Ella Talerico, Studio’s Artistic Producing Fellow, interviewed John O’Donovan, playwright of If We Got Some More Cocaine I Could Show You How I Love You, which will be featured in the inaugural New Pages, New Stages Festival.
ELLA: How did you fall in love with playwriting?
JOHN: I was in bands growing up and wrote a lot of music and songs, as well as short stories. When I went to university in Dublin, a friend in the drama society liked one of my stories and said he’d adapt it into a play. Then he got too busy, so I wrote and directed it myself.
My first full-length play was developed at the Galway Arts Festival in 2009 with Druid Theatre Company. I moved to London soon after, and it’s a great place to learn how to be a playwright.
ELLA: Why are you a playwright? Why theatre?
JOHN: I’m in my own head a lot, and playwriting forces me into multiple characters' at once. It stops me from becoming too cerebral. I love that theatre doesn’t tell you who to identify with—you can bond with anyone onstage at any time. It’s not like film, where perspective is often fixed. Theatre is democratic in that way.
ELLA: What themes do you explore in your work?
JOHN: Usually, my first inspiration for work is imagining people embodying a particular space. A lot of my work has been rooted in a single location. As if I’m a geologist or a shit archaeologist, digging straight down from the location. Analyzing this singular piece of the world. Seeing every layer. It's a cliche, that the universal is in the particular, but what that means in practice is that you can't make any lazy assumptions.
You can't go, “oh, I'll leave that out”. Focusing on a single place forces you to be really, really truthful.
I also write from a working-class background, insofar as that's possible because most playwrights are middle-class. Class consciousness runs through my work. For working-class writers, it’s easier to be aware of the solidarity that’s needed in the world.
ELLA: How did you come to write If We Got Some More Cocaine I Could Show You How I Love You?
JOHN: It started very arbitrarily. I was asked to write a piece for a short play night in London. I’d long had the image of two men stuck on a roof, so I wrote that. The artistic director of the Old Red Lion saw it and offered me a full-length slot if I could write it by August. I wrote three drafts in six months.
It was in the aftermath of the marriage referendum in Ireland. I was very heartened by the positive results, but I was also struck by how middle-class and conservative the conversation was. A progressive issue could only win on conservative terms. It wasn't telling the full story of what it is to be an outsider in Ireland. It was more about broadening the idea of what an insider is. I’m more interested in outsiders than insiders.
Mikey and Casey are both gay, but occupy different positions of visibility, class, and masculinity. I split parts of myself between them. What is it to be a grown man? What is it to get beyond that period of your youth when you’re at risk of being bullied or abused?
ELLA: Where is the play now in its journey?
JOHN: I’m excited to see how American audiences receive it. The play is critical of violence and homophobia, but it’s also deeply affectionate toward Ireland. I hope it complicates American narratives; I want to reestablish an honest image of Ireland.
ELLA: Anything else you’d like to share?
JOHN: I’m grateful and excited. Come with a sense of fun and danger. My guiding image is that these characters can see the way out; they just can’t get there from where they are. Holding that image is the secret key to the play.