Qualms ebulletin

MAINSTAGE BULLETIN

THE QUALMS Written by

BRUCE NORRIS

Directed by

PAM MACKINNON

IN THIS ISSUE PAGE 3

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PLAYWRIGHT'S PERSPECTIVE

LOOKING FOR SWINGERS

HUMAN NATURE

Bruce Norris sounds off on why he chose to write about swinging.

Discovering “the Lifestyle.”

Adam Greenfield discusses Bruce Norris’s plays.

FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

DEAR FRIENDS, One of the most distinctive aspects of Bruce Norris’s The Qualms can be ascertained visually just by skimming through the script. Every couple of pages you will find occasions where four or five characters speak simultaneously, represented in the script by those characters’ names spanning across one line. One can virtually feel the hew and outcry these various moments represent. What on earth could incite all this tumult? Well the answer is, of course, “sex.”

Norris has actually made a specialty of locating the hot buttons in any topic. And whatever hypocrisies, or self-delusions, or paradoxes that might lie within, he will be sure to unearth. Midway through The Qualms some of these paradoxes are identified and voiced aloud as part of the gathering argument of the play. “There are more church-goers in America than any other Western Country. But we are also the largest consumer of pornography.”

Most of the characters in The Qualms choose to reject this hypocrisy by espousing a practice of free love they self-describe as “the Lifestyle.” They get together on occasional weekends for what looks like a regular barbeque get-together, except every once in a while, two or more of them repair to the “Party Room.” Two newcomers enter this scene, Chris and Kristy, relative newlyweds, and we quickly learn something is going on between them.

Kristy apparently had lunch with an ex-beau a few weeks ago, and Chris seems to have seized the opportunity to attend this event as if on a dare. But the longer he stays, and the closer they come to the appointed activity, the more belligerent he becomes.

The more the characters reveal to us the various reasons they are all attracted to the Lifestyle, the more we come to understand how personal and diverse these reasons are. Sure, most of them espouse a certain degree of idealism about the virtues of non-possessiveness, but they are not ideologues. (Well, maybe one of them is.) They are complex, struggling individuals, seeking their own brand of intimacy with each other. And I think one of the aspects of the simultaneously spoken lines is to indicate this multiplicity of views. But Chris’s views, which he sputters with increasing bluster and dogmatism, keep spinning off inarticulately. He wants to represent the moral stance, but finds he can’t do so without hurting people. Norris sculpts the climactic mayhem that ensues with his customary dexterity. And as is often the case with Norris’s work, we feel grateful in the end for his determination to lay bare the unexamined knee-jerk attitudes that masquerade as moral convictions in many of us. Yet, I think the note this play ends on is an underappreciated hallmark of his best work. He depicts most of the characters in The Qualms warmly. His characters really just want to connect in their own ways and make some sense of their lives and find some kind of trust and enjoyment. The final tableau of the play is almost touching.

TIM SANFORD

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

The Mainstage Theater Bulletin is generously funded, in part, by the

LIMAN FOUNDATION

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Photo by Christine Gatti

PLAYWRIGHT'S PERSPECTIVE So people have been asking me a lot lately, “Why did you want to write a play about swinging? And how did you do your research?” Well… the thing is, it was never really meant to be about swinging. Not exactly.

About ten years ago a friend and I went to see a matinee screening of a documentary called The Lifestyle about the swinging scene in suburban USA — very much alive and thriving, in case you didn’t know. (FYI — Hacienda Villa, an all-polyamorous apartment building, just opened in Bushwick) And we watched the semi-pornographic footage of these couples — many of them quite elderly — arriving at a potluck dinner and, after eating and pleasantries, proceeding to casually penetrate each other’s partner at random, interchangeably, with no regard for distinctions such as age or aesthetics. Everyone fucked or got fucked equally, while discussing football scores and the weather at the same time.

My friend and I emerged into the daylight outside the movie theatre feeling vaguely sick to our stomachs — “Jesus, something is seriously wrong with those people,” we thought, “right?” But neither of us could articulate exactly what it was we found so repellent. I mean, I like to think of myself as a tolerant, liberal person. I have no problem with pornography. And yes, admittedly, some of their bodies weren’t totally attractive, but so what? And the couples all participate of their own choice, consensually. So what was pushing me to the limits of my tolerance? Why did I feel this lurking, conservative disdain, this reflexive need to condemn them? Was it because, as a hetero male, I’ve spent my life trying — and paying the price when I fail —to adhere to the monogamous binary? Maybe. But if that’s what was eating at me, didn’t that just mean I was maybe, possibly, a little bit… jealous?

So, a few years later I’m a guest instructor for a playwriting class at Columbia and we’re talking about how playwrights eke out a living and one of the graduate students in the class happens to mention a convenient method she’d found to make some extra cash to pay for tuition: she logs on to Sugardaddy.com or Seekingarrangement.com and hooks up with older, wealthy guys for “dates,” which the older men pay her for quite handsomely.

I sat there — slightly stupefied — but wasn’t that… prostitution? Yes, she answered — so? Once again, I felt like, well, okay, I know I’m old and everything but somehow I’m finding this very hard to condone. Why, she asked? She’s choosing the men she sleeps with. It’s totally consensual.

She’s not being coerced (other than economically). She’s in control of the whole thing, so what’s the problem?

And she had a point. Why was I having this conflicted response to her personal choice, as if she was in some way… unprincipled? Was I really so judgmental? What if there were actually no principles involved at all. What if, once again, I was just kind of… jealous. Jealous, in part, of the rich men who could afford casual sex with this girl, but also jealous of the girl herself for being so modern and uninhibited and freethinking. What, did she think she was better than me, because she was more sophisticated?

I happen to be writing this five weeks after the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris, two weeks after protesters shut down a production of The Vagina Monologues at Mount Holyoke for fear of offending trans women without vaginas, one week after a mosque was burned down in Houston and ISIS militants beheaded 20 Coptic Christians in Libya. In each case, one constituency supposedly acts on “principle” to control or punish the behavior of another group who choose to live differently. But why do we find it so hard to tolerate people who have different values and customs? Does the mere existence of difference erode our certainty and call into question the choices (or compromises) we’ve made in our own lives? And if we’re really so committed to tolerance, don’t we have to tolerate the intolerant?

So, forgive the bizarre leap of logic here, but this is why I think democracy — insofar as it places a value on social justice, fairness and equality — is very,

very difficult. And I think the reasons have something to do with sex, and our sexually-driven competitiveness.

We primates tend to live in communities, defined by blood or geography or income or sexual orientation or political affiliation — and in each of those overlapping communities we constantly observe each other and reevaluate our status at every given moment, relative to the other primates in the group.

When any one of us gets too high, the other monkeys revolt. As the nowfamous capuchin monkey footage demonstrates (look it up on YouTube) we don’t like it when another monkey gets too many bananas. Like Gary says in The Qualms: “Gotta share the bananas, man.”

We happen to be living in a time and place (’Murica) where competition is glorified. Where aggressiveness, personal advantage, individual achievement are highly valued, and fuck the losers that can’t cut it.

Free-market ideologues like Paul Ryan tell us competition is a blessing (Innovation! Efficiency! Lower prices!). But I tend to think — for what it’s worth — that competition is the curse that dooms our species. Sure, it’s sometimes balanced—hopefully — by its twin instinct, cooperation. That’s what we primates do — compete and cooperate by turns. I feel compelled to compete with people like Paul Ryan. I consider him my “ideological enemy.”

I’m not saying I hope ISIS beheads Paul Ryan – but I might take a look at the videotape.

The Qualms, for me, is as much about class-competitiveness as it is about sex. A new couple — with obvious advantages — attempts to join a group with fewer advantages, and one of them winds up feeling left out. He feels outraged that somehow the advantages he enjoys every single day of his life aren’t being respected on this one. And when that happens to us privileged people — like those of us who can afford to go to the theatre — we tend to get pissed off.

Problem is, the monkeys that get more bananas on a regular basis rarely defend the less fortunate monkeys. That’s because monkeys don’t have any “principles,” just primitive instincts. And frankly, I don’t think we operate according to “principles” either. Not really.

I wish we did. I wish that our “principles” actually mattered, but I don’t think they do — not in the way we think they do. At least, not for me. Because I’m just a primate.

A rotten, conniving, jealous, selfish little primate like anyone else.

I occasionally rise above my rottenness and do something halfway decent, but for the most part, I’m just studying your pile of bananas vs. my pile, and if you have more bananas than me, I criticize you for your lack of “principles.” And that’s what happens in the play.

So I wrote a play about people who swing — and the people that condemn them — because I admire something about the swinging “lifestyle,” so to speak. I could never be part of it, but, to my way of thinking, (continued on page 4) Photo by Zack DeZon

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swingers offer an implicit critique of competition and self-interest: Why are you so possessive of your partner? And sure, maybe they’re also a little bit tacky and gross and maybe polyamory is an unworkable utopian fantasy. Maybe they’re just a bunch of perverts — but how optimistic! Such generous perverts! Their lifestyle forces me to ask myself, where does my jealousy, this competitiveness, come from? And what risk would it pose to me — in a world with readily available contraceptives and antibiotics — to share my partner, sexually speaking, with others? Our genitals are not nonrenewable resources. So what do we lose, exactly, when our partners have sex with someone else, provided we’ve agreed to it? Why, for most of us, is

BACKSTORY

it so impossible to conceive, so utterly destructive to the very foundation of the partnership?

So anyway, that’s the play. And I hope you think it’s funny. And if you don’t, it’ll be over in ninety minutes.

BRUCE NORRIS FEBRUARY 2015

LOOKING FOR SWINGERS

Armed with only a search engine and overwhelming curiosity, I set out across the murky vastness of the internet in a voyeuristic search for “swingers,” hoping to learn more about “swinging,” and am back to report my findings.

I’m 24 years old and single.

What is swinging? Swinging, it turns out, is a term that mostly non-swingers use: real swingers prefer to speak of “the Lifestyle.” In Lifestyle networks, parties, and clubs, mutually consenting couples enjoy sex with other couples, without (in theory) threatening their primary romantic bonds. It saves or wrecks marriages, depending on whom you ask, and raises a host of philosophical questions: “What is love?” “Why do we have sex?” “Are sex and love mutually reinforcing and inseparable or are they distinct, isolatable drives?” “What’s a family?” “Does marriage work?”

Writing about the Lifestyle ranges from the diaristic to the commercial and the academic, and it’s consistently full of contradictions: the Lifestyle is a “subculture” but it’s “worldwide;” it’s “increasingly mainstream” yet still trades in the “forbidden.” I found one dissertation on the Lifestyle that opens with a heartfelt, paragraph-length thank-you note to the author’s wife. On the other end of the spectrum, an LA Weekly article titled “Swinging: The Underground Lifestyle that Lets you F*ck your Friends,” suggests that “typically,” couples start swinging when the woman expresses a desire to sleep with other women. (This unsupported assertion strikes me as a bona fide bit of male fantasy.)

Searching for Lifestyle communities, I cannot find a social network for swingers that doesn’t feature sexually explicit imagery on its homepage and doesn’t immediately ask for my contact information. I do find some endearingly amateur blogs by swinging couples, with headlines like: “We’re a husband and a wife trying new things!” “We love meeting interesting new people!” and “Almost none of our friends are vanilla anymore!” These are often followed by long trails of homemade, semi-pornographic images. I feel weirdly moved. Far from the Photoshopped, hyper-sexual barrage of blockbuster culture, these are authentic personal quests for fulfillment.

According to swinger lore, swinging was first practiced by American fighter pilots during WWII. The physical proximity, comfortable incomes and (most importantly) high fatality rates of Air Force families created an environment in which inter-marriage promiscuity seemed not only fun but logical. The pilots dubbed their naughty hobby “wife-swapping,” a term that suggests a subtle patriarchy lingering behind the origins of this mythically subversive practice. Indeed, there’s something suburban-flavored about swinging.

Contemporary swingers like to wax nostalgic for 1940’s “key parties,” where everyone would throw their keys in a pile and pull out a different pair — discovering, in the process, their bed partner for the night.

The “key party” evokes a quaint geography: keyholes, bedrooms, houses, rows of houses, lawns, lawnmowers, driveways.

So how does swinging look from a historical perspective? Sexologist Marty Klein notes that before the bicycle, the average American woman had to wear 37 pounds of clothing just to leave the house. The bicycle made that impractical, and within two years of its popularization, women were wearing half the clothes they used to. Following that example, he speculates that the technologies and cultural trends that will shape sexuality in our time are as wide-ranging and unpredictable as Amazon.com, the disappearance of downtowns, female clergy, female police, young adults moving back home, popular therapy, trend diets, whites becoming a minority, and chlamydia, to name a few. This was in 1999. In a similar list of historical events that indirectly shaped Western sexuality, he lists the story of Adam and Eve, the twelve male apostles, paper, clocks, light bulbs, women going to theaters and acting on stage, anti-masturbation campaigns, procreation as duty, and the 19th-century belief that conception required female orgasm.

While broad and eyebrow-raising, I’m surprised how these lists inspire in me an appreciation of our complexity and diversity. Who knows, years from now, what practices will seem fair, unfair, emancipatory, irresponsible, empowering, progressive, sexy, exclusive, problematic, stable, crazy, fun, painful, good, bad, weird, or normal.

Nude swinger selfies are unusual, in part because swingers tend to be latemiddle-aged, upper-middle-class married couples. For a long time, that also meant they were white and straight. A 2009 study found that the average swinger is college-educated and makes between $70,000 and $200,000 per year. A 1985 study of 10,000 swingers found that 50% voted for Ronald Reagan, and fewer than 24% voted for Jimmy Carter. All this should perhaps be unsurprising: if you’re seeking the small amount of controlled chaos that swinging offers, you’re likely otherwise secure.

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Special thanks to

THE LAURENTS/HATCHER FOUNDATION

for its very generous support of The Qualms.

MILO CRAMER

LITERARY RESIDENT

THE AMERICAN VOICE

HUMAN NATURE

For the most part, since Ancient Greeks paraded across proskenions in their masks, the intent of satire has been to expose a world plagued by hypocrisy and hubris, in the interest of discrediting these ills. From Aristophanes to The Book of Mormon, writers have placed man’s folly center-stage in the interest of giving it a good flogging. But however scathing the ridicule, however harsh the mockery, the satirist’s aim is traditionally meliorative at its heart: surely with knowledge of our flaws, we can take ownership over them and correct them. Though we laugh like teenagers at the humiliation of Malvolio or the comeuppance of Tartuffe, these characters reflect writers who share faith in the essential corrigibility of man; faith in progress.

And then there’s Bruce Norris, whose ruthless comedies aren’t concerned with inciting us to heal our more sinister problems because he doesn’t believe we can. “If you want some sort of climax,” we’re told at the top of The Infidel (2000), “some moment in which great truths are spoken, well, check your ticket stubs because you have come to the wrong performance.”

Refusing to provide easy comfort, his work inspects the psyche of American progressivism, mining comedy from the futility of good intentions. Though his characters yearn for an ethical life, the struggle is Sisyphean. “I think ethical behavior should extend as far as your arm,” Norris quipped in a 2006 interview with Chicago magazine. “You can try your best to do things that are ethical beyond that radius, but I think it’s ultimately kind of hopeless because human nature is indifferent to something like ethics…To go around with a plan how to make the world a better place usually results in the opposite.”

In the cosmology of his plays, a harmless or well-intentioned gesture can provoke a chain of events that takes down an innocent bystander; even the most altruistic acts cause harm, however unintentionally. This lack of a compass is terrifying, and it’s precisely what gives his plays the danger and the thrill that make them so excruciatingly funny.

While individually his plays wage war on different terrain, as a collection they reveal a writer hell-bent on testing American beliefs — or, more specifically, white, privileged lefty liberal American beliefs. The Infidel places a Supreme Court judge on trial for his own murky morality, and his play Purple Heart (2002) confronts a post Vietnam America that is reckless with its global legacy. The Pain and the Itch (2005) skewers the narcissism and compliance of a wealthy family whose progressive attitude shifts dramatically when they discover their 4-year-old daughter has a venereal disease; and The Unmentionables (2006) charts the consequences of American do-gooders in a Third World country. All of these plays challenge our belief that human progress is possible, suggesting that it's advance is consistently undermined by human nature — which, despite intervals of righteous vim, will inevitably default back to its own self-interest. Clybourne Park (2010) places the cultural attitudes of A Raisin in the Sun (1959) next to America in 2009, making a case that we’re a deeply divided country, despite what we tell ourselves. A Parallelogram (2010) is a more introspective take on this cycle of ineffectuality, centering on Bee, who’s able to look into the future (due to a cosmic glitch) and see her dismal fate, and the world’s, discovering there’s nothing she can do to change it. And Domesticated (2013) tracks the public downfall of a politician’s marriage after he’s caught with a prostitute.

The abyss that separates people — our ultimate inability to agree on the common good — is yet again mined for vicious laughs as Bruce positions the divide between the sexes as an indelible fact of being human.

It seems right to hop on a parallel track here and point to the writing of John Gray, the British economist and philosopher, a favorite of Bruce's (who is crucially not to be confused with the American John Gray, who wrote Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus). “‘Humanity’ does not exist,” Gray proclaims in his book Straw Dogs. “There are only humans, driven by conflicting needs and illusions, and subject to every kind of infirmity of will and judgment.” Central to Gray’s arguments is that our faith in progress comes from a misguided belief that humankind as a species is able to transcend our natural limitations, that the human condition will cumulatively be bettered by our ethical superiority. “History,” he says in the introduction to Heresies, “is not an ascending spiral of human advance, or even and inch

by inch crawl to a better world. It is an unending cycle in which changing knowledge interacts with unchanging human need.” We can see this belief— that human nature is an inherent obstacle to progress — reflected in Bruce’s plays. “You know as well as I do that this is a progressive community,” says Karl Lindner in Clybourne Park, trying to bar a black family from his white neighborhood in 1959. “Some would say change is inevitable. And I can support that, if it’s change for the better. But I’ll tell you what I can’t support, and that’s disregarding the needs of the people who live in a community.”

This perspective is reflected in Bruce’s take on theater itself, as he criticizes the hubris of a progressive-minded theater community’s belief that theater can be an agent of change. Not only is art — like all endeavors — incapable of significantly impacting human consciousness and behavior, he feels, but “if you slice the audience for theater,” he said in his 2010 interview, “which is already 1% the audience for all other entertainment, and you take that 1% and slice it down to the audience that actually attends new plays, and then go further cut to those who would be interested in so-called controversial new plays, that’s a tiny fraction of the entertainment-consuming public. It’s almost like a tiny little club, a tiny little fan club for a strange and useless obsolete art form…I certainly don’t think the plays I write are very important.”

But it’s impossible to read all this back to myself, to consider what Bruce has said in interviews, in public, and in his work, without suggesting that his actions betray him. He’s a contradictory guy. Because on one hand, he categorically rejects humanism and doesn’t believe in a social or anthropological value of theater; while on the other hand, he is the author of twelve stunning, immaculately made plays. And at the risk of him beelining to me in some theater lobby with an out-stretched finger and a head full of logical points I can’t argue with, I can’t shake my conviction that no artist can sit in an empty room in front of a laptop and put in the time, care, skill and conviction that he has — repeatedly throughout his career to date — without believing, however reluctantly, in its importance. I’m reminded of Article Three of Charles Ludlam’s manifesto for the Ridiculous Theatrical Company: “Just as many people who claim belief in God disprove it with their every act, so too there are those whose every deed, though they say there is no God, is an act of faith.”

I also think of the very final moments of Clybourne Park, in which Bev addresses her son, who’s about to commit suicide: “I know it’s been a hard couple of years for all of us, I know they have been, but I really believe things are about to change for the better. I firmly believe that.” A true cynic would have ended the play there, cruelly leaving us with how wrong Bev is. But Bruce chose to end the play instead by giving her a moment of grace. “You have enough light, there?” Bev asks her son. “Well, don’t hurt your eyes.”

ADAM GREENFIELD

ASSOCIATE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

Leadership support for the New Works Lab is generously provided by the Time Warner Foundation.

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PPDs with the creative team have been scheduled for the following dates:

2:30 PM 8:00 PM

WEDNESDAY, MAY 27 SUNDAY, MAY 31

2:30 PM l 8:00 PM 2:30 PM 8:00 PM 2:30 PM 8:00 PM 2:30 PM 8:00 PM 2:30 PM 8:00 PM

(Following the matinee)

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3 We hope you can take part in this important aspect of our play development process.

<

Indicates post-performance discussion

Open Captioned for

l theatergoers who are deaf or hard of hearing

We recommend The Qualms for audiences aged 16+.

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THE QUALMS Written by

BRUCE NORRIS

Directed by

PAM MACKINNON

MAY 22–JULY 12, 2015

Playwrights Horizons Mainstage Theater This is the last production in the 2014/15 Season.

#TheQualms

THE AMERICAN MEET THE TEAMVOICE BRUCE NORRIS (Playwright)

is the author of Clybourne Park, which had its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in 2010. It won the Olivier and Evening Standard Awards for Best Play (2010), the Tony Award for Best Play, (2011), and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (2011). Other plays include The Infidel (2000), Purple Heart (2002), We All Went Down to Amsterdam (2003), The Pain and the Itch (2004), The Unmentionables (2006), and A Parallelogram (2010), all of which had their premieres at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago.

The Pain and the Itch had its New York premiere at Playwrights Horizons in 2006. His most recent play, Domesticated, had its premiere at Lincoln Center Theater in 2013. His work has also been seen at The Royal Court (London), Woolly Mammoth Theatre (Washington, DC), Lookingglass Theatre (Chicago), Philadelphia Theatre Company, and Staatstheater Mainz (Germany), among others. He is also the 2009 recipient of the Steinberg Playwright Award.

PAM MACKINNON'S (Director) recent Broadway credits include Donald Margu-

lies' Dinner With Friends; Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, for which she won a Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play in 2013; and Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park, for which she was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play in 2012. Pam directed the world premiere of Beau Willimon’s The Parisian Woman (South Coast Repertory), as well as Craig Lucas’s The Lying Lesson (Atlantic Theater Company). Pam directed Horton Foote’s Harrison, TX (Primary Stages) and Itamar Moses’s Completeness (Playwrights Horizons), as well as its world premiere (South Coast Repertory). She also directed the world premiere of David Wiener’s Extraordinary Chambers (Geffen Playhouse), and Rachel Axler’s Smudge (Women’s Project) in 2010. Other credits include Edward Albee’s Occupant (Signature Theatre); Cusi Cram’s A Lifetime Burning (Primary Stages); Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance, with Kathleen Chalfant and Ellen McLaughlin (Arena Stage); Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (Intiman Theatre); Itamar Moses’s 8

The Four of Us (Manhattan Theatre Club); and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s Good Boys and True (Steppenwolf ). Pam directed the world and New York premieres of Edward Albee’s Peter and Jerry (Hartford Stage and Second Stage), Bruce Norris’s The Unmentionables (Woolly Mammoth) and the world premieres of Richard Greenberg’s Our Mother’s Brief Affair (South Coast Repertory), John Fugelsang’s All the Wrong Reasons (New York Theater Workshop), and Itamar Moses's The Four of Us (The Old Globe). Further credits include Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (Alley Theater, Vienna Theater); David Mamet’s Romance (Goodman Theatre); Gina Giofriddo’s After Ashley (Philadelphia Theater Company); Edward Albee’s Play About the Baby (Philadelphia Theater Company, Goodman Theatre); and Itamar Moses's Bach at Leipzig (NYTW), among others. Pam is an alumna of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, the Women’s Project Directors Forum, and the Drama League Fall Production Fellowship.

Pam serves as the Board Chair of the downtown company Clubbed Thumb and is a member of SDC.

Photo by Zack DeZon