Playwright Jason Grote is a Rutgers University English teacher by day, and he talks like one. Ask about his new play, 1001—a particularly ambitious entry in the upcoming Contemporary American Theater Festival—and Grote explains himself by way of Bertolt Brecht, British novelist Ian McEwan, even legal scholar Lawrence Lessig.
Mention his penchant for references, and he responds, naturally, with another reference: novelist Tom Wolfe’s inversion of the old writer’s maxim “write what you know.”
“His advice to writers was, ‘EXPAND what you know,’” Grote said recently by phone from his home in Brooklyn. “I tend to learn a lot in the process of writing a play.”
No wonder 1001 comes with a bibliography that ranges from the popular “Casablanca” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to Edward Said’s “Orientalism” and Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Translators of ‘The Thousand and One Nights.’” (Borges even appears in the play.) Grote’s often mischievously comic drama—which, as the title suggests, riffs on the storytelling charms of “The Arabian Nights”—leaps across time and cultures, eventually focusing on a budding young couple in modern New York.
“1001 is almost, but not quite, a collage text,” says the 36 year old Grote. “Harold Bloom referred to ‘the anxiety of influence,’ which said that young authors need to wipe their minds free of influence in order to be creative. I don’t think that’s true. In fact, it’s the opposite. I much prefer to celebrate my influences.”
Not bad for someone who nearly dropped out of high school. When his family moved to Hamilton, New Jersey, the teenage Grote sulked and gravitated toward the punk music scene in Trenton. But his direction changed when he enrolled in a performing arts high school and took theater classes with a woman who had worked with legends Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan.
Grote went to college at Montclair State University in New Jersey, acting and eventually writing a play that won a campus prize. After that, Grote focused on writing and directing, hustling his work to fringe festivals and showcases and losing his way a little until rededicating himself to playwriting in the New York University graduate program.
He’s been writing steadily since earning his degree in 2003, and his emerging plays now include Box Americana (A Dream of Wal-Mart), commissioned by Manhattan’s Working Theater, and the autobiographical Hamilton Township, which Grote notes with a relieved laugh required no research at all.
“It’s been a busy summer,” he says. “I’ve already been out to L.A. and Austin, and I’m doing a couple workshops in New York.” Next month he’ll even travel to Portland, Oregon, all in the name of play development—the step-by-step process writers often endure before their work finally gets a full production.
“I love what Ed is doing with the Festival. Actually getting the work up,” Grote says of CATF producing director Ed Herendeen.
“I’ve done a lot of play development that I think is b.s.,” Grote continues. Rather then helping the playwright, “It’s more so the institution can put its name on a play that’s pretty much already finished. Then they use that to get more grant money.” (Grote slings his industry opinions liberally on his blog, colorfully titled “And Then Jason Grote Turned Itself Inside Out.”)
On the other hand, the proliferation of reading series and workshops does offer a certain measure of encouragement and support, and can be a path to the kinds of commissions Grote is beginning to enjoy.
“I certainly don’t mind, if I’m going to be writing plays anyway, to be able to actually get some money for it,” Grote deadpans. “And on Box Americana, I can use all the help I can get from dramaturgs. The research on 1001 almost determined the shape of the play, because everything I was reading was so lush and rich. But what I’ve researched for Box has been very dry—a lot of journalism, business books, legal statements, union briefs, things like that. It’s really hard to humanize the play and make it interesting.”
1001 made its way to the CATF via the 2006 Denver Center Theater New Play Summit, a week-long workshop where Grote didn’t overhaul his script so much as hone it. If actors wanted to add words or lines, Grote worked to subtract material elsewhere to keep the show under two hours (without a momentum-killing intermission). He also looked for ways to subtly guide viewers through his often mysterious tale.
“It’s a difficult line to walk,” Grote says, “because I don’t want to leave the entire audience scratching their heads feeling, ‘That was a fun ride—but what exactly are we supposed to take away from it?’ At the same time, I detest theater where you know in the first five minutes what it’s trying to tell you, and it’s something you already know or agree with. I hope there’s a feeling of bafflement [in 1001] that’s not elitist or exclusive, but that makes the audience work a little bit.”
He adds, “I think more people get upset about the narrative structure than about the politics of it.” An exception came in one of the generally positive reviews during the recent premiere in Denver, in which a critic tried to pin the play down politically.
Grote, whose 1001 included a line about the controversial Rachel Corrie until the movable flap over My Name Is Rachel Corrie made it clear the late activist would be remembered without his help, sighs. “I get very bored by theater that picks a side and hammers it home. I’m not going to make any bones about the fact that I’m pretty much a big lefty, but I think a healthy society is one that’s pragmatic and skeptical about everything, always asking questions, never quite satisfied, always in pursuit of improving itself.”
And is there an audience for theater that speaks to that? Not everywhere, Grote suggests.
“I think the sophistication of New York is way overrated,” he says. He then repeats a bromide—and for once he can’t cite the source—that his wife recently shared with him: “If you make people feel like they’re thinking, they’ll love you. If you make them actually think, they’ll hate you.”
“In New York,” Grote contends, “there is a danger of pretty well-educated, pretty sophisticated audiences feeling like they’ve seen it all, and not wanting to move outside their comfort zone. Whereas my experience in Denver, Minneapolis, Louisville and places like that is that audiences are really game. They’re very excited to see what the theater is going to bring them.”
Nelson Pressley is an arts journalist and critic living in the Washington, DC area.