"Only Write the Good Parts": Playwright Lucas Hnath in Conversation with Jay Malarcher

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• "Only Write the Good Parts":Playwright Lucas Hnath in Conversation with Jay Malarcher

The keynote address at the 2023 Comparative Drama Conference was a conversation with playwright Lucas Hnath. His plays, known for their striking intellectual-tennis match-style dialogue, include Death Tax (2012), A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney (2013), Red Speedo (2013), Isaac's Eye (2014), The Christians (2015), Hillary and Clinton (2016), Dana H. (2019), The Thin Place (2019), and, most famously, A Doll's House, Part 2 (2017), which received eight 2017 Tony Award nominations, including for Best Play. The recipient of awards that include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Steinberg Playwright award, the Windham-Campbell Literary Prize, and the Obie Award for Playwriting for The Christians, Hnath teaches playwriting and is Head of Performance for the Dramatic Writing program at NYU. In this wide-ranging conversation with scholar Jay Malarcher (West Virginia University), Hnath shares his processes for generating ideas, researching, and teaching playwriting; the origins of several of his plays; and his use of ellipses as percussive beats.

Hnath was introduced by Comparative Drama Conference director William C. Boles (Rollins College).

William C. Boles:

In Lucas Hnath's note to actors and directors on the nature of the pacing of his play Isaac's Eye, he writes, "keep it moving"—and my aim is to follow this instruction with this introduction. Perhaps it's apt to begin by noting Lucas's meticulous attention to the way his lines should be delivered. In most of the editions of his plays you will find him urging his actors and directors not to dawdle with his language. In Death Tax he instructs to let the play move swiftly, and I'm really badly [End Page 9] paraphrasing this, but essentially, he wrote that if the play runs longer than eighty-five minutes, the director really screwed up.

Perhaps this fascination with the continuous flowing nature of his characters' dialogue can be traced to a fascination from his childhood. Anyone here know what city Lucas went to school in? Orlando! What are we famous for? Disney amusement parks, right. Growing up, Lucas had a fascination with amusement park rides, and he wanted to design his own ride, and by becoming a playwright, he essentially has fulfilled this childhood goal. Eschewing intermissions, he locks the audience into the theatre, much like we are strapped into Space Mountain, or Tron, or one of those annoying Star Wars rides. And then, as he says about each of his plays, the thing doesn't stop until it stops.

While his best-known play revisits Nora Helmer from A Doll's House, many of his other plays feature well-known figures—Anna Nicole Smith, Isaac Newton, Hillary and Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Walt and Roy Disney—and challenge the nature of how the theatre usually works. Dana H., which is a play about his mother being kidnapped, relies on the actor lip syncing to Lucas's mom's own words. In A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney, the entire production is simply a table read of a screenplay. He takes us to settings rarely seen on stage: a church where we are the congregation, featuring a full choir—"the bigger the better"; an alternative universe featuring a different fate for Hillary, Bill, and Obama; a natatorium, where a huge fight takes place in a pool at the play's end; and Isaac Newton's home, where a science experiment is conducted involving a needle being stuck into someone's eye. He admitted in an interview with Adrien-Alice Hansel, Literary Director of the Studio Theatre, "I like to write plays that are as close to impossible to perform as possible."

A profile in The New Yorker described Hnath "as a master of Socratic dialogue, a disciple of George Bernard Shaw by way of Wallace Shawn." Charles Isherwood compared his writing to a "hypercaffeinated David Mamet." And yet, despite all these comparisons, he has admitted that he feels greater affinity for the Greeks with his writing. As for his prolific output over the last decade, Hnath told D. T. Max: "Writing...