Julie Marie Myatt an american longing

PEOPLE
Julie Marie Myatt
An American
Longing
Her roaming characters
wrestle with unanswerable
questions
By Sar ah Hart
L
michal daniel
oneliness hangs in the plays of Julie
Marie Myatt.
This is not to say her characters are pathetic or selfpitying. In fact, they generally bristle at the very mention
of the subject: “You the Alone Police?” snaps one; “I want
to be alone. How many ways do I have to say it?” “Until you
believe it, I guess,” parry others. But her plays tend to occupy
liminal spaces—no-man’s-lands where broken people are stuck
or are grasping at transformation—and these moments lend
themselves to a certain isolation of the human spirit.
“It’s very American, that loneliness,” perceives Myatt.
“I think it’s inherent in the landscape of this country—the
settlers, the pioneers, all the immigrants who came here, all
those moving, looking for a better, new life. In that search
for Something Else is a loneliness. I am interested in where
audiences enter that feeling, empathize with it, reject it, are
uncomfortable with it. Theatre seems like a pretty great place
to talk about such loneliness—in the dark, together.”
The landscapes of Myatt’s plays are often expansive,
worn, western, American: Slab City, the demilitarized Marine
base reborn as a squatters’ camp in the southern California
desert; the Pacific Coast Highway and its parallel stretches
of littered beach sand; the Badlands of South Dakota. So
Ashland, Ore., nestled into the foothills of the Siskiyou and
Cascade mountain ranges in the Rogue Valley, just north of
the California border, is a fitting setting in which to talk to
the Los Angeles­­–based playwright, who sojourned here for
two months preparing her Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter for
its premiere at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The play runs
through June 20 before transferring to Washington, D.C.’s
Kennedy Center for a two-week run in July.
This is something of a career year for Myatt, who,
since this past spring, has seen premieres of My Wandering
Boy (South Coast Repertory’s Pacific Playwrights Festival
in California and New York City’s Summer Play Festival),
Boats on a River (Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater) and her
10-minute play Mr. and Mrs. (Actors Theatre of Louisville’s
Humana Festival of New American Plays in Kentucky). Next
up is Someday, to be produced by Los Angeles’s Cornerstone
Theater Company May 29–June 22.
It’s a flurry of activity for an artist whose work is marked
by slow, deliberate steps—and who has her sights set on unresolvable questions. “Her ear for false notes is so keen,” says Bill
Rauch, who directed My Wandering Boy at South Coast and
is now in his first full year as artistic director at OSF. “Her
voice isn’t about puffing up drama for its own sake—and it’s
much quieter and much deeper for that. She really internalizes. As everyone is throwing possible solutions at her, she
just quietly says, ‘I’m not there yet. Thank you. I’m not there
yet.’ Then she hits it—and it’s beautiful and perfect, and how
Julie Marie Myatt’s Boats on a River at Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater.
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her plays—and that’s from a very American
point of view.”
“I want to write about what is interesting
in America and what is dead about it,” Myatt
says frankly. “I hear ‘This American Life’
on the radio, and I think this is the greatest place in the world to live—then I hear
George Bush.”
Julie Marie Myatt
could it be anything but that?”
Myatt’s titular character, Jenny Sutter,
hovers in an in-between space. The veteran
Marine has returned to the U.S. from Iraq,
where she lost a leg in a checkpoint explosion,
but can’t bring herself to journey the final 80
miles from Los Angeles to Oceanside—can’t
reconcile the transition from carrying a gun
to picking up her children. “How are we, as a
nation, going to cope with this new phenomenon—women without legs or arms, coming
home from war, with war issues?” wonders
Myatt, whose father retired a two-star general
in the Marine Corps.
“Jenny, of course, is one character, but I
do think she’s kind of the unknown soldier,”
says the play’s director, Jessica Thebus. Veterans of Foreign Wars, Grizzly Post 353, based
in Ashland, served as a community partner
for the play (a first for OSF). Thebus notes
that though the veterans had different points
of entry, all essentially agreed: “Yes. This is
my story.” Jenny Sutter detours from the bus
depot to Slab City and is gently, awkwardly,
cared for by its misfit residents until she’s
ready to complete her trek home. “What’s the
arc of that limbo state?” asks Thebus. “If you
don’t cross over, if you don’t take action, or if
the right actions don’t come to you, you don’t
move on. That’s a very interesting theatrical
question—and an interesting human one. Do
you return to life? Or are you dead? You’re
in this weird echo of a place.”
“Julie’s really reaching to both grasp
and define the American spirit at this time
in our nation’s history,” says Michael Bigelow
Dixon, whom Myatt cites as an important
mentor, beginning when a Jerome Fellowship at the Playwrights’ Center brought her
to Minneapolis in 1999. He directed her
Kinsey-esque Sex Habits of American Women
APR08 AMERICANTHEATRE
in a co-production between San Francisco’s
Magic Theatre and the Guthrie in 2003, and
Boats on a River, about Cambodian sex-slave
trafficking, last year. He’s at the helm of a
new production of Boats at L.A. Theatre
Works this month. “Many of her questions
come back to a central issue about the pursuit
of happiness in our culture at this time,” he
says. “Responsibility versus personal fulfillment often creates the dramatic tension in
She’s adamant that she doesn’t
want to write “issue plays,” but she’s fascinated
by social questions and, in fits of doubt about
the sustainable life of a playwright, has considered returning to school for a degree in social
work. In her preparation for Boats on a River,
she went through a 40-hour course in L.A. to
counsel children who are victims of sex abuse.
“Children are so resilient,” she says. “You’d
never know what they’ve been through. Adults
aren’t like that. Adults break.”
The three children in Boats are played
by adult actors. They have been brought in
the middle of the night to a small after-care
shelter after a raid on a brothel led by an
American activist. Myatt doesn’t offer an
easy take on her thorny topic, and everyone
shows up flawed: The activist doesn’t know
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35
what’s best for the girls; the shelter-workers
are rendered feeble in the face of a glacially
paced culture; the girls themselves may have
preferred not to be liberated. The play’s
devastating close, however, brings home its
message: Child actors, the actual ages of the
characters—five and eight—replace the adults
and ride bicycles around the stage.
“The end of Boats on a River is one of
the most amazing things I’ve seen—in that
moment Julie says everything she wants to say
about the play without having to really say it,”
declares Michael John Garcés, Cornerstone’s
artistic director, who discovered Myatt’s work
through Dixon. “It struck me that she would
be a fantastic writer for Cornerstone. She’s
tackling really big themes and at the same
time telling specific stories. She can take a
lot of research, a lot of information, and tell
an interesting story. She manages to deal
with ambiguous moral situations in a way
that is clear.”
All that led to Cornerstone’s Justice
Cycle, a follow-up to the company’s five-year
Faith-Based Cycle. The Justice Cycle began
last year with Garcés’s Los Illegals, on the subject of migration, and continues next month
jenny graham
PEOPLE
Gwendolyn Mulamba in Myatt’s Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter at Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
with Myatt’s contribution, Someday, which
takes on reproductive rights from a multitude
of angles, such as sperm/egg donors, gay adoption, disabled motherhood and a common
denominator of money: What is the cost of
having a child? What is the cost of not having
a child? “I didn’t want to write about victims,”
says Myatt, who has been careful not to focus
the play on polar positions about abortion.
“It’s been the most difficult play to write,” she
adds. Cornerstone’s story circles, in which
the playwright goes into the community to
interview and collect stories, gave her a wealth
of material—much more than she could pack
into the play, though she’s tried. The subject
also highlights personal associations: “I want
children. I turned 40 this year,” notes Myatt.
“How does where I am in my life change the
way I look at reproductive rights?”
Myatt’s first interview for Someday was
with gay parents Bill Rauch and Liam Moore,
who have two adopted children. Rauch was in
the midst of transitioning from the artistic
directorship of Cornerstone to his position
at OSF, and at the end of the interview asked
Myatt if she had any unattached scripts.
She dropped two by his house that night
and Rauch says he immediately thought, “I
want to do Jenny Sutter in Ashland and My
Wandering Boy at South Coast,” where he
had a slot to direct.
Emmett, the eponymous wandering
boy of the latter play, exists only in its margins—so much so that, though he’s the subject, he never actually appears. Instead we get
the things he’s cast off—walkie-talkies in his
childhood home, his dog, a pair of shoes on
the beach, an engagement ring never given,
a letter to the son he’s left behind—collected
by a detective hired to locate a man who
isn’t missing so much as drifted off the map.
From that gathered detritus, Myatt sketches
a man more multidimensional and truthfully
contradictory than most characters who end
up on the stage. The play hints at Emmett’s
point of view in voyeuristic home-video
footage of his cross-country ambulations
projected against the set. (The device is one
Myatt incorporates into many of her plays—a
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henry dirocco/scr
Myatt’s My Wandering Boy at South Coast Repertory in California.
naïve American tourist’s recordings insert
him into the action of Boats; a contemporary
women-and-sex documentary juxtaposes the
period material in Sex Habits.)
My Wandering Boy also points to Myatt’s
transient, military-brat upbringing—one of
the reasons she believes place and loneliness
are so prominent in her work (on-the-road
evasion is also echoed in her beautiful but
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as-yet-unproduced August is a thin girl). She’s
never had a profound sense of home—but
she’s starting to suspect Los Angeles might
be it. She landed there in 1992 with a screenwriting fellowship from Walt Disney Studios,
thinking she would stay for a year; except
for the three-year span in Minneapolis,
she’s been there ever since. But she regrets
the lack of playwrights’ community there,
a gap left by the dissolution of A.S.K. Theater Projects and Center Theatre Group’s
play-development programs—a loneliness
in its own right. “I get tired of sitting alone
at a computer,” she says. “It’s very isolated.
Playwrights need to be out in the world, connected to it, trying to answer unanswerable
questions.” (Minnesota’s Bush Foundation
would agree; Myatt’s two trips to Cambodia
were part of a program to fund new experiences for playwrights.)
Myatt is currently exploring scientific
terrain in two commissions: a play about
extreme weather for Denver Center Theatre
Company and a Sloan Foundation–funded
work for the Guthrie about neuroscience and
love—called, appropriately enough, The King
of Lonely. “I think it’s time to abandon this
as a theme,” says Myatt—lightheartedly, but
she’s not totally kidding. The King of Lonely
could be read as a companion to Sex Habits—a scientist examines the brains of those
madly in love while her marriage falls apart;
in Sex Habits, Dr. Tittels publishes his book
on female libido while his wife is having an
affair. “Sex, love—what’s next?” Myatt asks.
“The marriage play, maybe.”
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