Teaching Artist Leah Reddy spoke with playwright Theresa Rebeck about I Need That.
What is your theatre origin story?
I fell in love with the theatre when I was really young. The nuns at All Saints would put us all on buses three times a year and take us to Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park for a student matinee. Those student matinees were everything to me. One year, when I was twelve, I felt really sick and I lied to my mother about it because I didn’t want to miss the student matinee. I came home after and she took me to the doctor and I had an emergency appendectomy. I always think about that. I think I almost died so that I could see Tartuffe.
What inspired I Need That? What were you interested in exploring in the piece?
I was interested in exploring the way that objects take on so many different meanings in our lives. There’s a real awareness now around the fact that too many people just have too much stuff. And for me, that ties into both capitalism and fear of death as well as a love of life. We want to hang on to these talismans – a spoon, a book, a favorite sweater, a pen, a toy from childhood – which are tied to people and moments that were precious to us. Those things are important expressions of what it means to be human.
In I Need That we see the relationship between a parent – older, but still vibrant and independent – and an adult child. They’re navigating a shifting dynamic in terms of care giving, one that will feel familiar to many audience members. What interested you in exploring that relationship?
I’m in the middle of that relationship right now. My parents are frail and there’s very much a sense of time running out. You want to be there for them as much as possible but they don’t necessarily want you there that much. They are still living their lives and you are off living yours so there is a collision of natural impulses: they don’t want to be told what to do and yet they need help, and the child is the right person, but the power dynamic is all off.
The father-daughter team of Danny and Lucy Devito have been attached to I Need That for some time. Did their relationship influence anything in the script as it developed? Did anything surprising happen during the development process?
Certainly, as we worked on the play, stories from all our lives started to weave themselves into the script.
You’ve talked about needing to finish what you start in terms of writing, saying, “Once I get to a certain place in a script my anxiety goes really high until I write the end.” How do you start your writing process? How do you get to that “must finish” place with your projects?
Starting the writing process is abstract for quite a while. I walk around with thoughts in my head that “I would like to write about this thing or that thing.” Or a person, or a group of people start to appear and say things. If thoughts hang around long enough the whole situation moves from “I might want to write about this” to “I’m actually writing” but I can’t trust that yet because I’m not actually writing yet. Then there’s a time when my brain says, “Start writing, what are you waiting for?” and there is an impatience in that moment until I actually start to put words into a computer. It is pleasant at first: a character will start doing something that is funny and when I re-read it it makes me laugh. So if I'm sufficiently amused, at some point I feel like I have to start pushing ahead and that’s where the anxiety starts to have something to say. Usually, I feel that I need to get to page 32 and then to page 64. When I get to page 32, I feel like I am in safe territory and once I get to page 64 the rest will come. Those two numbers are arbitrary but are special to me.
In I Need That, the character Sam is deeply attached to the objects he’s gathered throughout his life. How do you understand that impulse? What is your own relationship to “stuff”?
I really like little things that you can set on your shelves. I have an arrowhead collection which started when I was young because my father grew up on a farm in upstate Ohio. My uncle Johnny still lived there and when we went to visit, we would go look in the fields for arrowheads. Over the years they’ve retained their magic for me. I think they are beautiful relics of America when it was a different place. I also have a collection of Zuni medicine bears which are made of polished stone. I like bears. And sometimes if I really like a person I will give them one of them. I know that those bears are in their own pack and spreading slowly across the country.
I also have way too many books. And way too many shoes. And I always yearn to throw things away to give myself more space. But it's hard to throw things away. You might need that.
You’ve been one of the US leading playwrights and film/television writers for over thirty years. You’ve been enormously influential (especially to me – I would not be here now, creating these questions, if I hadn’t found Spike Heels in the Cincinnati Public Library when I was 12). You’ve also been very open about the obstacles you’ve faced as a woman in these industries. Are there any changes happening in the field that you’re excited about? Is there anything about the generations of artists who are following you that excites you?
Right as I am being asked this question – in this moment – screenwriters are on strike and have been on strike for more than 100 days. There is a drone of conviction that theater is dying and that new straight plays are going the way of the mastodon. So it feels in this moment like dramatic storytelling is somehow in crisis right when we need it desperately for the lessons it teaches about community and empathy and culture and being a creature of this good earth. I still feel that the leadership in film, TV, and theatre have a long way to go before they understand that women’s voices are not being fully integrated and celebrated and seen as essential. But women are at the forefront of the movement right now to take our country back from authoritarian fascists and I believe that women’s voices will lead us to more important storytelling eventually. Right now, the thing that bugs me the most is how many movies out there are about blowing things up and killing people. This is perceived as "masculine," as the kind of stories that "men like" and to me that’s death culture. America does not need to celebrate death culture. We need to figure out how to live and be visionary leaders for repairing the earth that is suffering right now. We need to look at each other as peers and partners. We need to celebrate who we are together.