Q: What first sparked your interest in theatre?
Eisenstein: Two things: a love of music, and a love of reading. My family had almost no money when I was growing up -- my dad was a Presbyterian minister, an activist urban missionary in San Francisco's inner city -- but we always had access to books and music because of the library. I was a pianist, something of a prodigy, and by age 10, I could sight-read almost anything you could set in front of me. I had an extraordinary piano teacher -- a genteelly impoverished, elderly Russian emigre whose family my father had befriended -- and her approach to music was simple: love and total immersion. She let me play through anything I liked as part of my lessons, and among other things, I worked my way through dozens of piano scores for operas and musicals. Though we didn't have money for live theatre, there were always movie musicals. I was absolutely poleaxed by West Side Story. I must have struggled through that score a hundred times.
Similarly, I fell in love with plays by reading them. I've always been a bookworm, and the public library has been a lifelong sanctuary for me. When I was 13, we moved to Cleveland. Every Saturday I'd go downtown on the rapid to the main library and spend the day there. I had a system: I'd start among the novels, then on to plays -- they were short, so I could skim-read 1 or 2 right then. Then upstairs to the music department, where I'd check out more piano scores, then finally the listening room, where they had a record player -- we didn't have a good stereo at home. In the 1960's they were still making original cast albums of full Broadway plays -- I remember listening to Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf there.
Q: Did you get involved with theatre at school?
Eisenstein: Not outside class. In high school I was pinned down with academics, and was too self-conscious to perform: it didn't occur to me that you could be involved in other ways. I took a theater class and for one assignment had to go on stage -- a bit part in a Maeterlinck play -- and I was terrified by it, I felt so awkward. In contrast, I loved reading plays aloud in class. I had an incredible teacher, Burton Randall, for three years running in Advanced Placement English. We read most of the Greek tragedies, and plenty of Shakespeare and Shaw. We spent a month on Hamlet, writing a one-page paper every day about various aspects of the play, from character to structure to prosody. It was a brilliant grounding in script analysis.
Q: And in college?
Eisenstein: It was the 60's. Life was Theatre then: civil rights, Vietnam, protests, revolution, sex, drugs, music, early feminism. I dropped in and out of several schools, had a child at 20, went to work. By the time I went back to finish my degree in psychology, I was a commuter student with a family at home.
Q: How did your first play come about?
Eisenstein: I was in my 30's, working on computer projects for a federal agency. One of my co-workers, Teddi Davis, showed me some of her poetry. We began doing some songwriting together -- her doing lyrics, me writing the music. We both loved musicals -- and when I looked around Cleveland, the one thing I saw dotting the landscape was a host of community theaters doing musicals. So I said "why don't we try writing a musical?" We began working on The Last Red Wagon Tent Show in the Land .
Looking back, it was an act of both daring and naivete. To create an original story, and try to make it into a musical, as your first project? This was the equivalent of deciding to build a Grand Prix car out of cardboard and rubber bands. But we were very serious in trying to learn, not just the writing but the business end of things. We read books; attended productions of musicals and new works at every theater in town; enlisted singers and actors to do demos and living room readings; made appointments with local directors whose work we admired, and shamelessly begged them to listen to excerpts. We went to theater conferences, to workshops, took lump after lump, and kept working.
Finally -- in, Sept. '83 -- we came upon Cleveland Public Theatre, which had been formed only a few months earlier. It was clear from the outset that it was probably the wrong place for Red Wagon. Founding Artistic Director James Levin had returned to Cleveland after several years doing experimental theatre at La Mama in NYC, and his personal interest in small mainstream everyone-fall-in-love musical comedies about 1950's female dress shop clerks was nil. I'll never forget the bizarre reading we did in my living room -- me singing through the songs at my piano while a motley assortment of experimental theatre types stumbled through our then-wooden dialogue. But nevertheless James was supportive to us, and encouraged us to get involved with the theater.
So two things happened. Teddi and I stayed in a "never say die, just learn and rewrite" mode. And I recognized in CPT an opportunity for me to gain credentials, chops, and contacts. Most of the theaters we'd had contact with up to then were well-established, conservative community theaters that already had insider cliques. CPT was barely more than a dream -- a few artists, no space, no track record -- it had produced only one summer Shakespeare production at that point. But there was a can-do attitude, the ambition to generate new work -- very rare in Cleveland at that time -- and a generous, if anarchic, openness to commit to whatever someone brought to the table and was willing to work at. So I decided to invest my time and energy to build the organization.
So I brought our monthly playwrights' group to CPT. The first public reading in CPT's unheated Detroit Avenue warehouse space was a sing-through of Red Wagon, on borrowed chairs from the Romanian funeral home across the street.
Red Wagon eventually got its premiere at a small theater in Akron in 1986; CPT produced a revised version in 1987, where it was a hit, albeit an oddity in the season. It was nominated for an area arts prize and made the critics' top ten list, but hasn't yet seen another production.
But in the process I made a commitment to helping invent and
build an artistic home for myself and other area artists at CPT.
I left my day job at the Navy in 1985 and poured my energies into
the theater, where I wore at least a half-dozen hats: grant-writing,
producing, you name it, I did it. As Resident Composer I wrote
music for something like sixteen productions during my tenure
there. As Director of Playwright Development, I read mountains
of scripts, and ran the annual Festival of New Plays, organizing
staged readings of nearly 200 new works of every conceivable type.
In short, I learned the hard way how theaters were run. CPT was
my sweat equity Ph.D in the business.
Q: Your work looks so eclectic: musicals, operas, plays, shorts, monologues -- tell us something about how your writing has evolved.
Eisenstein: In those formative years at CPT -- '83 through '94 -- I dove into theatre the same way I learned piano from Madame Prassaloff: through love and immersion. I worked on collaborations with many artists, saying yes to whatever looked interesting or I thought I could stretch from.
I began by writing original scores for 3 years' worth of eclectic outdoor summer Shakespeare shows. I was lucky to work with Emmy-winning director Robert Tolaro on my first theatre score, for Twelfth Night. It was a wonderful production, set in the 1960's: I wrote Motown-inspired music, with doowop harmonies and riffs from James Brown, and it brought me a special award from the Cleveland Critics' Circle, very affirming for a first time out. In 1985 Jim Levin and I collaborated on a wacky adaptation of Lysistrata, set in a galaxy far, far away. Later we worked on two other political satires with rock music: the Star Wares shows. The first, also in '85, had a nuclear family trying to make sense of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. Its sort-of-sequel, Star Wares: The Next Generation, was a reaction to the events of 1989 under Reagan/Bush: ecology concerns, greedy developers, the fall of the Berlin Wall, space colonization, and self-important artists battling consumer capitalism and interplanetary Sludge Monsters. Yes, it was a comedy.
I did several projects with CPT resident director Alan Trethewey, who directed Red Wagon in '87 and SW: TNG in '89, including a production of Alice in Blunderland, an anti-nuke musical. We also created dancing Dancing death, a scabrous anti-war musical revue based on a cycle of World War I poems by Siegfried Sassoon. It was our response to being sickened by "Rambo revisionism", the rah-rah heroic post-Vietnam war nostalgia that was being sold at the time, an attitude which Sassoon's work very pointedly critiques.
There was a period of much cross-pollination with artists from outside Cleveland. In 1987 I met Karen Malpede at the Dramatists Guild Women Playwrights' Conference; we brought her to CPT to direct her play Sappho & Aphrodite and I wrote music for it. I went to Maine to work with Buddy Butler on a production at Bates College of Peter Weiss' The Song of the Lusitanian Bogey, done with a South African flavor. Migdalia Cruz & I met at the New Dramatists Composer/Librettist Studio I attended in 1988. We collaborated on several short pieces, and CPT commissioned our opera Street Sense, which premiered in 1991.
Then there was a period of lots of performance experiments. Jim & I worked together on a provocative production of Marat/Sade, which he set in a contemporary homeless shelter. In preparation, he brought in Lee Worley from the Naropa Institute to run workshops with our ensemble. That was so stimulating, she came back later for 6 more months -- when we mounted James Slowiak's version of The Balcony with Lee as Irma and Colombian actor Jairo Cuesta as the Policeman. That led to Slowiak and Cuesta founding the New World Performance Laboratory as a resident company at CPT. I wrote music for a NWPL production of The Dybbuk, working with Jairo and dramaturg Lisa Wolford on the adaptation. Meanwhile Amanda Shaffer and I were running a weekly performance workshop with yet another experimental ensemble. '91-92 was an amazing year: we were studying the Mudra Space Awareness practice with Lee, doing Growtowski work with James & Jairo, Amanda and I were creating Enneagram experiments...
Q: It sounds pretty incredible --
EISENSTEIN: A very fruitful, exciting, and unbelievably overstressed time. And I haven't even begun recounting the dozen Festivals of New Plays! Or the hundreds of touring artists, the seasons of other area premieres, the Performance Art Festivals, the low-rent Vaudevilles, the constant influx of energies, the fundraising and schmoozing. I think the core group of us each worked up to 100 hours a week at CPT on one project or another, trying to keep all those plates up in the air. We were doing this on insanely low budgets and penurious stipends -- CPT had plateaued for years at around $250,000 -- we were constantly begging for money, subsisting on family hand-me-downs. I tell people that I never had to fantasize about living La Vie Boheme in Paris of the 20's, or off-off-Broadway of the 60's. I had CPT. And emotionally it was much like my childhood, where you're doing missionary work and the whole congregation is your family and there's no boundary between your work and the rest of your life.
Of course, that also leads to major burnout. I had hit my forties, and was wondering how many years I could keep up the pace. There were more artistic clashes, in part from the chronic exhaustion. We all desperately needed sabbaticals, but were afraid to walk away for fear it would all collapse. In '92, Jim and I worked on yet another collaboration, with Amanda directing -- Discordia, aptly named! -- that crashed and burned late in its process. While we were grieving over that, the landlord decided to sell our space, the building we'd leased and rehabbed so lovingly for 10 years. We were devastated, walking around like zombies. We all threw ourselves into a capital campaign to buy the building -- Jim lobbying and fundraising round the clock -- and I worked with Amanda on a piece of ritual magic: using our ensemble work to create The Chapel of Perpetual Desire, a carnivalesque tribute to CPT and its mission, to rally public support so we could save it. And collectively, we did.
Q: That must have been a relief --
EISENSTEIN: Yes. But that period of crisis made me realize how badly I needed renewal and inspiration. In September '92 I went back to graduate school -- into the creative writing program at Cleveland State U. -- so that I could focus on writing more on my own. It seemed like the right time for me to concentrate on telling my own stories, in ways that wouldn't require so many resources -- musical theatre being so ungodly expensive and complex -- or so many negotiations and collaborator compromises. I immersed myself in all kinds of writing -- poetry, fiction, drama, genre-bridging monologues, even theory; and, finally, finished my first solo-written full length play.
Q: That was Three the Hard Way?
EISENSTEIN: Yes. An early draft of the play was my Master's project. I directed a staged reading, with actors I'd known for years, for my committee as part of my thesis defense. I graduated in June, 1994, put in my formal resignation from CPT, and cast off on my own.
Q: But then you started another company, didn't you? Weren't you one of the founding members of Red Hen?
EISENSTEIN: In '95 - '96 I did put energy into the start-up of Red Hen, the feminist theater founded by Amanda Shaffer. In fact, 3 of my plays -- The Names of the Beast, Running from the Red Girl, and At the Root -- were Red Hen's premiere production. I helped Red Hen find other women playwrights via my Internet connections, and I did an early staged reading of Marla's Devotion there. But after so many years in harness, I wasn't tempted to get back into producing, nor to devoting the bulk of my energy to a single producing organization. I really wanted to concentrate on my own work.
Around the same time, the Cleveland Play House established a new Playwrights' Unit, and invited me in as one of the resident writers: they've been a huge support. And in '95 I started freelance reviewing for the Plain Dealer, which changed my relationship to many of the theaters and artists in town, and has led me to concentrate more on getting my work done in other cities.
I've done pretty well with that: Three the Hard Way, which I'm very proud of, has had 10 productions since its 1995 Dobama premiere. The shorter works have been widely produced too. Beast opened in Dallas, then Cleveland, in consecutive months. Marla's Devotion had simultaneous first productions in Georgia and in England. That kind of response has been very gratifiying.
Q: Let's talk about your "Bad Grrrls".
EISENSTEIN: Those monologues have emerged, piece by piece, over a number of years. The very earliest one, At the Root , actually sprang out of a first assignment in my CSU playwriting class. Not long afterwards, it had a reading in NY and was published in a Penguin anthology, The Actor's Book of Gay & Lesbian Plays -- a very fortunate turn of events. I've continued to write a lot of shorter work; lately much of it has been done at small women's companies or gay and lesbian theatre festivals. Much of my recent work -- including monologues and 10-minute plays -- seems to center around a woman facing some kind of transformational crisis in her life or identity.
Q: Would you call your work feminist?
EISENSTEIN: At its core, of course. I've always been happy to use the "F word", and identify myself as a feminist. Women's issues, our problems out in the world, our tangled connections, our inner yearnings: those are of most immediate interest to me. What I don't like is how using labels makes it seem like you're writing only for a certain group: I like to think my work speaks to a wide, diverse audience.
Nevertheless I'm particularly conscious of women in my audiences -- after all, most theatre audiences are predominantly women, although you wouldn't know it from most mainstream theaters' programming. I've been very involved as a theatre activist via the International Centre for Women Playwrights, trying to increase visibility of women's work. And in my own writing, I'm committed to writing candidly about the complexity of women's lives: our role conflicts, our socialization, our struggles against cultural definitions, the surprising territory of our inner landscape.
Q: Putting it that way makes it sound so serious: but your work is funny!
EISENSTEIN: It has to be, given my temperament and outlook. Life is so absurd! I love to laugh. I love outrageous but compassionate comedy, where women dare to give voice to "unspeakable" things and thereby transform their lives and understanding. And I love to write juicy, surprising roles as a gift to women actors, especially mid-life women and beyond. That to me is a both a political and feminist act, because they're so scandalously marginalized in the theatre business.
Q: There seems to be a persistent spiritual element in your later work, too.
EISENSTEIN: Definitely. The older I get, the more I've
become interested in our spiritual dimension. It's a circling
back to embracing the numinous. There's a drawback to growing
up as a "P.K.", a Preacher's Kid: you start to feel
"over-churched", and the conventional pieties begin
to ring hollow. Now it's even worse: we're up to our eyeballs
in people moralizing at us, hectoring us from the boob tube, and
religion has been coopted in the most unsavory ways. That's why
in my work, I often show how the transcendent is more likely to
sneak up on people in a unconventional manner: whether it's through
angels appearing in lesbian bars (A
Rustle of Wings), a Buddhist prostration practice (Marla's
Devotion), or enlightenment at a casino crap table.
Q: What kind of plays and playwrights do you admire?
EISENSTEIN: There are hundreds of writers and artists I've been inspired by, from the famous to the obscure.
Q: Name some names.
EISENSTEIN: Sure. Eve Ensler. Alice Childress. Karen Malpede. Caryl Churchill. Joanna Russ. Shay Youngblood. Judith Thompson. Holly Hughes. Doris Lessing. Adrienne Kennedy. Paula Vogel. John Guare. Christopher Durang. Tony Kushner. OyamO. Chekhov. Tennessee Williams. Essex Hemphill. Shaw. Richard Foreman. Verdi. Philip K. Dick. Lee Breuer & Bob Telson. I think I could keep listing people forever. I love theatre, performance, writers.
Q: What do you respond to in a theatrical work?
EISENSTEIN:
not bore me, or so repulsive they make me wish I were elsewhere, and soon
a striking image or metaphorical action is particularly important to me, a memorable moment where someone does something revelatory
i.e., something not absolutely trivial, worth leaving my warm house and armchair to see and pay for, including driving time and parking
not that each or all of the characters is emotionally honest -- they may be full of deceit and self-delusion -- but somehow their portrayal is truthful and emotionally honest, not false, a set-up, bad puppetry
i.e., that the playwright makes me care, somehow, about what is happening to someone in the play; often, the more people the playwright makes me care about, the more I like the play
that is, I care what is going to happen next, and can't foresee it an hour before the plot creaks; or if I can foresee it, it's riveting, like wondering when the emotional train wreck is going to happen
where the play makes me recognize some human truth I don't always see or face -- where I literally expel a great breath I didn't even know I was holding
There are other preferences I have, but these are near absolutes for me. If a play has a number of them, I usually like things about it. If it has none, I can't wait to get out of the room or throw down the script. If it has all of them, plus an ethical vision and a sense of humor, I usually think of it as a great play.
As an audience, that's what I want to watch, so it's what I try to write.
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