When I first moved to New York I was trying to be an actor and I hadn’t discovered what that meant, what the options of that could be for me. So then I discovered this club world that was so fascinating to me in the sense that there were rules, but they were completely different, and you didn’t have to ask for permission to be creative, you could just show up and do it.
And then there was a community too that was there, that was present, that was progressive and radical and interested in ideas. And you would think that the nightlife would just be people drinking and partying and having a good time, and it is that as well, but there was also this
real intellectual discourse that was happening amongst all of the fucking and sucking and drinking and, you know, all of the fun.
So because the form of that world was so liberating, so much not a part of a social dictator or social contract, then the form of my theatre could expand as well, the form of the art that I wanted to make could also kind of blow up. Even the work like Hir which is a four-character kitchen-sink dramedy, or black comedy, or whatever you want to call it (I call it absurd realism), is a piece that is addressing homogeneity and heterogeneity, andthe play is trying to be multiple things in a world that is asking it to be one thing.
So because the form of that world was so liberating, so much not a part of a social dictator or social contract, then the form of my theatre could expand as well, the form of the art that I wanted to make could also kind of blow up. Even the work like Hir which is a four-character kitchen-sink dramedy, or black comedy, or whatever you want to call it (I call it absurd realism), is a piece that is addressing homogeneity and heterogeneity, andthe play is trying to be multiple things in a world that is asking it to be one thing.
I started writing this play right after I saw Buried Child, the Steppenwolf production of Buried Child that went to Broadway. And so I had Sam Shepard on the brain when I wrote this play, and I obviously had this company on the brain when I wrote the play. Yeah, it was kind of my, it’s, I don’t want to say it’s my take on Sam Shepard, but it was heavily influenced, I think. So it’s thrilling to me to be at Steppenwolf, it’s totally thrilling, it’s like “Oh my gosh it happened,” you know? I feel like I manifested it.
The catalyst for it was certainly about growing up in Stockton, California, and in a place that I couldn’t wait to get out of, couldn’t wait to escape. I left, all my friends left, we’re all doing amazing things. Everyone is really, really interesting and doing incredible stuff in the world, but Stockton isn’t. Stockton is statistically one of the worst places to live in America and always has been in my lifetime, so that was the catalyst for the play, what responsibility do we have to something that has been abusive to us.
The plot of the play is, it’s a fairly simple plot, prodigal son comes home from the war and everything that he knew of home to be is now different. His sister is no longer his sister but his transgender / genderqueer sibling. And so everything is different and the house is a total disaster. The father made everything be orderly and now nothing is orderly. They’ve decided to basically deconstruct their home. And then this transgender character, Max, is kind of stuck in the middle a little bit. In a lot of ways it’s my way of saying, what if America (we always think of the prodigal son as the metaphor for America), what if the metaphor for America was the transgender kid instead?What does that do to our understanding of the United States?