Lucas Hnath will be in DC during the month of September, fine-tuning the script for Red Speedo before its premiere as a part of Studio Lab. He spoke with Literary Director Adrien-Alice Hansel about the research that led to the play, his love of putting nearly unstagable moments into the hands of great actors, and what he admires in a collaborator.
Can you talk a little about your inspiration for this piece?
This play was a perverse way to get interested in this question of doping, because on some gut level, I don’t understand the level of emotion people devote to doping. It has something to do with rooting for the home team—both your literal team and the country at large. I starting reading World Anti-Doping Association. Their anti-doping statement acknowledges that being an athlete is just about as detrimental as any drugs on a body. They cite the idea of fair competition—the right of athletes to know that their competition involves their skill and strength. But this notion of fairness is invented, completely invented, because athletic ability is at least partially genetic. The most interesting argument they make is that part of the joy of being a spectator is understanding that what they’re watching is real, that the achievements we’re witnessing are the product of hard work. Which rubs up against theatre in an interesting way—the audience isn’t actually under the impression that actors are really doing what they’re pretending to do, but there’s still pleasure in it.
That gave me the idea that I might be able to take into account the space between what we assume is really happening in athletics and isn’t really happening in the theatre. The beginning of the play used to be a total rip-off of Maria Irene Fornes’s play Conduct of Life, which begins with a character doing as many jumping jacks as he can. The play used to start with Ray doing as many pushups as possible. Now this physicality comes up towards the end of the play in a different kind of bravura display.
That’s interesting, this idea of what actors are and aren’t doing on stage. Are you often drawn to this idea of realness in your work?
I’m always thinking about limitations when writing plays. I think I like to write plays that are as close to impossible to perform as possible. I have a play that’s designed to be lip-synced—in an ideal version of the play, each of the four different actors have a tape of their full part, and lip-sync their lines throughout the play.
Another of my plays, A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney, is conceived of as a reading of a screenplay, and you watch the actors turn the pages at the same time, reading at this ridiculous pace—at some points in the play they’re turning six pages a minute. In the Soho Rep production, Larry Pine played Walt, and you see him turning pages, pouring and drinking vodka, taking notes on the script as he reads it out oud, smoking as he goes. I love that, watching actors walk a tightrope the audience knows is hard. It’s exciting, it feels particularly live.
We’re going to start rehearsals in about two weeks. What do you tend to learn once everyone gets in the room together?
I’m incapable of writing a play without thinking about the stage. I’m interested in staging difficult things, but then you have to help solve the problem of how to make that hard thing actually work. I can’t write something if I don’t know how it’s going to get accomplished. So I come into design meetings with a lot of theories of how things might work.
I can’t separate the staging from how the text works, so rehearsals are really an extension of my writing process. I love being in a rehearsal hall with a director I can bounce ideas around with during the process, rewriting the thing live as it happens.
What do you look for in your collaborators? How do you know if someone’s a good match for your sensibility?
It’s a series of things. With [Red Speedo director] Lila, I’ve known her for a while. I saw Samuel & Alasdair three years ago, which Lila directed with her company The Mad Ones. We’ve been trying to work together for a while since then, but this is our first collaboration.
The thing that stood out in that play was the level of precision in the performances. Lila built a play out of small and minimal gestures. Every single movement was significant. I’ve found it difficult to find both actors and directors who are ok with stillness, and it’s something I’ve found my plays require. Since the language is so demanding, you need as little distraction as possible. Any movement communicates significant meaning. There’s discipline to Lila’s work that I admire.
It’s true of designers as well—Mimi Lien, who’s designing Red Speedo, designed the set for the Disney play as well, and that play…. It’s a design minefield. It was essentially written for the rehearsal hall, for a non-place. It’s the kind of play that you’re surprised becomes an actual play. So when you have an audience who are coming to what they know is a production—they’ll be disappointed with a non-set. Mimi’s challenge was to maintain that feeling of going in to see a reading while letting an audience feel like they’re getting an experience worth paying for. And it was brilliant, what she did. She created a corporate space that was elevated by its environment.
Mimi really designs full environments for plays—she’s not just interested in the space, but in the experience of getting into the space, the journey into the lobby and the playing space. And she knows where to pull back. Disney had an extravagant design, and but it was selfless too—Mimi’s so skilled at giving the play exactly what it needs, and not doing more than that or showing off. When my play Death Tax was at the Humana Festival, my lighting designer Brian Scott told me after the first day of tech that he was completely prepared to give this play two cues—lights up and lights down, which impressed me, and which isn’t a wrong impulse for the play. We ended up with something like ten cues for the whole show, but ten very smart, very perfect cues.
I teach writing, and I use an article on the films of Béla Tarr with my students. I’m interested in work that’s minimalistic, work that looks like nothing is happening, so you have no choice but to look closer. I want so little to happen, in terms of music and set and light and gesture, that when something does, it registers like an earthquake.