Playwright and screenwriter Laura Eason is most often “of two minds”
Laura Eason is one of the most prolific and successful dramatists in the country — and one of the few women who can claim as much. Her “Sex with Strangers” was among the most produced plays in the country this season. The success has exceeded her expectations.
“It’s a tricky proposition, writing about writing,” she said by phone from her Brooklyn apartment.
Eason is also a staff writer on “House of Cards,” having written some of the most powerful episodes involving the scheming, backstabbing political climber Claire Underwood (played by Robin Wright).
“Lady MacBeth comes up in the writers’ room often,” Eason said.
She hopes to be in Denver for the regional premiere of her play this week, a story about writing and writers — specifically a young male blogger and a somewhat older female novelist — and modern relationships with internet technology.
“Sex with Strangers” opens at Denver’s Curious Theatre on Thursday.
“As much as it’s about writers, it’s about the larger idea: the nature of identity right now, when so much of our lives is online. I’m using writers to explore that.”
Eason observes both the beneficial and harmful effects of technology without taking sides. She is only certain that all of our relationships involve technology these days — if you have two characters at a table, there are four identities present, she said, “two people and their devices.”
The two characters in “Sex with Strangers,” pushing-40 Olivia and late-20s Ethan, are light years apart in how they perceive technology. She is a gifted but not-so-successful novelist, he is a blogger whose personal chronicles of his year of sexcapades, titled Sex with Strangers, won a huge online following.
“Olivia is not a technophobe,” Eason said, “she’s not someone who doesn’t understand it, she is just someone who has chosen not to be particularly engaged. This level of exposure is not of interest to her. Ethan is shining a light on the opportunity it brings.”
Writing across mediums
Eason’s red-hot career is a mix of film, TV and theater.
She recently sold a one-hour dramedy pilot to Fox. She has writ- ten a feature film for Sarah Jessica Parker’s production company.
Season 4 of the acclaimed, award-winning “House of Cards” will bow in its entirety March 4 on Netflix; theoretically the writers’ room would convene in February for eight months if there’s to be another season. Like the series’ fans, the writing staff awaits word on a Season 5 pick up.
“Sex with Strangers” first launched at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company; Anna Gunn (“Breaking Bad”) and Billy Magnussen played the roles offBroadway in New York.
Eason is an ensemble member and the former artistic director of Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre, winner of the 2011 Regional Tony Award. She is the author of more than 20 full-length plays, both original work and adaptations, as well as the book for a musical. Her play “The Vast InBetween” was a 2012 Denver Center commission.
The differences in writing for stage and screen start with the collaborative nature of TV versus the voice of the playwright onstage. From there, it’s about the reach and power of the screen in the popular culture.
“More people will see a commercial for “House of Cards” (let alone an episode of the series itself ) than will see every show of every play I ever write,” she said. Eason cited the 50 million legal downloads of “House of Cards” in China as a starting point, versus the couple thousand people who will see “Sex with Strangers” during the run of play.
“That aspect is very surreal. We joke that it saves us at cocktail parties.” Mention “House of Cards” and “very few people haven’t heard of it,” she said.
In the theater, “a lot of what we do is unseen.”
The fact that theater is fleeting while TV lives on in pixel form is another key difference, addressed in the play.
“One of the big things ‘Sex with Strangers’ is getting at is that things on the Internet do not go away, things you share are going to live on to haunt you in ways. That’s just true.” The notion of personal reinvention has changed as a result: “It’s not as easy to shed the skin.”
She sees that eternal presence as mostly positive.
“I was in a rock band in my 20s,” Eason said. “We made a CD, and it was so amazing to have a disc of our music, something so tangible. That was really gratifying. To have had a hand in this show that is a piece of television history has been really cool.”
Writing for TV is now an accepted goal for many acclaimed playwrights. “There isn’t the stigma anymore,” Eason said. While it offers financial stability to artists, “It no longer feels like selling out. It’s on par with good theater work.”
Her current TV favorites: Jill Soloway’s “Transparent” and the British sitcom “Catastrophe” (which is literally about sex with a stranger, resulting in pregnancy).
Eason appreciates and even revels in life’s contradictions and dichotomies. She is “of two minds about most things — that’s why I’m a dramatist. The important thing is to keep poking at the question. That’s what we do in theater. Keep an active dialog. That’s what the play is about.”
Likewise, she intends to keep poking at theater, even if the Fox network wants her full time for a prime time series.
“I don’t feel my theater life would go away if I take a break for a year or two,” she said. “I’ll always come back.”