HAS Interview

The Hampstead Authors' Society

Zsuzsanna Ardó: Greek Tragedy, the Old Testament and Theatre as Witness –

In conversation with Karen Malpede about her play, Prophecy.

Zsuzsanna Ardó: Karen, your play, Prophecy, calls on the audience to act as witness to contemporary and recent history, embedded in Greek tragedy and the Old Testament. What triggered the writing of this play?

Karen Malpede: The war in Iraq. My memories of the war in Vietnam. The war in Lebanon in 2006.

ZA: How did then the idea for a play turn into the writing process itself?
M: I wrote a short story called Prophecy and then I researched the Abraham-Sarah-Hagar story, and put the two together. I was in conversation with Najla Said and Kathleen Chalfant, two amazing actresses I had worked with in a documentary drama. So, I had done lots and lots of research about the lead up to and the war, already.

ZA: How long did it take from the idea to the final product – the premier?
KM: A couple of years.

ZA: Could you tell us about the nitty-gritty details of your writing process?
KM: When I feel the voice of the play then things start to move. I become obsessed and I can’t stop writing. But before that, I have to write badly, slowly, wrongly for a long, long time.

I hate beginnings, actually. Then, all of sudden, or, rather, finally, at last, the voice of the play, and the voices of the characters begin to speak to me and through me and I have to get out of the way. I become a receiver. It’s intoxicating. I am consciously making choices but at the same time I feel as if I am receiving the most amazing gift.

Oh, yes, I rewrite a lot after that. I’m a compulsive rewriter, more so as I get older.

ZA: How do you structure your days?
KM: I have to teach to make a marginal living. I try to teach in the afternoons and to write in the mornings. I have two dogs because I find I need the comfort and that dog walks are great ways to stimulate the unconscious, in other words, I’ve got to move about. I do a lot of yoga. I live simply. I also like to cook. I read a lot.

ZA: To what degree do you as the author like to participate in the casting and staging/design process?
KM: I have often directed my own plays, and this got me into trouble at the New End Theatre, where I was considered aggressive and overly-involved.

I like to be very involved. I like to work with a director with whom I can talk openly and freely and with actors who are intelligent and interested in the psychological realities of their characters. I’m usually very good with actors and I enjoy actors. I’m married to an actor, George Bartenieff, who is in the play at the New End.

I am a great admirer of good acting. In New York, I was blessed with the talents of Maria Tucci, Kathleen Chalfant, Larry Pine, Laura Esterman — who are all major American stage actors and are also wonderful, intelligent people. And Najla Said, for whom I actually wrote the roles of Hala and Mariam Jabar, in consultation with her by email while she was being bombed in Lebanon, is a brilliant actress and a brilliant woman.

I was only able to bring George and Najla to the New End, but they both are actors who deeply understand my plays and my way of working.

ZA: To what degree are the characters in Prophesy are based on people you know?
KM: Well, they are based on what I know about people.

ZA: The narrative is non-linear, very multi-layered, sometimes the actors actually speak at the same time. How did you deal with the potential concern that the play may come across as unfocussed and rather challenging to follow for some in the audience?
KM: I’m telling a story about people who each have different inner realities, and sometimes I juxtapose what they are thinking. Most plays are challenging for some in the audience. Most good plays are challenging, period. Most good plays benefit from repeated viewings, readings, discussions. I don’t believe in theatre that is disposable, like Kleenex; I want plays that last.

Non-linear, multi-layered, well we are all post-modernists, aren’t we? Then, again, most good plays are multi-layered. The interweaving of plot and sub-plot or of interconnected stories results in an experience that defies easy linear analysis. If I could say it in prose, why bother to write a play? I write plays to transcend reductionist thinking.
I write plays because I feel that the experience of being able to tolerate and hold complexity and ambiguities actually stretches the audience and it makes us more human, and hopefully, more humane.

We need to be able to listen to the other and to ourselves. Sometimes, we need to listen the other and to ourselves at the same time. Maybe because I’m also a mother, it fascinates me, the hearing of several voices at once.

ZA The verbal music of simultaneous dialogue is there then to stimulate the audience’s capacity to feel simultaneous but separate emotional realities.
KM The first duet takes place early in the play, when Jeremy’s acting of Tireaseas’s speech from Antigone trigger’s Sarah’s memories of Lukas, the young man she loved who was killed in Vietnam. The audience hears the similarities between Sophocles’ vision of violence and Sarah’s memories of those war years. It’s not necessary for the audience to hear every word; what is necessary is that they experience the impact of Jeremy’s acting on Sarah’s memories—and that they feel that, somehow, violence is always the same.
Later on, a split scene occurs, again, when Jeremy’s acting of a different part of the same speech from Antigone triggers Charles Muffler’s memories of his time in Vietnam and we learn that Muffler may have killed Lukas. We also see that it is Jeremy’s strength as an actor that trigger’s Muffler’s guilt and we come to understand that Muffler will not let Jeremy back into the school because he is afraid of the truth of what he has done. Right after that split scene, there was a simultaneous dinner scene, in which the audience was meant to watch the final resolution of the love between Sarah and her husband Alan at the same time as they witnessed the growing conflict between Jeremy and his date, Mariam, who is Muslim, and reminds Jeremy of the woman he killed in Iraq. This scene was orchestrated in the script like a piece of music with two conflicting themes, one harmonic, one dissonant, if you will—one hopeful, and one, ultimately, tragic. But, unfortunately, the director refused to stage the scene, or even to rehearse it as written and she ended up cutting the Alan and Sarah scene entirely. There were several cuts made in the New End production, one at the end of Act I which involved Sarah’s feelings once she knew Jeremy’s story and this one near the end of Act II both of which were made because the actress playing Sarah and director were not up to the emotional richness of the material. I feel these cuts diminished the complexity of the play and hindered its musicality. The play would have been, and was meant to be, more beautiful, and, therefore, more healing, than it was allowed to be in this production. So, I am left with an ache in my heart for the poetry that was lost.
ZA: The play is not about the victim of violence, but about the aggressor who commits the aggression, and how he becomes the victim of his own crime. Some would argue that this puts the aggressor in the focus, and thus the play marginalizes the victim.

KM: The play is also about the victims of violence. Although, I was very conscious while writing that I wanted to limit the amount of violence in the play. We are all inundated with the most horrific photographs and re-enactments of violence.

I think violence actually turns people on. So, I wanted limited violence and maximum listening—sometimes to multiple voices. Hala Jaber in the phone call scene in Act II speaks for the victims of bombings. Mariam Jaber, when she confronts her father, speaks for the victims of occupation; both Mariam and Hala have been victims of several wars. Hala was in Iraq. Both were in Lebanon during the recent war and also during previous bombardments. Sarah Golden, when she recalls her resistance to the Vietnam War and Lukas’s sacrifice and death speaks for the victims of that war.

The truth of the text is more complex than just the story of Jeremy, although it is also the story of Jeremy. He kills and kills himself for having killed. In fact the suicide rate among American soldiers is higher this year than it has ever been.

There are some things from which a person cannot recover. Jeremy is not by nature a killer; he joins the army before it begins, and he is sent over. He does a terrible, terrible thing which haunts him as it should. Muffler, the dean of the school, kills in Vietnam, perhaps he commits a massacre, in fact, I think he did, and he lives the rest of his life in a sort of fugue state, lying and manipulating, in order to keep from facing what he has done.

I would say to Americans and to the British who followed us into this illegal and immoral, not to say, unnecessary war: that the boy and girl soldiers kill and as such we are all implicated in the murder of the innocent victims. In my mind, the phone call scene in Act II, when Hala talks about the eyes of the victims and the fact of their victimization—that scene is the heart and soul of the play.

In all the American readings of the play, that scene stood out, especially to the women in the audience who were thrilled that Sarah Golden and Hala Jabar, who were rivals, even enemies, now become confidants and friends. It’s a transcendent act of listening.

It’s odd but in the New End production, that scene was not understood by the actress who had to listen; she did not understand the power of listening to the other, and how listening to the other transforms the self; and yet I consider it to be the most beautiful scene in the play. That scene and the scene in Alan’s office when Mariam threatens her father with a mock bomb, and he is able to listen to his daughter and finally to embrace her, those are key scenes. Those two scenes of reconciliation stand in contrast to the tragedy of Jeremy.

Also, in a scene cut from this production, Alan and Sarah are finally fully reconciled. Part of the tragedy of the play is that the young people: Jeremy and Mariam are so separate, while the older ones: Hala, Sarah, Alan find ways to reconcile and Alan reconciles with his daughter, too. In part the play contrasts the plight of the young with the older generation. We made this mess, but the young need to live it. There’s a sorrow.

ZA: Did you intend to write a provocative play? Can you tell us about how the play was received by people/groups from various cultural/ethnic backgrounds and political persuasion?

KM: I intend to tell the truth as I feel it and, more to the point, the truth as my characters feel their truths to be. In New York, and Washington DC, where the American cast performed four readings of the play before packed audiences, at the Kennedy Center, the Cherry Lane Theatre, among other places, the play was received with the sort of applause that I have never before heard at a reading. They started spontaneously to give us money to get the play on. The play was also funnier in the readings in the US, again, that had to do with the casting. Nevertheless, no American theatre has as yet been willing to produce the play. We only came to the New End because we gave them half the money for the production and this money came from the American audiences who contributed. We were hoping, and I think still are, that our reception in London would bring the play to the US.

Martin Buber said the “size of the gift depends upon the size of the goblet not the size of the pitcher.” In other words, the audience becomes the container, the larger the inside of each audience member, the more each one is able to take in.

I think the play needs a better production, actually. But I’ve been blessed, truly, by the audience response. Of course, no play is worth its salt if someone doesn’t hate it, but they don’t tend to tell me.