CAST Feature
Matthew Johnson graduated from George Washington in 2005 with a major in Political Communication and minor in Theater, and went on to attend the Tisch School of the Arts in playwriting. He was interviewed by phone for CASTNotes on November 28, 2007 by Lani Smith, a Sophomore Theater major
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Lani Smith
Lani: I guess I’ll start with the basic stuff, like where did you grow up?
Matthew: Well, when I was little we moved around a lot; my dad was in the Navy. But I spent most of the time in Hawaii ... we were stationed in Pearl Harbor, and I was there from about the eighth grade until I graduated high school. I went to Punahou, which is this really big private school out there; it’s actually kind of famous because it’s where Barack Obama went.
L: Why did you choose to come to George Washington?
M: I initially went to school for, and I got my degree in, Political Communication. I applied to the School of Media and Public Affairs – they have that thing where you can apply as a freshman into the major, then you’re set for the four years, and I used to be a real political guy. I mean, I still am a political guy, it just manifests itself very differently – the play [The Falling Man] specifically, it’s a very politically angry play. I think part of what happens – and a lot of people identify with this – is that you go to school for politics or you go to school for journalism, or for something that feels very idealistic to do, and the first thing that goes is your idealism. It just gets destroyed once you learn how things actually work. My situation is that I got very disenchanted with it, which is why I started doing theater because, strangely enough, as complicated as theater can be, you sort of put something into it and you get a similar thing out of it, rather than it’s all spin, you know? So that’s why I started when I was a freshman, soon after my first couple of classes; I started auditioning for student theater shows. It wasn’t until sophomore year that I was doing department shows, and I decided to get a Theater minor to keep my sanity while I was still slogging through the Political Communications stuff.
L: So even though you’d lost your idealism for the whole political realm, you still decided to stick with it?
M: I sort of became lost in the system of how government actually works. But I think I stayed with it because in politics – and in political writing and stuff like that – it’s all idealistic people, and a lot of them are just raging at the machine. After a little while, I saw myself as being one of those people. I wanted to learn as much as I could, but the idea of becoming some kind of lobbyist or something, that didn’t appeal to me. But at the same time, being ignorant about politics, being ignorant about what goes on in the world, really didn’t appeal to me.
L: Was the student work you did with Generic, or ... ?
M: Yeah, my first show was with Generic. I did two shows for them, one each semester. The first one was Rough Crossing by Tom Stoppard, which is a really forgettable Tom Stoppard farce. Then I did probably one of my favorite plays there, a play called Burn This by Lanford Wilson. That’s actually where I started getting interested in writing plays again. I’d done it when I was in high school; I would sometimes write out little scenes or something like that. But Lanford Wilson was the first modern straight-forward American playwright I got to really know who hadn’t been deified, you know, the way that Tennessee Williams or that Eugene O’Neill is deified – they’re not really real; you never thought of them as writers, you just thought of them as geniuses. Lanford Wilson was a guy who’s incredibly prolific. He writes about everything, but people don’t really know his work, so he’s allowed to just stay a writer, and that play is probably one of his best. It’s a beautiful play. We did that in Generic, and it was a really beautiful experience. That’s what I did my freshman year; I found myself acting a lot. I don’t really act anymore, but I liked being around that world and those kinds of people.
L: So, doing Wilson’s play got you back into writing. Is that why you decided to go on and get a playwriting degree?
M: The playwriting degree actually kind of happened by accident. What happened was, I was getting near the end of college, I was doing my PoliComm degree, and while I was at school, I was getting frustrated with things that were happening in the world. People who came to college in my year, it was very strange, because we were the last class that went to school before September 11th. So we all went really idealistic and immediately that was shut down, and everything became scary and weird. Whereas politics had been something you could respond to – if you wanted something, you could work it, you could get it – after that, it felt like that didn’t work, like we were on a runaway train and it was just going down the track. In my frustration, I started to write plays just to get it out. I took a couple of the playwriting classes that Pati Griffith teaches, and those were really wonderful. But I never thought of it as something I was going to do until I started getting near the end of college and realized, “Oh, I’m going to have to get a job in politics, I’m going to have to get a job in the government, I’m going to have to do something that I kind of never really wanted to do.” But I had all this writing that I’d been doing, and I really liked doing it. So I kind of made this joke with myself that I would apply to a couple schools that I never thought I could get into. I applied to the Yale School of Drama, the Julliard School’s Playwright Program – which is ridiculously competitive – and then I applied to the Tisch Program, thinking, “Oh, I’ll never get into any of those.” Unfortunately, it backfired on me, because I got into Tisch and they gave me a fellowship. I finished the [Political Communications] degree, and I had this other opportunity, so I said, “See ya! I’ll just go and do it and see what happens.” It’s been going well so far, actually.
L: That’s definitely not the typical way of getting into things ...
M: No, and that’s really been a sore point sometimes when I deal with other playwrights. There are a lot of people who write plays here – it’s such an intense way to work, and they’ve been doing it for years. I know people I went to grad school with who only got in after applying four times. That actually put me on the defensive and made me kind of feel like, “Am I okay to be here? Is this a club that I’m allowed to be in?” It’s not very typical, and it’s been interesting for me because, whereas other people went to grad school to refine their art, I went to grad school to learn how to do it. It wasn’t until the end of grad school when I wrote The Falling Man, that I really felt like I was writing anything worthwhile, and I wasn’t just experimenting.
L: How did you come about with the idea for The Falling Man? Did you want to write a 9/11 play, or was it something about the picture that sparked an idea?
M: I guess it was kind of all different sides of that. I was really inspired when I saw the picture, and specifically when I read an incredible article that was in Esquire magazine about the picture, but also about the way that the picture has been censored … it was something that people really weren’t ready to deal with, and they responded by rejecting it. That very much inspired me because, looking back on it, I saw myself doing exactly the same thing. Maybe that’s the way I felt about the fact that I had stepped away from politics, away from public affairs and trying to change things for the better – I just felt like I didn’t want to deal with all of that anymore. And maybe that was kind of cowardly. So when I was looking at that photo, I was reading about how there were also other artists – a whole lot of other artists – who wanted to deal with 9/11 and the immediate aftermath who were also rejected. One of the people who was talked about in the article – who was actually in a very early draft of the play – is a guy named Eric Fischl, who’s a really famous sculptor. He made this sculpture called “Tumbling Woman”, which is a statue of a woman on her back in this moment when she’s falling, and he specifically dedicated it to those people who jumped. I think they put it in Rockefeller Center, and after a week they had received so many complaints about it that they had to cover it with a sheet, and then they made him remove it. My thesis advisor – Marsha Norman, who helped me out with this play a lot, she was very much a proponent of it – the first thing she said when she read the first draft was, “Do you know about Eric Fischl?” And I kind of freaked out because that kind of reaction is so much about why I wrote the play; that reaction of somebody trying to deal with this, or somebody trying to examine it objectively, and everyone else kind of pushing them away and saying, “No, you’re not allowed to think about that.” That was so visceral to me, and that’s a really interesting thing that I wanted to write about.
L: It could have been really easy to just focus on Edie and her story. Why did you make the choice to include Jai and his experience in Purgatory?
M: It actually grew out of another play that was a little more personal, and that I always thought was just a really intense image. And I kind of had intended it to just be about Edie, but it grew into this other thing just because I was into the image of somebody dealing with something psychological or emotional in such stark and familiar terms as an interrogation room, and it all kind of spiraled out and became this other thing. I felt after a little while of outlining what the story of Edie was going to be about, that nobody really was trying to figure out who this person was – and I don’t even know if I really figured out who the person was or who the person could have been. Eventually I decided he wasn’t the man in the famous photo; he may have just been a man. But it was better to attempt to understand who he was, even if it’s on my terms, than to just act like it’s about us.
L: I was really impressed, because it’s not an easy subject to deal with.
M: It is a difficult play to get people in to. Some of my worst experiences with feedback are with this play. I felt like I’d gotten to a good craft point with it: I knew how to write a play, I knew what I was trying to do. And it was written from a very angry point, but I think rightfully so. I think that a play that’s angry is not a problem; a lot of the stuff that I’m writing is not as angry anymore. But there were a lot of people who had really big problems with the subject matter, because they were kinds of people who were still at the point where they wanted to push those things away.
I actually presented this play at the Public Theater as part of something I was doing at grad school. Oskar Eustis, the Artistic Director was there … and John Guare, who wrote Six Degrees of Separation – whom I have adored as a writer – was there. He was so offended by the play, and he really didn’t pull any punches when he told me so. I think his words, that I remember, were, “You should be ashamed.” I really didn’t know how to take that, but Oskar came up to me and said, “You know, you’re going to have to deal with people saying that because it’s such a raw subject. You’re going to have people who are just not ready.” And it was sort of strange to think of somebody thinking that, but at the same time, it’s also a little exciting that I was able to elicit that kind of reaction. I mean, at the time, I wanted to throw up all over the floor because there was this big playwright who was yelling at me. But I’ve also had people, like Marsha, congratulate me on it and introduce me to people who might be interested in developing it. You get all sides of it, but it’s definitely been a roller coaster of a play.
I’m really excited to see what a college audience does with it, because I think that a younger audience is so much more willing to jump out on certain limbs and to really try different ideas. They’re much more open to different ways of telling a story – very abstract things and very complicated ideas. I think that it’s very different to be young and have to deal with the aftermath of something like that than to be older, when you can just kind of file it away with everything else that’s happened in your life. But when you’re young, that’s the major moment that transforms you from an adolescent to an adult, and you have no control over it. I think that’s why a lot of young playwrights have their 9/11 play or their war play, whether or not it’s something that works. And I think that, if anything, we have just as much right to write about it, to be in a play about it, to explore it in art or photography or anything like that. I think that’s sort of what I hope comes across in the play –the frustration with that, with the walls up around that. I’ll be interested to see how a younger audience takes it.
L: So how did you get in touch with the Theater Department here to put the play on?
M: One of the plays I wrote at grad school was a play that I wrote for Cara Chute, who graduated last year; when I was at GW, she’d been a good friend of mine. Cara put it in her thesis, and I went down to see it. It got a really good response, and I know that Alan had really enjoyed it.
Alan and Nate Garner, they had both been supporters of the work that I’d been writing; they read it, and they would give me feedback. So, Alan asked me what I was working on, and I remember telling him about the play and asking him to read it. I think it was kind of gutsy for me to say, you know, “Hey, you should do it here.” But he’d been talking to me about how they’d been looking for a final show to do that was very much geared toward the seniors, because they had this really great group of actors who were going to be doing the final show, and they really wanted to do something for them. And he did actually say to me, “Do you have a play with this many women and this many men?” And I said, “Well, I have a play with this many women and a couple more men besides that,” and he said, “Well, I’ll read it.” And I guess he liked it.
It’s been really great, actually, the e-mails that we’ve been shooting back and forth, because he’s really excited about the play, and asks such incredibly intelligent directorial questions. It’s really nice to deal with that.
L: It’s definitely an inspiring sight to see a former student’s work being produced on stage.
M: There are a couple GW alumni who are up here, and every once in a while we’ll check in with what’s going on down there; I know that a lot of them are really excited about what’s going on there now, and that they’re going to be doing Falling Man, and that they did the student written work [at the New Plays Festival]. I know that we all feel kind of proud – a little jealous that it wasn’t happening while we were there, but it’s still really wonderful because writing a play and seeing it put up is one of the most incredible experiences that anybody can have. It’s one thing to choose and embrace another artist’s work. But it’s a whole other thing to see something that was a glimmer in your eye, and now someone’s doing it and trying to get inside the character’s head. It’s really incredible. That’s the thing that, sometimes, as difficult as it is where I am now – desperately trying to finish a play before a deadline, and all I want to do is just sleep – but it’s still so gratifying when you can see that.
L: Now this play you’re working on. Is it for a contest or an assignment?
M: This is something new, actually. I sort of joined this group of writers who decided that what they were going to do was they were going to commit to start a play on November 1st and finish it by November 30th.
L: Kind of like National Novel Writing Month, but for plays?
M: Exactly! I kind of handicapped myself, just because I started writing a different play that didn’t work – and I’m sure if you write plays, you know how you can start a play and you don’t always finish it, and for every one play that you finish, you have five or six that are half-finished lying in a drawer somewhere. Unfortunately that happened to me on this one, where I was so gung-ho about this play that I was going to write, and I got to about page 20 and I went, “This is never going to work,” so I had to start over. It’s actually an idea I wish I’d had a little while ago; I’ve been really, really privileged to have developed a good relationship with the Manhattan Class Company – they’re better known as the MCC Theater – they do a lot of work by Neil LaBute, he’s their playwright in residence, but they also do a lot of really interesting work and have a lot of TV contacts. I know they just did a show with Annabella Sciorra, and their next show is going to have Lynn Redgrave in it, so they get a really incredible acting group. They did the original production of Fat Pig, and an actress who was actually the lead woman in it was in one of my plays, and she introduced me to MCC Theater. They’ve been following my work and really encouraging me, and this is a play that they’re really interested in, maybe to develop. So that’s sort of what’s pushing me to keep writing as much as it’s hard to write, but there are people who want to read it who could help me to do something more with my work.
L: Well, I think that takes care of all my questions.
M: I’m really excited about the show. I know that they’re doing their auditions right now ... I’m really excited to find out who’s going to be in the show because I was a Senior when all of those kids were Freshmen, so I got to know a couple of them. I actually worked with a bunch of people who I know are auditioning for it; I directed a show at GW later on, and they were in it, so it’s just kind of cool to see how they’ve grown up and think of them as doing the play.
L: I’m assuming you’re going to come down and see them, so it’ll be a whole full circle experience ...
M: Right ... I actually have a couple people up here, people that I’ve met in New York, and we’re all going to take a road trip down through my past ... but it’ll be really exciting, you know, just to actually see it up there. Alan’s been sending me all of these notes and these questions and I’m getting really excited because it’s so hard to get a production here; it’s really hard to put yourself in a mindset of “This is going to be onstage”. Sometimes your plays just seem to become novels of a different form; like once you finish it, you’re like, “That’s done.” Because, you know, it’s wishful thinking for it to be on stage sometimes, just because I’m a really young writer, and it’s really difficult to actually put on a whole play. But talking about it in that way, like, “Oh, we’re going to use these sound effects, and it’s going to be really interesting, we’d like to use this recording ...” I’m just really excited thinking about that, because I hadn’t really ever thought about that. I’d thought about how it would look on stage, but I never thought about it actually being on stage, which is really very cool.
L: Well, I’m really looking forward to it. April seems like a long way away now.
M: It does, it does … It was almost a year to the day, last April or May, when he told me they were going to do it. And I was like, “It’s a year from now! It’s almost like it’ll never happen.” But now it’s coming up, they’re about to have a cast, and he keeps telling me all these ideas. It’s really exciting, because I’ve had productions before, but I’ve never had a production of a play that was so close to me and close to my work, that I’ve worked so long on. So it feels really like it’s an important thing, and I really couldn’t be happier that it’s being done at GW.