1/9/2024 0 Comments Tracy letts play on broadway![]() ![]() GERWIG: It’s interesting, this delay, as a writer, in terms of when you make something and when the work actually comes out. It addresses just how we got here: How did we get to this place we’re at right now? I’m not writing about this political moment, though I think in some ways the play does address it because it deals with history. I’m not writing about Republicans and Democrats. I’m not actually writing about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. When the election results came in, which was not anything I anticipated, it was a job to keep the blinders on and keep writing. I had started writing the play during the 2016 election, but it really wasn’t about that. I’m pretty conscious of that, I have to say-every time we throw out food or the casual ways in which we live with great comfort and take that for granted. The way we function with it, the way we move forward through a day, through our lives, knowing what we know about our history, knowing the things that we have learned or unlearned or learned wrong about who we are and how we got here. For me, The Minutes was a way to look at how we write and pass along our history. LETTS: The impulse of the town hall meeting was, of course, to take something very small and specific and hope that it represents a larger idea. GERWIG: You take a town hall meeting and spin it until we see the underside of it. Something about it is a little horrifying. It’s just a rote repetition of sounds we learned as little kids. There’s something about all those people standing up and facing the flag and putting their hands on their hearts and reciting the words that in some ways have been stripped of their meaning. So we just started saying the actual Pledge of Allegiance. I had written a fictional Pledge of Allegiance for that scene and then, when we ran through it, I thought it seemed really self-conscious. There’s a moment in the play when they say the Pledge of Allegiance. I’ve been wondering, do you find horror in procedure? GERWIG: It reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem in the way that it’s both a procedural and a horror. LETTS: Once we put it up on its feet, and I saw it in production at Steppenwolf, I thought, “Oh, it really does work.” But maybe, to what you’re saying, there’s a connection between thinking something is dumb and it actually being great. GERWIG: I definitely felt while reading it that it was a major work from you. She wrote back, “I think it’s your best play,” which was not what I was expecting. I sent it on to Anna Shapiro and told her it was no good. LETTS: When I finished writing it, I turned to Carrie and said, “This is no good.” I immediately knew it didn’t work. ![]() I remember being horrified by it and dazzled by it in equal measure. We’re here to talk about your magnificent new play, The Minutes, which I read a few years ago right after we did Lady Bird. ![]() TRACY LETTS: Greta, since people are listening to us, please don’t say all the dirty things you normally say when we talk to each other. They spoke about Death of a Salesman, the death of Edward Albee, and how a playwright’s job isn’t so much predicting the future as it is paying attention. He took a break from play rehearsals in Chicago to talk to a triple threat, the director, screenwriter, and actor Greta Gerwig (Letts appeared as the humbled, even-keeled father in Gerwig’s directorial debut, Lady Bird, and as the salty publisher in her second film, Little Women). It’s cracking up to be a busy spring for Letts, who also wrote the screenplay for the upcoming thriller The Woman in the Window, starring Amy Adams and Julianne Moore. For the first time, he’ll be playing one of the lead roles in his own play, opposite Blair Brown and Armie Hammer for The Minutes’ Broadway run. But the affable, 54-year-old Oklahoma native is a double threat: he’s also an accomplished, Tony Award-winning actor. Letts might well be our foremost theatrical chronicler of the messy American psyche, following in the footsteps of his playwright idols, Arthur Miller and Edward Albee. What Tracy Letts did with the family dinner table in his 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning play August: Osage County, he is now unleashing upon a city-council board meeting in small-town America in the new Steppenwolf production of The Minutes-which is to say, exposing all the fractures, urges, and ambitions of humanity just underneath the mundane, carefully controlled surface. ![]()
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