Interview with Elemeno Pea Playwright Molly Smith Metzler

By Julia Bumke

Julia Bumke: What drew you to Martha’s Vineyard as your play’s setting?

Molly Smith Metzler: I picked Martha’s Vineyard because I had spent some time there right after undergrad. Not knowing what to do with my B.A. in English, I ended up living there for almost a year. As a senior in college, I had taken an Intro to Playwriting class, and seeing my one-act play staged changed my whole life. I never went back to my previous plan—which was to pursue a Ph.D. in comparative literature—and I went to Martha’s Vineyard to be an anonymous waitress and write. I think I had read somewhere that Eugene O’Neill did all his writing in a house by the sea, and I thought it would be easy! I made wonderful friends there, most of whom were workers like my character Jos-B. Their livelihoods were completely dependent on the rich people who owned vacation homes: they built their houses, steered their yachts, painted their fences, raised their children, and stirred their gimlets. And, once Labor Day came around, the rich departed for the season, and my friends spent the entire nine-month offseason getting ready for them to come back. When I got one of those jobs myself, as a waitress at an exclusive Yacht Club, I got to see the dynamic up close and personal. There was a huge difference between the “Old Money” and “New Money” sets: club members were decidedly “Old Money,” and had been members since birth. They had their own fashion sense, their own tastes, their own preferences, and they were made up almost entirely of American royalty families. You couldn’t buy a seat in this yacht club: you were either born into it or not, and if you were not, then you were not the same. I watched “New Money” women like my character Michaela, who had married into the club, get completely shunned by the other gals; there was an icy brutality to the exclusivity.

JB: What brought you back to the idea of a class-driven comedy after ten years off the island?

MSM: Personal reasons drew me back to exploring class: someone I loved very much was being seduced by money, and I was initially very judgmental about it. But then I remembered that summer, in 2000, when I lived in Martha’s Vineyard. I remembered the first few times I was babysitting in those uber-rich homes, and the feeling I had: “Look At Where I Am!  Look Where I Get To Be! Oh, no big deal, I’m just on a yacht!” And when my very middle-class family came to visit me, I trotted them around the yacht club and the beach and the town, and introduced them to some of my new friends. They were in awe, but also very suspicious, and were eager to tell me that I was a servant, not a friend. They were concerned about me; I was too dazzled by the scene. They were right—and I had a play. Where else is there an old rich, a new rich, a middle class tourist, and a working class community all on one island, all segregated into their own neighborhoods?

JB: Once you decided to set your play on Martha’s Vineyard, what was your research process to capture the characters’ class distinctions?

MSM: Making a character is like cooking soup: a great soup has lots of individual ingredients that you don’t necessarily taste, but it’s the finished, final soup that’s the thing. My soups are generally 90% fiction. But when I start thinking about my characters—when I’m cooking the soup’s stock, if you will—I sometimes look to real people who present an element I can latch onto or relate to, and these people can become springboards.

JB: Although Michaela’s husband, Peter, is crucial to the plot, the audience never sees him.  What led you to keep him offstage?

MSM: I kept Peter offstage for one reason: so he’d be the most powerful person in the story. Can you imagine meeting him? After having heard so much about him for 90 minutes? He would be a real letdown. Peter’s so important, we can feel him. That’s real power.

JB: How has the script evolved since you saw it performed in 2011 at the Actors Theater of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays?

MSM: After the Humana production, I worried that Michaela’s character was too extreme; the audience wasn’t on her side at all at points during the run, and the play doesn’t work if you dismiss her as heartless. She became more clear to me over time: why she needed Simone so much, what she was so afraid of, what was really on the line for her, why she’s so threatened by Devon. As these things were fleshed out, Michaela became more human, more needy, more tender, and more lost. She also became more grounded in reality, so that we could really feel for her in the end.

JB: Your play centers on the female relationships between Devon, Simone, and Michaela.  Do you see this as a play about women?

MSM: I think there should be more plays about complicated, dynamic, flawed, wonderful, messy, triumphant, failing, honest women. And I think those plays should be allowed to be complicated, dynamic, flawed, wonderful, messy, triumphant, failing, and honest…and still be produced. I wanted to make Elemeno Pea about women because I feel that it’s a play about choice. And how could I talk about how unbelievably hard but important the choices we make are, and how those choices can literally make or break who we are, if my characters weren’t female? Men don’t have the ability to bear children, and I don’t think men are often plucked from the chorus to become Trophy Husbands to millionaires. So these women faced specifically female challenges. As my play examines, the consequences of women wanting more—more status, money, love, opportunity—can have a very high price tag. Devon, Michaela, and Simone will look back at their choices and certainly feel regret, not necessarily for what they did, but for why they did what they did. My hope is that by the end of the play, the audience can understand these women’s actions and have empathy for them.

Julia Bumke is a first-year dramaturgy student in the A.R.T.  Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.