Profile by Brad Balfour
Play: “Jack was Kind”
Cast: Tracy Thorne
Where: W. Scott McLucas Studio Stage, Irish Repertory Theatre
Address: 132 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
Run: 11-17 to 12-18-22
Sometimes, the best play is the simplest one — with a minimal set, ordinary costuming and little action. Everything is in the words and vocal expression. Maybe there’s a little embellishment through the lighting and sound design. But in making a production this way the focus for the audience is entirely on the words or what they suggest.
So the Irish Rep has given such a work the go. The in-person World Premiere of Tracy Thorne’s “Jack Was Kind” is now being presented by the venerable theater institution. This one-woman show had premiered on Zoom in October 2020 at All For One Theater (Michael Wolk, Artistic Director, and Nicholas A. Cotz, Executive & Producing Director). It was directed by Cotz, and produced in association with Jami Floyd.
“Jack Was Kind” previewed on the W. Scott McLucas Studio Stage on November 9, the opening night took place on the 17th, and it continues for a limited run through December 18, 2022. Again it has been directed by Cotz, with scenic design by David Esler (“rogerandtom”), costume design by Haydee Zelideth (“House Plant”) and lighting design by Kate McGee (“I’m Revolting”).
In this intimate, 70-minute monologue, a privileged woman defends and explores her role in her husband’s illicit behavior. “Jack Was Kind” gives an imagined, painfully human backstory to an actual American event that has affected the country. This intimate confessional examines long-seated issues of privilege and capitulation which is at the core of America, as well as being part and parcel of our current and explosive political traumas.
Thorne’s plays have been produced/workshopped/developed in New York and around the country at Manhattan Class Company, The Cherry Lane, SohoRep, Rattlestick, The Lark, Page 73, WP Theater and New Georges – to name a few. Her plays have also appeared on the Kilroys list and she has been a finalist for numerous awards, including the Susan Glaspell Award and Leah Ryan’s FEWW. This 40-something is a recipient of the Elizabeth George commission from South Coast Rep and has been a member of the SohoRep Writer/Director Lab, Page 73’s Interstate 73, as well as a playwriting fellow at The Lark. Her work is published by Concord and DPS. Thorne has also written screenplays and several TV pilots.
Though Thorne de-emphasizes it now, she’s worked as an actor in New York and London, collaborating with directors such as Matthew Warchus, Phyllida Lloyd, Anna Deavere Smith, Tony Kushner. And, she’s appeared in movies and on TV. She now lives in Harlem with her family.
Q: Did you think of your acting as a passage to your playwriting? Or did the playwriting naturally emerge out of the acting?
TT: Well, are you ready for this? I don’t really act anymore. I did not write this for myself to perform. I haven’t acted in a very long time. I didn’t write “Jack was Kind” for myself, I wrote it for other actors to perform. I always say I’m not an actor. However, when I wrote “Jack was Kind” it was literally — this is true — it was like dense prose on a page. I thought, if I send this to a literary office, they’re just going to look at that and go “I’m not reading now.” Because you know, plays look different on the page.
Q: So it’s not written as a stage play where you go, “Then she said…“
TT: Exactly. It just looked like a novel or something, and I didn’t think to reformat it. So I asked my agent, “Please don’t send me around. Please ask theaters if I can come and read it to them. He looked at me like, “Are you insane?” And I said, “Just please do it.” I know a lot of them said, “No way are we going to have her come and read it to us.” But then a few of them said, “Yeah, sure, she can come and read it to us.” When I did that for a small theatre called All for One, which just does solo works, they were interested in it. And then the pandemic happened so everything shut down.
I didn’t know All for One well at all. I’d spent a total of 70 minutes with them reading the play. When we were all in lockdown, they called me and said, “Would you be willing to do it over Zoom as a fundraiser?” I think a lot of the work they were developing was more physical work so it wouldn’t have worked on Zoom, so I said, “Sure, I’ll do that.”
Honestly, it was really nothing for them. Everybody was trying to keep theaters going. And long story short, that fundraiser went well, so they asked me to do it again. Then, they asked me to do it again, and said they wanted to produce it on Zoom, do a full production — as in, paid Equity wages, and all of that stuff. We thought about getting other actors, but under the circumstances, it was like, “Do we want to kill ourselves doing the casting checks and all of that?” That’s a huge project unto itself which takes a long time. Or should I just do it? And they said, “You just do it.” So when Ciaran [O’Reilly, Irish Rep producing director] called me up, he said, “You just do it.” I am not an actor, haven’t acted in a long time, and I’m really fine with that; but, apparently, I’m an actor now.
Q: When you’re acting in this as opposed to having written it, does that change it for you in some way?
TT: It’s a funny thing. As a writer, you’re thinking about theme, what you’re trying to accomplish, and about rhythm — because for me, rhythm is story. Also, with my acting background, I developed those elements with the character in mind. But I discover things in this all the time, which I actually quite enjoy, even though I didn’t miss acting or anything. I have enjoyed the discovery of “Oh, that’s there, too,” or how it’s almost more elastic — “Oh, I didn’t realize it could extend that far.”
Q: When you’re acting it, you’re also thinking about, “well, how will this look to an audience? I can’t just read this flat.” It’s as if you’re doing a reading. But then you’re acting, with costume and lighting changes, so how does that affect things?
TT: The audience affects it a lot because they are in a solo show, [so] they are your partner, right? This play has surprised me because — I don’t know what the audience you were in was like — but some audiences laugh much, are responsive verbally, and other audiences are silent. They seem to be with it, the silent ones, because you can hear a pin drop. And I have to accommodate it. It’s almost like, “What do you guys need from me?” Is there a big laughing audience? I can give them all the indications they need to go for it. I can actually respond to their laughter. But if they’re a silent audience, I need to respect that and be mindful that they are seemingly very affected by it. It’s almost like I need to push through so that I can release them from it.
Q: In a way, you have a second audience. You’re made this as if it were a Zoomcast or something with a setup iPhone — your daughter or someone gave you the idea to do this?
TT: I didn’t say it specifically, but I indicated that kids today film themselves doing everything. So I’m inspired to film myself.
Q: As the character, you have a different audience than just the “audience” because the audience you are presuming might see this. Did that affect you in the way you wrote it and envisioned it?
TT: No, it fell short. First of all, that came about because of the Zoom production with AFO. I very much wanted — this is pretty much true in all of my work — I wanted to create a circumstance where the audience viewing it on the computer would actually be viewing it on the computer. So we did some rewrites about that.
I had originally thought that, you know, she’s been asked to give a talk — the Daughters of the American Revolution or something — and she goes off the deep end. I hadn’t fully developed it, but it was in that storyline. Anyway, when we came to do it in 3D, the circumstances were obviously different and so we adapted it again, for her to be filming herself on an iPhone.
What I found in the acting of it…? A director once said to me, “I need you to look at the iPhone more, just technically, so that we keep the reality of that going.” I said to him, “You know what I find when I look at the iPhone? I look at it in at least the first two-thirds of the thing. I look at the iPhone when I’m saying nice things about Jack. When I’m saying mean things or iffy things about Jack, I find myself wanting to look away.” He felt that was super-interesting. That happened organically, almost like I didn’t want to confront the iffy stuff with my iPhone audience by looking at them.
Q: But didn’t that limit you in some way? You created a situation where you were limiting yourself even further, and that’s an interesting challenge. Is it a good thing that you restrained yourself even further?
TT: We did it on focus. We wanted to see — as she says, “You may forget in the denseness of the thing.” Many people do, and that’s fine. She says, “‘Tell me a story’ are the four greatest words in the English language.” So we wanted to see if we could actually sustain her just leaning in and telling us, the audience, a story. I happen to love that. The simplicity of that works for me as an audience member. So we decided to go for it and see the simplicity of “Mary is going to tell you this story now. Buckle up for 70 minutes.” We found that kind of theatrical, actually, the expectation being that she would move around and be theatrical or whatever. But we decided to channel all of that into the story, all of that physicality into the story, and create a minimalist kind of physical experience as she sat in her chair. So we decided to give it a go, and we hoped it would be theatrical in its own right — that she doesn’t move.
Q: The irony of it is, you never do reveal exactly, and in very specific terms, what Jack did. You kind of hover around it a lot, until the end.
TT: You know, I do. That was a choice, and I’m sure it works for some people and maybe doesn’t work for others. I do reveal at the end — I gave the audiences plenty — I do say he’s a Supreme Court justice. I do specifically say that in the end. I have laid it out that he is a very powerful person. People can draw the conclusions they draw. There is nothing literal about this, I have not written a literal play about any actual person’s life. But people can draw the conclusions they draw based on their own experiences, what kind of person Jack might be. But I do say specifically at the very end he’s a Supreme Court justice.
Q: Obviously, intentional or not, the timing of this particular play seems ideal because there are movies like “Women Talking”, “She Said” so that it falls in line — not in a bad way. It connects to that context of “MeToo.” In some ways, that gives a greater power to your story because it fits within the framework of what’s going on.
TT: First of all, I never expected it to be a solo play. I expected Jack to show up. I kept writing and writing, but he never showed up — which I found hilarious, actually. But [when] I started the play, I had read a novel that felt like a memoir. It was a novel, but it felt like a memoir, and I found that super-provocative, especially since it’s a novel where no one knows the actual identity of the author. It’s a female name as the author, but there’s some thoughts that it’s written by a guy. I thought that the trick that that author pulled off of making fiction seem like a memoir was super-provocative to me. So I was like, “I wonder if I could do that in a play?” [And] I started writing “Jack was Kind” and Jack kept not showing up, but Mary kept talking. Then, I thought I had created this person who seemed like a lot of people I’d known in my life. I thought, “Oh, I have actually somewhat achieved what I went for.” Then I thought of various things that had happened in the United States in recent days, weeks, months and years, and thought, “Oh, I could drop this very familiar person into the feeling of actual American events.” So I did that, and it felt for me that I was really pleased with how I was tackling America, but tackling it from the most personal, most primitive, most private, and most simple point of view.
Q: Have you seen “Women Talking” yet?
TT: I did, yes.
Q: One of the things they clearly delineate throughout the movie is, in trying to re-engage with these men, are they being collaborators, are they implicitly guilty as well for allowing this behavior to continue? Obviously, this wasn’t one incident, this was an ongoing pattern of behavior. You here also raise the question, “Okay is he’s done with this?”
TT: The thing he’s called out for is having assaulted somebody in high school. [Mary] says it comes quickly. He says he did that to [the woman when she was just in high school and he was in high school, too.
Q: The important implication is whether he continued the behavior, or was trying to continue the behavior. Was it just a one-time incident? In your case, [Mary] knows what he’s done and hasn’t really called him out for it, basically continuing with him, yet knowing this. In the end, both [stories] are about the woman being complicit by having allowed it to continue, or not revealing it, or not addressing it. I thought that was interesting. Am I on the right path there?
TT: I think so, in that she does understand that about herself. What I find interesting about her is that she seems a powerless person, but in fact, the fact that she stands behind him, as she says in the play, “I sat there, I filled in the most looming gap” gave her tremendous power. Because I would argue in other situations like that, if the spouse didn’t sit behind her husband at those hearings or whatever, the person at the hearing who is looking for the job wouldn’t get it if the wife decided not to show up. I’m thinking of an actual hearing that we both know. If that wife hadn’t showed up, in protest or whatever, I bet you that guy wouldn’t have gotten the job. So in fact, this seemingly powerless person has extraordinary power. I found that interesting. She doesn’t realize that until the very end of the play. And she certainly doesn’t think of herself as a complicit character until the end of the play, when she begins to understand that she was doing it for her children. She was preserving the image of their father as a great man, a wonderful man, a worthy man, for her children. And she realizes that it’s blown up in her face. Her children were on to it more than she was.
Q: It doesn’t matter when she became aware of his transgression or not?
TT: I don’t think she knows it until the end of this play. One of the last things she says — she lays all of that out — she says this about Jack’s composed face: “Maybe that’s how I could just sit there.” And then, after she says that, she says, “Or maybe I wanted what Jack said to be true, so I sat there to make it true.” But I don’t think she understands that about herself until those words come out of her mouth. I don’t think it’s political for her. It’s so personal, which is, again, back to what I tried to do. I tried to create fiction that felt like a memoir. But it’s her daughter who is the one — [Mary] says, “I tried to make it true. But then Flo came home and it couldn’t be true. She said she’d never forgive me, so it couldn’t be true.” So it’s Flo throwing it in her face that, frankly, wakes her up. And destroys her. SHe’s absolutely destroyed by the end of it.
Q: When she’s making this thing on her iPhone, is this something being recorded, or is it actually going out as it’s happening, in your eyes?
TT: It’s being recorded, which she then — the implication when you see the film at the end, is that she sent it somewhere.
Q: Does she finally release it? That raises another layer to the show.
TT: Exactly, and I like the ambiguity of that. But then when we show you the clip of video at the end, a) we thought it was fun and theatrical and what’s wrong with that; but, b), we thought, ”Yeah, she sent it. She pressed ‘Send.’”
Q: That’s an important point, because it does raise the question: did she do this all for nothing or does she really make it happen?
TT: Well, she says at the very end — very, very end, as one of her last lines, she says, “But everyone knows about Jack.” As in, we all know that he did it. We pretended we didn’t know. And then she says, “Now Jack does, too.” I.e., I called Jack out by sending this to the Daughters of the American Revolution or whomever invited her to speak.
Q: Does the name “Jack” have implications in your mind or was you just chose the name John, Jack?
TT: Place holder. It was a placeholder. The funny was, I started it because — it was a dialogue. I started the play in a Word document, and when you save a Word document, it titles it the first few words of the document. When I started it at the very beginning, the first lines of the play were “Jack was kind.” So I kept seeing that Word icon on my desktop. When those lines had changed a lot, I thought, that’s a good title. I just kept it — “Jack was Kind”.
Q: We could interpret it as having implications about — well, let’s say the Kennedys. Did that come back to you in a way that was good or that haunted you?
TT: Well, it only haunted me hilariously. Jack is not my father, but my father’s name was Jack. I never thought about it, never thought about it, never thought about it. But as I often do when I start a play, sometimes they’re called A and B, sometimes they’re called She and He, sometimes they’re called Jack and Jill. You know, just a simple placeholder. But then it stuck, and so my mother kept telling her friends “It’s not about your father.”
Q: How did your parents deal with it?
TT: Well, my dad’s not with us anymore so he never had to hear it, never had to tell his friends.
Q: How about your family? How does your husband and kids — how old are they?
TT: We have one we like to tease, she’s “Flo” — she’s a Flo type, the daughter. My family frankly, in all honesty, they’re moved by it. They felt it very moving, all of them. I appreciate that they dived into it and they find it moving.
Q: What is your relationship to the Irish Rep? How did this come to them, and how did it come at this time, since it is very relevant?
TT: We all find it hilarious because nobody knows how they got a copy of the play. Nobody knows. I got an email from Ciaran. I was working on a TV thing, which — I am not lying about this: I was sitting on my sofa, I just pressed “Send” on this TV thing out in Hollywood, and an email from Ciaran popped in saying, “We’d like you to do “Jack was Kind.” Right before I could think “Oh, crap, what do I do next?” I was like, “Irish Rep wants to do “Jack was Kind”? What?” So we don’t know how they got it. They got it somehow, and none of us knows how.
Q: That was uncanny timing.
TT: I thought my agent sent it to us, and I was looking back in my emails and had to call my agent, “Did you send it to him?” He said no. So we have no idea how they got it.
Q: You’re in the New York theatre community in one way or another, so you have known Ciaran and Charlotte [Moore] for a while.
TT: Charlotte and I did a play together when we were both actors. Hilariously. It was one of the — oh, it actually might have been the first — I had a summer stock job and it was my first professional production in a proper year-around theatre, and she played my mother. She actually is part of my origin story, because I met my husband when I was working with her. I had been invited out for a drink after the show, and we were out of town in New Haven. I spent all day, the matinee and the evening: “But I don’t know if I should go, Charlotte. I have to spend the night” — because she and I drove back and forth together from New Haven. “I don’t know” da da da. And finally, at the intermission of the evening performance, the great Charlotte Moore looked at me and said, “Look, I will pay your hotel fee. But you’ve just got to stop talking about this.”
She didn’t pay my hotel, but hilariously, she let me know that I had become tiresome, and that was the night I met my husband. So I’m glad I stayed. We haven’t worked together since, but we had had a fantastic time in New Haven, and both remembered it when we were reunited at the Irish Rep.
Q: I assume you were writing more conventional plays with multiple characters, and you didn’t have to put all the burden on yourself.
TT: Yes, I never plan to do that again, actually. It’s very over.
Q: What lesson did you learn from all of this?
TT: I learned that it was a good idea that I decided to be a writer full-time. That’s what I learned.
Q: Do you see this as potentially expanding out to a movie, or a version with multiple characters?
TT: No, I don’t think I’ll do the version with multiple characters. Once you explore something, you think, bye, I did that, now it’s time to explore something else. I mean, sure, I think it would make a wonderful movie. I did it on Zoom, but it was very different on Zoom. It was super-successful on Zoom. The simplicity of it worked great. Sure, if somebody wanted to do a little film of it or something, that would be great. And they are very welcome to stick a movie star in there. Go for it, guys.
Q: So you do see it as being handed off to other people?
TT: Always. Oh, yeah. I did not write it for myself. Everyone, of course, assumes I did, but it never occurred to me to do that. We had readings of it with other actors before all of this happened. No, it never occurred to me — not one time did it occur to me to do it myself.
Q: Do you see yourself writing other things like a novel, articles, or nonfiction essays?
TT: Well, I am lucky enough to have some fantastic fiction writers in my life, and I don’t know that I have that skill set. I certainly admire them so much, but I kind of feel like, “I don’t know.” But I don’t know that I have the skill set. My skill set is, character is destiny, and the nature of prose is such that I don’t know that I know. But I do write television, and I’m early in the game of developing it. But I really like long-form storytelling like that. I love a nine-hour, 10-hour movie. Or if it’s over several seasons, a 30-hour movie. Love, love, love, love, love.
Q: It certainly gives you a chance to develop characters in a way that you can’t do it in a movie. On the other hand, the good thing about a movie is you go in there and it’s done, you’ve made it work in two hours — or you didn’t — and you’re on to the next thing.
TT: I definitely will write for TV because I like that long-form storytelling. I definitely will write more plays. And Lord knows, if I can write a novel I’d be thrilled with myself. But I have no idea. My daughter is a novelist and she has got the Thing, whatever that is. She’s in her 20s, and is in actually in an MFA fiction writing program now.
Q: How did this experience change your way of writing theatre, film, or TV?
TT: Well, Mary’s mode of thinking is super-duper complicated. That’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to perform, because it’s circular thinking. She’s making connections. She says something forty minutes ago that then she circles back to. I am always like that in storytelling, but I can see that that is very hard for actors to mine and discover. So I might look for a simpler way of thinking in my characters next time. It’s hard for me to follow Mary’s line of thought — and I wrote it— and I have always written in a complicated way like that. One of the reasons I like television is that it is inherently simpler . So I might apply that in a good way, not a bad way, to my next play. We will see.
Q: Now you’re at the early stage of seeing how audiences will respond. If this play continues to sell, will they extend or will it just…
TT: Oh, that’s above my pay grade. That’s for the big shots at the Irish Rep. I don’t know the answer to that.
Q: What happens if you start getting offers now as an actor?
TT: [laughs] I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Q: Have you seen “Women Talking” yet?
TT: I did, yes.
Q: One of the things they clearly delineate throughout the movie is, in trying to re-engage with these men, are they being collaborators, are they implicitly guilty as well for allowing this behavior to continue? Obviously, this wasn’t one incident, this was an ongoing pattern of behavior. You here also raising the question, “Okay is he’s done with this?”
TT: The thing he’s called out for is having assaulted somebody in high school. [Mary] says it comes quickly. He says he did that to her when she was just in high school and he was in high school, too.
Q: The important implication is whether he continued the behavior, or was trying to continue the behavio. Was it just a one-time incident. In your case, [Mary] knows what he’s done and hasn’t really called him out for it, basically continuing with him, yet knowing this. In the end, both [stories] are about the woman being complicit by having allowed it to continue, or not revealing it, or not addressing it. I thought that was interesting. Am I on the right path there?
TT: I think so, in that she does understand that about herself. What I find interesting about her is that she seems a powerless person, but in fact, the fact that she stands behind him, as she says in the play, “I sat there, I filled in the most looming gap.” It gave her tremendous power because, I would argue in other situations like that, if the spouse didn’t sit behind her husband at those hearings or whatever, the person at the hearing who is looking for the job wouldn’t get it if the wife decided not to show up. I’m thinking of an actual hearing that we both know. If that wife hadn’t showed up, in protest or whatever, I bet you, that guy wouldn’t have gotten the job. In fact, this seemingly powerless person has extraordinary power. I found that interesting. She doesn’t realize that until the very end of the play. And she certainly doesn’t think of herself as a complicit character until the end of the play, when she begins to understand that she was doing it for her children. She was preserving the image of their father as a great man, a wonderful man, a worthy man, for her children. And she realizes that it’s blown up in her face. Her children were on to it more than she was.
Q: It doesn’t matter when she became aware of his transgression or not?
TT: I don’t think she knows it until the end of this play. One of the last things she says — she lays all of that out — and she says this about Jack’s composed face: “Maybe that’s how I could just sit there.” And then, after she says that, she says, “Or maybe I wanted what Jack said to be true, so I sat there to make it true.” But I don’t think she understands that about herself until those words come out of her mouth. I don’t think it’s political for her. It’s so personal, which is, again, back to what I tried to do. I tried to create fiction that felt like a memoir. But it’s her daughter who is the one — [Mary] says, “I tried to make it true. But then Flo came home and it couldn’t be true. She said she’d never forgive me, so it couldn’t be true.” So it’s Flo throwing it in her face that, frankly, wakes her up. And destroys her. SHe’s absolutely destroyed by the end of it.
Q: When she’s making this thing on her iPhone, is this something being recorded, or is it actually going out as it’s happening, in your eyes?
TT: It’s being recorded, which she then — the implication when you see the film at the end, is that she sent it somewhere.
Q: Does she finally release it? That raises another layer to the show.
TT: Exactly, and I like the ambiguity of that. But then when we show you the clip of video at the end, a) we thought it was fun and theatrical and what’s wrong with that; but, b), we thought, ”Yeah, she sent it. She pressed ‘Send.’”
Q: That’s an important point, because it does raise the question: did she do this all for nothing or does she really make it happen?
TT: Well, she says at the very end — very, very end, as one of her last lines, she says, “But everyone knows about Jack.” As in, we all know that he did it. We pretended we didn’t know. And then she says, “Now Jack does, too.” I.e., I called Jack out by sending this to the Daughters of the American Revolution or whomever invited her to speak.
Q: Does the name “Jack” have implications in your mind or was you just chose the name John, Jack?
TT: Place holder. It was a placeholder. The funny was, I started it because — it was a dialogue. I started the play in a Word document, and when you save a Word document, it titles it the first few words of the document. When I started it at the very beginning, the first lines of the play were “Jack was kind.” So I kept seeing that Word icon on my desktop. When those lines had changed a lot, I thought, that’s a good title. I just kept it — “Jack was Kind”.
Q: We could interpret it as having implications about — well, let’s say the Kennedys. Did that come back to you in a way that was good or that haunted you?
TT: Well, it only haunted me hilariously. Jack is not my father, but my father’s name was Jack. I never thought about it, never thought about it, never thought about it. But as I often do when I start a play, sometimes they’re called A and B, sometimes they’re called She and He, sometimes they’re called Jack and Jill. You know, just a simple placeholder. But then it stuck, and so my mother kept telling her friends “It’s not about your father.”
Q: How did your parents deal with it?
TT: Well, my dad’s not with us anymore so he never had to hear it, never had to tell his friends.
Q: How about your family? How does your husband and kids — how old are they?
TT: We have one we like to tease, she’s “Flo” — she’s a Flo type, the daughter. My family has — frankly, in all honesty, they’re moved by it. They felt it very moving, all of them. I appreciate that they dived into it and they find it moving.
Q: What is your relationship to the Irish Rep? How did this come to them, and how did it come at this time, since it is very relevant?
TT: We all find it hilarious because nobody knows how they got a copy of the play. Nobody knows. I got an email from Ciaran. I was working on a TV thing, which I had just — I am not lying about this: I was sitting on my sofa, I just pressed “Send” on this TV thing out in Hollywood, and an email from Ciaran popped in saying, “We’d like you to do “Jack was Kind.” Right before I could think “Oh, crap, what do I do next?” I was like, “Irish Rep wants to do “Jack was Kind”? What?” So we don’t know how they got it. They got it somehow, and none of us knows how.
Q: That was uncanny timing.
TT: I thought my agent sent it to us, and I was looking back in my emails and had to call my agent, “Did you send it to him?” He said no. So we have no idea how they got it.
Q: You’re in the New York theatre community in one way or another, so you have known Ciaran and Charlotte [Moore] for a while.
TT: Charlotte and I did a play together when we were both actors. Hilariously. It was one of the — oh, it actually might have been the first — I had a summer stock job and it was my first professional production in a proper year-around theatre, and she played my mother. She actually is part of my origin story, because I met my husband when I was working with her. I had been invited out for a drink after the show, and we were out of town in New Haven. I spent all day, the matinee and the evening: “But I don’t know if I should go, Charlotte. I have to spend the night” — because she and I drove back and forth together from New Haven. “I don’t know” da da da. And finally, at the intermission of the evening performance, the great Charlotte Moore looked at me and said, “Look, I will pay your hotel fee. But you’ve just got to stop talking about this.”
She didn’t pay my hotel, but hilariously, she let me know that I had become tiresome, and that was the night I met my husband. So I’m glad I stayed. We haven’t worked together since, but we had had a fantastic time in New Haven, and both remembered it when we were reunited at the Irish Rep.
Q: I assume you were writing more conventional plays with multiple characters, and you didn’t have to put all the burden on yourself.
TT: Yes, I never plan to do that again, actually. It’s very over.
Q: What lesson did you learn from all of this?
TT: I learned that it was a good idea that I decided to be a writer full-time. That’s what I learned.
Q: Do you see this as potentially expanding out to a movie, or a version with multiple characters?
TT: No, I don’t think I’ll do the version with multiple characters. Once you explore something, you think, bye, I did that, now it’s time to do something, to explore something else. I mean, sure, I think it would make a wonderful . I did it on Zoom, but it was very different on Zoom. It was super-successful on Zoom. The simplicity of it worked great. Sure, if somebody wanted to do a little film of it or something, that would be great. And they are very welcome to stick a movie star in there. Go for it, guys.
Q: So you do see it as being handed off to other people?
TT: Always. Oh, yeah. I did not write it for myself. Everyone, of course, assumes I did, but it never occurred to me to do that. We had readings of it with other actors before all of this happened. No, it never occurred to me — not one time did it occur to me to do it myself.
Q: Do you see yourself writing other things like a novel, articles, or nonfiction essays?
TT: Well, I am lucky enough to have some fantastic fiction writers in my life, and I don’t know that I have that skill set. I certainly admire them so much, but I kind of feel like, “I don’t know.” But I don’t know that I have the skill set. My skill set is, character is destiny, and the nature of prose is such that I don’t know that I know. But I do write television, and I’m early in the game of developing it. But I really like long-form storytelling like that. I love a nine-hour, 10-hour movie. Or if it’s over several seasons, a 30-hour movie. Love, love, love, love, love.
Q: It certainly gives you a chance to develop characters in a way that you can’t do it in a movie. On the other hand, the good thing about a movie is you go in there and it’s done, you’ve made it work in two hours — or you didn’t — and you’re on to the next thing.
TT: I definitely will write for TV because I like that long-form storytelling. I definitely will write more plays. And Lord knows, if I can write a novel I’d be thrilled with myself. But I have no idea. My daughter is a novelist and she has got the Thing, whatever that is. She’s in her 20s, and is in actually in an MFA fiction writing program now.
Q: How did this experience change your way of writing theatre, film, or TV?
TT: Well, Mary’s mode of thinking is super-duper complicated. That’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to perform, because it’s circular thinking. She’s making connections. She says something forty minutes ago that then she circles back to. I am always like that in storytelling, but I can see that that is very hard for actors to mine and discover. So I might look for a simpler way of thinking in my characters next time. It’s hard for me — and I wrote it — to follow Mary’s line of thought, and I have always written in a complicated way like that. One of the reasons I like television is that it is inherently simpler . So I might apply that in a good way, not a bad way, to my next play. We will see.
Q: Now you’re at the early stage of seeing how audiences will respond. If this play continues to sell, will they extend or will it just…
TT: Oh, that’s above my pay grade. That’s for the big shots at the Irish Rep. I don’t know the answer to that.
Q: What happens if you start getting offers now as an actor?
TT: [laughs] I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.