Tuesday, December 14
The Room and a Richard is the most personal play I’ve written to date. It’s also one of the most complex, and looking back on the process of writing it, the inspiration, and it’s various incarnations, I can’t help but brim with excitement over what’s to come in January with this amazing cast!
Richard is loosely based on a situation that happened to me last spring. I used to work at a restaurant in Chelsea. I stopped working there at the beginning of grad school and came back to pick up my tax forms in March when I ran into the sister of one of my former customers. He was a nice man (when I knew him) but seemed lonely and flirted with me beyond what was comfortable. I never saw him outside of work and slightly forgot about who he was when I left. When I came back to the restaurant in the spring and ran into his sister, she took me aside and told me he passed away. She found him moments after he died, on the night they had planned to watch Desperate Housewives. Apparently, he had blown up his infatuation with me to her as a relationship. When I told her we had never even seen each other outside of work, she cried and told me that the lesson of this whole situation – for her – was that you never know anyone; not even your family.
It was particularly sad for me because I couldn’t really remember the man. And it made me sadder to think that you could be that close to someone in New York and be completely invisible; that we all – ultimately – never really see anyone; just what we want them to be.
So from this spiraled a story and here we are.
For me the play is ultimately about two people, tied together through the death of a third party, that attempt to reconcile their fears of being forgotten – through each other. Alex comes into the apartment on a mission: to figure out who Richard actually was; to “reconstruct” Richard through the apartment and through Cynthia. Being a good soul, he feels completely guilty for being left an inheritance from someone he didn’t even consider to be there, when he actually was – there. Also, if he can’t remember Richard, then he (being a waiter/bartender, being a New Yorker) will, too, be forgotten just as easily. If he can’t remember someone else, how will anyone remember him? Cynthia, on the other hand, is on a mission to connect with Alex. She never knew her brother – not really. I imagine him to be the last of her family. Now that Richard is dead, and she aging, Cynthia feels guilty, utterly alone, and forgettable. Through “deconstructing” Alex – by clinging onto all the
things that make him real to her (his similarities to past lovers, his connection to her brother (even if that connection were fabricated or misinterpreted), their shared/mutual loneliness), she struggles to find an anchor in her grief.
Structurally, the play moves through three phases of “connection/relationships” that we find in our daily lives; the play asks if we actually do connect in these relationships. The first phase (the opening) is a normal conversation about the will and the apartment in which Cynthia and Alex never really talk to each other; really. The second phase is the beginning of a relationship between the two; they bond in this section over their mutual fear of being forgotten (a reason many people actually do connect), but are still pursuing their “needs” – and spiral into private anecdotes of loneliness. In the end of the end of the play, Alex and Cynthia enter a third phase of connection – sexual/physical connection. While they seem to connect, and in some ways do actually connect here, the “sex” is replaced by a series of relived moments in Time – moments that their connection reminds them of. In this last phase, we see that Cynthia and Alex connect only through an exchange of memory; that in embracing (in whatever way the creative team decides) they are really embracing all the people that have come before them – that in connecting to one another they are actually connecting with the lost time within them. In this way, they both fail and succeed in achieving their goals: Cynthia does connect to Alex and find temporary solace, but doesn’t connect because she sees her brother and her past loves in Alex; Alex does remember Richard but doesn’t remember Richard because it is Cynthia who acts as Richard – for him.
I developed this piece under the guidance of Anne Bogart at Columbia last spring, working with the wonderful artists Ashley Kelly-Tata, Kate Flanagan, Dave Klasco, and Caroline Prugh. Two months later, Mo Zhou approached me with the opportunity of bringing the piece to the Williamstown Theatre Festival. At Williamstown, Mo and I worked with Ian Harkins and Caroline Keene and came to an even greater connection/understanding of the material – a piece so personal (even to me) that watching it performed over and over seems to be the only way I can find it’s center. It was at Williamstown that it’s meaning and it’s importance – it’s reason for further production – became clearer.
Lila and I had been brainstorming the idea of connecting emerging and established playwrights for some time. When Lucy, Wendy and Bronwen came on board with their wonderful work, it seemed to us both that Richard was the perfect play to close the night – to bring all the themes of the evening – connection, misconnection, love, loss and memory – to a climax. To let the audience leave with a full circle; cracked open.
My hope is that after experiencing Richard and all the plays of CONNECT FIVE people will look twice at the people next to them. That we’ll remember that within us all – each of us – is a universe of memory and people, interwoven and layered in Time. That life is a journey toward unraveling that web. And that the journey, no matter how lonely or misshapen or confusing it can be, is made beautiful by the times we actually can look in another’s eyes and see not ourselves; but another.