The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks and Martin McDonagh, Live at The New Yorker Festival

Episode Date: October 25, 2022

This year’s New Yorker Festival featured two conversations with renowned playwrights: Suzan-Lori Parks and Martin McDonagh. Parks, the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for drama, sat down with the staff writer Vinson Cunningham. “The marketplace is telling us that Black joy is what sells,” she said. “I’m very suspicious about what the marketplace wants me to create because I know in my experience where real Black joy resides—and sometimes that’s in the place where there might be some traumatic thing that also happened.” A revival of Parks’s groundbreaking play, “Topdog/Underdog,” just opened on Broadway.  And McDonagh, who is out with a new film, “The Banshees of Inisherin,” spoke with Patrick Radden Keefe. “The Banshees of Inisherin” traces the story of a friendship breaking apart in the beautiful, remote hills of western Ireland. “I just wanted this [movie] to be sort of plotless in a way,” McDonagh said. “Just to have the unravelling of this breakup be what the whole story was about.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. And this is Vincent Cunningham, one of our theater critics on stage at the New Yorker Festival with the playwright Susan Lorry Parks. It feels very stilted to read an introduction for you because I always tell people, the first Broadway show I saw was Cats as a middle schooler. And the second one was Top Dog Underdog. And, you know, it's one of the reasons I studied literature, cared about the theater. You, like, sort of are the reason I'm even here talking to you. So I just am so happy to be here with you.

As Vincent said, Parks' influence has been enormous over the years. She's still probably best known, though, for Top Dog Underdog, a two-man show about a pair of brothers named Lincoln and Booth. They're struggling with poverty with the weight of American history and their own bitter rivalry. Top Dog Underdog opened on. Broadway in 2002 and 20 years later, it's just been revived in a production with Corey Hawkins in Yaya Abdul-Martin II. Here's Vincent Cunningham talking with Susan Lorry Parks. Susan Lori Parks is the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize and Drama. Other of her awards include the MacArthur Genius Grant, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize. Her

The theater credits include Top Dog Underdog, The Book of Grace, Unchained My Heart, the Ray Charles musical, and the upcoming plays for the plague year, which we'll talk about. She wrote the screenplays for the United States versus Billy Holiday and girl six, wrote the novel Getting Mother's Body, which I'm sorry, I will pay back one day. I read the whole thing in a Barnes & Noble when I was in college. So I'll Venmo you for that experience. and she was the creator, headwriter, and executive producer for the series genius. Additionally, Susan Laurie Parks fronts the band Sula and the Noise. Thank you so much for being with us. It's such an honor.

Happy to be here. Thank you. We should start with Top Dog Underdog because it's being revived on Broadway. You kind of shocked the theater world and the rest of the world when it came out. It felt like an avalanche. Now you, of course, are working with a digital. different pair of wonderful performance. How do you even think about it living in other bodies? Well, yeah, that's a great question.

I mean, as a playwright or as a writer of dramatic literature, you know, that's something that we grow accustomed to, you know. I write my specifically plays. I mean, films are, you know, that's just for the one actor and they do the performance. But with plays, you have to write it so that it endures. You know what I'm saying? It has to be passed around from hand to hand, from community to community, from continent to continent. Through the ages, long, hopefully after you pass away and the script will endure and be something that artists can come to and embody.

And it's built like that. It's built with that in mind if it's written well. So I believe that Top Dog is written very well. And it has been done by many, many, many people. And not only men of African descent, all kinds of different folks have felt like, hey, I have a place in here. Might I do it also?

And I'm like, sure, it's your production. Go for it, you know what I mean? And so I just sit back, and Kenny Leon is such a brilliant director. And I just sit back and go, yeah, that looks good. I like that. It's very, I did change the one thing they were talking about, you give someone your number,

and you tell them that you have a home. Because in 1999, when I wrote it, landlines were the thing, right? And now I've changed it. It's the same rhythm. So you give someone your number telling them one thing that you have a home. You give someone your number telling them one thing that you have a phone. Hello. Right.

So it's the same rhythm, different words, because now giving someone your phone. phone number tells them that you have a phone, not necessarily a home. So little changes like that, but it wasn't specific to the guys. It's just the world that we live in now. Wow. Do you think metrically like that when you write? Totally. Totally. So they say, I mean, scripture says, and I am a fan of scripture, in the beginning was the word, right? But that might just be the words point of view, all respect intended. But that might just be the words. point of view because I had a notion last night in the beginning was the groove

and that I was like yeah because the groove I think comes before the word see so this is me up late at night thinking you know or or feeling thing and surmising perhaps because I do write to the groove I write to the groove just to the groove and I can tap it out it's all it's all lyrics to me

I've heard you say that your dad when you were young You moved around a lot. He was in the service. He was in the Army. He was in service, yeah. I've heard you say that he bought, when you were a kid, a baby grand piano that you took around with you. Yes.

So would you say, I mean, in the same way that, like, you know, cosmically first comes to the groove. The groove came first for you autobiographically, right? I mean, was that before you were interested in writing and when you were interested in music? Oh, yes, definitely. I was definitely started out as a, I mean, musician, someone. who loved music, someone who played music very not so great on the piano. So my mom loved jazz. They both love soul music. My dad loved opera. And he's, you know, six foot four darker shade

of soul brother, you know. He would walk around the house lip syncing to Puccini and Wagner. And we would just sit there. You're like, what is this? Dad, you know, and by day he put on a uniform and you'd go and be in the army. And in the evening, he'd come home and turn on the Puccini and walk around the house. That was that. And you'd be like, yeah, okay, the drama was right there in the living room. Yeah. Yeah. During the first year of the pandemic, you wrote a play every day.

Yes. And now, of course, your plays for the play gear is going to be produced at the at the public. I heard from you that you had your first rehearsal today. We did. And I should say that you are performing, acting, singing in this performance. Yes, I am. How, can you please just, what was the... I know, what's going on? Huh?

Yes. No, what was the impulse behind doing this everyday thing? Right. Well, you know, no, I mean, we were all, you know, March 13th, what was it? March 13th, 2020, 2020, whatever it was. Right? And we all were like, minding our own business. or at work or whatever, and they were like,

we're shutting everything down. Like, gna. And I said, I need to do something to prepare for the moment where we can, when we all get back together. And I said, I don't know what that is, but I'm going to write a play.

I could just sit at home at our dining room table where I write. And while remote schooling, third grader in the one bedroom apartment, which was at the dining room table, also. Husband there, too. We were living there.

Like all of us, closed off from each other. I just started writing a play a day. And I showed it to the folks of the public theater where I am one of the writers in residence. And Oscar used to said, this is great. Let's produce it. I said, okay. And then he said, you have to be in it.

And I said, oh, really? He said, yeah, yeah. Because I'd written one of the recurring characters in these little plays is called The Writer. So I'd written myself into the plays without thinking that I was going to actually do it. I thought I was going to pass it on to a wonderful actor. Maybe this is like a very real question, but what's it like to memorize on the level of performance your own lines? It's a little strange. Because I thought for a while, I told the actors,

I'm not acting. Like I said to them, you're acting. I'm just being myself. And then I realized, well, I'm actually not even doing that. I'm pretending to be myself. So I'm, it's, yeah, I'm not quite sure what it all means, but. I love the fact that every time I read your bio somewhere, you always say her teacher was James Baldwin. you know that sense of literary ancestry is so alive in you i love that you always um that's always

a part of the package that we get with you how i mean as a 18 year old 19 year old yeah no 19 20 is 80 yeah i'm old so yeah it was uh when i was 21 1920 yeah he taught at hampshire college i went to mount holyoke college and you could take a class in the five college area, five college consortium. And I was one of the lucky ones, the 15 in the class, around a library table. He said it was the first creative writing class that he taught, which is kind of amazing. And there we were sitting there. I was very dorky and shy and very animated. I was writing short stories then, very animated when I would read them aloud like this.

And then, and then, you know, and the characters would have been. You know, I'd do all that. And he was just, you know, he was just like watching me like this. And, yeah, well, and he suggested that I write for the theater because I was so animated. I had no desire to write for the theater at all because theater people were, you know, laudie darling, darling. They all talk like that. And here I am. So, yeah.

Do you notice any differences in how people start out in their sort of aspirations to be writers now that you're, you know, with students so often. One thing that I think about, you didn't go to grad school to write, for example. And now, so many of the playwrights that we know, like institutions play a bigger part in creating artists these days, or nurturing or launching or whatever verb you want to use. Has that changed the structure of things or some of what we think of art? I think so. And again, the footnote to this is I teach it in NYU, you know. So I have a, oh, yeah,

my you, yeah, yeah, go violence. And it's expensive. Yeah, it's high. That bill is high. And I think that creates a lot of, in my students, I mean, not in y'all, but in my students, I think it creates a lot of unnecessary anxiety. When I graduate, I have to make, I have to pay this bill. But also, the competitive nature of the institution creates a kind of anxiety that I think creates an artist, specifically a writer who is, as they say in the wall of the new school as you pass by, desperate to make their mark on the world. I was never desperate to make my... I just wanted to do the best work I could.

So I think there's an anxiety that's happening because of the way these institutions are training artists. Which is why I stayed in my year because I'm like, well, If the majority of the training is like this, then at least I can offer my, you know, outlook and my sort of say on, you know, throw my words into the pot, you know, with the others, yeah. In The Times the other day, you mentioned feeling a certain compulsion in our culture to perform a certain kind of like, whether it's black joy or some other feeling as a black writer that you were expected to kind of bring. broadcast. I just wonder if you could talk more about that. What does that compulsion feel like and how have you dealt with it, circumvented it, ignored it, whatever? We do expect certain things of certain people. And I feel like as a black woman person, writer, human, certain things are expected of me and certain

things are like looked at, hmm, why are you doing that? I have to, you know, I follow the spirit. So the thing about black joy, which I think is important, I think I love to see black people joyful on stage, on screen, everywhere. And we need to be clear about, in my opinion, where the joy really is. The marketplace is telling us that black joy is what sells. I'm very suspicious about what the marketplace wants me to create. because I know, in my experience, where real black joy resides. And sometimes that's in the place where there might be some traumatic thing that also happened. Two things, and why I feel this.

So there are two things that make me really believe this, that we ought to take another look at this sort of rejection of trauma-based stories. That's very fashionable now. No more trauma-based stories. I heard professors at certain universities have to agree that their acting students won't be in any demeaning roles, which includes any roles when they're slaves.

I'm like, oh, gee, that's a lot of my plays. Okay, interesting. And if either, I'm just going to drop one more thing, WWJD, what would Jesus do? And whether you believe in Jesus or not, it doesn't matter. That was a person who went into the stinky places. Now, if you want to follow someone great who did cool things, a lot of those, that kind of person did some cool shit because they weren't afraid to go into places where there was pain and suffering. So, again, I love a good black, joyous story.

And I think Top Dog is one. But I'm not afraid of the painful places too. On the one hand, Top Dog is about the love, as you're saying. but there, you know, there is tragedy involved. Like, what is the, what's the use of tragedy as a... What's such a great... I mean, I'm smiling because I'm writing about that right now and one of an essay that I'm writing.

Yeah, because we don't think tragedy has a use anymore, you know? No, it's only good stuff. It's only happy stories, happy endings. If you, you know, write anything that approaches, you know, something that might make somebody uncomfortable. And I don't mean the titillating uncomfortable, like, oh, I'm not talking about that. That's some bullshit, basically.

I'm going to let's be real. I'm talking about the stuff that makes you re-evaluate the way you are, the way you treat your neighbor. Oh, my goodness, I have to rethink some things on a deep level. Not, e, it made me a little squirmie. I'm not talking about that. So I do think that there is a great use of tragedy that we've forgotten about. And in the old, and again, I didn't go to grad school,

so I'm just reading plays and coming up with some ideas out of the side of my neck. But in the old school, you know, like Greek tragedy. like Eipus. Eipus, you know, you guys know Eipus, right? So that player, if you don't know, just, you know, it's an old play. Everybody in the theater going to see Eipus would have known the ending already.

Amazing, right? So it wasn't like, spoiler alerts weren't a thing back then. Everybody knew, oh, Eipus, he's really related to that lady that he married. That's really his mother. So they're sitting back going, yeah, this is going to be really interesting.

They come to the theater, knowing the story, and yet the story is so all enveloping that it's so moving and it creates things like catharsis it kind of shocks them it wakes them up it moves them to reconsider

basic aspects of their life that's cool shit you know what I mean now just eating like sugar entertainment while it's really nice ain't going to do that entertainment is going to anesthetize you and make you buy shit that you don't need so

I'm encouraging us to as human beings. We have the equipment to do incredible things. So what are we waiting for? You know, right? What are we waiting for? Susan Lori Parks.

Her Pulitzer Prize winning play, Top Dog Underdog, has just been revived on Broadway. And she spoke with Vincent Cunningham as part of the New Yorker Festival this month. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick. Martin McDonough was a playwright in his 20s when he burst onto the theater scene in London. At one point, he had four plays running simultaneously on stages across London. But McDonough also aspired to work in movies, and he eventually made In Bruges, a real favorite of mine, and three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. McDonough's newest is called The Banshees of Innesharen.

Although most of McDonough's plays were set in Ireland, this is his first feature film about the country. It traces the story of a first feature. friendship breaking apart, and it's set in the beautiful remote hills of a fictional island west of Ireland. The movie stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleason. Now, I'm sitting here next to you, and if you're going back inside, I'm following you inside. And if you're going home, I'm following you there too. Now, if I've done something to you, just tell me what I've done to you. And if I've said something to you, maybe I said something when I was drunk and I've forgotten it. But I don't

think I said something when I was drunk and I've forgotten it. But if I did, then tell me what it was. And I'll say sorry for that, too, Colin. With all my heart, I'll say sorry, just stop running away from me like some fool of a moody school child. But you didn't say anything to me. You didn't do anything to me? Well, that's what I was thinking like. I just don't like you no more. You do like me?

I don't. Did you like me yesterday? Oh, did I, yeah? I thought you did. staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe interviewed McDonough at the New Yorker Festival. So congratulations on the film. It's kind of a breakup movie. So that's all it is for me.

I mean, that's definitely the starting point of it, to be as truthful to the sadness, I suppose, of a horrible breakup, where you can kind of understand both sides in it. I think that was the balance that I think you're naturally on Colin Farrell's side, definitely to begin with, and even in the script writing stage. But the trick, not the trick, but the thing to get right was to see as much of the story from Brendan Gleason's point of view to.

And was that what it was from the original conception then? Yeah. There was an earlier version of it just a few years before where it didn't quite, It went to a plotty kind of stupid, shitty place. No, really. But I just wanted this to be sort of plotless in a way, just to have the unraveling of this breakup be what the whole story was about. Did you write the, having worked with these two actors before in In Bruges,

I mean, a very, very different movie, and yet one in which their dynamic is everything in the way that it is here. Did you write this one with them in which? mind? Oh yeah, very much so. We've sort of been wanting to get together in the 14, 14 years since we made that. It hasn't quite happened. Obviously, I work with Colin again for seven psychopaths, but I'd stayed friends with both of them. We always see each other if we're in each other's countries, and they've remained great friends. So we always hope that something like this would come about. I've been very lazy about it, and I'm taking a lot of time to it. When do you

got around to it, you got around to it? Yeah. The fear was, because, you know, we all loved in Bruges and we love how much people love In Bruges, but when you get in the team back together, you don't want to fuck up that love. You know, you don't want to do something that's lesser. You know, you can do something, and I hope we've done something that's a stranger, but definitely something that isn't not as good. Yeah. And there's also, I mean, there's an aspect, it seemed to me there's a kind of fable quality to the story. And I want to talk about Ireland. So, I mean, because you're a Londoner, but grew up with Irish parents and spent time in Ireland during the summers when you're growing up. And your parents live there now, right? Not far from

where the film was made. And so much of your work has taken place in Ireland. And yet in the plays, I think there's sometimes also this slightly fable kind of fairy tale quality. And I guess I just wondered, is the place where these stories tick, is it a real place? Or is it a kind of Ireland of the mind? I wonder about your relationship to... I think it's a sort of theatrical Irish place. You know, this island doesn't actually exist. But obviously the Civil War was a real thing and did...

It is a very interesting part of the backdrop. So that takes away a little bit from the face. label quality. But I think if you said anything 100 years ago and lean into mysticism and banshees and folklore and all that stuff, it's going to have some semblance of that kind of thing. And do you ever feel, I mean, I hope you'll take this question in the right way because I'm a New Yorker who wrote a book about Ireland myself. But do you ever feel, do you ever feel like there's a trespass or there's a license that you're taking? Is that something you're totally untroubled by or is it something that you're kind of mindful of at all?

I'm in unchobled by it until the Irish reviews come in. Then things get troubling. But no, I mean, it's like more than just summer holidays as a kid. It's like we grew up in London. All of the families around us were Irish. And so you'd hear Irish music blaring from each sides of our little area where we grew up. Mom and dad were very proud to be Irish and, you know, encourage it in us almost too much. But we'd go for Christmases.

Our grandparents were still alive in Sligo at that time. So as a child, it felt like we were half the year there and half the year in London. Obviously, La accent is very London, but London Irish is probably a good way to describe me. I don't have a British passport, which is probably a good move these days. I've only had an Irish one. But I've also always sort of been anti-nationalist and anti-patriolic. and all those things. So the whole Irish-English thing,

I kind of find a bit boring these things. Yeah. That makes one of us. I read somewhere that the, that you first, that it was kind of a breakthrough for you as a writer with plays initially that you thought about the way in which your father

and your uncle maybe spoke, that there was a sort of idiom that you stumbled upon. in the way that, you know, I mean, I would imagine in the way that for Mammett or Pinter, they kind of discovered a register in an idiom that that unlocked something. Exactly. In fact, Pinter and Mammett were sort of the two big influences and sort of too much of an influence, in fact, because all of the stuff I was attempting to write then was sort of English or American-based and very much sort of rip-offs of, you know, the birthday party or American Buffalo to a degree.

And it was only once I, but I knew I wanted to have dialogue be more theatrical than than it is in real life. And I thought those were the best two people around who were doing that. But it was when I tried to do that in a West of Ireland context, that things did open up and allowed the dialogue and the characters even to be a bit more poetic and heightened than the everyday London kind of stuff that I was trying to do. I wanted to ask you, because you've had this fascinating career

where you started with plays. And then moved into film and have continued to do both. But I went back and I started reading these interviews that you did early in your career, 25 years ago. You suddenly burst onto the scene, this young guy in his 20s. You'd written seven plays in less than a year and just came out of nowhere. And there were these amazing interviews where you would talk to people who were clearly filled with a kind of wonder and envy. And they would say, like, you know, you're the first person since Shakespeare to have four shows. simultaneously in London. Like, how do you do it? And your reaction was always, eh, theater's fine.

What I really want to do is get into movies. And you could feel they were so kind of crestfallen. I feel terrible because I know Fenton O'Toole, but I have to quote you this. This is you and Fenton O'Toole in 1998 for Baum magazine. You said, I would be unhappy if I wrote 90 good plays and didn't make a good film. But if I made one good film, if I made one brilliant film, one really, really good film, I'd be happy. One would be enough. And then you say, like, clearly you're kind of... What an arrogant little dick, I don't know.

No, what I love is that... Fenton, who's there, and he's like, he's celebrating your, you know, budding career as a playwright. Clearly, there was something going on in his face. Because you then say, you really love theater, maybe, to him. And Fenton says, I do. Oh, sweet Fenton. So here's what I...

And his love of theater. Here's exactly, right? Here's what I wondered, is I wonder a couple of things. I mean, one is when you sit down to write something, how do you know if it's a movie or a play? If it's got four characters and it's inside, it's a plate. And if it doesn't have any donkeys or dogs, cats, it could go in the way. Cats, you can manage, yeah, yeah.

And you said to The Guardian recently that you, you may want to devote the remainder of your career, chiefly, to films. Well, it's something, weirdly, it kind of, it's, I don't know if it's just because Brendan Gleason's character is on my mind, but definitely during COVID, um, one does, you know, think of time passing and how much time you've got left. And I've sort of discovered as years gone by that it takes as much time or longer to do a play to get it on, you know, off West End in London to West End to off Broadway to hear. That will be like four years or so, whereas, you know, we've made this last year and it's out now.

So to take care of a play from start to finish does, you know, take a similar round of time. I do feel like, you know, the plays that we got good, like 25 years ago, you can't see them. They're all gone, you know, forever. And there's a sadness to that, I feel. And as the years go, I always, as much as I used to slide plays off, I do love them if they're done my way. No, if they're done in a certain way,

you know, Pinter's way or early mammoth's way or whatever. But now I'm not going to swear off plays because if I get a good play idea, I'll jump into it. But if I'm seriously thinking about if you, you know, you've got 20 years, 30 years left, you know, a film every couple of years is going to last more than play well. How do you decide on the setting of your movies and how do you do the research? Well, for this one, certainly, my parents lived just across the bay from the Aran Island.

And that whole area of the West, Connemara up through Sligo and Mayo is all the way down to Cork and Kerry. the whole west is, I sound like the Irish tourist board now too, but it is the most beautiful part of the country, I think. And I always wanted to set something there and capture the beauty of it. With three billboards. Also, it was to try and capture almost an old American small town with like a street that's kind of both sides close together and, you know, a one-horse sort of town.

So location is always, and obviously Bruges was a character. I do like the locations to be characters in the movies as much as possible. When you watched the film for the first time, did you find it sadder or more hopeful than you were originally anticipated? I think I was always trying to make it as sad as possible. Once it's finished, I don't think I've got enough distance to know where it lies right now.

Maybe I'll ask people afterwards. Who actually show our hands, who is going to be sad or hopeful? Who think it's a sad film? Oh, shit. Mission accomplished. Any hope out there? Oh, wow.

Okay. So that's... I guess it's a sad film. We're definitely not going to win the Oscar. Thank you so much, Martin, for coming. Thank you to all of you for coming to the New Yorker Festival. Good night. The New Yorker's Patrick Radden-Keefe,

speaking with director and screenwriter Martin McDonough. And we'll be bringing you more conversations from the New Yorker Festival this fall, including my conversation with Bono, the lead singer of you too. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for listening today. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour

is a co-production of WNYC. Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of tune arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato and Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Breda Green, Callalia, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gauphin and Putabwele. Along with Jeffrey Masters, Willi, Jenny Lawton, and Michael May. And we had assistance from Harrison Keithline and James Napoli. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Trina Endowment Fund.