Playwright Interview: Agnes Borinsky
Literary Director Lizzie Stern sat down with playwright Agnes Borinsky during a workshop of The Trees at Playwrights Horizons in November 2022, before rehearsals began. This is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Lizzie Stern and Agnes Borinsky, Feb 2023.
Lizzie Stern: How’s your morning, Agnes? How are you feeling about the workshop?
Agnes Borinsky: It feels like a dream of delirium, it’s that kind of rewrite, that space where anything is still possible. And then you land in a room with people. And it feels good. How about you? What's your personhood? Writing-hood, life-hood?
LS: Right now it's good. I’m in a writing process that feels like genuine self-expression. I didn’t write for most of the pandemic, I lost sight of my own ideas and what I think is funny and what existential questions I have, all of which is the start to writing any play. Which is a perfect segue into your beautiful play. Do you remember when and where you were when you started writing The Trees?
AB: Anne Washburn led this workshop at the Flea in 2013 I think. It was in the dark. We would bring in these little tiny lights. We were not supposed to speak to each other outside the room. I was writing a scene between a brother and a sister coming home from a party. And then Anne said, “something changes,” and I just wrote that their feet root into the ground. I finished that scene and I thought about it for the next couple years. And then in 2017 or so, I started writing more of the play.
LS: And it turned into a big cast filled out with a vast and specific population. Do you remember how you met the rest of your characters?
AB: I think characters are all different aspects of yourself, and then you just sort of start to know them. So, at a certain point, they all arrived and moved in. And people talk about being compassionate to characters, but I always feel like I have to be a little cruel.
LS: In what ways are you cruel to your characters? And why?
AB: Because these characters all contain a nugget of some part of myself, I have to beat them up a little bit so that they bruise and they feel like people. I put them in situations where they're not at their best. When they have a little toilet paper hanging out at the back of their pants. You know, emotionally. That's what I'm trying to do. But then I hope that that creates a kind of beauty. I really do think all these people are kind of beautiful spirits, I care about them all.
LS: I want to ask you about a specific character: Saul, the rabbi. What parts of yourself are this rabbi, and in what ways are you cruel to him?
AB: I go to synagogue every Saturday. Saul is the sincere religious part of me that I think is beautiful and, also, sometimes, a little too sincere. In a way that can be blinding, or naive.
LS: Saul enters the play with the belief that what’s happened, with Sheila and David becoming trees, is a kind of divine intervention. And when I think about divine intervention in Torah, it's often destructive. God comes to Moses in Exodus, and sends the plagues onto the Egyptian land and people. Or, before that, there's Noah and the floods. And there is a theme in your play, as there is in Judaism, of a kind of creative destruction, of death and rebirth. So I want to know: how would you locate your story, of what Saul calls an “intervention,” within this continuum of the Torah?
AB: I love that framework a lot. It makes me think of something Danusia [Trevino, the actor playing the character of Grandmother] said the other day, which was: “This grandmother understands that destruction is actually creative.”
LS: Oh my God. Yeah.
AB: Yeah. I was like, Danusia!! Thank you. Have you read Arthur Green’s book “Radical Judaism”?
LS: No, but of course now I will. [Lizzie now notes that she immediately purchased and read “Radical Judaism.”]
AB: Well, Arthur Green proposes that the guiding metaphor for Jewish history has been Exodus and the movement from exile towards freedom. And he argues that we need to start to shift the central metaphor of our theology toward Genesis, toward creation. Judaism is a diasporic religion at this point, and that's beautiful and painful. But it’s like, we've been in exile, honey. We’re not going back. Like, we need a different pattern.
LS: And I’d like to add another element that’s alive in your play as well as in Judaism: the idea of intergenerationality. I think about how, in Deuteronomy, when the Jews are in exile, they know their generation won't get to go back to Israel, but they hold onto the belief that their children will. They locate hope and purpose within the child. [Lizzie now notes she was referring to a drash she once heard by the scholar Carolyn Klaasen at her synagogue.] So I would love to hear you talk about Ezra [the child in the play] and the relationship between the child’s generation and the grandmother’s generation, and how you’d define Ezra’s role dramaturgically.
AB: It's funny because as someone with a lot of sympathy for queer, non-reproductive models of the future, with the Lee Edelman of it all, a part of me doesn't want the whole weight of the play to land on Ezra. So, it’s less about this kid and more about the question of futurity.
LS: Please say more about the question of futurity, Agnes.
AB: Well, we use the word sustainability a lot now. And there is obviously the good version of that word, but there's also a dangerous version of that word. The dangerous version focuses on things lasting, that how long they last becomes the marker of their value. But it's important for things to end. It's important for lives to end, for moments to end. We have to be comfortable living with knowing that what's happening now is not going to be the same tomorrow. So, how do you soak the soil with the water of the future, while staying in the present? [Agnes now notes that this is an idea that comes from something Rabbi Joey Rosenfeld says, quoting either Rabbi Nachman of Breslav or the Ba’al Shem Tov. She has looked for it but can’t find the source at the moment.]
LS: That brings us beautifully to the premise of The Trees: rooting, staying put in the moment right where we are. It’s radical to stay put. To do nothing. It’s one of the most radical things that can happen onstage.
AB: Right. And the idea of staying put is also about bodies changing. I think about transness and my own body changing and all the ways in which that's unexpected and weird. And also dealing with the materiality of a body. I feel that claustrophobia of Sheila and David’s feet rooted into the ground. There's some shade of dysphoria in it. And what is that about? How can we have a more expansive notion of what change is possible, of change that can accommodate and reckon with the discomfort of the way things are? Feeling your body as something foreign to you and then figuring out how to reconstruct a sense of home within yourself?
LS: It’s like tikkun olam, the idea of infinite repair. The question, or seeming contradiction, of being in a process that's infinite while also existing in the present moment, in our planet or home or body, which we are trying to repair. But. Okay. Before you and I end our conversation having discussed only the existential questions, can we please talk about the humor in this play? This play is so funny, Agnes. I’ve never read a play of yours that hasn’t made me laugh, and I’ve also never read a play of yours that has tried to make me laugh. Humor is just so natural and effortless in your work. It is organic and it is essential, as it is for survival. I can think of few things as essential for survival - certainly Jewish survival - as humor.
AB: Oh, yeah. Humor is the same thing I was saying about cruelty, where you have to beat up on the moments that feel the most truthful. That’s my feeling in general. My internal test for all the theater I see is: if I laughed while in this audience, would I ruin the play? I think you have to be allowed to laugh at any moment in a play. That's how you give an audience freedom.
