Playwright Susan Miller On Her New Play “20th Century Blues” and Hit Web Series “Anyone But Me”
Susan Miller is certainly not new to the New York stage scene. She’s a two-time OBIE Award-winner and Guggenheim Playwriting Fellow. She’s known for her solo show “My Left Breast,” which has been performed across the United States, as well as a long list of plays at the Public Theatre, Second Stage, and Naked Angels, among many other well-known theaters. She also served as a consulting producer and writer on Showtime’s “The L Word” and ABC’s “Thirtysomething.” She won The Writer’s Guild of America Award for her web series “Anyone But Me” about teenagers coming of age.
Miller’s returning to the stage with “20th Century Blues,” a new play at the Pershing Square Signature Center. It’s about four women who met one night in jail 40 years ago. One of the women, a photographer, had taken a photo of the group and gets them all together regularly for an annual portrait. Now they are reconnecting for a photo shoot for her to use during her upcoming TED Talk at the Modern Museum of Art in New York City.
Much has happened to the women since they met — evolving careers, college degrees and other credentials, love, children, declining health, aging parents, and a changing media and political landscape. A difference in opinion over taking an updated photo for public display causes them to clash, but the foursome have a strong history and connection to each other that has spanned several decades. Beth Dixon, Franchelle Stewart Dorn, Polly Draper, Kathryn Grody, Ellen Parker, and Charles Socarides star.
We talked to Miller about the significance of writing a play focused on women in their 60s, her inspiration and hopes for it, and her achievements both in and outside of theater.
“20th Century Blues” runs until January 28.
W&H: What is it like to be a woman in theater today?
SM: It’s interesting because when I started, I was one of the few women in theater, and I mean that literally. When my first play was performed, I was there with my one-and-a-half-year-old son who initiated the whole experience. His face turned red, and I realized that he had merde, or as we say in [English], a load in his diaper. I feel like the attention now — you could call it a moment — is both a good moment and a terrible moment. Women’s experiences have come to the fore.
But I think in terms of theater, though many more women are being acknowledged with productions and with press, being a playwright is difficult enough. Add any problems that people might have with gender to the mix, even just culturally or aesthetically, [and that makes it even more difficult]. I mean, we all respond to different subject matter. But I’m so happy to be a part of this right now. It’s a community in which women’s voices and people of color and women of color are really being listened to.
W&H: It is an interesting time for this play to come to fruition. It tells tales of female existence. What’s it like having a play on stage during the #MeToo movement and the types of conversations that are going on presently?
SM: When I started writing this play three years ago, it was pre-election, during the Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF) in Virginia. The play is very current in that it is of the time that these women characters had lived, but it’s also of this time. So how could I do that without having to update it? I feel like I have accomplished that in one or two subtle references.
Sometimes timing is so important. When I began writing it, I hoped it would be timely, but here we are, and I think more women are going to pay attention to it.
W&H: It’s rare to see a play focused on women in their 60s. What was the process like bringing a play of this nature to the stage?
SM: Lida Orzeck, the show’s co-producer, is my partner in life and we’ve been together for a long time. The play went through its rigorous life, as all plays do. It only had two readings in New York and then CATF picked it up for a production two summers ago and the experience of that made me really know that I had something that would appeal to both women and men, and younger and older [audiences].
Lida had seen it, as she sees many plays, and she felt that it was very, very important in ways that matter to her, as someone who supports the arts. She felt it might matter to a lot of other people. We got together with my agent and talked about her thoughts about producing it.
It typically takes years for regional theaters and Off-Broadway theaters that have chosen their seasons way in advance and she just thought now was the time. We gathered, of course, the most professional people to help us — press, marketing, and of course my wonderful director, Emily Mann. That’s how this play started.
W&H: The play tackles some tough issues about getting older. What was your inspiration behind writing about this specifically?
SM: First of all, I wanted characters who didn’t necessarily represent specific people in my life. I thought it would be a challenge and fun to try to find and develop characters who had a connection to each other. These women had to have lives and personalities of their own. I wanted to do a play about time that not only transcends this idea about aging but how we carry time within us. I also think baby boomers — I put myself at the edge of that — started talking about being old when we turned 40.
I also wanted to put generations together at some point in the play — this is a time where we have aging parents or parents who passed away or adult children.
But in terms of the women, I wanted to see how our personal histories, as well as what has happened to each of us in the world, could be manifest in a play and could be manifest in these very different personalities that we see.
W&H: What drives the written structure of the play?
SM: Different things drive the structure of the play, and I think that my trust was that the power of this play is accumulated. It’s not a gun going off or fists flying or even throwing someone a chair. It’s a kind of emotional acceleration and drive that I’m hoping and believe will ultimately invest the audience. I think that these women represent enough difference that they are compelling to watch.
W&H: These characters know each other so well, but there are also things they don’t know about each other. They are complex with rich individual histories and personal stories. Can you talk about the evolution of these characters?
SM: Certain observations the characters make or certain things that happened were based on things I know about or have been through, but I wanted originality of a certain size.
I’m very interested, for example, in what’s happening in the media, in journalism, and in the world of the written word. I thought how interesting it is to have somebody in the world with creative or artistic friends.
I also found [it interesting to have a character who is a] veterinarian. I have a dog and I love animals. I could put her in another city, and I could give her another life than [the other characters have]. That came from an idea I had a long time ago — how a photograph might somehow involve several people in a way I didn’t know. I also didn’t want the kind of writer I am represented on stage but I did want someone who was an artist.
W&H: You manage to address so many tough, relevant issues in 90 minutes. Was the play longer at one point?
SM: We actually cut out an intermission in previews. We tried it out and it seemed to work. I actually cut out 10 minutes from what it was but I am a writer who can go on tangents, and those tangents are still there.
W&H: Were you behind the play’s casting decisions?
SM: Polly Draper and I certainly met during our time on “Thirtysomething,” but I didn’t know what she was doing or that she was living in New York. She seemed so right. I felt the energy in her character from the start.
Kathryn Grody is my friend of 40 years. She did the first reading and every reading, including the production in West Virginia, as did Fran Dorn. She’s amazing. She was an actress in D.C. and then moved to Austin for family and is a professor at UT. I hadn’t known her before the production in West Virginia and I just knew I had to have her do this. Two different actresses have done the reading, and both were wonderful, but having an African American actress, a person of color, who I always wanted to play that character, having her support of it, and knowing that there are fewer roles available, that made me very, very glad.
Ellen Parker was in the original Wendy Wasserstein plays. I used to watch soaps she starred in when I was in college.
Beth Dixon is interesting and is just so right in her role.
W&H: What do you want audience members to take away from the play?
SM: The play is about the complications of history and collision with time and how we deal with it. I love people coming away not just hungering for this kind of a play or a play about women — which is in itself kind of revolutionary — but that they identify with a character or what they have heard and that the younger people will feel that they have listened to something worth hearing.
W&H: Your web series “Anyone But Me” is on Hulu. Please tell me about it.
SM: We have partnered with Hulu for nine years, starting in our second season, when they didn’t have this agenda of creating originals. We’re also on YouTube and Amazon, because that’s come about. We were in the pioneering era of web series.
W&H: Where can we binge “Thirtysomething”?
SM: It’s on DVD. It’s funny that it’s not streaming.
WH: You’ve won so many awards and have so many achievements behind you — what is your favorite medium?
SM: I performed my play “My Left Breast” as a solo performer. It was a play that I wrote. It was an amazing experience because as a writer you are the middle man or middle woman.
I also think that having this play now at this point in my life is unparalleled.
And “Anyone But Me,” which I co-wrote and co-produced with Cesa Ward — we won the Writer’s Guild of America Award. To put it out there for people to actually see — there is nothing like that, at least in my experience. We have had over 50 million views and have touched people all around the world because of the subject matter. I hope that’s what happens to this play, too.
