Playwright glad to let scripts do the talking
Ex-director Spector welcomes chance to observe, contemplate
Spector from One directing mostly is glad serious plays he made to reason writing the transition Jonathan them: It’s a lot easier in the rehearsal room. As a director, “it’s great, but you’re always responsible for every moment. People do something, and then you have to say something,” and that’s “even if you want to think about it for a while.” When he was an assistant director when he was younger, working at New York’s SoHo Rep, for instance, it was even worse. “You can talk,” he says, but quizzically, as if the subtext were, “but you probably shouldn’t talk.” If you do, “you have to have something really good to say, because once you say something dumb, then nobody wants to hear you ever again. “So it’s really great to be a playwright,” he concludes. “You don’t ever have to talk if you don’t want to. But whenever you do talk, everybody has to listen to what you have to say. You can be contemplative in that way, without the pressure, which suits me better.” Whether saying good things or contemplating quietly, Spector, 38, has spent a lot of time in rehearsal lately. His world premiere “Eureka Day” opens Thursday, April 19, at Aurora Theatre, where it was commissioned as part of
the company’s Originate+Generate program. The show takes place at an ultra-liberal Berkeley private school where PTA members debate endlessly about whether to add an option to the set of races parents can select for their children. (Sample line: “Look, it’s possible because of my cousin’s kids I may have some deeper learning around this issue than you all do?”) But if that alone divides them, they soon encounter a much deeper fault line: vaccination.
It’s not about whether vaccines work, he emphasizes. His interest, rather, is in that moment “where you’re talking to somebody who’s your friend, who’s really smart and at least as educated as you are, and who you agree with basically about everything in terms of how the world works — and then you discover there’s this one thing where they not just disagree with you but kind of exist in a different reality than you do,” so different is their worldview. From there, “how do you make a community with people, how do you make collective decisions, when you can’t agree on basic facts?”
In June, Spector has another world premiere in “Good. Better. Best. Bested.” It’s a coproduction by Custom Made Theatre Company and Just Theater, which Spector and his wife, Molly Aaronson-Gelb, created in 2006. The show pits the grotesque extravagance of Las Vegas against the outbreak of nuclear war in Southeast Asia.
If Vegas sounds easy to mock, Spector’s interest in it is more than passing. He estimates he’s been there “more than 10 times”; he worked as a dealer at an underground poker club in New York and played himself “pretty seriously.” “Everything there is built to put you in a state of only being concerned about your own pleasure, so that you will not mind spending money.” The show asks “how bad something would have to be” in the outside world to make you pay attention in an environment “custom built for pure solipsism.”
Both plays for him center on different versions of the same moral question: If you’re concerned with social justice, and you have a lot of privilege, “What should we be doing (to further progressive goals)? Should we be doing more?”
In between the two premieres, Just Theater is producing a reading series on Mondays April 23-May 14, with plays by Spector and some of the Bay Area’s other most dynamic playwrights: the Kilbanes, Christopher Chen and Kate E. Ryan.
If he’ll be ubiquitous in Bay Area theater this season, Spector didn’t at all see his writing career as inevitable. “It took me a long time to say that I was a writer without qualifying it in some way or undercutting it in some way.” After growing up in northern Virginia and then attending New College of Florida, Spector moved to New York, where he met Aaronson-Gelb in Lincoln Center Theater’s famed Directors Lab. When she moved to the Bay Area, he eventually followed, partly because it was “so cheap here,” an assessment he laughs at now.
He and Aaronson-Gelb (who now live in Oakland, with their 2½-year-old daughter, Maisie) founded Just Theater before the latest wave of interest in new plays took hold at the Bay Area’s biggest theaters. They’ve brought to the bay writers like Anne Washburn, Jackie Sibblies Drury and Rob Handel (whose “A Maze,” from 2013, was such a hit it got a remount the following year).
Spector first tried writing as part of the ensemble Mugwumpin, for 2010’s “This Is All I Need.” He was immediately struck by the joy of having his “words embodied by a person.”
“Now, in retrospect, I feel like (being a playwright) sat with me much better in some ways than being a director ever did. Looking back now, I feel like my directing and my producing really was always about, ‘This is a piece of writing I think is really wonderful, and so I want to share it with people.’ To the degree that I was a good director, it was always about being very attentive to the writing.”