Adam Greenfield and Sarah Treem

Adam Greenfield: So we’re here with Sarah Treem and a tape recorder. Hi, Sarah Treem, how are you?

Sarah Treem: I’m well. Thank you. Thank you for asking.

You’re quite welcome. So where are you from, in the world?

Well, that’s a complicated question because we moved a lot when I was a kid. I spent a long time in Avon, Connecticut— from the time I was, like, seven to the time I was fourteen. And then we moved to North Carolina, where I spent the last three years of high school. After that I went to Yale, where I stayed at for eight years. So that’s actually the longest time I’ve been anywhere, is New Haven. I consider myself sort of from Connecticut…

Is that why you chose to go to Yale? Was it a homecoming?

I definitely wanted to get out of the South. Yeah. I had a hard time adapting to Durham, North Carolina. But I think I wanted to go to Yale because I heard the theater program is really great. What’s amazing is that they gave about $1000 to any student who wanted to put up a play. And there’re spaces all over campus. And so people can just say, “I’ve written this play,” “I’m directing this play,” or whatever, “Come audition for it.” They cast it. They get a tech team together. They get a space. They put it up. And they have money afterward to throw a party.

So it’s just like the real world.

Yeah it’s just like the real world. Money grows on trees.

What did you take from your undergrad experience at Yale that made you want to go back for your grad experience? Was there a particular approach to theater, or to writing, that made you want to go back?

No…Well, because the thing is, I didn’t actually takemany theater classes when I was an undergrad. But I had tremendous freedom-- nobody telling me not to do it, or telling me that it was going to be difficult, or telling me that people weren’t going to give me $1000 to put up my play when I got into the real world. So I was writing plays, and I got to produce them, and people came to see them, and that was very gratifying. When I was about to graduate, I wanted to go back to the Yale Drama school, but I didn’t honestly think I would get in. So I just printed out the play that I had most recently written, and I put it under my coat — it was raining — and there was a 5 o’clock deadline to turn in your play and your letter of intent to the School of Drama. I ran over to the Drama School registrar’s office (it was three blocks away), dropped it on the registrar’s desk, and I asked, “Is this okay??” I felt like there was no way in hell I was going to get in.

What else would you have done at that point, if you weren’t going to Yale for Playwriting?

I think my vague plan was to come to New York with everyone else and get some job in Editorial, you know, publishing or something like that. Which I now know would have been awful. And it might have totally disillusioned me with New York.

Did you write your first play as an undergrad?

No, I wrote my first play when I was twelve years old. It was called Who Am I Going to Sit With at Lunch? and I wrote it in my Social Studies class in middle school because the lunch room cafeteria in my middle school was really draconian. There was a real social hierarchy wherein you had to sit with the right people at lunch. And so my entire mornings were consumed with, how the fuck was I gonna get to sit at the right table?? I was overwhelmed by the anxiety of it all! But I don’t know why I decided to write a play. I had been writing poetry and short stories and stuff, and I guess for some reason I decided that this would be better as a play. The whole thing was in rhyming couplets. There were thirteen characters. It had this perfect Aristotelian format where the first act was the build towards lunch, and the second act was lunch itself, and the third act was back in the hallway after lunch, talking about what happened at lunch. I gave it to my English teacher, who sent it to a Young Writers contest, and it won.

I love it. I love Who Am I Going to Sit With at Lunch?

It was a great play. I don’t think I’ll ever write a play like that again.

Do you think that you were trying to maybe-sort-of create change in the way that the school’s social hierarchy worked? Or was it that you needed an outlet to rail about the injustice of it?

Well, it’s interesting because that play was a little bit like my thesis play at grad school Mirror, Mirror. That play is based on “Snow White,” but it’s set in a southern high school. And Snow White is a boy in drag, and that’s why his skin is white as snow. And his lips are red as the rose because he’s wearing makeup. And something happens to all the mirrors in the town…they all go demented. Or at least everyone thinks they’ve all gone demented. So the characters in the play will look at a mirror and see back a terrible witch, or a monster. But it’s actually their own worst fear being projected back at them.

Did you have fun writing a fairytale?

Yeah! Yeah. It was a real lesson. I sometimes find that the best plays I ever write are the ones that I’m not theoretically writing for anybody. Or for production. When you allow yourself to just, kind of, write badly, or write ridiculously, then suddenly it becomes something really interesting.

Kind of like Who Am I Going to Sit With at Lunch?

Kind of like Who Am I Going to Sit With at Lunch? Exactly.

It allows you to write freely in the world of fantasy.

Right. So that’s always really fun.

And when, or where, did you begin working on A Feminine Ending? Was that also a play that you began working on in graduate school?

No no, actually I began working on A Feminine Ending the year after graduate school. And that play followed a weird trajectory as it came into being. I can’t actually remember the order of events; but I think I wanted to write a play about a female composer for a while because composition is as close as you can get to talking about writing without actually ever talking about writing. And the summer after I graduated, I saw that many of the boys I went to school with were all doing very well. And I wasn’t doing as well. They all got agents really quickly, and they were winning prizes, and their rises to theater prominence or whatever were just amazing. And it wasn’t happening for the girls. So that was curious to me. And then I had this professor — I had stayed on for a post-graduate fellowship to study with this one professor — who had said “come to me with some ideas for new works.” So I came to him with a bunch of ideas, and for some reason one idea included George Sand and Chopin and their relationship, and then also Marie d'Agoult (who was George Sand’s friend) and Franz Liszt. And this professor was like, “I really think this is the play you should write.” So I spent the summer doing research on that play and learning more and more about composition. Chopin was someone who was known to write with quote-unquote “feminine endings” in his compositions. But at the end of the summer I decided that I wasn’t going to write that play -- it was too complicated, and it was about French people in another century, and I was like, “I cannot write this play, I don’t understand these people.” But it did give me tremendous context with which to go back and write A Feminine Ending. It all kind of came together at the wedding of an old friend, where I got back in touch with a former [whispers something inaudible] from when I was very young.

She whispered the word “fling.”

“Fling.” It’s a secret. My boyfriend is worried that people are going to think that I cheated on him after they see this play — which I didn’t do! I just got in touch with this person. But after I got back in touch with him, I started to think about what it would have been like to have never left the town I grew up in… And then, so, that experience, plus the female composer, plus the research about Chopin all kind of came together.

So you have these three triggers -- you have this former fling and the town you grew up in; and also your own personal experience as an early career female playwright coming out of school; and then also this subject of music and composers. When you first started piecing together the play, where did you start?

I started at the beginning. The play wrote itself totally chronologically. Which doesn’t always happen, but for some reason happened with this play. I was working under a deadline so I had to write it very quickly. And there was not much space to really fuck around so I thought it was going to be this play about a girl who is dating this guy who’s about to be very successful, and then goes home and meets up with somebody

who she loved when she was very young. And then I realized it couldn’t just be about that so I thought, “Whoa, we need a Number Two story, the B story.” And then I thought, “Oh, her parents, clearly her parents. What’s going on with them?” And so I wrote a cursory outline, you know: “She starts off in New York.” “She goes home.” “She sees her mom.” “She meets this boy.” “She sees her mom again.” “She meets the boy again.” “She sees her dad.” “She leaves.” And then I just wrote it from there.

Were there any surprises for you along the way?

Yeah, well, Billy. I had it in my head that Billy was who Amanda would end up with. It was going to be this romantic comedy, and Amanda was going to end up with him. And I had been emailing with this boy that I knew when I was young, and it was exciting. But at some point his emails started to get really boring. Just totally uninteresting. I kept trying to find the humor that I had remembered from him. Because I remember him as kind of like Billy, as this jokey guy, and I realized that it was either masked over email, or he just didn’t have it any more at all. So anyway, my expectations were just totally thwarted. And so then I went to write, and at that point I was about halfway through the play, and I went to write the second Billy scene, and the way that Billy kind of blows Amanda off in the scene was a total surprise. I didn’t expect it to happen.

Well that’s interesting because if she were to wind up with Billy in the end, then it might seem like he’s rescued her.

Oh yeah, absolutely, no it’s a totally different play.

And wouldn’t that be a masculine ending, in a way?

Absolutely.

So it surprised you as you were writing, that what was happening in your actual life was informing what you were doing with the play. And did you already have the title, or did you discover the title once you got to the end?

I didn’t discover the title until a week or so later. I had originally thought it was going to be called Da Capo, meaning “to begin again at the beginning.” Which is the final movement in A Feminine Ending. Amanda goes back home, she’s beginning again at the beginning. She talks about a feminine ending, but I didn’t realize it was going to be the central metaphor until I was looking at it again after I had finished it, and I thought, “Oh! That’s what’s actually important here.” I was writing it under such a time constraint that I remember thinking, “I just need to get this done.” And so the play was coming out with a very brutal honesty that I thought was going to have to be severely finessed when I went back over it. I think the last line, “I’m afraid it’s a feminine ending. I’m afraid.” Was just going to be a place holder. I thought, “She’s going to have something else to say.”

I love it because so often you feel like a play ends a little bit after where the story ends. But every time I read this, or when I see it, it seems like this ends exactly when the story’s over.

Yeah. No, at first I thought maybe the ending was coming too quickly. But then I thought, “No, I think that’s it.” And it’s interesting because the first person I showed it to, he hated it. He said, “It’s terrible. It’s juvenile, it’s sophomoric, it’s awful. I can’t let you show this to anybody else.” It was a horrifying experience at the time, but it was really good in retrospect. I’d been at Yale for eight years, and it was clear I needed to leave, but I wasn’t in any hurry to leave because I was so comfortable there. And finally I had this terrible experience that just kicked me out, you know? I thought, “I can’t stay here anymore.” And I didn’t show the play to anyone else for a while. But then I showed it to my mother. And she has always been pretty critical of my work — so I showed her A FeminineEnding and I thought she was gonna hate it. But she didn’t. She said, “I think this is the play that you’re gonna get somewhere on.” It was so generous of her to say, and it was exactly what I needed.

This is the kind of question that I think writers generally hate to answer, but I’m gonna ask it anyway. And I’m sorry. How did the character Kimberly resonate with your mother?

Is Kim my mother?

Is Kim your mother?

No. There’s plenty of stuff from my relationship with my mother that made its way into the play. There’s a bunch of direct quotes that made their way into the play. But my mother is not a stay-at-home mom. She’s actually an incredibly busy working woman. So this idea of a girl who has a relationship with her mother — and she’s in the city while her mother is stuck in New Hampshire: That’s not my life. That might have been a fantasy of mine. But that’s not my life.

Do the generational differences between Amanda and Kim in the play ring true in your life?

Yeah.

Because clearly there’s two very different perspectives on feminism. I think at one point in your bulletin article [the Playwrights Horizons subscriber bulletin] you wrote that you’re interested in what it means to be the daughter of a feminist from a former generation.

Well, that’s a question that we’re gonna have to keep asking ourselves. I don’t know that my mother would necessarily define herself as a feminist, though I think she probably would. She grew up in a time of social change. And growing up, my brother and I heard a lot about the 60’s and the 70’s and how amazing it was, and we had the sense that we had sort of missed the party. There was this idea that the generation before us had changed everything, and that our generation was going to get to reap the benefits. And I didn’t realize until I got out of school, really, that that just wasn’t true. I think that’s something our generation hasn’t necessarily talked about. You know? I don’t know why. I find it really interesting, for example, that our generation doesn’t march. We don’t do that kind of social protesting. And we’ve gotten a lot of flack from our parents’ generation for being uninterested, and just, sort of bored, or self absorbed. And I don’t think we are. We looked at that generation and we think, “You know what? That didn’t work as well as you wanted it to.” Or, “It’s not gonna work for us.” And it’s very natural for one generation to look at their parents and say, “I’m not going to do what you did, I’ll do something else. Like what’s happening on the internet, for example, is a good indication of how our generation is going to organize itself. So part of this play was my attempt to say, “Okay, this is a new generation, and we still have our problems. And we have their problems actually. We’ve inherited them. But what are we gonna do with them?”

There’s also something that strikes me about the relationship between Amanda and Kim, that mother is looking at her daughter and saying, “You’re racing against time. You only have X number of years, and once you hit a certain age your life is just gonna be what it is.” Which is a terrible thing to hear.

That’s something that I felt in my life a couple years ago. I’m not sure I still feel it now. When I got out of school and was writing this play I did have this sense that I had to get it figured out early. And this idea of having a couple years before children was really weighing on me. Because I was of a certain age …well [giggles] “of a certain age.” I was twenty-five. But I thought that I was gonna have kids in five years or so, because that’s what my mom did. But I have a fear that when I do have a child it’s going to be difficult for me to continue outputting as much creativity. It’s just the sense I have about myself. I used to feel like I had to get everything figured out quickly, because if I didn’t then I wouldn’t have any time left. But I feel different now, having been out of school for a couple of years, and having figured out a million and a half different ways that one can choose to live a life. And, actually, for this reason, it has been wonderful to work with Blair Brown, who hasn’t married but has had a kid, and kept working. Kid grows up, she’s still working. There’s a totally new chapter of her life now.

…which is the life that the character Kim wanted to live, but didn’t. Kim has been desperate to go out and live her own life again, whereas David — he seems perfectly happy, perfectly resigned that this is what his life is now. He’s very happy researching his esoteric subjects. He’s settled into a happy routine. So we see gender differences in the way they live their lives… What about in their work? Do men and women create work differently? Do you feel that Amanda’s way of creating, her way of composing, is different from her male counterparts?

Judging from the way I write, and the way that my male friends that are playwrights write — my friend Roberto for example, always writes with an outline. And he was telling me that, when he writes, if he doesn’t know where the play is going, then he has to stop writing and make an outline. And he can only continue writing from there. And I’ve heard that from a couple different guys. They outline and they outline and they outline. For example, Itamar Moses, you know, Itamar’s a structuralist to the nth degree. I mean, his structure is just exquisite. And Jordan [Harrison], I mean I think Jordan is sort of less definable, but his structure is incredibly tight and radical in its own way. I have a really hard time writing with an outline. I outline the play, and then I feel no impetus to write it. It’s actually destructive for me to use an outline, and I think maybe that has something to do with the difference between female brains and male— it definitely fits into the Virginia Woolf model that Billy talks about in the play. Also, I always start small — I start with, like, two people, and then I’ll branch out from there, and the play gets much bigger. But I never can start large; it has to move out that way. …But, I don’t know enough about how other women work to know if the way I write is particular to me or if it stems from a difference in the way men and women create.

And yet, didn’t you started with a 7-part musical structure for this play—?

That came later. I looked at what I had written, and I thought, “Oh, I know how to make this into a structure now.”

The play is really marked by its fluidity, I think. Time doesn’t pass in a consistent way. In some moments there’s a great deal of verisimilitude in the way time moves, but then in other moments time passes and suddenly it’s three days later or four months later, you know, as if time contracts. And in seeing the way that the play is staged, which I think is lovely, space is very fluid as well. The use of space is very fluid. Is that something that you find generally true in your plays? That time and space are so malleable?

I find that in much of my writing space is very malleable. I wrote a play called Against the Wall in my freshman year of graduate school, half of which takes place in Berlin and half of which takes place in Northern California in 1961. The stage space is shared, and the Berlin wall goes up over the course of the play, but in California it’s a garden wall. In Empty Sky, half of the scenes take place in dreams and half of them take place in waking life, so there’s a sense of reality being distorted. And Mirror, Mirror, the Snow White play, takes place in these very regular locales around the school, but, there’s a lot of magic going on — I mean, it’s open to interpretation whether it’s magic or just teenage angst — but there’s a lot of unreal elements in place. I think the only very straight play I’ve written is Human Voices, which doesn’t have any elements of fantasy with time or space. I’m still playing around with it; I don’t think I’ve found a voice, in terms of this yet.

One last question. In the play, Amanda is able to find a job writing jingles kind of quickly — a job which I assume pays her pretty well. So she does find mercenary success. And yet, she’s not allowed into the club that she wants to be in, the canon of great musicians. Is that something that rings true in your life?

Yeah, I mean, I think it rings true for women in general. For example, I write for television. Which pays very well. I’m very grateful for it. And almost across the board, all the development executives I meet are women. But the people who run the companies are almost always men. Or, for example, in restaurants, the sous chef is a lot of times a woman. But it’s very difficult for women to get into the position of being a top chef. So I feel like this idea of Amanda being able to write advertising jingles — it’s like, of course she can write advertising jingles! She’s very good at what she does. But of course, that’s not enough to satisfy her. Because that’s not genius, that’s not the highest calling there is, that’s just functionary. I don’t think that women are barred from doing jobs like that anymore — I mean, that’s not what A Feminine Ending is saying. A Feminine Ending is not saying that there are big X’s on the doors saying, “KEEP OUT GIRLS.”

Right. Well, certain kinds of opportunities are thrown your way, and then that becomes your life.

Absolutely. Like Blair was saying, she did this television show for five years, “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd”. And at that time she had a child, and she thought, “Do I want to go work on television? Not incredibly. You know, I realize that that’s gonna be selling my soul a little bit. But I have a kid. There’s no choice here. I have got to make a living for this kid. And I’m not gonna make it working on stage.” And it was interesting because a lot of the girls that came in to audition for Amanda kept saying, “I get this part. I get this part. I get this part.” So I think there’s a bit of Amanda in all of us at one time or another. Being an artist, in the most classic sense of the word, requires as Jack says “a solitary life,” really a selfabsorption that women, especially, find very uncomfortable – almost “wrong.” And also, as a young woman, it’s much easier to attach yourself to a man (because his success often looks more certain than yours) than it is to step into the abyss on your own and say, “It’s going to be me, or no one.”

To me, the parallel between a great composer writing commercial jingles and a great writer working on a crappy sitcom is…

...Yeah, I think they’re comparable. Or, a playwright writing ad copy, for example, would be like a [whispers something].

She just whispered “Circle of Hell.”

I did.

I know you write for TV. Are you enjoying it?

Well, as my mother would say, it’s not TV, it’s HBO. [She smiles.]