Tim Sanford and Nicky Silver

Tim: It’s been twelve years since we did one of these interviews and a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. I thought I’d start by giving you an opportunity to talk about—

Nicky: The rise and fall of Nicky Silver.

However you want to characterize it. How do you look at your own career growth over the years?

When you start your career you always think, “If I can just get them to listen to me, they will like me.” And, quite amazingly, I got them to listen to me, and they liked me. And then it seems to me to be the case with almost every writer of any import to me that you go through periods where you are in fashion and out of fashion. And I feel at the moment, the aesthetic and the culture have changed, and I’m sort of
out of fashion. We tend to like safer things than we did when I sort of, quote, burst onto the scene. Interestingly, I don’t think my relationship toward my work has changed at all. I’m just as ornery as I ever was in terms of what I want out of it; it hasn’t humbled me in terms of my opinions. I like plays that have not proven to be critically successful--many of them I like a good deal more than plays that have proved to be critically successful. The Food Chain was critically successful
and commercially successful, and I certainly liked Beautiful Child more than I liked The Food Chain. So, you have to find some inner barometer of what is good and what is bad. 

Do you spend any energy analyzing what that fashionability factor might be?

No, I can’t. I don’t.

Can you analyze it about other writers?

A little bit. But I was telling an actor recently about how it was in New York, I think maybe in’76? I didn’t live here yet, but my father brought me to see A Chorus Line and Pacific Overtures in one weekend. They were both brand new. And I thought Chorus Line was pretty good, and I thought Pacific Overtures was a masterpiece! So I was never that in touch with the zeitgeist. And I remember a Sunday New York Times article about Pacific Overtures in essence said, Pacific Overtures tries to soar, it doesn’t always succeed and sometimes it falls with thud, but it always tries to soar, and it’s thrilling to watch that attempt. I don’t think we live in a time when that is the mindset of the press at all. I think they’re very happy if you can crawl successfully. And that has never been of interest to me. At all. So I can’t really worry about it. And hopefully you get to a point where you think, “I guess this is what I do with my life, and it will go in and out of style, and I just keep doing it.” And I’ve also been very lucky in that I actually do have a small following that has been seeingmy plays formany years. And so, somebody must like ‘em! And I’ve never gotten a dismissive review from the New York Times. To be perfectly honest, Ben Brantley
reviewed Pterodactyls, and he liked it. And then next thing he reviewed was Raised in Captivity, and he reviewed it with such reverence, and was quoted later as saying it was like his favorite play of the decade or something. And it took on this stature in his mind — like it was sort of this pinnacle of art that I was never going to be able
to live up to again, and it was just a play like all the other plays. That’s the thing. They’re all just plays like all the other plays. 

You know, while The Food Chain was your next play, you’ve talked about how that was a departure for you. Fit to be Tied was your next play in the vein of Raised in Captivity. And it was the first play I selected as Artistic Director so I had a lot at stake in it too, and I thought it deserved… 

A kinder response?

I thought it deserved enthusiasm. I thought there was clear growth in it, but maybe you’re right, maybe they were looking for disappointment. 

I think that’s true.

I think the reason I brought up whether fashionability might affect your work is because I was re-reading our interview about Fit To Be Tied, in which you talked about making the conscious decision before you wrote Pterodactyls to approach that play differently.

I did, but it wasn’t a stylistic choice. It was really the subject. People had written about AIDS before, but when I wrote Pterodactyls, Angels in America hadn’t come here yet, and even Angels in America is a very weighty work, and Pterodactyls is basically a comedy. And no one had addressed it in comedy, and that was sort of calculated on my part. It reflected my feelings of anger as opposed to sadness of the
heart. But in terms of my fashionability stylistically, or lack thereof, that’s something about which I can do nothing. We seem to be in an era where “realism” is of more interest than it was in my formative years, when Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato were experimenting within the confines of the commercial arena.

I think that’s true, even if you look at how [The Marriage of ] Bette and Boo was received. It was received respectively, but no one seemed to jump up and down and say, “Oh thank God we get a chance to see this masterpiece again.”

Which I think it is. During my formative years in New York City in the ‘70’s, you had a very experimental downtown scene, you had a very commercial Broadway scene, and then you had the middle ground of the non-profit arena that experimented with different aesthetics but was accessible to the audience. And I guess because we don’t do plays on Broadway anymore, really, unless there are big movie stars, the work in our arena has to be more accessible to the public.


I also don’t think the downtown theater scene is as experimental as it
was either.

Another factor is that I write pretty much exclusively about families. To me it is the most basic human relationship, and it is the one thing that unifies all human beings. I have a sense, however, that it’s seen as a little bit politically lazy to write about families now.

I do think our theater culture is terminally susceptible to Anglophilia. The British tend to prize social content more, maybe because Shakespeare is their model. So they tend to pooh-pooh family plays. And I think that’s why certain circles here tend to as well. I also think your plays are more psychological in a post-Freudian way than what the English value. Psychotherapy is not so big in England. On the other hand, it is in Scandinavia and Germany, where your plays are very popular.

True.

Besides, all of the great American masterpieces are family plays.

Right.

O’Neill, Tennessee Williams.

Absolutely.

Unquestionably.

I’m not really sure why at the moment it’s not something people want to be looking at. It’s almost viewed as self-indulgent and socially irresponsible to be going on about the family when, to me, of course, and to anyone I think with a brain, the political—first of all politics is in all plays, whether it’s addressed overtly or not—but second of all political problems and cultural problems are a result of family problems! They don’t run parallel, they come from family!

I think it’s true that there’s been a certain gravity to your recent work, and also in the kinds of directors you’ve been interested in. Terry Kinney and Wilson [Milam] are cut from a different cloth.

I’ve wanted less slick, more emotional directors lately. First of all, I can take care of the slickness, let them take care of the emotion. So that interests me, I don’t really know why. I think it’s true that I tend to be asking bigger questions in heavier ways. Hopefully there are still some jokes. I was talking to my agent one day about a contemporary of mine, and I said, “He gets richer and richer becoming shallower and shallower and sillier and sillier, and you’re stuck with me who’s getting poorer and poorer becoming grimmer and grimmer and more mysterious.” Like I think this play is relatively mysterious, and the person I was talking about, there’s nothing mysterious and it’s very silly and very light and very fluffy. I wish I could remember his name!

I’m not saying!

I have no bitterness. People would rather laugh than think. That’s always been the truth.

But there are always laughs. And there pretty much has always been weight as well. That’s why I thought David Warren was a good choice for you. There was a real lyricism and poeticism to his work that I thought complimented the broadness and absurdity of yours. And that has never struck me as inorganic or odd at all. In your Fit To Be Tied interview you talked about your training at Experimental Theater
Wing Studio at NYU and how students were encouraged to explore different styles and then find—

—The one they like. But what I found was I liked using bits and pieces of all of them to tell a story. One of the things I very much do like about the play is that it’s constantly shifting terrain under your feet. You think you’re in this kind of play and then Steffi comes out and they have a scene in front of the set and now you’re in a different kind of a play. Then all four people come out and talk to us. But even still
you’re still in sort of a slick modern theatrical world, and then in act two someone has a whole monologue to the audience within the set and suddenly you’re in an Alan Bennett play. There’s a quote from someone—I wish I could remember who said it, it’s like Joe Orton or Robert Altman or somebody I like—that I used cite all the time: “You have to wake an audience up to communicate.” Of course you can’t
be off-putting. You have to take them there. When I started out, subject matter was enough. You could shock an audience with subject matter. You really can’t shock an audience with subject matter anymore. When I wrote Fat Men in Skirts, having a boy rape his mother and eat the other passengers on the plane was very shocking. That
was, what 25 years ago? It’s not so shocking anymore. It’s actually happened and we all know about it. So you can’t really shock them. But what you can do, is you can surprise them in subtle ways by constantly shifting the terrain, and I think it keeps them awake. Otherwise they say, “I know what this is,” and it’s either pleasant or it’s not pleasant, and that’s it. And I think most audiences in New York
are theater-goers and have an understanding of this kind of work whether they know it intellectually or not.

We also talked about the centrality of family in your work in the Fit To Be Tied interview.

I’ve had no new thoughts. It’s been twelve wonderful years.

You’re true to yourself! And that’s true of most writers; we recognize common themes and motifs throughout their work. And stylistically, for all your variations, you have an unmistakably identifiable voice. 

High-pitched and shrill. (laughs)

Not on the page!

Sometimes.

And yet for all the common threads, I feel your work steadily evolves in the way archetypes and roles keep shifting. In Fit to be Tied, the son was detached from his mother; he hadn’t been nurtured by her. It was like the umbilical cord was never attached. And in the play, he takes care of her and the roles are reversed, like the umbilical cord is retied. In Raised in Captivity, the brother and sister start as polar opposites of each other, and in the course of the play they begin to balance each
other out. How do you see this played out in Three Changes?

Well, one of the big differences is that, as I age, I am no longer the child in the universe. There are no mothers in the universe of this play. I am the parent figure. And as I have no children it is largely a play about being childless. But I think that’s just a natural evolution. I don’t think Edward Albee is a better or worse playwright between Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Three Tall Women. He’s an older man, that’s all.

Huh.

He’s a different human being. He has the same artistic point of view, but his place in the world has completely changed. And that’s true for all of us: As we age, our position in the world changes, but what you’re looking for doesn’t necessarily change. I would also say that it is the nature of theatrical resolutions, and certainly all of my plays, that in the end the characters generally get what they needed at the
beginning of the play. And I think that that accounts for the sort of transferences that you’re talking about. Because what they need is usually to be found in the other characters. Their obstacles are usually themselves. It’s usually their own narcissism that prevents them from connecting to other people. In this play, these characters for the most part need a familial connection, and they get it by the end of the play. Except for Nate. What he needs, really, is relief more than anything else. The world is a terrifying place for him, and he gets relief. In Raised in Captivity, two characters create a family by connecting. Even in a really cynical play like The Food Chain, they come to an accommodation where they’re all three of them going to have a sexual
relationship that allows them to be happy. I’m old-fashioned in that regard in that it may look really grim and creepy and disturbing, but actually the characters generally get what they want.

You also mentioned in the other interview that most of your plays start from a very simple conceit. Do you still believe that?

Yes. I do.

So what’s the conceit of Three Changes?

Well, it’s personal. But in general terms, I wanted to explore the idea that artists are destructive and rapacious creatures who ultimately destroy in order to create.

You articulated this idea to me when we first started talking about doing it, and I remember being a little surprised, because I didn’t see Hal as that destructive, oddly enough.

The initial conceit is almost never what the play ends up being about. It really isn’t. For the last several years, I’ve been asked to speak once a year at NYU and Columbia, and talk about writing. This is followed usually by a glut of parents demanding a refund for their children’s tuition. I encourage the students to smoke and not take anything anyone, including me, says with the remotest seriousness. Anyway, I always say that writing is about knowing enough so that your unconscious
is free to function, and not knowing so much that your unconscious isn’t stimulated. The initial conceit is ultimately not what a play ends up being about. When I sat down to write Three Changes, I had a strong idea of where it was headed and who the basic characters were. To me, what the play ended up being about is the profound loneliness of these people. When we talked about the image for the
artwork, I said we should have a sense that something is missing because all these people are missing something. But the play is also about the falseness of what we perceive to be a moral universe, that our idea that we’re rewarded for moral behavior is a myth. Because here you have a character who is immoral at the beginning of the play (I’m talking about Nate), but he’s not really a bad person, I mean we’re all immoral, and you could say that his wife, very shortly after her brother-in-law arrives, behaves with basically the same kind of emotional immorality. I mean I don’t think she sleeps with him, but she’s looking for that connection. Yet one person wins and another doesn’t because there is no moral universe. And Nate’s mistake is to believe that there is an order, a moral order to the world when there isn’t. The
order in the world is based on power.

Guilt is a very powerful force in your plays.

Do you mean real moral guilt?

Characters feeling guilty. But it’s kind of like Kafka, isn’t it? Are they actually guilty of something, or is it just the universe?

It’s the universe. I mean, I’m clearly not particularly religious and if I were religious it wouldn’t be Catholic, and I don’t believe in original sin, but I believe it’s in Raised in Captivity, Hillary says that her sin is that she breathes and takes up space in the universe! You don’t really get more basic than that. Because she doesn’t feel she deserves it. And that’s the thing. The characters feel guilty (except Gordon doesn’t
feel guilty about anything), but it isn’t because of something they’ve done. They feel guilty because they don’t think they deserve to be happy. And what I admire about my characters, for the most part, is that they fight. Years and years ago when I was just starting to write and send my plays out, I would get rejection letters all the
time that told me that there was nobody to like in my plays. Which I didn’t really understand. I didn’t understand their criteria for liking someone. I always liked all the characters in all my plays. They were all scrappers who fight for what they want and that’s what I admired about them.

It has occurred to me that in some ways this play reminds me of that TV documentary, “The American Family.” In some ways, just having the camera enter that family destroyed them. And I think there’s a degree of that with Hal. In some ways, he just enters the home and just sees them. He looks at Laurel, and he sees her.

He sees her loneliness.

And Nate says very early on that he can feel his brother watching him. And he can’t stand the scrutiny. At his lowest point he says to Steffi, “I want to be a better person.” In a way, Hal doesn’t do anything.

He doesn’t have to do anything.

I mean, maybe he does things. He might have called Laurel when Steffi comes over.

I think he does call Laurel, but by that point, by the time he calls Laurel, Nate is so depleted by Hal’s presence that, Hal calls Laurel because he’s impatient. Nate is on his way out, clearly. By that time, he’s walking around in his bathrobe sorting buttons all day long.

Nate really goes downhill after Hal strangles him with the tie. But when you think about it, in Laurel’s monologue, just before that happens, she talks about how she and Nate would hear Hal and Gordon making love and started to make love themselves and that she felt like they were becoming a family. But Nate wants to kick them out. He’s the destructive one in a way.

Nate.

I mean he just can’t function in that universe.

Correct.

Even though there are things about it that are good.

Yes, but if Hal had never come back to the roost, Nate and Laurel would have gone on in perpetuity pretending they were great together. I think. So it is Hal’s arrival that does pull the card out from the bottom of the house ultimately.

It’s actually a lot like an Ibsen play. Ibsen’s plays are all about families trapped within a “life lie,” when an intruder comes in and stirs it up and destroys the illusion. And if Hal hadn’t come in, how long could they have gone on, really, just drinking and having affairs? In perpetuity? I’m not sure.

Well eventually he’d get prostate cancer and then he’d stop. But I look at couples who’ve been married fifty or sixty-five years in my family, and they hang in there and they muddle through. They just don’t look at things too closely. But Nate’s problem is not his morally objectionable behavior, because I don’t really object to his behavior on moral grounds. It’s his inability to accept his morally objectionable behavior that is his undoing. The difference between Hal and Nate is that Nate believes that there’s a moral order to the world. Hal knows there isn’t. So Nate’s doomed. He’s never going to win, because either he behaves in a way that satisfies him sensually and feels so guilty that he finds no happiness, or he stops that and finds no happiness.

Why do you say Hal knows there’s no moral order to the universe? How does that jive with him talking about God all the time?

To me God doesn’t imply a moral order to the universe, Christianity does. I think he believes that God is on his side. God is on the side of the artist in Hal’s mind. (laughs)

Do you mean, like, God is The Force of Creativity or something?

I mean that Hal has a relationship with God. He will protect him and provide for him. He believes that. He also believes, and the play supports this belief, that God isn't concerned with "moral" behavior, at least not in any traditional sense. It may be that Hal is an artist and "There is nothing more important in the world,” as Laurel says at the end. However, the play undercuts that theory by having Gordon respond "blah blah blah." I think it's simply related to Hal really accepting God and understanding that God accepts him, without judgment. Morality implies judgment, an idea that this is better that. Nate says, "I don't judge my characters." And neither does God.

When Hal talks about finding God, he's really using pretty straightforward language of redemption and recovery, addicts and born-agains would probably describe what he's gone through as being transformed by grace. Wouldn't most people interpret this as a moral vision?

Yes, I think most people would. But Hal knows something different. He knows God has no interest in judgment. Hal uses the word "Jesus," and in our culture we would assume that means that Hal is following some tenet of Christianity. He's not. His Jesus loves him without restriction. If one looks at the play and accepts Hal's relationship with God as honest, one could very easily feel that I am saying God is a destructive force — if you feel Nate's demise is a negative thing. I don't. Nate finds release and the other characters find a family. The pain of the play is the labor pains of a new beginning.

So when you say that Nate's problem is that he believes in a moral order to the universe, do you mean that he doesn't believe you can just let go, like Hal? He doesn't believe in the "grace that surpasses understanding." He believes you have to "earn it," yet at the same time is incapable of acting. He's disconnected from the world now, so how is he going to “become a better person,” as he says to Steffi.

Well, Nate comes late to this thinking. He's scared into thinking there's some moral order. Hal's arrival and his erosion suggest to Nate that he is being punished. I don't think he thought about such things too much prior to the action of the play. But I would absolutely agree that as the play progresses he believes he has to earn redemption.

Nate’s a fascinating character tome. In your earlier plays, the straight male type tended to be a little more like Donnie, the guy Steffie talk about from small appliances: dumb and vulgar.

There was no sympathy for the Nate character. The father in Fat Men in Skirts is a philandering husband for whom I allow no sympathy. He is butchered and eaten. (laughs)

In Raised in Captivity, what was the character Brian Kerwin played?

Bernadette’s husband.

The dentist. To me he’s the model for the sort of callow, straight guy in your work.

Yeah, I think that’s true.

But he’s a little less like just an object of derision. He’s only a kind of a cipher whom you suffer to join the world of…

Of the heavy thinkers! It’s true.

He’s sort of creeping into the Nicky Silver world, and just as long as he shuts up and doesn’t talk too much we’ll allow him to sit there on the sofa.

If you look at Fit To Be Tied, Carl, the character Dick Latessa played, is an outsider, not of this world, and I don’t disdain him but nor am I too interested in him. He onlymakes an appearance at the very end of the play.

But what an appearance! If you think about how Dick went to town with that role, maybe there’s more evidence of how the trope is evolving. Actually, the evolution of the type into Nate, becoming a full person with feelings reminded me of Nessa in Fit To Be Tied. Your mothers used to be more domineering and you’d be very interested in them, and they’d be monstrous and juicy, but in that play she’s sort of tiptoeing into being sympathetic, which was different.

Well if Nate didn’t become a human being it wouldn’t be a very interesting
play.

But to me it’s more than that. To me there’s a real resonance to Nate. I was saying before that it reminded me of “An American Family” in a way. And what Imean is that, tome, Nate and Laurel typify something purely American, particularly in the 9/11 era. He works for Morgan Stanley, part of the money making machine, and she does catalogue layout for LL Bean, part of the mass-production of style. They are childless, empty. And the prodigal brother arrives with his specter of God. An amorphous redeemer/punisher God that takes sides. I know it’s heavy-handed to look for allegories. But to me, your play has the force of a parable, and parables can accommodate all sorts of interpretations.

Huh. Alright, thanks.

The other thing about Nate pertains to the idea of the mixture of styles in your work. At one point during rehearsals, you mentioned how one of the actors asked what style the play was written in. And we talked about how in some ways style is a misnomer. Style is a reflection of a worldview. And Nate brings a worldview, and hence a style, that is in many respects new to your work. The style shifts a little
when Steffi enters the play. She seems like a real Nicky Silver character, loudly declaring her needs and fears. But then the biggest shift happens when you introduce Gordon.

I’ve always thought of Gordon as a Joe Orton character. He’s also not dissimilar from Bishop in Fat Man in Skirts for instance. Big adolescent id, without any censoring: just sort of genitals on parade. He’s much craftier than Bishop, but he’s mostly id.

It’s also the clearest instance of what you were saying before about liking to shake up the audience. You just had the very lyrical scene with Hal comforting Laurel and surprisingly kissing her, and then we shift to Orton-land.

It is the most dramatic shift in the play. I purposely wrote it that the lights come up on a new character alone onstage. Hal’s offstage because I’m saying to the audience, “new world, new character, new beginning.” Maura Tierney, the actress playing Laurel, was watching this scene with me during tech and she said, It’s like a new play begins.” And I said, “Well not quite.” And I used the analogy, “If you get a script and you’re playing a very sweet suburban housewife and then on page 40 you shoot your husband, you’re not a new character.The definition of your character is now grown.” So to me it feels like a new play, but it isn’t a new play, the definition of what this play is has simply grown, and hopefully it continues to grow.

It’s also the most disorienting for how we feel about Hal. We’ve just seen Hal kissing Laurel, and now he’s explicitly coaching this kid on how to insinuate himself into this new family.

Well that’s clear. But it’s also still not clear what his ultimate goal is really, until it’s revealed. And I purposely kept the play mysterious.

A lot of people seem to interpret his duplicitousness as evidence that he has been entirely manipulative from the beginning.

Well he is being duplicitous. But to me, the question is, was he just paying lip service to Laurel? Does he have feelings for Laurel? And does he love Gordon? And it’s not my business if he loves them, but he needs them. He needs both of them, and therefore they have to believe that the feelings are genuine. And for them to believe it, we have to believe it. So it doesn’t matter whether they really are genuine
or not. What matters is if they believe it and we believe it. I think he does have feelings for both of them, and not arbitrarily. They’re chosen because they’re two people who are in as much need as he is, and he fills that need.

I also think it’s interesting that even though he and Gordon make up a back story for Laurel, when Gordon goes off to shower, he pretty much tells her exactly how he feels about Gordon. He doesn’t try to hide his feelings.

Right.

So do you really think Nate gets what he wants at the end? 

Well, yes I do. Throughout all of my plays death is a positive thing for all the characters. Seriously. I didn’t realize it until I was at NYU and a student asked me something like, “Looking over your plays it seems that death is always a positive thing. Do you really think that’s true?” And I said, “I have no idea if it’s a positive thing. I think for these characters and thus probably for me, it is simply that life is so hard that they perceive death as a positive. That death is the end of the struggle.”
I wrote a play that you might have seen when I was doing those plays at the Sanford Meisner theater called Siblings in Paradise, or Moscow When It Sizzles. Not a very good play, but it was about three sisters and they get to Moscow and have to share an apartment with the tailor from Fiddler on the Roof and Louise Bryant and Emma
Goldman. And in one of the opening scenes, Masha is being tutored by Professor Pangloss from Candide, and she asks him, “Is there any afterlife?” And his response is, “Well, if there is an afterlife then all of our struggles here on earth are transient and meaningless and amount to nothing more than dust.” But he continues, “If there is no afterlife, then all of our struggles here on earth are really transient, really meaningless, and really amount to nothing more than dust.” And that’s really my world view! Makes it quite difficult to wait in lines.

And what about the other characters? I can see how Laurel gets what she wants at the end. She has a family, she has a child, she has meaning. What does Gordon get? What does Hal get? How do you think it happens?

Hal quite consciously wants a family too. He says so right at the beginning. Gordon doesn’t discuss it, but it’s clearly what he needs. These are three characters who are very adrift in the world and are looking for something that they couldn’t make with Nate. As far as how it happens, the play is purposefully ambiguous; there are hints
to both possibilities. And when I say both possibilities, I’m referring to the idea that these three human beings decide to live this life as husband, wife and child, not dissimilarly from George and Martha deciding that they have a child in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Laurel says, “it wasmanymonths before thingsmade sense, and then one day they did.” And I’ve discussed with actors at times how that journey would have happened, in terms of the slow progression and the gradual decision as a group to live as a family. And there are hints in the play to suggest this is what’s happened. At the end of act one, Steffi says, “I woke up and I didn’t have any clue as to who I was, so I decided to be someone else.” Conversely, it’s also planted throughout the play that the universe simply changes. That necessity and/or
God and/or The Universe and/or Nature creates the reality when a reality is needed. Pluto isn’t a planet anymore. It was a planet yesterday, it’s still the same rock, but today it’s not a planet. Yesterday the glaciers were ice, today they’re lakes. So there is a sense that reality is a mutable thing. And I leave it purposefully ambiguous. I
was very, very careful not to suggest to the audience that one possibility is much stronger than the other because I think both possibilities are quite acceptable in interpreting the play.

And of course it’s also possible that both are true, that one is possible because of the other. The end always felt right to me, but it also felt slippery, which I liked. In some ways, it seems Hal and Gordon have everything they want after Nate dies. But Laurel doesn’t. She has grief and absence and it seems almost like a law of nature that this new family unit would seek a new equilibrium.

That’s what I meant… I guess.