A Conversation with Michael Weller
On August 26, Don Cohen spoke with Michael Weller, author of Approaching Moomtaj, which is having its world premiere at New Rep.
Cohen: Where did the story of Approaching Moomtaj come from?
Weller: It came first of all from a dream I had of an Arab country, a dream journey ending at a lake that was the most ravishing image I’ve ever felt. I couldn’t get it out of my head for weeks. One friend said they thought the lake was death, bur to me it was quite the opposite: deeply human and wonderful. I decided to meditate on that lake and see what came out. I’m usually much more formal and careful in planning things out and finding dramatic strategies that will keep the journey going. This time I decided to improvise like a jazz musician around a theme and a counter-theme. It was very unusual for me.
Cohen: Why did you choose to combine serious reality—the references to 9-11—with a somewhat loony fantasy world?
Weller: I wanted to create some kind of stage dissonance that would be as disorienting and surreal as what I felt was happening in the back of people’s minds after 9-11. The world seemed to tilt a little. It’s difficult to achieve that kind of dislocation in a linear play. And I’ve always been interested in the Elizabethan form, where you have a low world and a high world. I’ve experimented with it a few times before, but I never found a form with equally compelling urgency in both realms—one always took precedence over the other. In this case, I felt I could imagine myself into both worlds with a sense of urgency and energy.
Cohen: In Shakespeare the low world tends to be the jokey one.
Weller: As Moomtaj is in this play, yet the low world has the most profound things to illuminate.
Cohen: Your central character, Walker, is somewhat passive and self-centered. The things that get him unstuck are his crazy, dangerous brother and this dream world where he faces and stands up to a challenge.
Weller: Having an essentially passive guy who’s got to make some decisions is not very interesting. If he’s thrust in another place where he’s forced to take action, you can examine the texture of his passivity in an activated state. The other place allows you to get inside someone that’s basically passive-aggressive and set them in motion.
Cohen: All of the characters in his everyday life have a more extreme counterpart in the other world. It’s like The Wizard of Oz story, where the nasty woman who takes Dorothy’s dog turns into the wicked witch.
Weller: It’s also like the topsy-turvy plays of Gilbert. He wrote a whole series of plays that have a counter-world.
Cohen: What surprised you as you worked on the play?
Weller: The biggest surprise is that every time I come back to the play, rather than feeling frustrated or tired of something I’m exploiting in it, I feel that a new door flies open, because at the beginning I touched something that came to me in such an unconscious or preconscious way. Every time I go back to that territory some other little thing gets unlocked. The biggest problem, as I said to the cast, is to shoot stragglers, because there’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t quite fit, I realize now. I have to be ruthless in getting rid of it and then shaping the rest. It’s now reached a formal moment where I’m in front of people who are asking me questions. I have to clarify things in my own mind and I have to remember an audience is about to pay money to get told the story. It has to be properly executed.
Cohen: The process you’ve described—pulling this out of your unconscious—sounds similar to the action in the play, where Walker seems to go into his unconscious to solve his problems.
Weller: I don’t think it’s quite as random as an unconscious. A clear plot evolves in the other place. It has crazy rules, but the spine of the adventure is very simple.
Cohen: Did you experience any disappointments in writing Moomtaj? Things you hoped would develop that didn’t?
Weller: The disappointments happen in front of an audience.
Cohen: Not in the process of writing?
Weller: I don’t do that to myself. A playwriting teacher I had long ago said the only reason to write a play is to please yourself. It’s the only time you’re going to see exactly what you want to in a theater. I took that to heart; I write exactly what I’d like to see on stage. If a play is done as well as these people are going to do it, I’m delighted when I see it. If it’s not, it’s agony.
Cohen: Did you have a reading of the play before coming here to help you shape it?
Weller: It’s had two readings, but they weren’t developmental. One of them, about a year ago, was getting friends together to read. The other was a benefit for a theater that I work at a lot. That was a pared down version, with a narrator linking things up. We had to get it down to about an hour. Because I had to winnow the play down to plot, I learned a lot about what was extraneous.
Cohen: How does it happen that the world premiere is at New Rep?
Weller: I didn’t want to send this play around and get a lot of people saying, “It’s not quite right for us.” I asked my friend Austin Pendleton to suggest a theater that was really the place, in his mind. He asked if I knew New Rep. I didn’t. He said, “Go up and see a show, because I think this is the place.” I saw The Threepenny Opera and thought it was an amazing piece of work. I hadn’t seen theater that made me feel that enthralled for so long. It was like when I first saw Steppenwolf years ago. It had that kind of buzz. So I gave Rick the play and told him I hadn’t given it to anyone else, and asked him to read it and consider doing it. He said, “Let’s have a reading and invite some of my audience and see what they say. Then we’ll talk about it.” After the reading we went to a bar. I’m not sure he knew how serious I was, and I was shy of putting him on the spot. But I think he was taken with the play and I really wanted him to do it here. We kind of edged towards each other.
Cohen: You’ve been in rehearsal for how long?
Weller: Three days. We’ve been through the play very carefully. Now I have pages and pages of rewrites to do.
Cohen: Do you anticipate changing a lot before the opening?
Weller: I wouldn’t exactly describe it as change. There’s a lot of sharpening and adjusting to do. There are a few things we discovered along the way that we’re animating and energizing. But where the play goes and how it gets there will to stay the same.
Cohen: It sounds like you’re a writer who puts a lot in and then cuts, rather than one who starts with bare bones and adds on. I’m thinking about what you said about shooting stragglers.
Weller: I seem to have two entirely different modes. In some plays I write exactly what’s going to be there. I may change five lines in rehearsal. I’ve written a new play since this one that was very consciously designed. It’s just not going to change. I knew right from the start I was writing Moomtaj in a way that was very dangerous for me. I had to grab the tiger by the tail and ride it. It was great fun and terrifying at the same time. I just didn’t know what was going to happen next. That’s not typical, but there is no typical. It depends on the play. I had one play where I changed literally two lines.
Cohen: You’ve written a lot of plays over a long career. What keeps you going?
Weller: In all of my work, I try to answer questions that puzzle me. I’m always puzzled and there are always things that are mysterious to me as to why I’m acting as I am or why things are happening as they are in the world. The only place I can have a complete discussion and get the puzzles straight in my mind is in a play. I think I write the way other people socialize. I have to go out in the evening and drink with my plays; otherwise I won’t know what I’m thinking.
Cohen: What was the puzzle in this case?
Weller: The simplest one was, could I write a play floating on the lake I dreamed about, and what would come out if I tried to? 9-11 had just happened and I had personal anxieties. I’d almost been kicked out of my office by my landlord a couple of days later; my home was being threatened. I felt I had to order all that, to find a way to shape it that—as I said earlier—expressed the craziness I felt around me in the world. Things were crazy and this lake was very still and calm.
Cohen: The dream of the lake came soon after 9-11?
Weller: I don’t remember how soon but soonish.
Cohen: It’s interesting that the dream was so benign, with all the fears of terrorism and its links to the Middle East at the time.
Weller: I would call it pacific, not benign. If it was simply benign, the dream would have left my memory. There was something deeply calm about it, a deep, deep peace, as if you had a tunnel going right to the center of your psyche. It was much more evocative than “benign” implies.
Cohen: But the Middle Eastern plot in the play is full of danger.
Weller: It has to be scary and hilarious at the same time. That’s what I was aiming for. I think that was the best way to express the dislocation of 9-11: how terrifying it was and, in the middle of it, how ridiculous the posturing was.
Cohen: The approach you took—this ludicrous and over-the-top story—sidesteps the problem of an American trying to write about the Middle East.
Weller: I would never attempt Kabul. Unless I feel I have really been to the places I write about, at least emotionally, I can’t begin to know how to write about them. I don’t have any synthetic imagination. I have a literal and a descriptive imagination. I have to have been there to get it.
Cohen: Tell me more about why you brought the play to a small theater like this. I don’t know whether you specifically didn’t want it to be in New York.
Weller: I would have been fine in New York if there was a theater this exciting, but there wasn’t. I work a lot in big commercial houses. A couple of years ago I did a big West End production. It was fine, it was sort of cool to see all these people paying all this money. The appointments were plush. But it felt like a dress-up party and my clothes weren’t quite good enough. I make my living in whatever way I can, and every once in a while a play brings in some dollars, but basically writing plays is a huge indulgence. It’s an expensive hobby. If I’m going to do it, I want to love what I’m doing. When I do a movie, when I do TV work or teach, that’s my job. Playwriting is my love, and I want to pick where I’m going to do it. If I find a place that excites the hell out of me, that’s where I want to do it. In a theater like this, the audiences are truly interested. They’re coming to see the play, not to gossip or be the first to denigrate the talent or second-guess what’s going on. They come to see a show. That’s what I’m writing for. That’s why I picked New Rep. That why I would pick any theater now: because I saw their work and it was great. Most of my best experiences have been in the small playhouses where I began.
Cohen: What else would you like people to know about the play?
Weller: I want anybody who’s thinking of coming to the show to know that it’s not some tortuous examination of 9-11. It’s a wild ride and it’s a lot of fun. Years and years ago, when I was just starting out, a French actress came and asked for the rights to one of my plays. She was very French, very coquettish, and she said, “Why I enjoy so much reading your work is because in the middle of funny is deep.” That’s the best description I’ve every heard of what I try to do.
Don Cohen is a writer and editor who also spent seven years as technology manager of the school division of D.C. Heath, the educational publisher. His articles on knowledge management initiatives and ideas have been published in California Management Review, Knowledge and Process Management, and by The Harvard Business Review. He is also the co-author of several books on social capital.. Also a playwright and fiction writer, Cohen lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, with his wife Helen and their two daughters, Rebecca and Sarah.