WS

I fell into theater because I’m attracted to it — I have that weird theater gene, and I was always fond of theater. There was a period where nobody would produce any of my plays, but then when people started doing them I realized the audience was very unfriendly. At that time I didn’t have any kind of class analysis of it. By the mid eighties when I finished Aunt Dan and Lemon, I realized more clearly that theater has a more middle-class audience. It’s not like the movie audience, where anyone can go.

I started trying to make the audience part of the play. In Aunt Dan and Lemon I presented some right-wing and even fascistic points of view, and left it up to the audience how they were going to react to them. There’s a vaguely liberal character in the play, who is obliterated by the conservative and openly-fascistic characters.

I intended to get a response from the audience, and in that way they become part of the play. With any play the audience is making its mind up about the characters, but there is a bigger space for the audience in some of my plays. If they don’t think about what they’re seeing and try to come to their own point of view about it, there’s no play. The drama takes place in the individual minds of the audience. That’s the battlefield.

As I wrote my later plays, I began to realize I was speaking directly to the bourgeoisie. That’s who comes to plays. So I’m going to talk to them. And I know them, because I am one of them. So The Fever is like a secret meeting of the bourgeoisie, in which one member is talking to the other members. But I can’t go on the assumption that the people who go to my plays know less than I do. If I felt that way about my audience, I’d become too depressed. I assume they’re like me, and then I try to present things I myself will find unexpected and unforeseen — things I hadn’t thought of before. Many of my plays are meant to be upsetting, and if I don’t feel upset by them as I’m working on them, I realize they’re not finished yet.