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An interview with the playwright
Playwrights Jen Silverman and David Adjmi met for the first time when Adjmi taught a class at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where Silverman was in graduate school. Silverman remembers Adjmi instructing her on how to make a life in the theatre. Here they discuss her play The Moors.
DAVID ADJMI: I remember reading an early play of yours, which was an adaptation of Baba Yaga. That play, as in The Moors-it's not all of your plays-was crashing together genres and myth and contemporary stuff, and you created your own idiom inside it. What's the provenance of this impulse to crash together genres and time periods? Where does it come from in you?
JEN SILVERMAN: I grew up moving around the world, as you know. My parents are scientists, and my dad worked internationally for a time, so we moved around a lot-different parts of the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
So you were displaced everywhere.
Yeah, always, although it never felt like a bad thing to me. But because of that, I grew up drawing from many different traditions or stories. On the surface you could go, "Oh, this is a story from Japan" or "This is a myth from Germany," but ultimately the heart of those stories is all fed by the same thing.
It's that Joseph Campbell thing.
Yeah! Human storytelling, as varied as it is, all has the same beating heart: loneliness, fear, desire, the attempt to connect with something higher, the attempt to reconcile with our failures-it's all the same story. So initially 1 didn't think of it as smashing together many different sources-it felt very much like the same multi-textured source. But eventually I started investing in the dictates of genre, of time period, of audience expectation around a certain set of tropes. And since then, part of my desire has been to use a genre as a container, and then within the safety of that container make it unsafe, blow it up, make it present-tense and dangerous.
When you're dealing with these tropes of Victorian culture in The Moors, and then you introduce these violent things inside of that thing, it does feel more shocking.
Right! And something that felt vital to me, when I...