1. AN ARTIST’S LIFE is a recent play you’ve submitted to The Baltimore Playwrights Festival. What is it about?
“An Artist’s Life” portrays a pivotal point in the career of Suzanne, a painter from Scranton who has settled in New York. At the opening Suzanne still believes that she can make a living by painting, with a little help from her lovers, Trevor and Marc. Over seven months Suzanne lets her career slide while she tries to choose between them. Trevor and Marc move ahead, and Suzanne ends up dependent on them. I’m grateful to the readers who reviewed “An Artist’s Life” for BPF. Their comments are perceptive and helpful. However, I was surprised that the readers said that the characters were convincing and interesting, but not likeable. I guess that’s praise; it’s easy to make characters likeable but much harder to make them interesting.
2. Did you have a plan in place before you began writing—number of scenes, subplots, how the play will end, etc.? Is this your usual approach to writing? What playwrights have influenced you and can we see any of this influence in AN ARTIST’S LIFE?
I took the plan for “An Artist’s Life” from Puccini’s La Bohème. The opera follows young artists through three seasons. It ends, poignantly, with Mimi’s death in the season of high hopes and new beginnings. I was influenced more deeply by Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Chekhov portrays the rise and collapse, over two years, of each sister’s hopes of getting out of the dreary provincial town where their father’s death left them. I suspect the readers would have found my characters more likeable if “An Artist’s Life” had ended on a clearly tragic note: Mimi dies of an untreated illness, Irina, the youngest of Chekhov’s sisters loses her lover in an absurd duel. As I wrote, however, I realized that I wanted to make Suzanne’s tragedy subtler. Suzanne ends up as Marc’s executive and Trevor’s building manager. Is Suzanne a tragic heroine? Not by traditional standards: Marc may not make it big, but Trevor won’t let her starve, and she’s going to be a mother. Nevertheless people face choices like Suzanne’s every day, and those choices are no less profound for being commonplace.
3. Tell us about yourself.
I grew up in Baltimore; I’ve worked as a designer and tech director here and in New York. These days I teach dramatic literature at Towson University and the University of Maryland.
4. What are you working on now? What is coming up next for you?
Last year I produced a reading of one of my plays, and I’m looking forward to staging another.