Hey Everyone! Dav here. Our fabulous playwright Ann Marie Healy recently sat down with me and answered a few questions about What Once We Felt. Here’s what she had to say!
What’s your favorite book?
Hmmmm….That’s hard. It changes from day to day. Today, I would say “The Collected Stories of Alice Munro” or JM Coetzee’s “Disgrace”. Mann’s “Magic Mountain” is not one of my all-time favorite books but it’s one of the books I end up thinking about all the time. It comes back into my life and into memory in all sorts of unexpected ways.
What are you watching on TV right now?
I finished the third season of MAD MEN and I just started watching SIX FEET UNDER.
Do you watch your shows online?
DVDs…Very “old school”
What’s your favorite drink?
A Stumptown coffee with cream
Alcoholic or otherwise?
Gin n’ Tonic on a hot summer day
What were your inspirations?
Oh so many! For one, I was reading Ishiguro’s NEVER LET ME GO and I just loved it. I thought it was so beautiful how he melded the coming of age adolescent story with a kind of futuristic science fiction story. In the end, it’s really just a heartbreaking story about loss.
I also wanted to use the flood of information I was getting about the digital revolution (DNA bar codes, the Google book scanning debates, Amazon’s Kindle and the future of publishing) and try to weave it around a more personal story of the artist in society. What is the artist’s role in the midst of all this change? Do we have a responsibility in our storytelling?
What was the first image in your head of this play?
I started thinking about Violet because I was taking my inspiration from Ishiguro’s novel. Now she is a much smaller part of the play but initially I was hearing her voice throughout the whole piece. I also started by trying to write the play in “exponentials” (a scene with 2 people and then a scene with 4 people and then a scene with 16 people…) It was a fun little way to try experimenting with a form that mimicked the math of statistical genetics. Of course, math and playwriting don’t also make good bedfellows. By the time I was writing a scene with 16 people, I realized I need to chuck that idea. Still, I hope there is some trace of a biological pattern underneath the narrative.
Where did the title come from?
Well I think I chose that title when it started to become clear that the play was, one many levels, about storytelling. It has a ring of a “Once Upon A Time” to it. It also references a past world where intangibles like emotions, beauty and art are valued vs. a future world where all things are quantitatively measured and deemed useful or useless.
What about eugenics (for now defined as actively shaping selective human breeding) and the world of publishing make good foils for one another?
Hmmm….A VERY good question. I suppose, again, there is the control of “story” at the heart of both. One is controlling the story of the future of a society and the other is an industry that is controlling how, when and what stories we read.
What’s/is there something wrong with all books being digital? Do you own a Kindle?
I do and I love my Kindle. I think digital books are pretty amazing actually but I find that I never download books I intend to reread over a long period of time. I suppose that fact is telling. There is nothing wrong with digital books but there is something wrong with an entirely immaterial culture. Or rather, I should say that it is worth questioning such a culture.
What about this world doesn’t allow men around?
A few years ago, there was a big stir about the shrinking of the Y chromosome and “the end of men”. I just folded that idea into the given circumstances of the play. I thought: what if? And then I started the first scene of the play.
(Additional note: I just found this little piece from NPR on a Google search but I remember of number of these news stories about three or four years ago:
“It takes a man to carry a Y chromosome, and it takes the Y chromosome to make sperm, which is necessary for human reproduction. So men are essential to the future of the species. But researchers have found that, over the millennia, the Y chromosome has lost most of it genes. What if it were to disappear altogether? NPR’s Joe Palca explores that possibility in the first report of a three-part series on the End of Men.)”
Do you eat at Panet? (What’s Panet?)
I don’t but I wish I could. (I wish it existed.) I would definitely order the short ribs.
