Playwright finds awesome in the everyday
Middletown author says he found his literary voice after an exhausting stint working on Wall Street Corrine Koslo and Moya O'Connell in Will Eno’s Middletown, at Toronto’s Streetcar Crowsnest.
The prospect of a conversation with the American playwright Will Eno both thrills and daunts. I really enjoyed the two productions of his work I’ve seen — The Realistic Joneses at Tarragon and Middletown at the Shaw Festival.
While Eno’s writerly voice is unmistakable, it’s also elusive: particularly with Middletown — that acclaimed Shaw staging is now being remounted by Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre — he captures the extraordinary ordinariness of people living and people talking, in a purposely ordinary place. The worry is how to discuss this with him without being reductive or mystifying.
As it turns out, you couldn’t meet a kinder or more easygoing guy than Eno, who slips into a Manhattan highrise lobby to “do some Skyping” with me on his way to the Signature Theatre, where a revival of Thom Pain ( based on nothing) — the play that made his reputation in the U.S. when it played offBroadway in 2005 — is currently being revived, in a production starring Michael C. Hall ( Dexter, Six Feet Under).
I ask him to verify all the odd jobs the internet says he’s done to make ends meet. Cat-sitter for the playwright Edward Albee? Check. (“The pay was $10 an hour, on the hour. I remem- ber he would round down.”) Proofreading psychology textbooks? Yup. Competitive cycle racing? Totally true — he even trained at the U.S. Olympic centre in Colorado. Construction work for a health-food store? Indeed, and he was paid partly in supplements.
He adds a couple more: Personal assistant to model Lauren Hutton, who picked him and a friend up while they were hitchhiking in Germany. And the worst: A stint on Wall Street, making cold calls for $6 an hour. While that was “really, really rough” work, it did have a purifying effect on his writerly voice: “I was so exhausted I started doing this writing that didn’t have any of what I thought was my personality in it. I was too tired to sort of maintain a pose … So it kind of just got down to nouns and verbs.”
In about 2011, he started to make enough money to survive as a playwright, although he still sometimes does teaching and other writing work to supplement the family income (he’s married to actor Maria Dizzia and they have a 4-year-old daughter, whom Eno describes as “a really, really wonderful person”).
The story of his first big break as a playwright could not be more improbable or romantic. In about 1999, not really knowing what he was doing, he dropped his first play, Tragedy:
A Tragedy, off at the stage door of the Royal National Theatre in London; the literary managers read it, liked it, and organized a staged reading.
These days, things are more prosaic: he first heard that the Shaw Festival was interested in
Middletown through publisher Samuel French (Shaw’s artistic director Tim Carroll caught the Eno bug from actor Tom McCamus, who performed in Thom
Pain at Tarragon in 2006). Director Meg Roe “was just really great all the way along” the Shaw production process, says Eno. “She seemed to have a very clear sense of things.” Going to see the show was a family adventure: “Niagara-on-the Lake seems like it was designed by a little gang of 4-year-olds: fudge shop, fudge shop, ice cream, park, playground … We had a blast.”
When I ask him if Middletown is a comment on Middle America, he strikes a repeated theme — that his work “is not meant as a critique.” Setting it in an unnamed place was so that “maybe it would just be general human life with enough specificity that people can sort of follow along.”
He soon reveals something personal about a family tendency toward deflection.
While many have likened the quality of self-correction in his writing to that of Samuel Beckett (and he acknowledges Beckett as an inspiration, along with Harold Pinter, Don DeLillo and his friend and writing teacher Gordon Lish), he says he thinks it also comes “from my mom. She would be saying something that was seeming to be on track to be a compliment, and then she would go off in this eddy saying, ‘Oh, is “affirmational,” is that a word? That sounds funny’ … I don’t know if it was a fascination with language for her more than it was a desire to get out of an emotional moment and move to the surface of a thing.”
It rubbed off. “I know I do that as a human being, and I know when I write, I try to do that as other human beings doing that … I don’t mean it as some pointy-headed critique of language. I mean it as a person who is wanting to be understood and anxious that they’re not being understood.”
Away to get productions of his work wrong, I suggest, would be to play the lines ironically. This gets agreement.
“I’m actually really not interested in irony. I just sort of think it probably exists in the universe, and it doesn’t need me to promote it really. So I think people generally mean what they say, and they’re saying it the best way they can.”