Interview with Phillip Howze, playwright of "abominable"

Welcome to the 37th Annual Bay Area Playwrights Festival! I'm Natasha, one of the interns at this year's festival, and I will be posting a series of interviews with the playwrights in the next few weeks leading up to the festival from our incredibly talented playwrights.

The plays have been chosen, the artistic team is being finalized, and everyone at Playwrights Foundation is working very hard to make this year's festival one of the best yet. Keep checking back with our blog to stay updated on backstage scoops and information on our engaging special events throughout the festival. 

I was fortunate to interview the brilliant Phillip Howze whose play abominable is really worth checking out. 

Phillip Howze

Natasha Brown: Thank you for letting me interview you. Let's kick things off! First question, is your style distinct or does it change depending on the play? 

Phillip Howze: With each play I’m becoming more aware of getting out of the way of the play and letting it be what it wants to be. The play is shapeless for a very long time. It takes a while to figure it out. Every play is different and it takes on the features and qualities that it intends itself to be.

NB: That makes sense. Are there any interesting stories about how this play came into being?

PH: I wrote the first draft of this play a couple of years ago, very quickly. It started as an exercise with a great professor of mine at Yale, Paula Vogel. She challenged us to write a play with a certain prompt and ingredients. Actually I’m not very good with authority so my first thought was “no!”, but eventually the idea became kind of freeing once I went with it. The draft changed dramatically over time. I’m really happy to work on it at the festival in its current state because I think that I’ve gotten to what is actually at the heart of this play.

NB: And we're happy to have you! Whilst reading your play, the hole reminded me of the digging of the hole in Suzan-Lori Park’s The America Play. I was excited to see the imagery again. The tone of this play, however, is different. What are you hoping to accomplish with the hole in your play?

PH: Of course Suzan-Lori is someone I love and admire. I think she describes that hole as a kind of metaphor for the history of America. Recently, in Florida all of these crazy sinkholes were opening up all over the place. My parents live there and I visit them and often think about that geological phenomenon. The hole in this play is likely more literal. But it is ambiguous whether the husband is digging himself into it or out of it. Of course anyone who sees it may project whatever they want onto it. I encourage that.

Suzan-Lori Parks

NB: You play around with the use of sound a lot in the play, whether it is through the blackout transitions or words being distorted in some way. The writing is also very lyrical. What do you want the audience to experience whilst watching your play in terms of the soundscapes?

PH: As a writer, I’m interested in the visual and aural landscape too. There is a lot in this play about listening versus hearing – the idea of something going in one ear and out the other. How does that information change on its route? How does your imagination change it? Everything goes through a filter and that filter is how we are interpreting or making meaning of the things we are engaging in. In part, I think the heightened speech and sound in the play reflects that disruption. 

NB: I agree. This play really highlights the economic strife of the family in very bleak and despairing ways. However, I’ve heard that you actually see the play more like a comedy. Could you tell me more about this?

PH: It’s strange because the story, though dark and eerie, is also incredibly funny. In life, we laugh to get through the hard moments. And I think that this family laughs a lot with each other, despite their circumstance. There might be a tragic framework, yes, but the characters don’t know that. They’re trying to have a good time together. For the spectator looking at it, it might seem abject but that’s only one half of the story. We can choose to laugh with them. In a lot of Shakespeare’s tragedies, there are flits of comedy throughout. A similar combination of light and dark are operating in this play. 

NB: Last question: whose work would you recommend for emerging writers to study?

PH: It’s important to read as much as you can. Read everything you can get your hands on. Never stop reading. Playwrights who have been meaningful to me over the years have been many, but especially the Classical writers. The Greeks. I love a lot of Shakespeare’s plays. But go to witness a lot of theatre too, because it will motivate the work that you’re making and it’s always been an important thing to me to be part of the community in that way. Get involved. Bear witness to things that are happening around you. And read the newspaper. Trying to stay informed about the world is a very important part of being a writer.

NB: Thanks, Phillip! 

The Bay Area Playwrights Festival gives voice to emerging and established playwrights who are pushing boundaries and have the potential to shape the future of American theater and culture. The festival runs from July 18-27. Click here for the calendar and special event details for the whole festival. abominable is showing on July 19th, 4pm and July 26th, 8pm. Get your tickets here!

Inside the Des Voix Mind: Michelle Haner on Léonore Confino and "One Upon Another"

For a translator, taking on the work of a contemporary playwright, especially one as playful and provocative as Léonore Confino, can be a bit like taking a trip down the rabbit-hole.  While hanging out the unknown found there, ideally, that time is spent not just obsessing over the "blades of grass" (the word-to-word stuff), but also discovering a greater landscape, one forged of rhythms, sounds, atmospheres, themes and of course characters. 

Michelle Haner, Translator

In the process of rendering Confino’s world from French to English, questions of translation range from the logistically banal (should I transpose euros, kilos and the names of products and supermarkets?) to the culturally subtle (how to translate that sense of lightness, irony, melancholy or “je ne sais quoi” embedded in a particular turn of phrase?)

In Confino’s portrait of a contemporary French family, three generations “one upon another”, alternately imploding and exploding, the voices of the characters are a particularly rich, vital part of her landscape. Voices come from beyond the grave; voices lose their bodies and resonate through the pre-fabricated house. Seeking to capture their distinct, vital qualities in translation has been both exciting – and particularly challenging.  There is the broken, breathless, sometimes frantic voice of the over-taxed mother; the loving, but ‘oft evasive voice of the scientist –husband; the ironic, bitter, profanity-laced voice of the wheel chair bound grandfather.  Most powerful, poignant and challenging are the voices of the children, smart, savvy, funny, self-aware and heart breaking in their brutality, their nihilism, their despair. Theirs is a language infiltrated with new tech-inspired inventions and pop cultural references, not to mention such French adolescent mainstays as Anglicism’s and “vers-langue” (a popular French slang created by saying words literally backwards).

Léonore Confino, Playwright

It is as much through the specificity of these voices – as through her unique mix of drama and slapstick, tragedy and comedy, real and surreal – that Confino probes the French family of today, offering up a portrait of a society in flux, in tension, in uncertainty and self-reflection. 

Having so enjoyed the opportunity to spend this time exploring Confino’s world, the translator’s humble hope is simply that she has been somewhat successful in rendering up an English-language version, that Confino’s vision may be shared with a wider audience.

-Michelle Haner, Translator of One Upon Another by Léonore Confino.




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Staged Readings of "Les uns sur les autres" or One Upon Another by Léonore Confino will be on Saturday, May 10 @ 2pm and Sunday, May 11 @ 7:30pm at the Tides Theatre, as a part of the Des Voix Festival. 

Des Voix...Biennial 2014: A Festival of New French Plays and Cinema features the American Premiere of Communiqué n˚10, three new French Plays in translation, five french film screenings and a Bal Littéraire, a New Play Night Club.  

Purchase a Full Festival Pass here and gain access to every reading, film, Bal Littéraire and your choice of Communique n˚10 performance during Des Voix!

Check out the Des Voix Festival website for more information, including links to buy tickets, a full festival schedule and directions on how to find where the Left Bank Meets the Left Coast.  

Cross Cultural Collaboration- Bringing Communique n˚10 from Des VoixReading to Full Production! A blog by Rob Melrose

Cutting Ball Theater is proud to present the American Premiere of Communiqué n˚ 10 as a part of Des Voix... Biennial 2014 A Festival of Contemporary French Plays and Cinema.  This is only the second production of this play (the first was in Avignon in the original French) and it is the first production of a Samuel Gallet play in the United States. Communiqué n˚10 was part of the Des Voix... Found in Translation 2012, and was directed and translated by Rob Melrose during the staged reading process. 

We asked Rob Melrose, Cutting Ball Theater Artistic Director, to share his thoughts and relationship with Communiqué n˚10 throughout the past few years. Enjoy!

Rob Melrose

As part of the selection team for the inaugural festival of Des Voix – a week of readings of new French plays in translation – I fell in love with Communiqué n˚ 10’s craft and composition: a powerful combination of short, cut to the bone scenes and long, luxurious Faulknerian monologues that penetrate deeply into the minds and memories of Gallet’s characters.  Only after reading did I learn that the play was inspired by the 2005 riots outside of Paris by disaffected North African youth.  Gallet had managed to create specific characters but has also abstracted the landscape so that the story felt universal and essential as opposed to “ripped from the headlines.”   

Through directing the reading for Des Voix, I realized that the play actually resonates with life in our theater’s neighborhood - the Tenderloin - where we have such an important immigrant population.  At about the same time as the first Des Voix Festival in 2012, Occupy Wall Street started and Romney commented about “the 47%”; it seemed like everyday some piece of news highlighted our country’s growing divide between rich and poor.  At The Cutting Ball Theater, just blocks from Market Street, we feel the difference between longtime Tenderloin residents and the boom of tech companies moving in.  Now feels like a perfect time to present a play that examines, with such humanity and care, the insurmountable gulf between haves and have-nots.  

This play has been the most challenging translation project of my career thus far.  I have translated works by Sartre, Arrabal, Maeterlinck, and Ionesco…none of them a walk in the park, to be sure.  What makes Samuel’s play so challenging is that he not only writes in the hurried French of the streets, but he also writes in a heightened poetic language that is surprising and strange. The characters speak in ways that would sound artfully unnatural to a modern French audience.  This meant that after I took one pass through the play just making sure I had decoded the colloquial expressions so that I had the sense correct, I had to do another pass to make sure I was riding the right line between naturalism and non-naturalism in a way that retained the poetic spirit of the language and still felt like people talking to each other. 

Gallet’s world may feel like a post-apocalyptic inner city to us.  But unlike U.S. cities (with the possible exception of Manhattan) in France, the marginalized people live outside the city in the suburbs (la banlieue) and the wealthy live in the center of the city.  So to translate la banlieue as “suburbs” would give the completely wrong impression.  Another word I am struggled with was friches.  It is a word that means industrial wasteland – abandoned buildings, factories and warehouses.  We don’t have a simple single syllable word for this (even a single word for this – forget the syllables).  I struggled with it because it is a very important word in the play – much of it takes place in les friches.  “Wasteland” by itself has a poetic resonance with us in English and that is what I am favored now, hoping that in our full production, the industrial-ness of the wasteland will be implied.

As gritty as the world of the play is, the language in it is rich and resonant – it is as if the characters are speaking from soul to soul, revealing their innermost thoughts and needs.  In this way Gallet is an heir to Beckett, to Pinter, to Bernard-Marie Koltès, and to Sarah Kane.  His language is simple and at the same time profound.  It is an extraordinary play and it has been a great privilege to work on it.

As our Cutting Ball audience knows well, Associate Artistic Director Paige Rogers and I have been in love with European theater for years, and recently have developed a particularly strong love for the theater of Poland, which really came into its own with the work of Jerzy Grotowski after the Second World War decimated Poland.  Out of the ashes, Grotowski created what he called a “poor theater.”  Opera composer Richard Wagner dreamed of a rich theater experience where all the arts (dance, music, painting, theater) could come together in what he called a “gesamtkunstwerk” (literally a “total art work”).  Grotowski, on the other hand, pondered a theater made of little more than the actors and the audience – a theater stripped-down to its essence, that focuses on the actor’s work.  It is a physical, muscular theater.  Paige and I have now been to a number of festivals there and Grotowski’s spirit still infuses everything we see.  Some props are mimed, some aren’t, sometimes there’s a set, sometimes just a skeletal structure – but the work of the actor is at the center.  In a world where digital animation can represent anything the mind can imagine in film, seeing theater in Poland that takes full advantage of our art form’s strengths is truly refreshing. 

It is this focus on the actor’s flesh and blood presence and physical work that I wanted to bring out in our production.  On this production, I feel fortunate to be working with with Emma Jaster, who choreographed the physical moments and trained the actors in some of her many physical vocabularies.  (Emma and I had the same commedia dell’arte teacher – it is indeed a small world.)  This physical work adds a layer that becomes as important as the text itself.

The actor / audience relationship is extremely important in Grotowski’s theater and many of his productions redesigned the space anew for each play giving the audience a new vantage point on the actor.  For Communiqué n˚ 10, I thought it would be powerful to have the audience on either side of the action on the same level with the actors.  Today, when so much of our communication occurs online, having a configuration that emphasizes the physical presence of the actors and our fellow audience members highlights what is special in a theater experience.

At the same time as I am directing Communiqué n˚ 10, I am in the process of translating another contemporary French play for the second incarnation of Des Voix, Riad Ghami’s When and Where We Died (Où et Quand Nous Sommes Morts).  While Gallet’s play takes us deep inside the French banlieues to follow an Arab immigrant as he seeks revenge for his slain brother, Ghami’s play takes us into an upper-class apartment of a wealthy couple being invaded by a young Arab man.

In many ways Where and When We Died and Communiqué n˚ 10 try to get at the same problem through completely opposite perspectives.  From Ghami’s biting satire to Gallet’s poignant tragedy, from the extremely privileged world of When and Where We Died, to the gritty wastelands of Communiqué n˚ 10, these plays have a lot to say to one another and cover a great deal of ground.  It is this kind of thematic connection that makes a festival like Des Voix so rich and I eagerly anticipate hearing about the experiences of the audience members who chose to experience the work of both writers!

-Rob Melrose, Artistic Director of Cutting Ball Theater and Des Voix Translator and Director