SHEILA CALLAGHAN: What was the genesis of this play?

STEVEN DRUKMAN: I wrote a play years ago called The Bullet Round, in which there were two brothers named Joey and Kevin, and I found myself wondering what happened to them when they got to middle age. They were Irish and from South Boston, and the two brothers in this play are Italian and from Newton, Mass., but that was really what started it. Of course, there was also the adoption thing, which I had never written about except obliquely, and everyone told me I should. For whatever reason my own adoption story must have been on my mind.

One thing I admire about the play is how you manage to dole out the flow of information without overwhelming us with exposition. There was a sort of ease, a rhythmicality and musicality to it.

It did come really easily. Some plays go through dozens of drafts and so much in terms of development and readings, and over years really change. This play really didn’t change much from first draft to production.

I saw the premiere at South Coast Rep, in which the set took on a delirious life of its own. That giant octopus chandelier was hideously awe-inspiring. How much of that strident visual detail was in the play’s conception, and how much was in the collaboration?

I find that I never know what my sets are going to look like, and I entirely trust designers and directors to figure that out for me. The designer, Tom Buderwitz, took the ball and ran with it. You’re right, it’s hilarious—completely over-the-top gaudy. I think the difficulty is the poor actors have to play heartfelt moments on a set one of the characters calls “The Little Mermaid on acid.” Believe it or not, what you saw was scaled back. We decided during previews it was just too much. You felt like your eyes threw up when you looked at the set. (Laughter.) Have you been to the Dalí Museum in Spain? It was like entering one of those rooms.

There are multiple references in the play to Hamlet. Did you have a Hamlet in this story?

That’s a very good question. I think what Kevin comes to appreciate about Hamlet is that after all the stuff he has to go through, he gets to have his story told. In that sense, I suppose Kevin is Hamlet. But when you think about a displaced son on a quest, that does tend to attach to Miles. The problem with Hamlet is it’s a touchstone for everything in the world—everything goes back to that text.

What about the importance of class as a theme?

I’m certainly not the first to notice or say this, but class often seems to be forgotten in dramatic literature. The play I wrote after Atlantis, called Death of the Author, is perhaps even more about class, and likewise tries to talk about it without ever talking about it. Where I grew up, Newton, Mass., is a good laboratory for understanding class, because it has some of the wealthiest denizens of suburbia as well as some real working-class sections, like Nonantum.

Boston is like another character in the play. You take an insane delight in exploring this colloquial jargon that I’d never even heard of, that felt almost tribal at times. This is an actual thing?

You’re not alone. People in Boston, even some people in Newton, don’t know about this dialect. I grew up with kids who used a few of the words—I heard “mush” all the time, and “divia” and “quistya”—but most of the others belong to the generation before mine. It is a dying dialect, sad to say, but there are people who really do speak this way. It’s a hybrid of Italian and Romany; Nonantum had a lot of carnivals that came through town, so it’s supposed that the Italians mixed their language with the visiting carny folk, and there are some dashes, supposedly, of French Canadian that can be detected in there as well. My director and I did some ethnographic research to find some real mushes who speak like that. Sometimes they corrected what I had in the play, sometimes they confirmed.

Do you get home much? It’s obvious this place lives deep inside you.

I don’t go home enough. I feel happy that I escaped Boston, in many ways. I’m a huge Red Sox fan, but there’s a sort of clannishness and a piousness to Boston that I don’t really cotton to. And it feels sometimes very provincial to me. But when I do go back and see old friends and hear that accent, you know, I become a little misty-eyed and nostalgic.

A lot of the humor in the play comes out of surprises about the characters—like the reveal that Connie is a wine connoisseur. I took her at first to be unsophisticated, and then I felt a little shamed, which is not an unhealthy feeling to have as a viewer.

I’m sure you know this, too, but when you start writing characters, they take on lives of their own and start telling you surprising things about themselves. You resist what they tell you at your folly. I didn’t know that Connie was a wine connoisseur either; she sort of shamed me in the same way. But you know, this is what your unconscious does. It turns out you lay the groundwork in a strange way. It was already in the play that Connie had worked so many years in travel—and I thought, well yeah, we know she’s ambitious, it makes perfect sense she learned about wine.

In my experience, the topic of adoption typically is treated in theatre and film as melodrama—often unintentionally. Tonally, your play remained elegant and authentic on this topic, which made me feel huge relief as a viewer and as an adopted person. I wonder if you’re able to articulate Miles’s journey in relation to your own.

I found the difficulty with writing Miles was that dramaturgs and directors thought the stakes should be raised, regarding why he was suddenly on this quest now. For me, there didn’t need to be any exposition about that. I could only answer that as an adopted kid you almost always feel like you’re on that quest. The moment you decide literally to make real that quest can happen at any time. Miles’s experience is similar to mine in that I undertook a search for my biological roots close to when I turned 30, and was met with a flurry of deception and obfuscation. You’re an adult, you’re a reasonable person, you understand why there might be a need for evasion, but there’s still this powerful need to answer questions.

More times than not, people give children up because of unfavorable circumstances, so if you’re lucky enough to find the people who gave birth to you, the odds are against you that it will be a wholly positive and satisfying experience. In the case of this play, Miles beats those odds, which is incredibly moving and hopeful. I too have a crazy adoption story that people have been urging me to write about and I’d been resisting; and, actually, I received a commission finally to write that story just one week before seeing your play. I’m terrified—but your play emboldened me. In your e-mail to me before we talked, you pointed out that several prominent playwrights are adopted—Edward Albee is the most famous, but I didn’t know Richard Foreman and Craig Lucas were adopted, too. You wrote to me, “It must mean something.”

I think you could make a case that adopted people by their nature are going to be more curious than other people. I’m very happy to have that sort of lens on the world. Not only does it allow you to use your own life as material—because you always saw your life as, not fictive exactly, but something that wasn’t necessarily true, or ontologically vacuum-packed and sealed tight as true—you also always knew that there were these kinds of leaks and possibilities to any kind of relationship. I think that’s potentially really creative and generative.

Sheila Callaghan’s plays include That Pretty Pretty; or, the Rape Play; Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake) and Dead City. Her collaboration with FoolsFURY, Port Out, Starboard Home, will have its world premiere at Z Space in San Francisco this fall. Currently she writes for Showtime’s “Shameless.”