Curious About Playwriting? A Conversation with Lisa D’Amour

Curious About Playwriting? A Conversation with Lisa D’Amour

 
Jake: My guest today is Lisa D’Amour. Lisa is a brilliant playwright, she has taught at some of the finest grad programs in the country, including running the MFA Playwriting program at Brown. She is a Pulitzer finalist for her play Detroit, and she is also one of my mentors. She is the gifted teacher with whom I studied playwriting when I first came to New York City.
And so it is a real honor for me to have Lisa on this podcast and also to have Lisa now teaching for us at Jacob Krueger Studio.
I wanted to ask you first: whether you’re a playwright, a screenwriter or a poet, a novelist, a memoirist, a song writer, everybody talks about this thing called voice, right?
Lisa: Hmm-hmm.
Jake: We all know that the great playwrights and screenwriters that we admire have a specific voice. So how did you find your voice as a writer? And what did that mean to you, as you were coming up?
Lisa: Hmm-mhh, that’s a great question. I sometimes associate voice with things like chemistry and sense of humor, actually. Not that I’m trying to say that in order to find your voice you have to write funny plays, that is not what I mean at all.
But, when you’re with friends and you’re feeling really at ease and someone makes a joke and suddenly you just find yourself laughing and feeling so flexible and open– I think that when we are writing and feeling our own voice, when we’re writing inside what we call our voice, there is something that feels very pleasurable and very free.
And for me, as a very young writer before I went to grad school, I remember trying to write plays that looked a lot like “plays”– that had lights up, lights down, a single set– just kind of trying to fit my words into the structural box.
And I remember that one day I just was like, “You know, I don’t know if this will get produced, I don’t know what this is going to look like, but I’m curious about these two characters that are hanging out in a New Orleans cemetery.”
And New Orleans cemeteries are unlike these other cemeteries; they are these big, above-ground kind of tombs. And I really just let myself be with those two characters, and what I remember is finding lusciousness, finding poetry, and in some ways, finding some humor.
But it was really letting go of what the shape of the play was going to be, and just kind of being with the space and the characters.
Jake: I love the word “curious.” I was always a student of writing and so I was always studying the masters, I was always studying the scripts that I loved, and that caused a kind of intellectual approach for me early in my career where I was trying to control everything.
And at the beginning of my career, I always felt like voice was my weakest thing. Now, I actually feel it is where my strength is. But at the beginning of my career, I always felt like, “I don’t even know what people are talking about when they say ‘voice,’ I’m just, I’m putting the Legos together and trying to make the Death Star.”
And that lesson about curiosity, coming from a place of curiosity rather than control, is what helped me.
Lisa: Yes, I love that, that’s great. Yeah and I think also just like being, letting yourself be and see what feels good to you, see what cracks you up in your own writing, can sometimes be a good sign.
Sometimes I talk about that moment when you’re like, “Oh my god, I just wrote that? Can I write that? Am I allowed to write that?” And that’s usually a good moment.
Jake: Yeah.
Lisa: So, it’s an interesting process, and it is hard to name that process of finding your voice.
Jake: I like what you said about, “Am I allowed to say that?”
Often, when we actually start to crack that shell and actually start to find our voice, what happens is we’re actually just dipping into this subconscious place in our...