HOME
Signature: So the play is called The Open House,
and the idea of home seems to stick with you a lot.
Why do you think this theme keeps coming back
to you?
WE: I don’t know, I guess there’s something I haven’t
figured out yet, or there’s something I have not quite
shut the door on or put a bow on. I guess I am sort
of dogged by questions about home and growing up
and all that stuff. A formative experience is a formative experience, and so we all do share, if not the details, we share the experience of being two feet tall
when everyone else is three times taller and ten times
heavier. And knowing vaguely about the brain, it does
sort of build its connections on its early connections
and so I guess I’m dogged by questions about that.
I have a friend who has a little kid, Benjamin, and
their next-door neighbor was a guy named John
Churchill who smoked all the time and he just flicked
cigarettes in his driveway and then every Sunday
he’d sweep them all up. So there were just cigarette
butts all over his driveway. Really nice guy. He died.
And a couple years later Benjamin, who was still
only four or five, was walking down the street with
his mom, my friend. And he– at four or five years
old– picked up a cigarette butt off the street and
said, “John Churchill.” And that’s all. That’s the whole
story. But it just amazed me what a complicated
relationship– what a rich, totally personal, fully expressed relationship he had to a cigarette butt. And
then I wondered if he’ll start smoking. But anyway.
James Urbaniak
in Thom Pain
(based on nothing)
at DR2 Theatre, 2005.
top: Tracy Letts, Parker
Posey, Glenn Fitzgerald,
and Johanna Day in
The Realistic Joneses
at Yale Repertory
Theatre, 2012.
...we all do share, if no