ARTicles: The Gulf of Words

Kyle Brenton: How did you first begin writing plays?

Robert William Sherwood: I began writing poetry in high school. Later I became fascinated by Shakespeare, and tried to write a verse drama about the Roman emperor Nero. But I was too young to write plays. I didn’t have any perspective on other people. There’s a reason why plays are often the province of writers who begin when they are older. Personally I didn’t begin to feel that I was engaging fully with how people relate and talk to each other until my late twenties, which was when I finally completed Nero.

KB: And after you finished Nero?

RWS: I knew that I needed to learn more about theater, and moved to London. My first year there I saw more than a hundred and fifty plays, fringe and West End. That was where my real education began. I began to write in response to what I was seeing on stage. My second year there I wrote four plays in nine months, which is pretty indicative of the enormous effect the move had on me.

KB: So that’s where you learned your craft?

RWS: Yes, and no. I think my most important teachers were the Classics. I actually trained to be a Classical scholar, which was the career path I pursued in my twenties. I studied Greek and taught Latin at university. But just before I entered my PhD program, I left academia for writing. Nevertheless I think my years studying ancient literature taught me how to structure not only a speech, but also a story.

KB: How does that come across in Absolution?

RWS: First, the telling of the tale is highly structured, so that an event which took place fifteen years earlier becomes almost contemporaneous with events in the present moment. I’d be lying if I denied that this structure was inspired, if not outright stolen, by studying the Greek tragedians. A more specific example of the Classics training might be Peter’s speech in the fourth scene, the longest uninterrupted speech in the play. Although spoken naturally, and entirely in the vernacular, the speech is constructed quite consciously using rhetorical devices learned from reading Cicero.

KB: Your plays all seem to focus on crime. Why?

RWS: Actually my last two plays don’t involve crime. But before that, I do seem to have been obsessed. A friend once observed that no play of mine was ever complete without scenes of heavy drinking, and the appearance of a gun. Nefarious behavior attracts me. I began writing neo-noir pieces in London. Although it progresses well beyond the genre, Absolution is at heart a noir play.

KB: What interests you about noir?

RWS: It describes an ambiguous world, an ambiguous morality. The fascination lies in the uncertainty of how to interpret what you’re seeing right in front of you, in the uncertainty of human motivations, of human words and explanations. Go back to Raymond Chandler novels. The first thing you notice is that they’ve got great language. The second is that you have no idea what’s going on.

KB: Film noir has made a comeback in recent years. Why do you think the genre has such a hold on us?

RWS: It’s about post-modernism. Our moral, our metaphysical beliefs, the fundamental concepts which define us, and upon which we base our society, are essentially word-based. But language itself has come under attack in the post-modern world. We distrust what we once trusted most, the specific words and narratives by which we communicate with each other. One of the best genres to explore this predicament is film noir.

KB: An odd position for someone who makes his living by words.

RWS: Absolution was the first play in which I addressed the problem. The experience was searing. As I wrote my own world became much more uncertain, the questions more disturbing, than they had been before. The very tools which I used in my craft were called into doubt.

KB: So in the play, the character of David is right in his rejection of word-based moral precepts?

RWS: Well, if you reject word-based moral precepts, this leaves you with no means of defining moral precepts, which is David’s dilemma. In such a world, the question of whether David is right or wrong becomes meaningless. There’s a saying of Nietszche’s, something to the effect that someone who has no morality has the most difficult morality of all. Certainly, for me, the writing of the play brought up some difficult questions, which have affected my subsequent work.

KB: In what way?

RWS: The idea that I can define something absolutely through language. I realize now that this is preposterously arrogant. In the theatre the only way to get at something real, something truthful, is by working through other people, working with good actors and a director, who can influence and interpret, who can create afresh, something new and immanent, beyond the words. I think that if Absolution succeeds in having any effect at all on the audience, it will do so obliquely. It’s not going to come at them directly with the presentation of a problem. In the pivotal scene of the play, a gulf opens up between the audience and what they’re seeing. There’s real discomfort in the audience, a sort of moral chasm. It’s only there for an instant, and it’s a completely nonverbal moment, but that’s what I want to shoot for in my writing. That’s what the best theatre aspires to, a nonverbal communication accomplished by means of words.

Kyle Brenton is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training.