Real lives

Playwright Emily Mann's 'theater of testimony'

by Bill Rodriguez

There's never been a question of theater being an ego trip for Emily Mann, and not just because she isn't an actor. The playwright, 47, has spent her life creating what she calls the "theater of testimony," standing in artful silence as real-life characters walk the stage of their own lives and recount experiences that thrum with social and dramatic import. Her play Having Our Say, the biography of African-American centenarians Bessie and Sadie Delany, received two encore extensions at Trinity Repertory Company in 1997, and for the last two years has been the most frequently produced play in America.

Her first fiction adaptation, of the Isaac Bashevis Singer novel Meshugah, is being produced at Trinity February 25-April 9 and directed by Oskar Eustis. Like Mann's first play, the 1977 Annulla Allen: An Autobiography, it is about Holocaust survivors, this time a love story and tragi-comic examination of the heavy costs of survival.

The play premiered in 1998, under her direction, at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey, where she has been artistic director since 1990 and earned a Tony in 1994 for best regional theater. Earlier she was associate director at the prestigious Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis.

Before the remarkable response to Having Our Say, Mann was best known for Execution of Justice, the play about the murders of Harvey Milk, the first gay supervisor in San Francisco, and the city's mayor, by homophobe Dan White, of the infamous "Twinkie defense." All of Mann's plays have been done in a documentary style, whether the focus is on the violent Vietnam vet of Still Life: A Documentary (1980) or the killings of five anti-KKK protesters in Greensboro -- A Requiem (1996).

Mann spoke by phone recently about the Trinity production and her approach to theater:

Q: Did your interest in theater have its own genesis, or did you see theater as a means of furthering the work of your historian father, which involved collecting Holocaust accounts?
A: I don't know how to answer that. I've been making theater since I was 14 years old. Before that I was writing poetry and short stories. So in a way you'll probably have to put me down on a couch for years (laughs) to figure out the genesis of all of this. Certainly my interest in things that have to do with my heritage, my mother's family, my father's family and the plight of Jews in Europe comes from deep family roots and from knowing people as I got older who were refugees. Because Singer was my father's favorite author, I'm sure that's why I read Singer. But I think he would have astonished me whenever I read him. I started quite young reading him, but I went through almost all of his novels back-to-back one summer three years ago, and they have changed me -- they've marked me forever.

Q: Have you at any point considered doing straight documentaries, films?
A: I have, actually. I've been interested in that in the past. I don't think I would do that now. Probably if I do film directing now it will be of the feature variety. We did a movie of the week for Having Our Say. I didn't direct it but I did the screenplay for that. I'm more interested in taking some of my plays and making movies out of them, or doing more fiction work. I think probably the next thing I'll be writing is fiction. Of course, nothing is fiction -- like I.B. Singer said, "Nothing I write is fiction. I just listen well." I think that's probably where I'm going.

Q: What prompted you to adapt Meshugah?
A: It was that summer when I was reading all of Singer. This was a story I could not get out of my mind, it was just unshakable. I said, "You know, I've got a free week here. Let me see what happens. If I can write five pages of a play maybe I'll look to see about doing this in the next couple of years." Five pages came out in one morning. And then I couldn't stop. I called the theater and said, "Sorry, guys. Can you not disturb me till I get a draft of this out?" They said they would oblige and only call me for emergencies, and I got a first draft in five weeks. It just came pouring out of me.

Q: What fascinated you about that particular story, since you were familiar with his entire oeuvre by that point?
A: With Singer there are the refugee stories and then the immigrant-in-America stories. And I guess I knew those people in New York. I knew those characters. I knew those people. That intrigued me at first, because many of them are dying out and I wanted to somehow bring them back to life, if you will, and have them onstage live, before they were gone forever. And then this story affected me a great deal. And certainly we see that outside of the Jewish context, we see that all over the world right now: How do you go on when you have known the brutality and cruelty of man and war, how do you live with that? How do you continue to live and love and put one foot in front of the other -- how do you do that? That's one question the play has.

There's the other question of where do you draw the line about what you will do in order to survive? At one point is that no longer ethical? At what point is it better that you should die? Can you ever make that decision? Can you ever judge people who've had to make that decision? Similarly, how do you love after having gone through the worst? And how, on the other hand, do you love somebody who's been through the worst and made certain choices to live? How can you judge them? Can you judge them? Do you judge them? Hard questions to answer. I don't think there are answers, but they are very important questions to ask.

Q: In writing your plays, were there any you almost threw your hands up over?
A: Oh, sure. I would say that's true of almost all of them.

Q: Well, they seem so inevitable afterwards, when they're accomplished and fully shaped.
A: Yeah. Inevitable, that's a good word. Very good word. But this one has, I think, an extraordinary power over me. I was away from it for a while and then had the opportunity to watch Oskar working with the actors. Did quite a bit of rewriting as well. It's been very exciting.

Q: Was it mainly trimming?
A: Yeah, mainly trimming. That's made a huge difference. It's great to just be the writer on it. I directed the last production. Now I was able to just sit back and watch them do some just beautiful work.