Flood Story, by Adam Lucas, is a modern retelling of the religious myth, The Great Flood. Like the telling, the flood comes to us, again and again.
Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from, where did you grow up, and how did you get to FSU?
I grew up in a small town in PA. What a very appropriate question for this play. It’s a sort of dying coal and steel community that when I was a kid, it was prosperous enough to be a great little hometown to grow up in. Um, you know everybody, everybody was pleasant. A lot of bars and churches, one of those towns. By now, it’s just boarded up windows and despair. Which town? Portage, PA. Even though every time I put it down in a production bio I write Tacoma, PA. It’s…I can encapsulate my childhood, my memories and who I am and where I came from in that town if I can make up the name and control it and package it; it’s mine. Tacoma, PA. It’s, it’s, it’s (laughs) that right, I’m half crazy. So every time I write a production bio, including now, I written down Tacoma, PA. It sounds like Steelton, a little town outside of Harrisburg. It’s probably very similar, like Allentown and all of those. It’s kind of what the plays about actually. It’s where it’s set and it’s where all of the….it’s actually where the play came from. There’s one small grocery store in town called Cherbeni’s and the Cherbeni family ran it for three generations I guess. And it was the one grocery store in Portage, this little family store, and uh, over the course of time, the children moved away and wanted nothing to do with it. It was Mr. and Mrs. Cherbeni and he died and she was running the store by herself. She was like, eighty-seven years old and two Christmases ago, right before I went home, um, someone went in to rob the store. With a gun; at gunpoint. There was five dollars in the register and eighty-seven year old Mrs. Cherbeni told him no, I’ve worked really hard for this five dollars and she talked him out of the store. I thought it was this great little juxtaposition of old despair with new despair. They were the exact same people since it’s what the play’s about. It was kind of sad because by the time…that time I went home, that Christmas, the milk was in the vegetable, the fruit crisper because she couldn’t afford to keep both coolers on. And only like, one quarter of the lights were on and it looked closed but she was still open. All the shelves were bare because she couldn’t afford to buy anything new and she had changed the expiration dates on the milk and it was just really sad. And when I went home this Christmas, upon writing this play, I wanted to just sit in the store and kind of absorb it but it was completed closed, they had already shut it down. And, and, you could look through the windows and it was just this barren store with a brand new neon open sign in the window. It was really…it’s just heartbreaking. That’s Tacoma.
So how did you get to Tallahassee?
I went to…I actually went to…my undergrad was actually at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. Johnstown was right outside of Portage, it was a half hour away. I stayed close because I was in a band at the time and had no idea what I wanted to do. So I thought I’d stick around here and go to school here so we can still play music. We played for the rest of the time that I was in college. But uh, wanted to do film the entire time but there was nothing in the immediate area to do it so I ended up going for pre-med and the first day it came to when everybody seemed to understand what the hell the teacher was talking about and I didn’t, I just walked out of class and changed my major to psychology. (Laughs) Graduated with a bachelor’s in psychology. I did very well and it was a great major to study that I wanted nothing to do with for the rest of my life. So as soon as I was out, I just moved down here in hopes of attending Florida State for film school and worked for two years just to make some money.
We’ve talked a bit about where you’re from. Now let’s talk about where you’re going….
(Cracks himself up) A bridge? A cardboard box under a bridge!
What we want to explore with this interview is the process of playwriting from the perspective of the playwright. Before we expand on that, tell us: why write plays?
(Laughs) To be honest, when the writing portion of the film school shifted us over to theatre, I didn’t know a thing about theatre. And I had no idea what it was going to be like or how I was going to do it or if I was going to enjoy it. By the end of that first semester in theatre…I absolutely love it. To be honest, I could be a playwright for the rest of my life and be completely satisfied. Why do theatre. My God, I wish I had some great Herzog answer for that… (Fake accent) Theatre, it’s a part of the soul… Jesus, that’s a great question. Why do we get into any of these artistic fields like film or theatre, fiction or poetry? I guess it’s like anything, it’s for the selfish reason: because we have no idea how to cope with life. (Laughs) And, and, we just, it’s a continual process asking ourselves the questions… It’s very much like being Ingmar Bergman. Whatever the reasons, I mean, why he did it was because he had no answers to anything. This is the particular framework that he had, the questions that he needed to address. Ultimately, it’s selfish, I guess.
Was there something you needed to address with Flood Story?
Yeah, I was just remembering what it was. Actually, it was last night and we were going over…we were going over some of the changes we made to it and uh, I had this horrible vision of me at ninety, or thirty, whatever old age my body feels like… With my particular lifestyle, three more years may be a whole lot to ask of my body. But I had this vision of me at ninety years old still rewriting this fucking play because I just…this one, especially, it’s been such a struggle. It’s a question I’ve been asking myself and I don’t know what it is. Because I can still see myself rewriting these characters because, as the question changes in my mind, I just need to address this thing. And I… Man, if I had an easy answer, I would understand my play much better. To some extent, it’s very much about… I can understand how it’s, how I’ve put it on some hanger of me growing out of the town that I came from, beliefs that I had. It’s very much a piece about (sighs) the despair that I kind of grew up in. That sounded incredibly overdramatic. The despair of the town that I grew up in. Um, I grew up very strict Catholic. I went to Catholic school. My parents are Catholic. Everybody in the town is very religious, primarily Catholic. And a lot of what this play is about is where are we…where am I now that I don’t necessarily know what the hell I believe in. And, yeah, it’s a large jumbled question of what it means to exist when seemingly, there’s no reason to do it. It’s like Camus- what’s that great Camus quote that ended up in the plays? After all those years of studying, Camus’ answer was why don’t we just kill ourselves? I really don’t have an answer to that but anyway! (Laughing) Ponder. Talk amongst yourselves!
Let’s talk a bit about creating a piece and developing characters. Where do the ideas come from? How do you find them or more accurately, how do your characters manifest themselves? Do you hear a line in your head? Do you hear a voice? What drives you to create a piece at all?
Absolutely everything, everything that I’ve done starts with a question. I’ve never been in a place of….we all steal from everything around us, you know. You end up eventually watching people that you feel would turn into a great character. You overhear dialogue that would be great dialogue or things that amaze you or situations, things in the news that you think wow, that would be a great situation to write about. Things that lend themselves, I think, to setting a character…elements. But I’ve never had one of those particular elements drive me to actually want to write something. It’s always started with a question and then, around the question, I can build a framework of to-answer-this-question-for-myself, what characters do I need to populate this world with and what world do I need to set them so that they can bump and grind up against each other and hopefully, as they start to take on lives and as they start in interact, they can start to answer these particular questions for me. Provide me with some insight. But you know, all of my inspirations are musicians. We’ve had that conversation before. All of the people I’m obsessed with are musicians. I think ultimately…. Ultimately, I wanted to be a musician. I mean, I still want to be a musician. I’m just not that good at it. (Laughs) All the people I gravitate towards are musicians. People like Tom Waits and Joe Strummer and Neco Case and…. Or poets. It’s all about lyricism and music to me.
Are you familiar with the phrase “writer’s block?”
(Cracks up) Yeah.
What does that mean to you?
Time to go to the bar! (Laughs) I think…The only way that it’s frustrating to me is in regards to a deadline. Writer’s block doesn’t really frighten me. There are definitely times that you get jumbled up. What’s that phrase, “Paper’s cheap, ideas are free?” You can go through ten drafts of something terrible and the worst thing that happens is that you have to pick them up off the floor because they wouldn’t go into the garbage can the first time. So it doesn’t really bother me. It’s always the process of working through it. You write horribly and eventually you find out where you’re supposed to be. There’s always the option of going to another project and letting another gestate. It doesn’t really bother me. Except the fact that I have a whole bunch of deadlines for everything. Other than that, it’s all a part of the process and if it’s not coming, it’s not coming and if I don’t have answers for a particular set of questions, I move on. It’s time to go to the bar, meet new people, find new questions. This play that I’ve wrestled with, it’s not so much writer’s block. It’s… I’m thirteen official drafts into this play and it was a very different play when it started and it was a very different play in the middle and a very different play that’s sitting on my computer now versus what’s going to end up on my computer tomorrow after the conversation that me and Joel had last night trying to figure out what this play’s about. I’ve never struggled with a piece as much as this damned play. I really feel like… I feel like I’m some weak younger brother and just I have to wait until I get big enough and strong enough but it’s taking YEARS. I can’t quite get it and it’s like the play is standing over top of me on the playground going, “I know what I wanna be; why don’t you know what I wanna be?” And I really feel like the play is living somewhere. It knows exactly what it wants to be. It’s known what it’s wanted to be from the very beginning and it wants me to figure it out. And it’s pissing me off! Because normally, you end up a few drafts in where – it’s gonna sound strange, but you start to have an open dialogue with the piece that you’re writing and it starts to take on a life of it’s own. You know what you want it to be but it’s communicating to you and you’re able to kind of shape it? This one, the entire time, has just been out of reach. It’s really been the most frustrating piece I’ve ever written. Because of that, because I can’t get my hands around it… Because of that, it’s so much more exciting. I have worked on it so much more, so much more diligently. And I’ve obsessed over it much more. I’ve thought about it much more because it’s been difficult. But at some point, I’d really like to just pin the damned thing down on a mat and you know, walk away. By April 3rd.
Do you remember the movie Misery? James Caan played an author who wrote novels, fiction. His character had distinct rituals that he went through when he wrote and also when finished a novel: he preferred certain paper, he had the whole cigar and champagne thing set up when he finished the final page… Do you have rituals?
I suppose we all do. But now I have to pull myself out of it and look at the ritual from above. Yeah. I mean, a simple thing, I write better at night. I have a lot of problems writing during the day. I get distracted. So, usually I spend my day running errands and thinking about things. I don’t actually put words on paper until eleven o’clock or later. I usually write from eleven to six. Um… I wouldn’t know how to write without coffee and cigarettes. (Laughs) You know, little things like that. I don’t think I have anything that I would say is ritualized. I end up writing anywhere from… Whenever something comes to you, which can be, sometimes, at incredibly inappropriate times. Bar napkins and Denny’s placemats. I’ll write on anything. I do like to write with pen and paper before I ever address the computer. I usually write a draft or two in longhand.
Why longhand?
It feels more moldable. I can’t rationalize it. I guess it makes no sense. It’s just as easy in a computer to erase something and go back but there’s something about being able, I think, to also… It feels more like a piece that I have my hands on, that I’m crafting and molding, that I’m pushing around. I really like being able to see the mistakes on the page. I like to see… I like the flaws being present. It’s like a particular of mine…seeing the seams in theatre or hearing the flaws in music. I like not-highly-produced sound and images. So I like to see the flaws and the scratches and the notes and the erase marks and the rips and tears. For some reason it helps. It feels more organic to me. It’s kind of like, it’s a part of the piece living on its own, maybe. I’m not really sure. That way it can start to take kind of the life of itself as opposed to being deletes and deletes and deletes and it starts out as a third draft.
OK. You’re in rehearsals and things are moving along. What happens when the director wants to change or, gasp, CUT part of your script?
Joel is great because Joel is… Joel is like another archaeologist trying to dig up the bones of this damned piece and figure out what it used to be and put them together. Finally see the dinosaur. Working with Joel’s great. We share very similar sensibilities. We… I think immediately, from the moment we started working on this thing together, we both had a very similar experience. You know, I think we both understand the play. We know the question is that we’re addressing. We know ultimately the story that we want to tell. Now how do we phrase it, what’s the framework for it, how do we get this question to be addressed so that by the end of the play, at the end of the question, there’s at least, if not some kind of an answer, I feel like we’ve appropriately asked the question. I feel like Joel has been incredibly helpful in helping me sort out the million ideas that come to me. It’s great because a lot of our rehearsals are what-if sessions. You know? And we work within the play itself but it becomes a what-if-he-doesn’t-do-this-but-he-actually-does-this and we had some major breakthroughs last night, actually, which was wonderful around two o’clock in the morning. I’m being serious. Of just completely changing our understanding of the characters and how they interact. And that’s been great. He’s wonderful because he’s come on to… He’s accepted this piece which has not been easy and has undergone many changes and could be completely fail miserably if I can’t get this damned play under wraps and have it up and running. But I think he’s been exited by that.
Do you have an emotional response?
It’s less difficult for me. Actually, I have no problem with it in theatre. Everyone I’ve worked with, I’ve had a… Luckily, I’ve had a great experience with everyone I’ve worked with. I worked with Rob Ek on the New Horizons piece last year and had a great time. Love working with him. He was a great director. I got to work with Greg Lemming in Sarasota. Thought he was fantastic. We had a great relationship. Working with Joel has been absolutely wonderful. And it always seems like these people that I work with… I respect their…I respect that from them. I’m not offended by it. Because I feel like everyone that I’ve been working with…it’s always been a question of…it’s always been…the nature of it has always been that we want to make it the best piece possible. We’re not fighting for our own stake in the project and I don’t feel like they were overstepping me going, “Your words don’t work,” and I don’t feel that I have to overstep them going, “Your blocking doesn’t work,” or, “You don’t understand the scene.” Everyone I’ve worked with has been…they’ve approached the project like it’s the piece that matters. And that’s completely the way I see things. I feel I have a very open dialogue with Joel when he says, “Let’s try it without that line.” I have no problem with that because nothing is set in stone. I don’t think he has a problem with me asking, “Can we try it a little bit differently onstage? I just like to see it.” Again, the whole rehearsal process with us has been what-if. Let’s try something and see if it works. Ultimately, it’s gotta be the piece that you’re fighting for not yourself. Otherwise, there’s no point to being in this field or medium. And that’s been different sometimes in… I haven’t had that working experience necessarily in everybody that I’ve worked with. I’m speaking generally over the course of my time in these fields. I mean, I’ve co-written with people multiple times, in and outside of school, both. Not necessarily just for school projects and there are always those times where, because you don’t get along, you end up fighting for yourself and not the piece. And that’s not what it should be about. It’s always the piece that lives on after you. There’s no reason to put yourself in it.
Do you have any words of wisdom for new playwrights?
Advice for young writers? Why the hell are you doing this? Live a normal life! Have a family! Get out to the suburbs, man! Get a fence, get a dog, enjoy yourself! Go to work, come home, watch Everybody Love Raymond, eat dinner, go to bed and sleep like a normal human being. This is dumb. We only do this because we can’t cope. Be normal… (Laughs) Enjoy it. There are so many times I feel we get into this position where we’re beating our heads against the wall for something and I think what a horrible way to spend a life. The reason I do this…the only reason I do it is primarily because there is just so much that I don’t understand. I just have… There are so many questions that I have to ask. Otherwise I would suffocate in them. This is a way for me to frame those questions and explore the issues that sometimes end up like a weight on your shoulders. Yeah. Enjoy it. It’s a horrible way to spend a life, beating your head against the wall for something especially when this is supposed to be one of those jobs where you’re living the dream. Enjoy it. If not, get out and do something you can enjoy even if it’s working at Wal-Mart. I like working construction. I’m like, do I really wanna do this? Can I ask these questions if I worked construction? Probably not, dammit. I gotta stay here. (Laughs) It’s true. I’ve always wanted to work construction. For me it required absolutely no mental energy because I was just shoveling road off the back of a truck. But it was good exercise, I was outside, it required no mental energy, and every time I went home at the end of the day, I felt like I was really awake. It was good. Oh! Final advice for young writers, only surround yourself with people you enjoy working with. Find those people, hold on to them and create an established relationship with them because those are the people who are struggling for the same thing you’re struggling for. Whatever it is. Find people who share the same sensibilities and stay with them. They will keep you sane.
Is there anything that you wanted me to ask you that I didn’t?
Um…no. Nothing that I can think of off the top of my head. I’m not that talkative. No. Not really. “You wanna sell me your script?” That would be a great question to hear. Or, or I’d even take one as simple as, “How ‘bout I buy you a beer?” I mean, I have answers for those. Those questions I’m ready for.
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