It’s a romantic comedy about money and the effect it has on relationships. We’re at this point in American history where everyone is looking at what they have and what they don’t have, so I was interested in looking at this one person whose life revolves around money. Eve, the mother character, is a financial guru and she has this job where she thinks and talks about money all the time. I wanted to know how that would affect her personal life.
When I was doing research for this, I was really
interested in Suze Orman, who’s one of the more popular financial talking
heads. One of her key points is how women deal with money—how often women give
money away instead of saving, giving it to friends or boyfriends. In many ways
I think it’s because women have an anxiety about money; they don’t want to take
responsibility for it.
Another thing Suze Orman talks about is how the first
lessons you learn about money are through your parents’ relationship to their
own finances. The play is loosely based on the Henry James novel Washington
Square, and James’ female characters often inherit their money, and then
they don’t know what to do with all the power that they have. And I feel that
that’s true with Claudine, the daughter character. Her wealth has always been
this burden; it separates her from other people. But because the wealth is her
mother’s, the money defines her but is not part of her.
Claudine’s relationship to her wealth couldn’t be more
different from her mother’s. Because obviously her mother has gained power from
money whereas Claudine’s very passive and can’t figure out what she wants to do
with her life—until she finds Henry, and then he’s what she wants to do with
her life. It’s the only time she’s ever gone against her mother’s wishes, and
it’s the first real choice Claudine has ever made.
Q: Did the play come
about because of the financial crisis, or was that just a coincidence?
I started it before the mortgage crisis
[in 2008], but I did a huge amount of the work after the crash. Often you write
a play because you want to explore something you know nothing about. I’m a
pretty typical person with my own finances; I’m lackadaisical about them, and I
don’t know as much as I should. So money was something I was interested in
exploring as a topic. And then the crash happened and suddenly everybody was
obsessed with their 401(k)s and whether or not their lifestyles were
sustainable.
Q: How did you get
started as a playwright?
I
was actually a professional stage manager for a long time, right out of
college. I’d worked on a lot of new plays with the playwright in the room—plays
by Paula Vogel, Naomi Wallace, David Rabe—but writing plays seemed beyond my
reach. So I was working on this Peter Sellars opera in Europe, when out of nowhere, in one week, I got my first idea for a play and my grandfather died, leaving me a little bit of money, just enough to change my life. Suddenly, I could afford grad school. So I made this really funky switch, where I decided, “Okay, I’m going to go to grad school for playwriting.” I wrote the play that I had had the idea for, applied to grad school with that one play, and got into Iowa. And became a playwright!
Q: What do you like in a
play?
I’m
drawn to any kind of theater that makes me lean forward and wonder what’s going
to happen next. And in terms of what I personally like writing, I like writing
for certain actors, and I really love writing thorny and complicated
characters. I usually start with a character and move outward from there. So
that character-driven work really excites me.
Partially because I was a stage manager,
I have fairly broad taste. I grew up watching a lot of avant-garde theater, so
I’m intrigued by that, but I love story, and I love narrative. So plays that
can do both of those things—mix a sense of theatricality and a sense of story
and narrative—make me really happy.
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