Return to The Poetry Of Pizza 
CSC Professional Equity Play  
Feb. 24 - Mar. 12, 2006  

Deborah Brevoort, Playwright

Deborah:
In 1998 I was in Copenhagen Denmark on a 2-month playwriting residency sponsored by New Dramatists. I was writing the Women of Lockerbie, and renting a room in a house in Fredericksberg, an outer enclave of Copenhagen where the only restaurant was a Kurdish pizzaria. For those who have never been to Copenhagen, there are a lot of Kurdish refugees there, and they have taken over the pizzarias. There are Kurdish pizzarias everywhere. Anyway, I went to this one pizzaria everyday for lunch or when I needed to take a break from writing. The place was filled with elderly Danish people and Kurdish refugees, and there was a community feeling to the place - everyone was a regular. There was one old man who escaped to the pizzaria every Tuesday and Thursday to get away from his agoraphobic wife who would watch him from the window of their apartment across the street. He would ask the pizzaria to play “Con Te Partiro” over and over, and when the song came on he would begin to weep. He was a sweet old man--very sad, actually-- and the Kurdish pizzamakers would humor him and just play the song for him. He would sit away from the window so his wife couldn't see him. I got to know this man, as well as all the Kurdish guys behind the counter making pizza who told me their stories of how they escaped from Kurdistan (Iraq) and Saddam Hussein. And while I was there, I got the idea for the play. How I got the idea for floral pizza, I don't know...but there was something about this pizza parlor, and the enormous care that these guys put in to decorating it, and to making good pizzas. And of course, Ule, who would sit and weep over pizza. At the time I thought I would write it as a screenplay - how else to communicate the magnificence of floral pizzas (?) except through the use of a camera and close up shots--but then I got excited by how I could do it on the stage. How could I do it without the visuals? I realized that the way to make the audience SEE the pizzas was by taking them away. This would force them to imagine the pizzas and to see them in their imagination. So the goal became for me to create names for the pizzas that were evocative--image based--so that they could evoke images in the mind and so that everyone would imagine and "see" their own version of “Purple Passion Pizza”, “Arabian Nights Pizza”, etc. I then took that idea one step further and decided to take away everything -the set, props, space and time, so that the audience would have to imagine the setting, the time -everything. It was very hard to do this, technically, but very liberating. This approach helped me achieve economy and minimalism - the keys to theatricality.

Interviewer:
I often think of Shakespeare's comedies when I watch this play. What would you say your favorite or strongest influences have been, for this work and as a writer in general?

Deborah:
This play is influenced by a few things. The Noh Drama of Japan is one influence. The opening scene when Sarah travels to Copenhagen is straight out of the Noh--she is the waki ( traveler ). Noh bends time and space, and I use the techniques of Noh all the way through the play. It is instrumental in how I liberated the play from the confines of realism. The other influence has been Shakepeare's comedies, and the wonderful way in which all the right couplings are made in the end of his comedies. And then I combined Shakespeare and Noh with the movie formula for the romantic comedy: boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl in the end.

Interviewer:
You have a long and diverse history in the theatre. How did you first
become interested in theatre? And in writing?

Deborah:
I am an accidental playwright. I lived in Alaska and became involved with a group of people who were starting a theatre--the Perseverance Theatre (www.perseverancetheatre.org). One thing led to the next. I started backstage - as a stage manager, light and sound technician and costume builder. Then I became the producing director - raising the money and working as the administrative head of the company and building it, financially, into a major regional theatre. Then I started acting in the company. After about 13 years of this I began to write. I didn't start writing until I was 38 years old. I knew I wanted to be a writer when I was 14 but didn't pursue it because I had teachers in college who told me, cruelly, that I had no talent and that I shouldn't embarrass myself any longer by pursuing writing. I took their advice. Many years later, Paula Vogel came up to Alaska (when we produced one of her plays), and did a playwriting workshop. I wrote something that she really liked and she hauled me out of the classroom, got me into a corner, pointed a finger in my face and told me that I had talent and that I simply had to pay attention to it. I started to write on the sly...not showing people my stuff for several years. Then, Perseverance started producing my early plays. They were OK, not great. Then Paula came back a second time and offered me a fellowship to come to Brown. I accepted, intending to go back to Alaska. But...that didn't happen. I came to NYC to do a second MFA in musical theatre writing, and have stayed here ever since.

Interviewer:
Your first-hand knowledge of so many of the elements of theatre must influence the “craft” of your dramatic writing in a very rich way.

Deborah:
They totally inform my work--and the way that I teach playwriting. My plays, if nothing else, are playable. I write them to work on the stage. I know what works, and what doesn’t, from having worked in every capacity in the theatre. This experience was more valuable than any graduate program.

Interviewer:
Paula Vogel was a "mentor," of sorts, for you. How important was that to you as a writer
to have someone who perceived, believed in and supported your work?

Deborah:
She saw something in me that I wanted to see, and wanted to believe in...but that something had been so resoundingly discouraged by past teachers that I was unable to even consider writing again. She got me writing again. I owe everything to her.

Interviewer:
This spring there are two plays by Deborah Brevoort playing in New Jersey!
Women of Lockerbie will open at the New Jersey Repertory theatre later this
March. The two works are dramatically different both in subject and style.
Can you talk a bit about how your work has evolved?

Deborah:
As a writer, I bore easy. I never like to repeat myself. Lockerbie was my journey into the heart of Greek tragedy. Now that I've done that, I want to do something else. Poetry of Pizza is the polar opposite. Playwriting is like travel for me...I like to voyage to different parts of the theatrical landscape.

Deborah Brevoort, Playwright

Interviewer:
What has been your favorite experience in the theatre?

Deborah:
I think the moment when I heard King Island Christmas being sung by a chorus. I had spent all this time in my room, scribbling words (the lyrics) on a page...working with a composer to bang out the melodies on a piano. And then Perseverance did the first production. I couldn't go up for the whole rehearsal period because I was teaching. The night I arrived, they took me to the rehearsal hall and the cast sang the show for me. I broke down and wept like a baby. I couldn't believe that all of that time scribbling words on a piece of paper in the solitude of my room could ever create something as glorious as that. I'll never forget it
 

Interviewer:
The piece that you are currently writing, "Blue Sky Boys" sounds so exciting -
would you like to give our readers a "preview?"

Deborah:
The Blue Sky Boys (www.deborahbrevoort.com/BlueSkyBoys.htm) is about the very first group of NASA engineers who worked on the Apollo moon mission. Those first engineers were real mavericks, and they used many unconventional methods to get to the moon. They consulted a wide range of influences - Buck Rogers comic books, science fiction, Greek myths, and the paleontology essays of Louis Leakey, to name a few. They basically used their imaginations and took wild imaginative leaps. It wasn't the "straight ahead scientific" process that we thought it was. The convention that I use in this play is that whatever is in the heads of the engineers is what is on stage. So the NASA lab is essentially a metaphor for the creative mind in the midst of creation. It's a wild, loopey, comic play about the chaos of creativity and the intersection between art and science. It's got an all male cast--8 men play about 18 different roles, from the engineers, to the Greek God Apollo, Icarus, Louis Leaky, Buck Rogers, Galileo, Einstein, Snoopy and others.

Interviewer:
Any advice for budding playwrights?

Deborah:
The most important thing you can do is become a “Whole Theatre” person. You need to go to the theatre all the time. You need to read plays by the fistful. You need to wheedle yourself into rehearsals so you can see what a director does. You should volunteer to work back stage, in the light booth, in the sound booth. You should take acting classes, directing classes and learn what a light designer does. You have to know how every person in the theatre does their job--because your plays have to go "through" those people before they can get to the audience. Only if you know what they do, and how they do it, can you write a play that is workable on the stage.

Return to The Poetry Of Pizza 
CSC Professional Equity Play  
Feb. 24 - Mar. 12, 2006