The American Plan opened to rave reviews on January 22, 2009 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. To see scenes, photos and more, click here.

Playwright Richard Greenberg recently spoke with Jerry Patch about writing The American Plan. Patch has served as dramaturg on many of Greenberg’s plays.

Jerry Patch: Going back 20 years, where did this play come from?

Richard Greenberg: I don’t know. I got into Yale [Drama School] with the first play I’d ever written, and then had two plays in New York before I graduated. The second one got a lot of attention, so I was launched into this very public career. Back then, people were eager to find new playwrights. And you know…you can learn something from drama school but it’s sort of a time-release thing. You don’t really understand it until you’re ready to, and I wasn’t ready to be paid attention to, to be scrutinized so closely.

So I got into a little trouble after the first couple of plays. Then I realized after my Yale education that I had to turn into an autodidact. I decided that I needed to write plays with very evident plots, so that I could get the feel when something was working, when the play added up to something, was finished? The easiest way was when it was clearly testable, which happens with plot-heavy plays, or plays where the plot is on the surface. You can test it against reality, you can test it against tradition – you could just test these plays.

And so I wrote The Author’s Voice, which was a kind of gothic farce, and then I wrote The American Plan which has a lot of plot…for me. I knew I was putting together a lot of genres, but at the time it didn’t seem to me a problem, or problematic. I just said, “Well, of course! It’s just a gothic-melodrama-high-comedy-problem play. Why not?” I was telling a story, and you can tell when that kind of story is finished. So it was really a part of my self-education that followed my conservatory education.

JP: What about the subject matter, or the setting?

RG: I don’t really remember where that came from. I think I started writing it when I was living in Woodstock…

I saw a woman who was in her 50s and her mother. The woman I knew of a bit, and she was delightful and somewhat scatty, and, I think, in pain. Her mother was sort of a looming, late Inseb-esque figure.

I saw them in one particularly heightened emotional situation. As the mother, who was in her 70s – even 80s – was talking, I could see the daughter’s mouth working, and it looked as if
she was trying to swallow her mother’s words as they came out. And that stayed with me. It was a long time ago, so I can’t really account for all of it.

JP: What about the nature of that Catskills world you put your characters in?

RG: One of the reasons I put them there was because they as a family don’t belong there. It’s a perverse choice to put them in one of those old resorts like The Concord with all the middle class Jews from Brooklyn and the Bronx. They’re German Jews; they’re fancy, rich, and completely out of place.

JP: You've now put together a significant body of work over a bit more than a quarter of a century. Where would you place The American Plan in that lineup? 
 
RG: This is an early play. The thing is, my career was a little precipitous. I got into drama school with the first play I ever wrote and had two plays in New York during my third (and final) year. The second of the plays was a one-act that got a lot of attention. You can learn things in writing class but it tends to be time-released – you figure out what you've been taught years later. So, I was being scrutinized and I was a neophyte. I realized I had to do something. What I did – in the wake of my Yale education – was turn myself into an autodidact. I decided I needed to write a few plays where the craft was strongly evident, where I couldn't get by through wit or lyricism or some kind of brute force. So I wrote a couple of plays that were kind of jubilant with plot, where the mechanism of plot was intended to be part of the pleasure of the experience.
 
The American Plan is the full length play that most embodied this effort. It's a farrago of genres, really – social comedy, romantic drama, problem play, fairy tale, and – in its plottiness – melodrama. This is the third production of the play I've been directly involved in, and I long-distance consulted on a fourth and what's singular about this play is it's never tortured me. I mean, all four productions turned out to be excellent. The others, though, tended to mute the melodrama, I think, in favor of more prestigious values. But with this one, Mercedes really responded to that aspect of the play. She saw right away how Eva's controllingness – connivingness – was rooted in her need to protect – she understood its tragic nature – but she also saw how Eva takes a sort of regretful compensatory pleasure in her expertise. I think that acknowledging the chessmanship of the play has ended up enhancing all its facets – the melodrama comes off as part of the play's design, which is right, as opposed to a misstep. It benefits the way anything benefits when its full nature is expressed.

Portions of this interview were originally published in PERFORMANCES Magazine as a part of “The Borscht Belt of the Catskills” by Kim Montelibano Heil.