Naomi Wallace

The interview with Naomi Wallace took place on September 23, 2022 in her home (via a WebEx meeting) in North Yorkshire, UK, where she has lived for the past two decades. I was in my office at Georgia State University, Atlanta. We revised the final conversation in March 2023. Although we were separated by an ocean, talking with Wallace emerged as an informal but informed conversation, a comfortable dialogue in which this dynamic American playwright discussed her work in poetry, film, and, above all, the theater.What quickly became apparent was her grace, intelligence, and humility while discussing art, politics, and such broader topics as the myth of the American Dream, racism, capitalism, colonialism, war and, among many other topics, the effect of such topics on both the body and the spirit of the individual.As reported in American Theatre,Wallace “speaks to, and for, the body as eloquently as any American writer since Walt Whitman.”

Wallace, a Kentucky-born dramatist and screen writer, has seen such plays as In the Heart of America (1994), Slaughter City (1996), One Flea Spare (1996), TheTrestle at Pope Lick Creek (1998),TheWar Boys (2009),Things of Dry Hours (2009), The Fever Chart:ThreeVersions of the Middle East (2008), And I and Silence (2014), The Hard Weather Boating Party (2014), One Short Sleepe (2008), The Liquid Plain (2013), Night is a Room (2016), and, among others, The Breach (2022), performed in the United States and the United Kingdom as well as in several countries in Europe and the Middle East. In fact, One Flea Spare has been included in the permanent repertoire of the French National Theatre, the Comédie-Francaise. Only two American playwrights have been included in the Comédie-Francaise in three hundred years: Naomi Wallace and Tennessee Williams. Only recently,Wallace informed me, was a third American included—Tony Kushner of Angels in America fame.

Wallace has garnered numerous awards since staging metaphysical works of surprising complexity and genuine originality. Her plays have twice won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Joseph Kesselring Prize, the Fellowship of Southern Writers Drama Award, an Obie award, and the Horton Foote Prize for the most promising new American Play. In 2013, she was awarded the inaugural Windham- Campbell Literature Prize established at Yale University, and in 2015 she received the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts development grant,Wallace continues to write politically charged works of the highest order. Indeed, when Tony Kushner finished reading her first play, he announced, “This is one of the most astonishing plays I’ve ever read.” In plays that are often non-realistic and haunting—ghosts often animate her stage—Wallace has the courage to explore selected key issues of a nation and the private anxieties of the individual. She is, indeed, a storyteller aware of the coercive power of story, a mythmaker who deconstructs myths. In a Naomi Wallace play, victims and victimizers, the pursued and the pursuer vie for a metaphorical, political and spiritual space. Often, options slowly diminish. At other times spaces open up which prove unbridgeable. Necessity rules. Bodies are exploited. Loving families too often fracture under the weight of a business as sacrament world. Irony, in the world of Naomi Wallace, is constantly reinvented from the frustrated desires of those who obey compulsions they would wish to resist. And yet there is a fractured poetry, a loving energy and passion to the lives of those whose demons she stages.There is a resonance, an intensity, and a power of resistance which lift them above their social insignificance.Wallace is, finally, a poet of the theater who herself discovers poetry in the broken lives that are the subjects of her plays, and in the broken society that they inhabit.
Finally, on a more personal note, Naomi Wallace is an incredibly humble, kind, and thoughtful artist. During our conversation, she sipped a cup of tea while talking about politically charged issues, human rights, what she calls her dark comedies—her transgressive plays—and so many other important subjects embedded in the following interview. It’s been a pleasure getting to know Naomi over this past year. She even took time from her busy schedule to teach my two classes during the Spring 2023 semester: an undergraduate course in Modern Drama and a graduate seminar I co- taught with my colleague Gina Caison in American Drama. In both we explored The Breach, the first of her three-play Kentucky trilogy. She did an amazing job of discussing her chief concerns in the play and patiently answered numerous questions from students. She’s read one of my undergraduate’s first play, and made numerous suggestions for revisions. She is also in email correspondence with two graduate students whose research papers examine The Breach. By all accounts she has been remarkably patient and insightful. In my many email exchanges with Naomi this past her, I have come to appreciate her intelligence, healthy sense of humor, and willingness to help those interested in contemporary theater.

Roudané: To begin, I’d like to hear about your latest projects. You mentioned you’re collaborating with Rock and Roll Hall of Famer John Mellencamp on Small Town: The Jack and Diane Musical. How did you get involved with Mellencamp?

Wallace: I listened to John Mellencamp’s music when I was a delirious teenager, driving the roads with friends through what I call our wild Kentucky nights. I grew up in Kentucky and John grew up in Indiana, right across the Ohio river.We still call this area “Kentuckiana.” I never ran into Mellencamp when I was growing up. He’s a few years older than me. But we knew some of the same people. So through my agent, I learned about John’s wish to turn his hit song Jack and Diane into a musical about star-crossed lovers. I read the idea for the musical before I first spoke to Mellencamp. I didn’t know Mellencamp himself had written what I read. I thought it was the producer’s vision for the stage. So the first time I spoke to John, I launched into why I wasn’t very taken with the initial story as I found it somewhat clichéd. About halfway through that conversation, he told me that what I had read was actually his vision! Of course, I was mortified that I had been so direct about tearing that vision down. But John, and this is what I like about him, merely paused and then said, “You don’t like what I’ve written, then let me hear your version.” By that time I figured I’d lost the project, and I had nothing to lose. So I launched into my idea for a narrative to match his song.And Mellencamp heard me out, then simply said,“I like this better. Let’s go with your story.”And I thought, okay, this is someone I can work with.

Mellencamp is particular about what he wants and very clear, and I like that about him. But he’s also willing to listen to alternatives.And, of course, he’s a genius songwriter. So I have now written a story that underpins the musical, one that takes place in a small town in the United States. I’ve written the dialogue, etc., but it’s Mellencamp’s music—all his greatest hits, plus some other songs that are not as well-known. It will be directed by Kathleen Marshall.We’re still in the draft stage and presently working with New York Theater Workshop to develop the musical further.

Roudané: Impressive, indeed. Any other new projects?

Wallace: I have my play Night is a Room, which has been adapted for film. It will be directed by Elizabeth Moss, and star both Moss and Ann Dowd. It was adapted by Bruce McLeod, my partner. And this project came to us because I worked with Dowd when Night is a Room had its world premiere at the Signature Theater, New York City, in 2015, directed by Bill Rauch. Dowd and I became friends during the rehearsal process. She’s just a phenomenal actor. One of our very best.We always talked about turning the play into a film, but I felt too close to it. Bruce didn’t want to do it, so I just said, “I’m not going to let anybody else adapt it, so you need to do it or it won’t get done at all!” Bruce is a film writer and, thankfully, he did adapt the play to screen.And it’s a fantastic screenplay.

Roudané:You and Bruce McLeod have worked on several films together.

Wallace:We’ve collaborated on at least three film projects—TheWar Boys, Flying Blind (2012), and Night is a Room—though we haven’t written film together in quite a few years.Bruce is writing his own film scripts now,and I’m writing more for the theater, as I always have. I have a play premiering in London in June 2023 called The Return of Benjamin Lay, which I have co- written with the historian Marcus Rediker, about the eighteenth century abolitionist and dwarf, Benjamin Lay; he was a fiery visionary, way ahead of his time, embracing veganism, pacifism and economic exploitation. Lay was a true radical, and until Rediker’s book, largely written out of history. It’s a one person show, and we have a wonderful actor coming from L.A., Mark Povinelli, who will play Ben Lay. It’s been an honour and delight to work with Marcus Rediker. He’s got a brain like a universe. I work to not be intimidated by both his knowledge and creative thinking.

I also have the second part of my Kentucky trilogy, What Need for Heaven. The first of which is The Breach, which was produced at The Hampstead Theater. The second production isn’t nailed down yet, but it should premier in 2024. I wrote the lead for Anne Dowd. Lucky for this playwright,Ann loves the play! And lastly, George Wolfe and I are working on a musical about the great country music star, Loretta Lynn, who was born in Kentucky,something George and I also have in common.Speaking of minds like universes, Wolfe thinks and imagines like no one else. No one else. It’s Wolfe who taught me how to write a musical. I wouldn’t be writing SmallTown had it not been for him.

Roudané:Well, I marvel at how productive you remain, obviously with all these new projects, and how you’ve sustained a career for nearly three decades.

Wallace:You mentioned something about my productivity—we should talk about productions.There are only a handful of professional theaters in the U.K. and in the U. S. who are willing to produce my work. It has made little difference, in terms of productions, that I’ve won an OBIE, a MacArthur Award, or that one of my plays has been inducted into the permanent repertory of La Comédie Française. For whatever reasons, professional theaters won’t produce my work. Now while I’m very happy that my plays are taught at universities and high schools, I would like to communicate more with the theatre-going public. Alas, my work is very under-produced. I sure would like to see more of my work staged before I die! When I was just out of university with an MFA in playwriting, In the Heart of America was on the cover of American Theatre magazine, and I was told, “Now that your play is in American Theatre, you are going to be produced in regional theaters across the US.” Well, it didn’t happen. I hardly got a production out of the publication in American Theatre. I do believe it had to do with the play’s harsh critique of U.S. wars abroad, of the homophobia and racism in the military.

Still, I am grateful to the few theaters that have supported my work over the years like NewYorkTheaterWorkshop and SignatureTheater,and here in the U.K.,The Hampstead and BushTheatre.And I thank the gods for The Public when George C. Wolfe was running it! There are few in the theatre world like Wolfe who are willing to rock the boat, sometimes even turn it over: the late, great Jim Houghton, who ran Signature Theater, was also one of them.When I warned Jim that producing my plays would surely bring bad reviews from The New York Times (something I was used to), he simply said: “Fuck ’em.”

Roudané: I am struck by the fact that for Naomi Wallace history hurts. In several of your plays—The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, for instance—the past co-mingles with the present, and it will surely influence the future.What is it about history that so engages your imagination?

Wallace: What inspires me to write is reading history, and by that I mean radical history, and by that I mean history that’s been buried. I love “exhumations” (and I often use ghosts in my work) and what historians like E.P.Thompson, Howard Zinn and Marcus Rediker call “history from below.”And for me,that very often has to do with giving voice and vitality to poor and working people who have invariably and with huge courage and creativity resisted the conditions that they have been imposed on them and imposed with a violence that is physical, psychological, and economic. It has very much to do with a history that is outside the mainstream narrative of the Empire of the United States of America, which is forever pursuing “democracy” at home and abroad. I’m being sarcastic, of course. I’m inspired by a history where people said “no” to various forces of oppression, whether that be in terms of their class, race, or sexual/gender identity and also by how that resistance manifests in their individual lives as well as how it manifests in their bodies and minds, and in their families and communities. I’m interested in what happened to them because of that resistance. Our mainstream education de-educates us in the United States, promoting a tunnel-vision. It focuses mostly on the elite, the rich, and the powerful. It focuses on individuals, rather than the oppressed, those who nurtured and created a truly democratic spirit in the United States. So I work to educate myself about a seemingly invisible history of resistance to racial capitalism and all the forces that are engineered to diminish us. I continue to try and learn from our brilliant, radical historians and philosophers like Angela Davis, Robin D. G. Kelley, Nick Estes, David Roediger, Marcus Rediker,Tera Hunter, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor,W.E.B. Du Bois. Historians who have given this playwright a hard shove into a consciousness about another America. I’ve tried to listen and learn from our courageous historians, journalists, and activists who have uncovered the brutal U.S. imperial wars abroad: Nick Turse, Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said, Daniel Immerwahr, William Blum, Franklin Lamb, Jeremy Scahill, Joshua Casteel, and others.

Roudané: I think of The Liquid Plain, your more recent and beautiful, powerful, painful example of that history. I can’t help but think of Suzan- Lori Parks who says a lot of her plays are about rewriting “the holes of history.” Filling in the absences.That’s why I wanted to ask you about your interest in history; you explore the pain of the past to shed light on those who have been disenfranchised vis á vis capitalism, racism, colonialism, and all the rest of it.

Wallace: As violent as the history might be in my plays, this evocation of the past—which is deeply interconnected with the present and possibilities for the future—is also where my characters draw their strength, from what Robin D. G. Kelley calls “freedom dreams.” So too with my characters, who often find the line blurred between their own past and present, who are visited by the ghosts that refuse to go unnamed. But listen, let me say right here that my plays are not grim. I consider most of my plays to be dark comedies. Perhaps very dark comedies. But I always attempt to foreground the forces at play with a sort of dialectical humour, a humour which I consider to be another way of surviving.

Roudané: As I understand it, you began your career as a poet. I was struck by the titles of some of your poems from To Dance a Stony Field (1995): “Looking for Karl Marx’s Apartment, 28 Dean Street,” “Execution in the Country, Nicaragua 1986,” “Kentucky Soldier in the Saudi Desert on the Eve of War,” and so on. Would it be fair to say that your poetry often concerns violence and exploitation as endured by those who are disenfranchised, those who are caught up in a larger system?

Wallace:Well said, yes.That’s what my poetry, to a large extent, addressed. I began as a poet, and I thought I would always be a poet. But I was increasingly frustrated by the confessional, introverted, individualistic, heart-sore, “authentic” mode of writing poetry; this is what I was largely encouraged to pursue as a young writer. So I began to adopt other voices, imagining other voices speaking in a larger, more politically infused world—and that’s what you’re seeing in those titles you’ve just mentioned. At first, when writing this poetry, I liked the idea of creating by myself, alone, in a room. I needed that isolation. Or at least this was the story I told myself. And in a way, my poems were almost like mini-plays. So I was groping toward theatre without really knowing it.

Theatre had not really been part of my life, except for once playing Romeo in high school! I didn’t see a professional production until Jean Genet’s The Maids (1947) at Actor’s Theater of Louisville when I was maybe nineteen-years old. I liked what I saw on stage, but I didn’t go back to the theater for years because the audience (ironically) were for the most part dressed up in pearls and suits and finery. It was largely, or so it seemed to me,only the elite who went to theater.And I thought,“I don’t want to be here with these rich folks!”Which was all a little silly and self- important because I too was from privilege, at least on my father’s side. My mother’s side of the family was Dutch working-class. In Louisville we were outcasts as my parents were labelled “communists” because they supported the Cuban Revolution and marched for Civil Rights.

One of the first plays I wrote, while at the University of Iowa, was In the Fields of Aceldama (1992), and it was structured through big monologues, as though I had taken pages from my poetry and stuffed them into a play. As I watched the director, Diana Dawson, and the actors during rehearsals I suddenly thought,“I don’t want to be a poet.This is where I want to be.” I realised then that I was not flourishing sitting alone in a room writing poetry; I wanted and needed to be in a more collaborative environment. Sometimes my work is still called “poetic.” I’ve never really liked that idea because it sounds as if my language is ephemeral and detached from reality. What I do see in my work is an attention to language and how words can do specific work, not least in foregrounding or making strange the apparently obvious or normal. I found a lot of my language by listening to the people I grew up with, which in my area of Kentucky was mostly black and white working class.Yes, I use a slightly heightened language at times, but it is rooted in the voices and lives I grew up with.

My recent play The Breach is the closest to my own experience of growing up in Kentucky; the language emanates from the group of friends I had then, half of whom are sadly now dead, killed by poverty and drugs and the lies of the American Dream. These friends haunt me. And how wild and intelligent and creative they were in their brief lives. How they were taught early on that the world was theirs, but then soon realised they’d been given a life sentence to serve a system that benefitted the few over the many.Yeah, they were brief candles. But I carry these people with me, their voices, their language.They refuse to be quiet, so I can’t forget them. I’m grateful for that.

Roudané: It seems like you relish doing extensive research for many of your plays. Do you enjoy the research?

Wallace: I don’t know if I do more research than others, but I certainly read—and yes, with “relish.” I like that word. So I read with relish as much as I can about historical periods I don’t know much about. For Things of Dry Hours (2009), I did research for four years before I dared write the play.The play was inspired by Robin D. G. Kelley’s book, Hammer and Hoe; it’s about the Alabama Communist Party, which was mostly made up of black members and a few whites. I try to understand how my characters have become who they are at the point at which we meet them in the story, at the crossroads.When I wrote TheTrestle at Pope Lick Creek,I felt I needed to study the decades before the play takes place in order to understand how these characters got to where they are, to that place of a “beginning.” So for Trestle, the question was: How did Pace and Dalton get to 1936, how did the Depression shape who they are, and what might 1936 hold in store for them?

Roudané: Do you want your audience to be active participants, or emotional participants in the spectacle?

Wallace:A good question.The challenge for this playwright is how does one get an audience emotionally involved without emotions swamping some sort of critical distance and thinking. I’d like to think of this involvement as “emotionally active.” If the writing or story is comfortable (and comforting) then an audience can go into snooze mode; if it is overly uncomfortable they can feel shut out. Either way it’s game over.They are not really going to feel engaged in a participatory way. How does one find that balance? Between the familiar and defamiliarizing?There’s (hopefully) an intimacy created between an audience and a character. The audience knows when a character is telling the truth, and when this happens, an audience is invited inside.When an audience feels safe in the knowledge that they’re hearing the truth of a character’s experience and it’s conveyed directly and honestly, they’ll stay. I don’t think I’ve ever been asked this question of yours, so I’m thinking, how have I attempted to do it? I don’t know if I was every consciously thinking about how to get audiences engaged in a critique, say, of consumer capitalism or war. But history is a lived experience. It pours into our bodies and fills us, changes us. Or sometimes sinks us.

Roudané: Many writers I’ve interviewed have said that the American Dream myth permeates all of American literature, forming an ironical cultural backdrop to the writer’s story. Do you think such a myth of the American Dream informs your theater?

Wallace: I don’t really see the American Dream as a “myth.”That is perhaps to give this ideological force a sense of grandeur, which it does not deserve. I see it as one of the insidious lies of our system.The American Dream puts the failure to succeed on us because we “didn’t make it.” The American Dream keeps us quiet, keeps our failures private. It’s not even really about “failure” because the American Dream is a paper bag popped over the heads of the majority of Americans, and it’s filled with a bitter sleeping gas. It’s a nationalist fable that keeps us divided.

On the other hand, it’s not a myth at all: it’s worked for millions and millions of Americans over time to the deadly expense of Native American nations and enslaved Africans, as well as the exploited labour of “immigrant” workers such as the Chinese and Mexicans. As I said earlier, I’ve always been riveted by labor processes and the ideology that surrounds labor, and how both are so often obscured on stage and in our society. Mainstream theater still largely embraces that myth. Poverty is too often presented on stage as simply a character flaw rather than a result of an economic system that must keep many in poverty in order to give vast profit to the few. History teaches us one story: that if you are born poor, you most likely will die poor. Most of the wealthy in our country have not worked for their wealth, they’ve inherited it.The American Dream is neither myth nor nightmare, rather it is the workings of an ideology that supports racial capitalism.The word “myth” romanticises, obscures its true function. But for a moment, let’s use that word. Myth. And let’s connect it to the U.S. myth of trickle-down economics, of freedom, of individualism. We call it the American Dream but I would call it the myth of an economic system that promises everything is within our reach, but cannot bring even a semblance of decent living standards to the majority.

Half my childhood, I grew up in Kentucky, which is still the second poorest state in the country, I saw the ravages of the American Dream up close in the kids I grew up with and their families. My father was a journalist and a farmer, and we had privilege compared to most of the people around us.When I was fifteen-years old, I dated a boy called Jay. He was the son of one of our neighbours, and I remember Jay’s father—who was very handsome—worked so damn hard. On the side he tried to be an inventor because he thought he might get ahead that way. Maybe ten years later, when I was well into adulthood, I saw this same man sitting in a corner of a McDonald’s restaurant with a cup of coffee and a cigarette, at a time when you could still smoke a cigarette inside. I said hello, and I sat with him because I was polite. I’d just finished college and most of the people I grew up with didn’t go to college. I hadn’t seen Jay’s father in years, but he was still handsome. He looked like a rough version of Errol Flynn. I sat with him a moment and asked him how he was, and he just said, “You know, I don’t know what’s happened or what I did wrong. I’ve worked hard all my life, and I still I’ve got nothing.” I’d seen him work hard, and I’d seen his family work hard.This is a story of disillusionment and self-blame which is repeated over and over. In the end, we blame ourselves for our economic failures. That’s the genius of capitalism. It cannot give us equality and a decent life because that is not in its nature. It’s a system of exploitation, oppression, and immense destruction. Not only through brutal, colonial wars but through wrecking the environment. And we tear ourselves apart for not “having what it takes to make it.” It’s a lie that keeps the focus off of the perpetrators, so to speak.

Roudané: I remember when I first met you at the International American Drama Conference in Madrid in Summer 2022, you were discussing some of these very issues. Can you elaborate?

Wallace:When I gave that talk in Madrid last summer,I spoke about how many bombs we’ve dropped, how many wars we’ve been involved in over the last hundred years, and the figures are staggering. It is just colossal, the criminalities of the U.S. killing machine. Our military adventurism in Korea killed 10 percent of their civilian population. And three million during the Vietnam War. More recently, as a result of the U.S. “War on Terror” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Yemen, 1.3 million deaths. The socio-economic, environmental, and human devastation left behind is beyond belief, almost beyond imagination. I think we must speak about this every day. Instead we’re encouraged to point fingers (and missiles!) at other countries.We must not allow the dead and murdered to become invisible. So when I gave my talk in Madrid, I knew that there might be a little silence after my keynote in which I address American culture and war.“Wait a minute, aren’t you a playwright?” But that’s my writing—whether in essays, poems, or plays—I’m trying to understand the connection between the demise of the hedgehog, the oil industries, racial capitalism, and war. All of this is connected. But I’d be remiss here not to say that what intrigues me most is the actual resistance to U.S. wars and pillage, resistance to the ravages of capitalism inside the U.S. For where there is oppression there is always resistance. And for as long as we’ve had racial capitalism, we’ve had radical justice movements challenging the interdependent evils of colonialism, war and climate destruction. And more often than not these radical justice movements are lead by black, brown, and indigenous people. Look, for me as a writer from Kentucky, how could I not be interested in Kentucky soldiers who went to Vietnam or Iraq? How could I not also be interested in the lives of the people we were and are at war against? To me, these realities are inseparable. And then there are the contradictions, where workers in unions within the military industrial complex are making bombs.And I think about the sweat of their labor. How often has the sweat of our labour been used to kill other people? These are the questions that fascinate and inspire me.

Roudané: Good questions, indeed.You’ve been talking about the myth of the American Dream, and the effects of war, bombing, empire, racism, capitalism, factory workers, labor, and all the rest of it. I’m thinking about the workers in your recent play The Breach, but for one example.This leads me to a question about the toll on the human body, both a physical and emotional toll. Could you discuss?

Wallace: Working to understand how people labour, and how they use their bodies in this labour—has always intrigued me. My mother was from the Dutch working class. From my mother’s side of the family, I learned about the differences between those who had money and those who had to labor for their shelter and food. For instance, in In the Heart of America, two young men seduce each other through the language of war.There’s an interconnectedness there because the U. S is the biggest exporter of military weapons in the world, and all of those weapons are created through labor. I explore the idea of how we can put these bombs together and then go home and play with our children. I’m not criticising workers for having these jobs. I’m asking, what is the connection between these bodies and the bodies on the receiving end of this violence?

When I wrote Slaughter City, many slaughter house workers had carpal tunnel syndrome. These are still the most dangerous jobs in America—in meat packing plants. When I wrote Slaughter City, I first went and spoke to the workers who were on strike at the Fisher Meat packing plant in Louisville.They gave me a little book that defined the different jobs and it was poetry to me! The language around the different jobs within the meat packing plant and then the different knives for cutting. How the workers spoke about their knives. How the blade folds over if you don’t sharpen it right. How some workers’ accidents intimately affected their lives. I remember a woman with carpal tunnel syndrome saying to me, “I can’t pick up my grandchildren anymore.”There is a connection between our most intimate moments and the injuries sustained in unsafe working conditions. How do you touch your lover when your hands are shaking and painful? There is an accident in Slaughter City that was inspired by my conversations with a striking worker. One man at the Fisher Meat packing plant said he could no longer cry tears because of an ammonia spill. Others had damage to their hands through accidents with knives because they were so tired at work, because they were hardly given rest.

Roudané: You present a pretty hard-scramble, malevolent world where a lot of the characters are exploited, beaten up, beaten down, severed by the corporation, by capitalism. Individuals collapse.You present a pretty naturalistic Zolaesque vision of experience where we’re all insignificant specks in the universe over which we have little or no control. On the other hand, I sense at least in some of your plays a kind of moral optimism.

Wallace:I would say,Matthew,that the reason I write is because we are not insignificant specks. I’m interested in the lives of those whom mainstream history refuses to inscribe.We are discouraged from thinking about how destructive our economic system is to the body and how many people die each year—I think near six thousand in the U.S. alone—or are injured at work. In The Breach there is a death because of a company cutting corners and not taking care of workers’ safety equipment. The body is vulnerable when it labours for profit, but that same body is also constantly resisting, whether it is resisting homophobia or racism or low wages. The body always resists exploitation.This keeps me writing.

Roudané: I read with interest where you dedicated In the Heart of America “to my mother, Sonia de Vries, who gave me a conscience.”

Wallace:Yes. My mother was from a Jewish working-class family. She was also a communist. She believed that we must always stand with those who have the least power. My mother didn’t go to university. She was self- educated. She learned five languages through teaching herself.When I was only twelve years old she had me reading James Baldwin and Lorca.Which I resisted, of course. I wanted instead to be out running wild with my friends. I think I somehow managed to do both at the same time.

Roudané: One sees a stance within your plays: the impulse to stand up with a sense of conscious for those in need, especially in light of what you earlier said about the human body.

Wallace: Clint Ramos is a designer I met at The Signature Theatre when they produced And I and Silence. Clint was recently speaking about my plays and said something which is rarely, if ever, said about my work, which is “Naomi’s work is always about love. Love and desire are at the center of her work.” The Breach is in part about love, about how our social system will, if we let it, strip us of our sensuality, of our ability to love, to expand and cherish our bodies.This is also a theme in In the Heart of America—how these two young men, who are U.S. soldiers, are steeped in a language of war and weaponry.When they fall in love, they take this same language and transform it into a language of love and desire. And even though a terrible violence happens in the play, the last image is a memory of the two of them together, alive, vibrant. They fight to keep their ability to love intact.

Roudané: Perhaps this is why I see a kind of moral optimism, maybe connected to that sense of resistance and solidarity. Sam Shepard told me he finds more hopelessness in hope than anything else in his plays, but is there something a bit more affirmative in your work?

Wallace:Well, I think pessimism is a lazy and easy posture.To me, the body that survives, the person that survives, carries the affirmation you speak of as a testimony to resistance.And even the dead can resist by refusing to disappear. Of course, I have quite a few ghosts in my work. Ghosts are the shadows of history that refuse to dissolve.

I made up this word, “enhauntment,” to try and describe the hauntings of history that we carry within ourselves. “Enhauntment” as opposed to the enchantment of entertainment in mainstream theatre. Now of course ghosts can be hugely entertaining! But ghosts in my work are there to make space for the banished, the disappeared, the denied. It’s been said many times before that the past is never really over. It’s right here with us, in our arms. So how do you manifest that on stage? I like to do it through ghosts. For me, the theater is the only place where the past and present can be alive together on stage, simultaneously. This idea, of course, I take from Walter Benjamin: the notion of the past breaking through into the present moment, flashing up in a moment of danger.

Roudané: Is it true that as a young girl you accompanied your father to Vietnam war protests clutching a sheep?

Wallace: Yes! (Laughs) We brought our pet sheep to the anti-war demonstrations in Louisville. I was very young but I remember my mother said to us: “Is there a difference between my children and those of a Vietnamese mother? No!That is why we are marching.”When the Freedom for Information Act was created, the FBI released near four hundred pages on my father, including a letter signed by J. Edgar Hoover stating that my father was a danger to the U.S. government because of his sympathies for the Cuban Revolution. I can remember being afraid as a child—during the Vietnam war—when people would call up my father and say, “We’re coming to get you and your family.” I remember one time being stopped by another car on the road because my father drove a car plastered with stickers saying,“Get out ofVietnam.”This man got out of his car and approached us. He said, “You know, you’re nothing but a dirty communist and, if I could, I’d drop a bomb on you!” I remember hiding in the back seat of the car and my father getting out of his car and replying, “ A dirty communist? Hell, I want you to know I take a bath at least once a week whether I need it or not.” My father always had a sense of humour. He often wrote letters to the newspaper condemning racism and theVietnam war.That’s what got him in trouble.We had our mailbox blown up.We had a quote by Che Guevara on a sign by the entrance to the farm and it was repeatedly shot up. So as a child I learned that it could be dangerous to hold certain beliefs.And then the U.S. slid from the Vietnam War into supporting violence and right-wing coups in Central America, and then on to twenty years of war in the Middle East. Now the U.S. has China in its sights. My eldest daughter is thirty-four and the United States has been at war her entire life.The U.S. and allied air forces have dropped more than 337,000 bombs and missiles on other countries in the past twenty years.That’s an average of forty-six strikes per day!What a propaganda coup that any of us might still believe the U.S. to be a force for peace and democracy abroad.

Roudané: Of the many compelling aspects of your theater that spark public interest and strike a private nerve concerns your exploration of “the family.” Distant mothers, absent or strange fathers, wayward sons and daughters, often in a coming-of-age experience, animate your stage. Could you comment on your lifelong interest in exploring the family?

Wallace: One of the reasons I wrote The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek was in answer to Sam Shepard’s writings about “the dysfunctional family.” Shepard was a very talented writer. Unfortunately, he set off about two decades of furious scribbling for the American stage wherein “the American family” is inherently to blame for all our psychological and social woes.The family is morally fucked up rather than socially screwed.As though larger, historical forces have nothing to do with how a family develops.And so I wrote The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek as a reply to the idea of “the dysfunctional family.” In Trestle, the father and mother are both loving people who care about their children but the economic pressures, translated as individual failings, lead to the family’s collapse.

Roudané: In The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, it’s as if Dalton becomes the female and Pace becomes the male.

Wallace: Dalton Chance and Pace Creagan are restricted, in terms of what they can and cannot do with their bodies, by a ferocious heterosexuality. They want to touch places that they’ve learned shouldn’t be touched.They want to break with the old guidebook about what it means to be a “boy” or a “girl.” To explore what it means to be transformed by another body. The play is also about finding “place” in our bodies—a home, a refuge, an exploratorium, a lover’s world.

Roudané: I’ve been struck by a question about your non-realism.You’re not a traditional playwright.Accurate?

Wallace: In 2022, my thrilling director for The Breach, Sarah Frankcom said, “I don’t think you’ve ever written a realistic play.” She’s right and you’re right. Non-realism in the sense of troubling reality, unpacking reality, makes sense to me. I’m not trying to “reflect” the world. I don’t want to see a refrigerator on stage. I don’t want to see a table. I find these domestic props of theater suffocating and tedious, and besides, I can see them in my own home every day. I’m glad you bring this up. I have a play, Night is a Room, and there is a scene where a husband and wife are at home in their living room. But then I thought,“oh no, now a designer is going to bring in a couch and chairs and table, and it will be my fault.” And I thought, “What can I do to prevent this?” So I decided that this couple were actually in the midst of redecorating their living room, so that everything needed to be covered in sheets.Then I felt more relaxed.

Roudané: This helps me better understand your theater and your non- realism. Now I appreciate why you don’t need a refrigerator on stage. Could you talk about the ways in which you capture human emotions on the stage?

Wallace: In The Breach notes to the director, I write,“No one cries in this story.”Why? Because, to me, that is part of naturalism, part of realism.The old adage is true: when someone cries on stage, the audience doesn’t need to.And I would prefer that it is my audience that cries.This goes back to something else you asked about my work, suggesting that it is experimental. I find it odd that we even consider writing realism for the stage.After all, we spend half of our lives asleep, which of course includes dreaming.Then while we are awake we spend huge amounts of time talking to ourselves, day dreaming, fantasising, talking to dead people, imagining people that don’t exist. Each of us moves through other, imaginary worlds, day in, day out. So why settle for realism on stage? My non-realism is more real than realism! As I get older half the people I have relationships with are dead.

Roudané: I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts on the importance of stage directions.

Wallace: My stage signals are often counterintuitive. When a character is at their most open, perhaps revealing a secret, my stage directions often read for the dialogue: “Facts.” When I write “facts” next to dialogue, it’s because I’m signalling to an actor that this is not the place where you pile on emotion, rather just tell the story, speak the words. I don’t want heavy emotional furniture brought to bear down on the language. I also usually write that the stage set should be “bare” or “minimal.” Maybe there is a chair. There’s a monologue in One Flea Spare where Mrs. Snelgrave talks about the death of the horse that was given to her as a wedding gift, and I signal that the actor should tell the story as facts.And it is far more powerful when the actor just says the lines in the same way one might say, “Okay. This is what I’m going to cook for dinner tonight.”Then the emotion can spill out, but only as a light under the crack of a door. Any more than that and you swamp the moment. In doing this, I hope we listen more carefully because the character’s emotion has been pulled back to make space for our emotion. I was just recently reading more Tennessee Williams and his stage directions are not “realistic” either.

Roudané: Paula Vogel once told her student, Sarah Ruhl, to think of Tennessee Williams’s stage directions as love poems to the audience.

Wallace: I like that the stage directions can be seen as directly engaging, wooing the audience. But I also like, by contrast, Edward Bond’s very utilitarian directions. There’s no romancing the audience there. I tend to just try to strip everything out now. For my plays, the bodies and the language should take up the most space. That doesn’t mean that the set design isn’t important.To create a set that is almost the absence of a set is extremely difficult. Naomi Dawson can do that. Riccardo Hernandez can do that. For me, the relationship between the audience and the stage should be one of bodies and language, not between refrigerator and couch. As for crying on stage, I don’t like it. A character can show their broken heart by being very still or by laughing. And I think these other ways of reacting to hurt or loss can jolt us. And perhaps when we’re jolted, we might see the entire picture differently.The contrast between what someone says and how they feel—that’s where a lot of the magic happens. Between the words and the emotion.

Roudané: In One Spare Flea, could you discuss the relationship between apples, oranges, tangerines, sexual desire, and the body itself within the play? I was also fascinated by the way you talk about clothes, shoes, and fruits.

Wallace: (Smiling broadly) A lot of that comes from the idea of making things strange on stage. I like to work with a small thing that’s domestic or that we see every day, but then when we put it on stage, suddenly it takes on a very different property. You’re right, at the end of One Spare Flea, Morse “tosses the orange high into the air,” the stage direction reads. But that orange, divorced from its usual place in the world, becomes, I hope, like a small sun rising into the air. I’ve never told anybody this but you! These materials can possibly take on a whole different quality and then be examined in a different way. As does the orange earlier in the play when it is fingered by the sailor Bunce. And a pair of shoes! There can be transgression by stepping into another’s shoes, especially if you’re dirt poor and the shoes belong to an aristocrat.Theater can be magic, and at its best is a radical, brutal magic. It tears through the familiar and leaves us standing within the possibilities of something else just about to happen.

Roudané: I can hear echoes of Bertolt Brecht in you.Was he an influence on you?

Wallace: Yes, Brecht was and is, but I was thinking today, probably the playwright I have read the most is Shakespeare. A shift happened over the years in my reading of Shakespeare, especially after reading Cedric J. Robinson’s Forgeries of Memory and Meaning.Anyone who reads Shakespeare should read Robinson on Othello, a play he calls “the last magnificent public gesture” to challenge the rise of white racism in the seventeenth century. I have a very old volume of Shakespeare’s complete works on my desk.The pages are as thin as a Bible’s, and turning them gives me pleasure. Reading Shakespeare rubs off on you, thankfully. But to return to Brecht: His belief that theatre should be a discursive, dissenting, and unsettling experience; where humour and horrors rub shoulders; and that we understand that we make our realities but not under conditions of our choosing—all of this influences the way I think of theatre. More contemporary playwrights I hold inside me now would be Adrienne Kennedy and Alice Childress. And then there’s Heiner Müller’s The Hamlet Machine (1977) and always Büchner’s Woyzeck (1836; 1877; 1913). Webster and August Wilson. I should probably stop or I will keep adding. Trevor Griffiths. Kia Corthron. And more recently, hugely talented young playwrights like Ismail Khalidi, Aeneas Sagar Hemphill, and Erika Dickerson-Despenza. And the gifted director Sharifa Elkady.

Roudané: I consider yours a radical theater. “Radical” from the Latin, meaning “to get at the root of something.” True?

Wallace: True. I hope mine is a radical theater. A radical theater is going to critique the very foundations on which we built this illusion of a democracy and equality. And it’s not just about better relationships between men and women, or gender equality. It’s not just about #MeToo. It’s even not just about inclusivity and equity. Inclusivity and equity in what? In this capitalist system? We need a new pie. We need to build an entire new house. We need to actively champion and involve ourselves in what the great historian Robin D. G. Kelley calls “freedom dreams.” A radical theater, to me, is where you can’t really write about ending racism if you don’t talk about ending capitalism, as the two are interdependent. You can’t talk about bodies if you don’t talk about exploitation and then resistance to that exploitation. One of my attempts in theater has been to understand and then distill radical visions that I have learned from people like Kelly and Tera W. Hunter. And to try and put these visions into the bodies and lives of people on stage, so that we can connect with them in a way that isn’t just intellectual or historical. When someone says to me, “Your work is anti-war.” No, it’s not some general anti-war sentiment. It’s anti-colonial. It’s anti-empire—and there’s the difference. I would say that the most exciting radical theater happening now is coming from communities under assault, people of color, indigenous people, queer and trans people. Those who live precarious and policed lives know best what creative resistance and transformation look like. Not that mainstream theater has welcomed these more radical visions. Radical writers have always had to pry the theater open for themselves. They have not only had to storm the main stages, but also forge stages of their own, putting forward political visions that ultimately include all of us, and are always about turning the world inside out and upside down. And giving it a few hard shakes as well!

Roudané: I’m so impressed with your work. I know yours is a radical theater.

Wallace: Thank you, Matthew, for being interested in my plays and in having such detailed and intelligent questions. I’ve really enjoyed these two hours that have blown by.

April 24, 2020 Interview by Ismail Khalidi

CALL & RESPONSE reached out to playwright Naomi Wallace to have a conversation about art, truth, and hope during these dark times.

Naomi Wallace is a playwright and screenwriter originally from Kentucky. Her plays — which have been produced in the UK, Europe, the United States, and the Middle East — include In the Heart of America, Slaughter City, One Flea Spare, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, Things of Dry Hours, The Fever Chart, And I and Silence, The Liquid Plane, Hard Weather Boating Party, Returning to Haifa and The Corpse Washer. Her stage adaptation of William Wharton’s novel Birdy was produced on the West End in London.

Her films include: Lawn Dogs, The War Boys, Flying Blind (co-written with Bruce McLeod).

Wallace is the recipient of numerous awards including: Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (twice), Joseph Kesselring Prize, Fellowship of Southern Writers Drama Award, Obie Award, the Horton Foote Award for most promising new American play. She is also a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts development grant. In 2013, Wallace received the inaugural Windham Campbell prize for drama and in 2015, an Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Naomi Wallace has been called "a dedicated advocate for justice and human rights in the U.S. and abroad, and Palestinian rights in the Middle East," and her writing described as "muscular, devastating, and unwavering."

C&R: Is there an object or a practice (sacred or mundane) that gives you solace in these dark times? Is there something or someone who gives you hope?

NW: In the dark times there are always pieces of light, yes? If one looks only at the U.S. government, the corporate elite, then the lights go out, in terms of hope or solace. But if one looks at the magnificent struggles in recent years, for example at Standing Rock or thru Black Lives Matter or with BDS—there’s a lot to give us good juice. Raccoons also give me solace. Turtles do too and small animals that fly at night. My three children give me solace, and my partner. Right now I’m rereading for sustenance. Buchner’s Woyzeck, Shakespeare’s Othello (with Cedric Robinson as guide). I’m re-reading James Baldwin’s Another Country and Audre Lorde’s poetry. Philip Levine’s What Work is. Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck. As well as discovering new books like Nick Estes’ Our History is Our Future and Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide and Empire. These works are lights in the dark times, lights of learning and remembering.

C&R: Albert Camus, in his novel The Plague, writes: “At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there’s always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they’re returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth–in other words, to silence.” Where is your head, and your heart, in relation to the rhetoric, to our habits, and to the silence that falls when the hard truths of calamity come into focus?

NW: Pestilence. This word has more meaning that we allow it. Its origin is Middle English, and then also meant ‘morally corrupting’, not just epidemic disease. The calamity that befalls us now is rooted in the brutal inequalities of an economic system that cares little for the flourishing of humanity or for preserving the earth’s ability to support us. So in a sense, capitalism is also a pestilence and much of the world has been dying from this fatal system for decades. Thru war, thru economic exploitation, thru emotional manipulations. Now we have pestilence on top of pestilence. And racial capitalism’s fault lines and lies are exposed even further.

C&R: What does solidarity mean to you? In your work?

NW: I work, mostly alone, in a small one room green house in our garden in North Yorkshire. Thru the windows I talk to the birds, who always have the last word. I always miss working steadily with other people (which I do only when in rehearsals or co-writing for the stage or screen). But to write, I usually need to sit alone. Solidarity for me is with my close friends; we share our writing and critique our weaknesses. Solidarity in the wider political sense is showing up and standing with those who are in need, who are without, who have been ruthlessly exploited, and yet have the most to teach us.

C&R: What/who have you read, seen or listened to recently that really blew you away?

NW: Carl Safina’s Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. I grew up on a small farm in Kentucky. While my father raised cattle, my siblings and I raised anything that needed a little help: ground hogs, raccoons, squirrels, runt pigs. Our culture teaches us that animals are very different from people. They are not. Even fish can tell faces apart. That’s why I no longer eat them, or any of my sentient brethren. And Bill V. Mullen’s Living in Fire is the new James Baldwin biography and the one we’ve been waiting for. It explores his anti-imperialism, his queer advocacy, his feminism. And Bach’s Cello Suites (Janos Starker on cello). And T.J. Clark’s Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come.. Its about ideas of paradise on earth, visions of another world, thru paintings. I finished a new play some months ago, What Need for Heaven. I’m still thinking about how we dream up new social relations, new economies, new ways to relate to one another that are not predicated on profit but on love and sensuality and play.

C&R: Does truth still matter in a “post-truth” age? What role does art play in relation to the truth?

NW: I think I’d rather rephrase this question and ask what role art can play in relation to history. We know there is not one history but many histories. But the ones that interest me as a writer are the histories that are repeatedly repressed by the ruling elite, the Masters of War, so that they can control our imaginations, for instance what we believe about ourselves, about who we were and what we wanted. Does the term “post-truth” mean anything really? I don’t think so. Its one of those dead-before-born words the mainstream corporate news likes to play with. Most of the world, the 80% that carry the wealthy on their backs, they know what the truth is about their lives, their work, the lack of dignity accorded to their needs. If there is a constant truth perhaps it is that people have always resisted what oppresses them, what degrades them. People have always worked for a world that will give gentle welcome to their children, to all children. We may not consistently be aware of that work, that resistance, but it is there. Sometimes in strikes, sometimes in marches, sometimes simply in continuing to love against the odds.

C&R: There is no shortage of apocalyptic thinking these days. But what if we could fill the future with visions of light instead? There is a Sikh prayer that asks, “what if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?” Seeing this dark moment instead as the prelude to a rebirth of sorts, what would the world look like in 50 years if you could imagine and bring that future into being?

NW: Well, frankly I’m not that capable of imagining another world on my own steam, so to speak. When I want to envision a future, I read Robin D. G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Or Angela Y. Davis’s Freedom is a Constant Struggle. Edward Said’s The Last Sky, a testament to the resilience and creativity of a people under years of lock down.Lets hope that in 50 years time, a Green New Deal, democratic and socialist, will be in the works and working. Perhaps we’ll have built so many libraries by then that we will begin to nest among the shelves of books until we are inseparable. Until books are our substructures. And the ocean will be clearing and the air and the sky and we will work for one another’s contentment. We will all have roofs and satisfying work and the health of the earth will once again be respected and considered with every choice. And no one will be an outsider or unwelcome. War will only be in the memory of old books and hunger a noun that has fallen out of use. And we’ll be able to be in our bodies the way we need to be and no one is lesser and no one is ‘normal’ because there are so many ways to transpire. Is it naive or idealistic to conjure this way? Perhaps what is naive and idealistic is thinking capitalism and wealth can save us or that individualism is anything more than a construct that makes us sick with loneliness, longing and fear. I won’t be there for that future in 50 years but perhaps a bird (a few generations down the line) that once ate a beetle that ate me will be there. I’d like to perch on a book in one of the open air libraries built in every city because in 50 years the books about rain and how rain happens will be made partly of rain. I look forward to it.