Samuel Hunter, Photographed in Chicago, Illinois, September 10th, 2014 Credit: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Samuel D. Hunter is an American playwright, born and raised in Moscow, Idaho. He is best known for plays A Bright New Boise, which won the 2011 Obie Award for playwriting, and The Whale, which won the 2013 Drama Desk Award and the 2013 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play. He is also the recipient of a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship (more on that later).
If you were lucky enough to catch Rogue Machine’s lauded production of A Bright New Boise in the fall of 2012, then you witnessed first-hand — and way up close — the searing majesty of his words.
Other recent Los Angeles area productions of note include The Whale and Rest at South Coast Repertory.
His 2011 play, A Permanent Image, just launched Rogue’s 8th season with a bang.
A Big one.
I asked Sam to get intimate about the play, about life as a playwright, and about his inspiration to write.
************************************************************************************************
TC: What was the impetus for writing A Permanent Image?
SH: I started writing A PERMANENT IMAGE for a few different reasons. The most concrete reason was that years ago a theater that I dearly love out in my home state, Boise Contemporary Theater, offered me a commission and a slot in their season. And the artistic director, who is a dear friend of mine, came to me and apologetically asked me if there was any way it could be for three characters, and that if I wanted–only if I wanted–it would be great if one of those characters was a lesbian because they realized they had done a good amount of plays with gay men, but never with any gay women. And I was sort of excited by the constraints, so I said sure. It was sort of this great empty container they were giving me that I could fill any way I wanted.
The other impetus was this feeling deep in my gut that I had just started to articulate back then–this sort of irrational fear I had (and still do have) that we are the only intelligent life in the universe. I grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I think what appealed to me so much about it was that it was saying that there is this whole big universe out there, so much more than just this little insignificant planet. And I found that comforting. So the play is, in part, about facing that fear–someone realizing their place in the universe and submitting themselves to it.
TC: Rich, interesting elderly people show up in your plays quite a lot. What’s the connection for you?
SH: I think I started writing a lot of older roles because I saw all these amazing older actors out there who didn’t have complex roles. I wrote A PERMANENT IMAGE a few years ago now, and it was really the first time I had written a main character who was over fifty or sixty, and as we got into auditions all of the sudden I was like–holy crap, there are some amazing older actors out there. Of course now the pendulum has sort of swung back, the new play I’m working on is about a group of twenty-somethings.
TC: How did you meet and become friends with the theatre?
SH: I used to do a lot of acting when I was in high school, I was a very socially awkward and introverted kid so theater allowed me to come out of my shell in junior high and high school. And all along the way I was becoming more and more obsessed with writing–poetry, at first. But then I started writing plays and something about it just clicked, like I found my mother tongue. And I still feel like playwriting is a way of telling a story through poetry.
TC: What inspires you to write?
SH: Usually something that’s troubling me, something that I haven’t quite worked out yet. The play ends up being a 20,000 word answer to a question I’m asking myself. Also, I find myself really drawn to characters who are typically underserved in national discourse. People who live on the margins, who don’t have much of a voice. An elderly woman in a tiny town in Idaho dealing with existential doubt, for example.
TC: What/Who are some of your favorite plays/playwrights, and why?
SH: I think it’s constantly shifting, but lately I’ve been drawn to a lot of Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill. Williams because at times you read or watch a play and you just feel like it’s unhinged, like he’s letting a wild animal loose in the theater, and then ten pages later someone might just sit down on the couch and tell you a story that’s so quiet and haunting and mysterious. O’Neill because you feel like the plays are these unsuccessful exorcisms, like the demons come screaming out but they never quite leave you. I rarely read an O’Neill play and wonder why I’m reading it, or why he wrote it. Among my contemporaries, I think there is so much good work going on–Annie Baker, Anne Washburn, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Dominique Morriseau, Lucas Hnath, to name a few. It’s a great time.
1971: US playwright Tennessee Williams (1911 – 1983). (Photo by Evening Standard/Getty Images)
TC: Where is the American theatre headed? Do you have…a fantasy vision for it?
SH: I think that’s a question for a much smarter person, or at least a person who has a wider view of the theater. I guess my fantasy vision for the theater would be that it just becomes more accessible, in every sense of that word. That the general population can stop thinking of theater as being something that rich people do on the weekends. That there is a kind of theater that is relevant to them, that struggles with what they are struggling with, that treats them with respect and challenges them at the same time.
TC: Talk about the MacArthur Fellowship you received. How is that informing your writing, and your life?
SH: I think that in a certain sense it’s taken away a lot of pressure, the pressure to say yes to everything in order to make a decent living. So in a way it’s given me the extraordinary gift of being able to say no. I’m not totally sure how it’s affected my writing, that probably remains to be seen. Along with the financial pressure being alleviated, it has given me the pressure to do better work, I’ll say that much. And hopefully I can just keep improving, play by play.
TC: How often do you get to see your plays produced all over the country? What is that like for you? Any productions that particularity shocked or surprised you?
SH: I don’t often get to see productions of my plays after the first few, so it’s always interesting to visit a play of mine years after I’ve written it. It’s like sitting down for two hours with this former version of yourself. Like sometimes I’ll hear a certain line and I’ll remember exactly what I was feeling when I wrote it, and exactly where it came from in that specific time and place. And then there are times when a production does a scene or a line in a totally unexpected way–and suddenly a production sheds light on this corner of the play that you didn’t even know was there.
TC: Talk about your time with Partial Comfort in NYC. (I love PCP!)
SH: Partial Comfort was one of the first companies that ever had faith in me as a writer, so much faith that they asked me to write them a play from scratch about three months before we were to go into rehearsal. And they gave me no restrictions, no notes, just complete support. And so in a few months I had written the first draft of A BRIGHT NEW BOISE, and we read it as a company in a little bar called Jimmy’s 43 in the East Village, and afterwards I turned to them and I said, “was that okay?” And from then on it was just nothing but unconditional support. And actually my husband, the Dramaturg John Baker, is currently working with them, so I still very much feel like part of the family.
TC: Lastly, outside of writing, and of theatre, what do you do to have a normal, happy life?
SH: That’s a GREAT question, and one that took me years to figure out. And honestly, I’m still figuring that out. It helps that I have a husband who’s also in the theater, so we both get it. But I think beyond that it’s just doing very simple things, like allowing yourself to have a hobby outside of the theater, or even taking a vacation once in a while. My husband and I are taking a three week vacation in August, which is utterly unprecedented for us, the only other actual vacation we’ve ever taken was our honeymoon. I think we both spent all of our twenties desperately trying to make a life in the theater, and now that we’re in our thirties, it’s becoming more about making a life outside of the theater as well.
For Further Reference:
New Dramatists: http://newdramatists.org/samuel-d-hunter
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_D._Hunter
A Permanent Image
Directed by John Perrin Flynn
Featuring Anne Gee Byrd, Tracie Lockwood, and Ned Mochel.
Saturdays at 5pm, Sundays at 7pm, Mondays at 8pm through July 27th.
For tix and info, click on the (permanent) image:
roguelit 