Five Questions for Craig Lucas

Craig Lucas has distinguished himself as an artist who moves fluidly between theatre and film, both as a writer and a director. Works such as Longtime Companion, and The Dying Gaul originated as plays that Lucas later adapted to films. Screen adaptations of others’ original work includes the script for The Secret Lives of Dentists, the acclaimed 2002 film based on Jane Smiley’s novel The Age of Grief.

In 2002, at the Sundance Theatre Lab led by Producing Artistic Director Philip Himberg, Lucas collaborated with composer and librettist Adam Guettel to develop the musical The Light in the Piazza. As he looks forward to the play’s opening at Lincoln Center this week, Lucas shares some of his thoughts about moving between the media of theatre and film, and gives a glimpse of what we’ll see from him next.

Some of your earliest work in the theatre was on stage as an actor and a singer. Did your on-stage experiences inform the way that you approach the writing process?
Yes. Understanding what actors do, how they approach the material, how they bring it to life, enact, inhabit, rehearse, along with knowing what kinds of questions they ask and how that then translates into something they can perform repeatedly in front of an audience -- all of that goes into writing. I always think it's good for playwrights and screenwriters, not to mention directors, to study acting thoroughly.

Light in the Piazza is an adaptation of the book by Elizabeth Spencer, and was adapted for film in 1962 before you adapted the story for the stage. Your film The Dying Gaul is an adaptation of your original play by the same name. Your career has been marked by your ability to adapt your own original material and that of other writers for the different media of theatre, musical theatre, and film. How does your approach to the material differ depending on the media you are working within?
Big, big, big question. The media are all story-telling agencies, of course, and the story is the brain of the piece: the main event. From there on, things get dicier. Having worked in theatre, I have some sense of what can carry, how to tell a story in a forum where some people will be sitting five feet away from the action and some people will be fifty feet away. The words carry more weight, because they can presumably be heard by both parties, the near and the far, whereas the flutter of an eyelid may only be visible to the front three rows. In addition, no matter how "realistic" a theatre set may be, the space is always metaphorical by nature: live actors in a lit box (or thrust) are NOT really where they say they are or we are expected to suspend our disbelief in order to believe they are; when you watch a performance of Julius Caesar, you know you are not in Rome, because you are sitting there, and you always know exactly where you are; the proscenium is normally fixed in theatre, so that missing fourth wall contributes to the sense that one is watching something that STANDS for something else, represents something you do not see -- the Coliseum in the distance, the Appenines in the far distance, whatever. So the IDEA of Rome is what you are providing when you watch, and that metaphorical relationship to the event allows all of the language and the behavior to have an extrapolatable quality that is far less present in movies, because you ARE seeing the real thing or what looks like the real thing; one is being convinced by the literalizing nature of the camera itself that a crew went to Rome and made the movie with the real Coliseum in the distance, etc. etc. So the event is more of what it says it is, and of course it is in two dimensions. Movies are less capable of conveying thought for this very reason; thought is normally conveyed by words in a linear way, the words representing things; the thinking required in transferring the mind from the word to the thing represented IS thought, plus the things being represented in their linear fashion are the LINE of thinking. In movies, what one is essentially succumbing to is the images, rather than something that stands for them, so the necessity to think (i.e., use the mind to substitute the image or the thing for the word) has been surpassed or circumnavigated; illiterate people can glean a great deal from watching a movie in a language they don't understand, whereas a printed text would provide little or no sustenance. So, in imagining a story for the screen, the eye of the writer which in theatre is watching everything through a fixed proscenium and doing the editing in the MIND is now using a portable proscenium (the camera can move anywhere, establishing a new fourth wall anywhere it chooses -- near or far) and all the editing will be done for the viewer, no work will be required past keeping their eyes open and focusing their attention on the screen and the sound track. Filmmakers who have relied heavily on dialogue -- Rohmer, Bergman, Jarman -- are working far outside the mainstream, and even their work is susceptible to the centripetal pull of the image, the primacy of seeing over thinking or hearing-cum-imagining.

Musicals are a whole other kettle of fish, because they take reality and look at it through a conceit -- that of bursting into song. The stylization of that allows for a certain inner truthfulness, a baring of the soul. Books for musicals are the hardest to write of the three -- they are the most reliant upon structure and economy and variety, imagination, humility. An entire book could be written about the difficulties and challenges of writing books for musicals. Suffice it to say that the job is completely other than it would appear to be -- it is most emphatically NOT providing dialogue to hook the songs together. Book writing is creating a structure which, at its highest level of achievement, disappears from the audience's view, allowing the story and the music to appear to be moving forward, happening with an inevitability that draws the eyes and ears and heart completely OFF the work of the book writer and onto the main event: songs within stories.

Looking back to 2002, how did your time at the Sundance Theatre Lab inform your creative process of developing Light on the Piazza?
The contribution at Sundance was immeasurable -- primarily thanks to the work of Robert Blacker; he provided the finest overview of the work we still needed to do; his dramaturgical skills are, in my view, as fine as any in the American theater. Along with Robert, we had the help of Michael Greif and a magnificent dramaturg from Ireland, Jocelyn Clark. Wonderful actors brought what we had to life, and myriad things became clear to us and fell into place. It was a fecund time.

What projects are on the horizon for you?
An adaptation of Miss Julie about to begin rehearsals, directed by Anders Cato (who also did the literal translation), starring Marin Hinkle, Reg Rogers and Julia Gibson at New York's Rattlestick Theater, a place I consider an artistic home.

An adaptation of Three Sisters at Intiman, Bart Sher directing.

A new musical, The Listener, with music by Michael Torke (I'm doing lyrics for the first time and am petrified to my bones), premiering at Juilliard in September; Bart Sher is directing this one, too.

And a movie of my play, Small Tragedy, starring (as of now!) Maggie Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Patricia Clarkson and Campbell Scott.

I also have two big plays that are still being produced outside of New York -- works that I am doing at various regional theaters; I may skip bringing them to New York. One is Singing Forest which has played at Intiman and Long Wharf and just won the Steinberg Award, the American Drama Critics prize for best new play of the year. The other is Ode to Joy, a commission from Long Wharf. I have outstanding commissions from several theaters and I hope to be able to get down to work on them at last. I love working at regional theaters, and hope to be able to sustain myself there without depending any longer on New York as a home for new work.

What are the plays, films, books, or other works of art that you are responding to right now?
Chekhov -- the stories, the letters, the plays, the criticism surrounding his work, often brilliant (particularly Richard Gilman's work).

Giambattista Vico's New Science and Autobiography

Peter Cameron's novels and stories.

I'm doing a great deal of reading from the public record on the psychedelic era for a possible movie.

The books of Christopher Bollas.

The novels and stories of William Maxwell.

The autobiographical writings of Wilfred R. Bion.

Denton Welch, Glenway Westcott, Julian Mazor.

The letters of Keats.

Jonathan Lear's Therapeutic Action.

Bernard Williams' Truth and Truthfulness.

Stanley Cavell's work, particularly on Shakespeare and on movies.

A whole slew of psychological horror novels for a possible musical -- these are incredibly fun.

A.A. Long's book on Epictetus.

Recent poetry by Mark Doty, Charles Simic, Spencer Reese, Richard Wilbur, C.K. Williams, plus some things I didn't appreciate when I was first exposed to them, Snodgrass' "Heart's Needle" and Berryman's “Dream Songs,” Adrienne Rich, Marilyn Hacker.

The movies I've seen lately that I loved were Unfinished Piece for the Player Piano and Oblomov. I read and hugely admired Anton Dudley's Slag Heap and Anne Washburn's The Internationalist, two wonderful young writers I admire and follow.