The complete text of Samuel D. Hunter’s play The Whale appeared in our February 2013 issue. Here he’s interviewed by the play’s director.
DAVIS MCCALLUM: In the October issue of American Theatre, in an interview with Caridad Svich, you said, “It sounds incredibly narcissistic, but I think my plays are, in one way or another, always about myself.” Could you reflect on that further as it relates to The Whale?
SAMUEL D. HUNTER: Writing from a deeply personal place gives me a bigger emotional investment in my main characters, and results in the plays feeling like weird, roundabout emotional autobiographies. In The Whale, the struggle for human connection, the struggle for empathy—that’s something I acutely feel, especially in times like these, in an election year, when empathy is in short supply.
Charlie discovers that what is most important to him as a teacher of writers is honesty. It seems to me that’s true of the play as a piece of writing as well. There are moments that take your breath away because they feel so first-person, and unvarnished, and deeply honest.
I didn’t start this play thinking I needed to write about a 600-pound man or that it was going to be about obesity. I started from exactly the place you said: I was teaching expository writing. All of the teaching scenes in the play are snapshots of what I felt. I started out trying to get kids to write topic sentences and well-executed paragraphs, but I realized through the course of teaching Expository Writing 101 at Rutgers University that what I could give these 18-year-old New Jersey kids—the valuable thing I could give them—was the confidence to express a truthful, original thought. That was the spine of the play, and everything else fell out from there.
The play happens over five days and we get the clear sense at the beginning that Charlie is going to die at the end. I remember saying to you once that I don’t have much of a relationship with death, and I don’t think about it very much. And I said, “What about you?” And you said, “I think about it all the time.”
I know it makes me sound like the most depressed person on Earth to say I think about death all the time. But I’m generally a happy person! I don’t dwell on it like, “Oh, look at us all on our inevitable march toward the grave.” To think about death clarifies life and celebrates and exalts life. For all of the darker aspects of The Whale, it’s a play that ultimately affirms life.
Which is the invisible final word of the play. I was watching the performance [at Playwrights Horizons] last weekend thinking about that final sequence, his final intake of breath. When he says, “You’re perfect, you’ll be happy, you’ll care for people,” I thought, really—if any of us were to have this one moment, this 60 seconds, left to say something to the people we care about the most, we’d probably speak in similar terms to that.
I have this horrifically bad peanut allergy, and when I was 17,1 had the worst reaction I’ve ever had. I went into anaphylactic shock in the middle of my high school, and my lungs filled up with fluid. By the time the ambulance arrived, my body was pretty much purple and I couldn’t take in air. Maybe this is why I write about death; that was a very formative experience for me.
I called on it a lot when I was writing the final scene of the play, because when I was in the ER—and I only have spotty memories of this because I wasn’t getting any oxygen—I remember that final attempt at an intake of air, which I thought was it. And then I remember letting go. Eventually they shot enough epinephrine into me that I revived. That was a defining moment of my teenage years. This is really personal, maybe too personal…
Maybe so, but it’s germane to the take-your-breath-away feeling that audiences get from your plays. We get to have that moment of: Here’s the truth. It’s a challenge to say it and it’s a challenge to hear it. On another topic: I would like to talk a little about your background as a musician. When you’re writing, do you think about your plays in musical terms?
It took me a while as a teenager to figure out that I wanted to be a writer, because I studied piano and I thought at first I wanted to be a musician or a composer. I think what pulled me in a different direction was the first time I found poems of Allen Ginsberg in the University of Idaho Library stacks. It seemed to me at the time like this conflation of music and language I hadn’t known existed.
I approach plays the same way. There’s a choral rhythm in playwriting that I love. I usually have an idea of the rhythm of a scene I’m writing before I know what the words are, exactly. In the final scene of The Whale, the language starts to get so terse, and the scene rises and rises until it plateaus on the essay, almost like a sustained note, with the steps Charlie’s taking like a rhythm underneath it. I don’t know if I’d call it musical, but there’s an aural shape I really enjoy about playwriting. It’s easier for me to accomplish it in dialogue than it would be for me to accomplish it in prose.
We were joking the other day about that phrase “great reckonings in little rooms.” A Bright New Boise seemed like a big play in a very small container, and The Whale carries that idea even further. Why do you like plays to be big?
I’ve actually been asking myself that question a lot, because I would probably be well served career-wise if my plays weren’t so big. I think their largeness makes them targets. And I’m fine with that. I mean, The Whale is an hour and 50 minutes, no intermission, big themes, big metaphors, and it’s about a man dying. There are a lot of ways to reject that. It’s not a pleasant evening in the theatre. I’m asking the audience to pay money to see something that’s really hard to watch.
How do you sense where and when to inject humor into this kind of play?
Moments of levity are so crucial—that’s another way the audience can get on the ride. This play would be really tough. almost unwatchable, if it were humorless.
I usually spend a lot of time with plays in development, but I try to write first drafts fairly quickly so that my experience is closer to that of the eventual audience’s. Theatre is a time-based medium, and I try never to forget that. If I were to spend days and days constructing a few pages of dialogue, I would lose a sense of what the play feels like in real time.
I wrote the first draft of The Whale over the course of six Saturdays, in 20-page bursts. When I got to the pot-smoking scene, I felt the play needed some kind of different energy. By that point the audience pretty much thinks they have a handle on the play, and I felt I had a handle on writing it, like, here are all the dramaturgical pins I’ve set up, and now the rest of the play will be knocking them down. The pot-smoking scene is about throwing a wrench into that machinery, and then Mary’s entrance takes it into another corner. Hopefully the end feels inevitable but still surprising.
As the writer, when you encountered these “corners,” were you surprised to find out what was revealed?
Sometimes they’re planned, sometimes I surprise myself. Usually the corners that surprise me are the best ones. But it does mean that after I write a first draft, I spend a lot of time rewriting. When I’ve made discoveries in the course of writing, sometimes it turns out that the Elder Thomas I’ve written on page 5 is different than the Elder Thomas on page 100. And so I have to go back and reshape everything.
I have to surprise myself, even if it means going back and changing things, because if I’m not surprised and engaged as a writer, I can’t expect the audience to be surprised and engaged either.
Director Davis McCallum’s recent productions include Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale, A Bright New Boise and Five Genocides (at Playwrights Horizons, Partial Comfort Productions and Clubbed Thumb, respectively), and the premiere of Quiara Alegria Hudes’s Water By the Spoonful at Hartford Stage.
