The playwright Anne Washburn is slight and unassuming, lank of hair, pale of face. As she sits in a Dominican diner near her Brooklyn apartment, the most eye-catching thing about her is a swirl of pink pickled onions adorning her breakfast of cassava and eggs. If she were a superhero, this secret identity would have everyone fooled.
Here’s the funny thing: Washburn is a superhero of sorts. She has distinguished herself as one of the most formally experimental and stylistically innovative writers of her generation. This season in New York she’ll premiere two wildly dissimilar plays, a relatively faithful “transadaptation” of Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis, which is in previews at Classic Stage Company, and Antlia Pneumatica, a play that begins as a Big Chill-ish reunion and warms into something much stranger. It’s still in draft form, in anticipation of a run at Playwrights Horizons in the spring.
No two Washburn plays are especially alike, though to her they feel “embarrassingly all very similar”. Trying to find some overlap between Iphigenia at Aulis and Antlia Pneumatica, she posits: “Maybe they’re intimate stories in the context of slightly larger implications.” But there are commonalities: a searching intellect, a playful attitude toward genre and structure, and a comfort in dispensing with elements that most writers consider essential. Like a protagonist. Or an overarching plot. Or decent lighting. Her plays attempt to defamiliarise the ordinary or to make the fantastic seem quotidian.
She has a play that takes place in the dark; a play that takes place at rehearsal; a play that takes place largely in an invented language and one, Mr Burns, a Post-Electric Play, which imagines old Simpsons episodes as the origin stories of a post-apocalyptic society. It earned fiercely divergent reviews and audience responses when it played London’s Almeida Theatre after its New York debut (the Telegraph described it as “three hours of utter hell”).
Washburn’s own origin story is less imaginative. She grew up in Berkeley, California, and saw little theatre beyond school plays. She acted a little and wrote a lot of poetry, but it wasn’t until university that she ever tried any playwriting. As a first-year student at Reed College, she was acting in a senior’s thesis production, a play based on the Oresteia. She had a crush on him and so, to get his attention, she wrote a parody of it. Even that first sketch felt, she says, “like what my brain was meant to do”.
After school she made her way back to Portland, Oregon, and temped and wrote and temped some more until she was admitted to the graduate program in dramatic writing in NYU. Actually, it took a few more years before she could give up the temping. The plays that have emerged since grow from a “notion” or a “question” or “an experiment”. Often there are songs.
She is taking a turn toward the classical with Iphigenia in Aulis, a comparatively straightforward adaptation of Euripides’s final play, which concerns Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter at the onset of the Trojan war. It’s her second transadaptation, following an earlier version of Euripides’s Orestes. She worked from previous translations (she has tried on a couple of occasions to learn ancient Greek and has failed) in an effort to make what would have been available to those Athenians available to us.
“Call it a collaboration,” she says: between Euripides, the son or nephew who finished the play when he died, the revisers a century later and everyone who has mistranslated or miscopied it ever since. Her adaptation is mostly faithful, though she allows herself the occasional “great line”, she says, “in the spirit that these things have been messed with for centuries and centuries and centuries”.
She doesn’t need to rejigger or unsettle the formation, because the structure of a Greek drama – with its presentational monologues and violent offstage action and philosophical songs – is already weird enough. “The thing that I love about this play is that there’s a story, which is really gripping,” she says, “and then there’s singing and dancing.”
She finds Agamemnon’s ambivalence particularly fascinating. “He wants two things that are absolutely incommensurate and in failing to really decide for or against one of them a decision ends up being made for him,” she says. “It describes how we contend with what has most meaning for us. And if we don’t get a grip on that, we can end up losing things that mean everything to us.”
Washburn describes this “mental dynamic” as “sophisticated and completely modern”. It’s a curious observation, because what Washburn doesn’t write are plays that are primarily about modern human psychology, modern human relationships. She says she is “obsessed with character”, but it doesn’t seem to occupy her nearly as much as story or theme or form.
That may change, she claims. She’s working on a play now, she says, “which is all about characters, which is all about relationships”.
It is about Nero and Seneca – and it is 12 hours long.
