|
The Argotist Online Home Articles Interviews Features Poetry Ebooks Submissions Links |
|
Kirk Wood Bromley Interview
Kirk
Wood Bromley is a playwright whose verse plays have received extensive
critical acclaim, and can be seen in New York and Los Angeles. Michael Feingold
of the Village Voice calls Bromley "The Verse-Play Champion". In the
words of Robert Lopez,
Tony-Award winning
composer of Avenue Q, "Kirk's writing is some of the most crafted,
interesting stuff in the New York theater. And it's almost as much fun to read
his plays as it is to see them -- he's one of the few playwrights whose work can
be considered literature".
Sheila
E. Murphy
is a prolific poet who has
published numerous individual and collaborative books of poetry. Her book Letters
to Unfinished J. appeared in 2003, and received the Gertrude Stein Award
from Green Integer Press. Recent titles include Collected
Chapbooks, Permutoria
(with K. S. Ernst), How
to Spell the Sound of Everything (with mIEKALaND), Quaternity (with Scott
Glassman), Circumsanct and Reverse Haibun. Since
1993 Murphy has led a consulting firm (now Sheila Murphy, LLC) that provides
Customized Artistic Designs for public and private spaces; keynote speaking; and
corporate consulting in Strategic Corporate Communication; Individual and Team
Executive Advisement and Succession Planning.
SEM:
It's a privilege to interview you, Kirk, after being dazzled by your artistry in
bringing poetry to the stage. You've been praised by legions of critics and
theater audiences in New York, including The
New York Times, The Village Voice,
and scores of others, and have been lauded by fellow playwrights and
theater-goers. Please talk about your experience and share your insights
regarding poetry and the stage. KWB:
I basically got into writing “poetry for the stage” because I was feeling
unsatisfied writing “poetry for the page.” I was feeling this because the
poetry I was writing felt like it was disappearing into itself. I had gotten to
a point at only 23 of writing poetry that was composed almost exclusively of
phonemes with various source meanings in foreign languages, and it all felt so
cold and isolated and meaningless. So I decided that I’d force myself out of
this rut by engaging other people in my poetic project, since I knew they’d
demand that I “mean something,” and since I could think of nothing better
than having people read my poetry out loud to me, I started work on a play whose
language was poetry and planned for a production. Now, many years later, after
writing over 20 verse plays and/or musicals, this combination – play and
poetry – is one I go back and forth from and within every time I write. But it
feels like a coupling that is very hard to maintain. I’m always tilting one
way or another, though nowadays it’s towards the play. When I started out I
had to labor to make my poetry playable. Now I struggle to make my plays poetic.
But for me, the possibilities that theater offers poetry make for a poetry that
could not be achieved in any other way. I’m not sure what it is, but I feel
that when I set out to write poetry that I know will be involved in the
theatrical adventure – actors interpreting and performing the text for
audiences who will be interpreting and experiencing the text – I feel alive. I
feel like my poetry goes places I could never go otherwise. I feel that I’m
involving myself in a poetic world that is completely different from one that
comes to someone simply writing for the page. No better or no worse, just
different. The theatrical demands – of voice, of flesh, of movement, of light,
of “entertainment,” of “conflict,” of “story” – these effect the
poetry in ways that would not be able to occur any other way. And from the other
direction, what I’m able to achieve as theater using poetry for dialogue is a
form of theater that immediately sets it up as something very grounded in a vast
tradition, and yet something that’s completely new. The club of American verse
playwrights is relatively small, and the telling of American stories in
stage-worthy verse is not that common. And all that said, I feel very ambivalent
about “verse.” Ideally, I want to write poetry. Or maybe I just want to
write plays. I guess I’m not really sure what the difference is anymore other
than a level of attention I pay to either, which, I am hopeful, will soon simply
mean paying attention to the one thing – the action of the play, which will
have been pre-conceived by me as an already poetical thing. SEM:
This
highly charged, highly evolved level of poetic composition (as plays) emerges
from the stage as live in a way that
page-texts rarely do. One feature that becomes immediately apparent is the
audience’s obvious enjoyment of your language, and the capacity of your work
to engage many senses in human experience at many levels. The context of theater
causes audiences who might have appeared candidates for page poetry to flock to
your work. Your writing shares many features of Shakespeare’s work:
deliciously bawdy humor, a use of parody, metrical lines juxtaposed with
celebratory cadenzas that fly off into the ether with joyous abandon. Talk a bit
about your historically focused plays and the way that you deal with a range of
social issues, past and present. KWB:
I am in the middle of a pretty major transition on this very question, so it’s
been very hard to formulate an answer. I used to know what “history” and
“social issues” meant, but I am going through a kind of physical
reformulation that is holding me in a great and deep state of uncertainty. As
far as history, in my already written plays, I’ve taken a fairly standard,
objective view – such as in The American Revolution, where I covered
“the main events” in a rather populist manner. But this play was always
intended to be played in parks on July 4, so I kept it pretty traditional. My
sense of history now is changing, and as far as what I think of history, of
things that have already happened, I don’t really have a perspective on them
that allows me to speak of them as things separate from my living them in
whatever way I am living them. So when I do go to write a history play – the
eight years of Jefferson’s administrations greatly interest me as does the
Civil War and I will probably inevitably write “about” them – something
very different, I think, from my past history plays is going to happen. Theater
is personal. It’s about the bodies on the stage. It’s about the
playwright’s desire to physicalize his psychology and understand his history
in a public way so that others might also understand theirs and then achieve
their ideals to a greater degree. So no matter what I’m writing about – the
past or the present – that is what I am doing as a playwright. KWG
As much as I’d like to declare I receive all my emotional,
I-want-to-write-a-play-about-this information from timeless inspirations, yes, I
will admit that the political realities of the last 6 years have thrust me into
a new way of thinking. Maybe it’s just a matter of feeling that “art is not
enough” in a time like this, or maybe it’s just that the gross negligence
and malice that seems to be so widely popular as represented in our elected
leaders has me so aghast has helped me discover new crises around which to
orient my dramatic instincts. But whatever the reason, it’s true that I am
feeling of late a new urge to write plays that address, or attempt to resolve,
or investigate the ways out of what seems to be a suicidal social pleasure now
so acceptable. I have friends that have lived for 60 years and say that in a way
it’s better now than it’s ever been, and that very well may be. And maybe
this change of mine – this feeling of needing art to help us find a way out of
our crises, to adopt a moral agenda – is more about my personal life, about
having children, about getting older myself and losing my currency in the
free-for-all sexual arena of chemical abandon – I’m not sure. But what I do
know is that somewhere in the first part of the 21st century it came to me that
it’s not enough for drama to be active within itself; it must also be acting
upon its milieu in very specific, conscious ways. So that’s just about the
laws of drama as I understand them, or now care about them. I want my plays to
be active both inside and outside themselves because one writes plays in order
to investigate the realm of action, what action is, how it plays out in our
lives, and how we are basically it. And in this day and age – no, in every day
and age – action is present in every dimension of our lives – biologically,
psychologically, socially. So when a play has a “social agenda,” I just
think of it as being socially active, which, in the end, is good drama. I think. SEM:
It is entirely probable that many readers of this interview will be poets. Your
own poetry has come to life vividly and resides distant from the page. Based
upon your artistic transformation evidenced by 20 plays, what would you say
about poetry per se. Apart from your own work, what is your interest in poetry
at this stage of your artistic career? KWB:
Before I wrote plays, I wrote poems. That's been primarily what I've done as a
writer other than a few lame attempts at short stories or a couple novels in my
early 20's. I don't like prose at all. It just feels stuck. So my interest in
poetry is just that I think it's the most beautiful and honest way to write. It
lifts me up, it couples perfectly with rhythm, it feels cool to move from one
line to the next... sort of wild and abrupt..., it brings speaking closer to
singing, it facilitates a wider and deeper way of thinking, it loves vocabulary,
it's ultimately circumspect, it's easy to recall and project. In deciding to do
plays in poetry, I knew that I was bringing together what are often considered
the most passive and the most active forms of writing into one creation, and I
liked that. So my "interest" in poetry also comes from what I like
about its interaction with drama. Early on, just as I was deciding to become a
verse playwright, I felt that the synthesis of poetry and theater was something
that would make it possible for me to find and express truths that no other
"genre" would. To wander in that space - that poetic theatrical space
- is to see and hear and feel and say and know things that you can't find
anywhere else. It's a biote totally unto itself, but it is, I think, our most
basic biote, so what I dredge out of it feels somehow more important than
anything I've been able to get elsewhere. SEM:
What are some of the most stimulating and perhaps important texts that you are
reading now?
KWB:
I am heavily into reading German poetry from the 1960's... I have a great
anthology from Reclam... I'm also into the French surrealist poets right now...
also a great anthology from NRF... and Bill Knott, and books on schizophrenia
(I'm writing a one-man play for a schizophrenic actor), and the Princeton
Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics,
and Emily Dickinson, and, of course, Sheila Murphy! SEM: Ah, Kirk, thank you! You’ve placed me in fine company, indeed. We spoke previously about political issues, but I want to look at your play about Tourette Syndrome. I’d appreciate your talking about this piece, discussing what prompted your creating this work, and whether you have plans to do any related plays. KWB:
I was asked my an actor I knew to write a one-man play for him, so we sat down
and talked about what was unique about him, and it came up that he had Tourette
Syndrome, which got my interest, so I wrote a show for him about his history
with that and the condition in general. And I guess I do have a related play
coming as I'm now writing a play for a different actor who has a life-history of
acute schizophrenia, so I'm researching that now and talking with him about his
experiences. We think the play will be a kind of ritual that investigates what
the schizophrenic spectrum means about the efforts of the self to heal itself. SEM:
One
final question: what would you hope that an astute perceiver of arts and culture
two decades from now would say about the place of your work in the late 20th
and early 21st Centuries? KWB:
Good question. I hope that people will feel that I was able to make poetry play.
copyright © Kirk Wood Bromley & Sheila E. Murphy |