young. Of course, at that time I also thought I would be a professional baseball player, perhaps the sixth, you know, sixth or seventh member of the Beatles. So I had lots of dreams. But I always felt like I would be a writer of some kind. You know, theater specifically didn't really, I didn't really discover theater till I was older, probably when I was in college.

Previous to that, though, I would say the biggest moment for me where I suddenly felt like there was something special about the theater for me in my life was reading Waiting for Godot. My older sister was going to college and she must have been taking a 20th century drama course, and she brought home a stack of books over Christmas break. And I remember I must have been about 11 or 12 and just being drawn to that. I don't know if you remember the old cover, maybe it's still the same cover illustration of Waiting for Godot, you know, the Grove Atlantic publication of the just the iconic tree with the two, you know, characters, the two hobos, the vagrants, you know.

[3:42] Dan O’Brien: And I just remember reading that play and being utterly bewildered by it, I guess, but also very moved by it and in ways that I didn't really understand. You know, there was a kind of uncanniness or eeriness to how it affected me. And on one level, it just reminded me of the culture within the house I was growing up in. It felt very much like I recognized in some strange way, you know, what that play was about and a childhood in a family that was full of secrets and denial and repression, and also an Irish, an Irish American family. And this was an Irish writer I connected to that as well. So that was the first play I read that really spoke to me and made me feel like, you know, maybe this is the type of writing I'm gonna be most drawn to.

And then it was actually coming to theater as a performer in college, was the biggest development was specifically comedy improv. I like to say that this was when I was, this was back when I was funny, is how I like to explain it. And it's actually how I met my wife. My wife and I were in the same comedy improv troupe at Middlebury College in Vermont. And that, you know, that was such a direct experience of performing directly to an audience, but you know, without a script, which is somewhat ironic because I'm a playwright. But in many ways, I think that means that improv is such a stripped-down version of what theater is, of essentially what theater is, which is performer and audience. And so that's really what awakened my interest in theater and probably writing specifically for the theater as opposed to novels or poetry.

[5:34] Jeryl Brunner: Let's talk about how you went from reading Waiting for Godot when you were 12 to going to Middlebury College and studying theater. How did that happen?

[5:50] Dan O’Brien: Um, well, you know, the play obviously made a big impression as a reading experience, but I'd never seen it performed. So, you know, I still wasn't thinking aspirationally in terms of becoming a playwright. It that really came with performing. So again, it was doing comedy improv and becoming a theater major and performing in lots of plays at Middlebury College, which you know was a remarkable program, a small program, you know, only three full-time faculty members, two of whom were married to or still are married to each other. But it was a remarkable program in that they did plays by living playwrights, often very political plays. The faculty had been very influenced by, you know, political British theater of the 70s and 80s. So, you know, I had in some ways a very atypical college theater experience.

On the flip side, you know, I didn't do one musical or even any classical theater. It was all pretty much modern, sometimes fairly experimental political theater, which you know really excited me and kind of synced naturally with my interests and my talents. And it wasn't until I went to Ireland, I spent about a year in Ireland after college, and that's when I finally saw Waiting for Godot in person.

[7:22] Jeryl Brunner: Oh.

[7:23] Dan O’Brien: And that was an amazing experience too, because suddenly this play that had been on the page very haunting and evocative and poetic, really, for lack of a better word, suddenly I understood it as the comedy that it is, as such a human story, such a human experience. I even think there were certain Irish colloquialisms in the play when I read it that I thought were some kind of poetic stylized language. And when I was seeing it in Ireland with Irish actors and an Irish audience, suddenly the whole thing, the play felt a lot more human and accessible and funnier and sadder as a consequence. So that was a meaningful trajectory for me to go from being 12 and reading this play and feeling like it spoke to me deeply and I didn't know why, to seeing it in Ireland. And I went to Ireland in many ways because of that play, and because of my interest in Irish theater and other Irish writers. So it was a real full circle lightning strike in many ways.

[8:38] Jeryl Brunner: And what inspired you to pick up your pen and your proverbial pen and start writing yourself?

[8:49] Dan O’Brien: You know, I started so young. There's sort of two phases. One is I just started so young, probably because, you know, I heard teachers and my mother saying things like basically saying that I was talented at it. And I probably, like all children, like to hear that. I was in an experimental class for two years in elementary school, where every afternoon we just wrote stories. And it's all we did. And we would then we would bring our stories to a table in the corner of the room, and just like a graduate level workshop, we would critique each other's stories at the age of 10 or 11, you know. And yeah, as a consequence, I'm sure my geography or my math skills suffered. But, you know, this was an amazing gift for somebody who had a natural talent for writing and interest in writing.

It wasn't until, you know, my family had a very, I think I've mentioned a significantly dysfunctional family. And when I was around 12, the family really kind of fell apart. And my older brother was suffering from untreated depression, and he had attempted suicide by jumping out the window of our attic, which was an event that I witnessed. And that's when I was, I was 12. I don't know if this was before or after I read Waiting for Godot. Interestingly, but it was around that age, very soon after, that I started to discover that writing about that experience or writing about my emotions in general was a way to feel better. It was a way to feel better about life, was a way to feel like I was making something constructive or artful or beautiful or meaningful out of chaos or trauma or pain, you know. So it was really around that age, 12, 13, where something really fused for me, which is the idea of writing being the way that I could perhaps survive trauma.

[10:57] Jeryl Brunner: Because your plays in particular are so deeply personal, right? I think about your play The House in Scarsdale.

[11:12] Dan O’Brien: Yeah, uh, memoir for the stage is that basically about your family and the struggles you went through, you know, growing up in that household.

[11:26] Right.

[11:27] Right.

[11:27] Dan O’Brien: Yeah, that I mean that's that's probably my most, as a memoir for the stage, as I call it. I'm sure it's my most um personal uh or uh, you know, naked uh offering for lack of a better word.

[11:42] Uh, you know, the approach to that play was to, so you know, to give a little background. About 15 years ago, I was um suddenly disowned by my family without any, my birth family, my parents, without any uh explanation. And they were, of course, you know, it was a dysfunctional family. So in some ways it wasn't surprising, in other ways it was a shocking and traumatic uh experience. So I started researching that play a few years after that event, uh, with basically, with the idea that I would approach it almost as a journalist would. I would approach my own disowning and my childhood as uh almost as an investigative reporter.

[12:25] And so what I did, my parents have a um, you know, a long list of uh relations that they've cut themselves off from. So I had cousins and aunts and uncles and a step-grandmother, you know, people that I um knew a little bit in my childhood, but had been um disappeared from my life. And so the play, you know, really was almost a docutheater um uh, you know, creation, recreation of my investigation, you know, trying to figure out what happened, you know, why did this happen? Well, why was I disowned? Why was my family uh such an abject failure as a family?

[13:07] Um, searching, you know, in some ways searching for what psychologists call the happy answer, searching for like the one simple answer that could explain trauma or explain chaos. Um, you know, of course, that's often not the case. Often the truth is complicated, and I think that's where the play ends. But the play's structure really follows a certain um fantasy or delusion uh I had that perhaps my father's father uh could be or could uh could could be my father.

[13:41] Uh, and uh, I won't I won't give away too much uh because that is the central question of the play. But it was it was about me trying to figure out, you know, is there is there an explanation for the dysfunction and the cruelty and the uh emotional and verbal abuse um in my family? Uh, so but but it's been a while that I've been writing fairly autobiographically. The play before that, The Body of an American is much more about my friendship with Paul Watson, who's a war reporter.

[14:13] Um, and but I'm a character in that play as well.

[14:16] And uh, yeah.

[14:18] Jeryl Brunner: That to me is also, I mean, looking from outside The Body of an American and and your connection with Paul. I mean, that to me feels like a, forgive me for saying, a lightning strikes moment where you are listening to NPR and you hear him. Do you want to tell that story? Because it's a fascinating story about listening to Fresh Air, right?

[14:46] Dan O’Brien: And in 2007, I'll let you tell it.

[14:49] Thank you. Yeah, it was it's the only time in my life, really, or my career where, you know, I heard somebody on the radio or, you know, and and felt um so moved by their story, but also uh kind of haunted by their story and felt such a deep identification with that person. Um, it's the only time I've reached out to someone like that, just like I did to Paul.

[15:15] So I heard him on Fresh Air. He had just published a memoir about his 25 years in war zones. Specifically, the book, you know, his life is really um focused uh around this one experience um taking a photograph of a fallen U.S. Army ranger in the streets of Mogadishu in uh during the battle for Mogadishu. Many people think of the Black Hawk Down film when they think of that uh period over that event.

[15:44] Uh, Paul was one of a handful of Western journalists who were remaining uh in Mogadishu because it was so dangerous. And he, so he was there when a Black Hawk had been shot down. One of the soldiers was being dragged through the streets. Paul went out into the streets. He he got to what turned out to be the corpse of a soldier, and he felt he should document it for various reasons.

[16:10] And right as he was about to take the photo, he heard a voice that he believes is the voice of that soldier. And he heard the voice say, if you do this, I will own you forever. Um, and he took the picture, and um subsequently he he feels, has felt that he's been literally uh, you know, haunted by by the spirit of this individual.

[16:34] Um, so that was at the core of his story in the core of that interview on Fresh Air, and probably what moved me and disconcerted me and fascinated me the most. Uh, so I reached out to him.

[16:47] He he claims he never responds to strangers who write to him.

[16:54] And for some reason he felt compelled to respond to me. Um, and that started about two years of just kind of being pen pals, you know, just sort of because I didn't really know. I told him I wanted to write about him, but I didn't really know how to do it.

[17:08] Um, I was I was overwhelmed in some ways by the material, you know. Uh, I'd never written about war.

[17:17] Um, I I was scared of it. Um, so to some degree, I felt like I needed to acclimatize to his world, you know, and build up trust, um, which luckily is what happened.

[17:31] Uh, and we eventually met up in person about two years later in the Canadian High Arctic, because he was uh, he was trying to get out of war reporting and was covering, was writing stories about the Arctic for the Toronto Star.

[17:45] Um, and so the second half of the play is ostensibly set in this little hostel where we stayed at the very northernmost coast of Canada.

[17:57] And um, since then that turned into that was a play that then turned in. I felt like I couldn't stop writing about them, and it became uh not one but two collections of poetry.

[18:08] Uh, and now a second play that's most recent and is still in development.

[18:14] Um, as well as in there, there was actually an opera that I wrote the libretto for as well that was based on the play.

[18:23] And you I I uh in researching, I read Alexis Solaski's New York Times review about Body of an American, and what she said was so poignant.

[18:40] She says, what Mr. O'Brien suggests powerfully is the lead these haunted men feel for connection and their hope that by writing, by shooting, by skyping, by drinking, by loving, they may start to make sense of their inexplicable lives.

[19:03] I thought that was so beautiful how the two of you connected on such a visceral level, you know, in a way that in a sense you're going through your own wars together.

[19:21] Do you want to talk about and also what's fascinating to me is that Paul Watson, tell me if this is still true, that he because it was so traumatic, this experience that he's never seen the play.

[19:36] Or at that point he hadn't seen it.

[19:39] Dan O’Brien: Yeah, he still hasn't.

[19:41] He still hasn't seen it.

[19:42] If for a while, his he has a um, uh, one of his siblings, his brother was seeing, was coming to many of the productions.

[19:50] Um, and but Paul himself, and Paul has come anytime he's been invited to be a part of, you know, audience talkbacks, um, he'll come and he'll do those.

[20:00] And uh, you know, sometimes that has been a humorous experience because in the talkback, he'll start telling stories that are in the play.

[20:09] And audiences will sometimes, especially in New York. You know, it's funny to see in New York people are not, you know, shy to say to call out from the audience, you are that's in the play, you don't need to tell us this again.

[20:20] You know, uh, so that that happened a fair amount.

[20:23] But it it proved to me that he actually wasn't, he really was doing what he was saying, uh, which was that he didn't, you know, he wanted to give to me as much material as I asked for.

[20:34] He, you know, he wanted to, he allowed me to record all of our conversations and turn them into the dialogue of the play.

[20:41] And yet he didn't want to read it.

[20:43] So it, you know, it was an odd, I I term it a peculiar collaboration in that sense that that um I really do feel like I wrote those plays and those two poetry collections with Paul.

[20:56] Uh, and then at the same time, he wasn't telling me what to write or how to write it, or or giving me giving me notes, God forbid.

[21:03] You know, he was really trusting me.

[21:05] Um, he said something interesting to me after many years, the one reason why he started working with me and and why he continues to come give talkbacks and and um is that he, you know, he feels almost like it's his penance in a way.

[21:23] Uh, you know, he's not he's he's not a religious person. I believe he would call himself an atheist.

[21:28] But um, I believe he's also used the word penance to talk about, you know, because this thing happened to him, and many other traumatic experiences in war zones happened to him.

[21:39] Uh, he does feel like it's his responsibility to to bear witness to to what he's witnessed, to share that.

[21:46] Um, you know, he has significant PTSD, so these these talkbacks and these talks come at, you know, quite a cost emotionally.

[21:55] Um, but he's always been, you know, very quick to say, of course, of course I'll be there.

[22:00] Dan O’Brien: And uh, so no, it's been a, you know, from the beginning I felt like it was a once, uh perhaps once in a lifetime artistic experience to to connect with somebody so deeply and to have it reciprocated, to feel like you know, we were writing something together in its own strange way that was probably better than what we could write on our own.

[22:26] Dan O’Brien: Uh so if you take the big picture on that play, The Body of an American, it really is a story of friendship and bearing witness to each other's trauma and the healing power again of storytelling and theater by, you know, uh because it's specifically is a play.

[22:43] Dan O’Brien: Um so no, I feel very lucky. I I think Paul felt too that it was almost kind of, you know, eerie or uncanny.

[22:51] Dan O’Brien: Yeah, exactly. Kismet is probably a better word. But there was some other we just had a feeling like, oh, there's there's some reason why this is happening.

[22:59] Dan O’Brien: It's kind of beyond our control, you know. So great. And let's talk about a story that happens in your new book of essays.

[23:09] Dan O’Brien: And it's based on a series of lectures, right? Well let you tell it.

[23:15] Dan O’Brien: Yeah, so let's see. In 2015, my wife was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer.

[23:23] Dan O’Brien: And then about six months later, I was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. So we had about a year and a half of uh, you know, pretty traumatic at times.

[23:35] Dan O’Brien: Uh I will say, you know, knock on wood, we're both um, you know, four four and a half years now cancer cancer free or in remission or no evidence of disease.

[23:45] Dan O’Brien: Um but you know, that was that was a cataclysmic period of time for us that we're still working through.

[23:51] Dan O’Brien: Uh I'd been teaching at the Suwannee Writers Conference for many years, you know, um almost every summer for about a decade.

[24:00] Dan O’Brien: Uh, when this happened, and I had to take that summer away from Suwannee. Came back in 2017, and uh was invited to give a lecture, a craft lecture, they call them, to talk about anything really related to the craft of playwriting.

[24:16] Dan O’Brien: Um so that summer and each summer since I've been writing uh these essays that the uh lecture essays um that are about writing plays but are very much informed by not just the experience of of cancer, uh, but but what we've been talking about, my relationship with Paul Watson and war and trauma, as well as drama and childhood.

[24:38] Dan O’Brien: You know, trying to um I wasn't interested, I'm not interested in writing lectures telling people how to write anything, you know.

[24:46] Dan O’Brien: Um that just seems like the height of hubris. And so on some level, I just wanted to write very personally about craft and about why I write plays the way I do, how that's changed over time, how it might change going forward, um, how it's been changed by the most recent challenge in my life.

[25:09] Dan O’Brien: Um so, you know, that first um essay in 2017 is the first essay in the in the collection.

[25:17] Dan O’Brien: And it's uh, you know, it's only four uh four essays at this point. I like to think of it almost as a part one, I hope, you know, of a longer book, because it doesn't, I mean, I don't know if any book can cover every element of craft in playwriting, but I I do feel like of course there's more to talk about.

[25:35] Dan O’Brien: Um but this publisher in London and a US publisher upcoming uh felt like the four essays together had a certain coherence and and potentially a certain power.

[25:46] Dan O’Brien: So um so they've they've published it this spring. What one of the there's so much, I mean, it's just a feast in this book, the different essays.

[25:58] Dan O’Brien: One uh one sentence I love, you write, our wound was our gift, the mythical consolation.

[26:08] Dan O’Brien: We were nobody, so that we could become everyone. You talk talk more about that.

[26:16] Dan O’Brien: I just think that's so beautiful. Our wound was our gift.

[26:21] Dan O’Brien: Yeah, I mean, that's a that's a sort of foundational or core belief for me.

[26:28] Dan O’Brien: Yeah, you know, that artists are um striving to heal themselves through art.

[26:36] Dan O’Brien: And uh by extension, readers, audience members are going to, if they connect to the work, are going to experience some of that, some of that healing.

[26:45] Dan O’Brien: Um, so you know, it goes back again to what I was saying about being 12 and experiencing that trauma in my family and realizing, you know, for some added context, or you know, around that time, right after my brother um attempted suicide, I developed obsessive compulsive disorder.

[27:05] Dan O’Brien: Uh it it may have been coincidence, because you know, often that's the age when that can develop.

[27:12] Dan O’Brien: But I did find that writing helped a lot.

[27:16] Dan O’Brien: Um, you know, it perhaps it used a lot of the same energies to control and to shape and to frame experience.

[27:24] Dan O’Brien: And uh, but I think it was also just allowing me to give voice to my emotions.

[27:28] Dan O’Brien: Um, and I found that my obsessive compulsive symptoms were better if if not non-existent at times.

[27:36] Dan O’Brien: Um, you know, uh that's been with me since then, that idea that uh that really I feel like I have no choice but to write about um what I'm going through.

[27:47] Dan O’Brien: Doesn't mean I can't fictionalize what I'm going through.

[27:49] Dan O’Brien: And I've often done that. Uh it's just that more recently I've been writing very nonfictionally about uh about my experience.

[27:58] Jeryl Brunner: There was you wrote you and your wife, um, Jessica St. Clair wrote this deeply personal, very moving piece for the New York Times, right?

[28:09] Jeryl Brunner: About, as you mentioned, getting done each getting diagnosed with cancer within six months of each other, and also having a small child.

[28:21] Jeryl Brunner: And what really struck me, I mean, your honesty is so beautiful.

[28:26] Jeryl Brunner: You write, I feel an obligation, even the privilege to tell the truth of what we have been through.

[28:34] Jeryl Brunner: This is the same impulse that made me want to become a writer in the first place as a boy.

[28:39] Jeryl Brunner: Discovery authors who seem to reach out of their isolation into mine.

[28:45] Jeryl Brunner: What they wrote made me feel stronger and made me believe that it was and is possible to survive.

[28:57] Dan O’Brien: I think it's really, really beautiful.

[29:00] Dan O’Brien: Um thanks.

[29:01] Dan O’Brien: And so much learning there.

[29:01] Jeryl Brunner: Yeah.

[29:04] Jeryl Brunner: And I know, yeah.

[29:06] Jeryl Brunner: And you talk about how here you you both survived this harrowing illnesses, and then now we're in the midst of a pandemic.

[29:19] Jeryl Brunner: Do you want to talk about how your your illness and also and the last year?

[29:25] Jeryl Brunner: How have that both how have they both um impacted you as a few years?

[29:32] Dan O’Brien: It's been a it's it's been a strange experience.

[29:35] Dan O’Brien: I mean, it's been strange for everyone, as well as heroin and you know uh to be living through um the pandemic.

[29:45] Dan O’Brien: I I think for people who have been, I mean, I had the feeling last spring I wrote an essay for the Times Literary Supplement about just the eeriness of suddenly seeing everyone wearing masks the way cancer patients often wear masks to protect their immune system uh from you know pathogens.

[30:06] Dan O’Brien: And suddenly it seemed like the entire culture, that the entire country, the world was in treatment for cancer, you know, uh from my perspective.

[30:15] Dan O’Brien: It suddenly appeared that way in a certain way, because we were all trying to protect immune systems that would have been that are potentially really vulnerable to uh a lethal you know pathogen.

[30:30] Dan O’Brien: Um so it has been very interesting, fascinating, um, disturbing to see uh some of what Jessica and I experienced on a very personal private level happening writ large on the culture, you know, in terms of um in terms of the trauma.

[30:50] Dan O’Brien: And I I feel like I'm still you know trying to figure that out.

[30:53] Dan O’Brien: I'm still observing, you know, trying to figure out the similarities and differences between perhaps the private response to to illness and the cultural response to illness.

[31:07] Dan O’Brien: It's been um really disturbing, fascinating, interesting to have the perspective of recent cancer treatment uh while living through a pandemic, you know.

[31:20] Dan O’Brien: Um it yeah, it'll be it'll be interesting to see.

[31:26] Dan O’Brien: I mean, what I'm what I'm thinking about for this summer at the Suwannee Writers Conference is uh is a lecture uh comparing you know, finishing cancer treatment to finishing to the culture now finishing uh lockdown.

[31:44] Dan O’Brien: Yeah, so what I'm thinking about for a lecture, a craft lecture for the summer's Suwannee Writers Conference is um you know comparing uh the experience of finishing cancer treatment to what we're all experiencing right now with the idea that lockdowns and quarantines are are easing and perhaps ending at some point.

[32:06] Dan O’Brien: Um that we'll be returning to uh in some ways a more normal life, which is how I felt four and a half years ago finishing cancer treatment.

[32:17] Dan O’Brien: Um, at that time I had such an impulse to reinvent myself and to fix my life in any way possible, to change my life for a rational and rational reasons.

[32:31] Dan O’Brien: At this summer's writers' conference, Suwannee Writers Conference, I'm you know, hoping to write an essay lecture about uh comparing the experience of finishing cancer treatment and returning to normal life or trying to return to normal life to the experience we're all going through right now of trying to uh uh emerge from our quarantines or the emerged from the pandemic to normal life.

[32:56] Jeryl Brunner: Thank you so much, Dan, for being on. It's just been an honor having you.

[33:01] Dan O’Brien: Thank you so much for sharing.

[33:04] Dan O’Brien: Great.

[33:04] Dan O’Brien: Thank you, Jeryl.

[33:05] Dan O’Brien: It's been it's been a real treat.

[33:07] Dan O’Brien: Still happens every day.

[33:09] Dan O’Brien: When lightning strikes is the moment you know.

[33:16] Jeryl Brunner: This episode was edited by Kyle Moore.

[33:19] Jeryl Brunner: And the talent was booked by Anna Strout.