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Brooklyn Goes to Williamstown: An interview with playwright Martyna Majok

June 22, 2016 By Peter Stamelman Special to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Martyna Majok. Photo by Brian McConkey, courtesy of Martyna Majok
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On an unseasonably cold, blustery night in early May, I had the pleasure of attending, for the 12th time, the Juilliard Drama Division’s annual Playwrights Evening at the Pershing Square Signature Center on Theatre Row. The evening featured scenes from new work by Juilliard’s 2015-2016 playwright fellows. Having completed their yearlong fellowships with co-directors of the program Christopher Durang and Marsha Norman, the five playwrights were showcasing their works for an invited audience of family, friends, alumni, agents and one journalist.

The evening’s opening scene was from Martyna Majok’s play “Cost of Living,” which will have its world premiere from June 29 to July 10 at this summer’s Williamstown Theatre Festival. The production is to be directed by Obie Award-winner Jo Bonney and will star Rebecca Naomi Jones, Wendell Pierce, Katy Sullivan and Gregg Mozgala.

Majok’s other plays include “Mouse in a Jar,” “queens,” “Petty Harbour,” “reWilding,” “the friendship of her thighs,” “Buffalo, Maine” and “Ironbound,” which was first performed at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company two summers ago as part of the First Look Repertory of New Work; it had its New York City premiere at Rattlestick/Women’s Project in 2016. Her plays have also been presented at the Marin Theatre Company, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Yale Cabaret, Red Tape Theatre and The Kennedy Center.

Having been floored by the urgency and unexpected humor of Majok’s razor-edged dialogue, I sought her out at the reception that followed the performances. Alternately scathingly funny, engagingly feisty and wicked smart, I knew after five minutes I wanted to interview her. The fact that she and her husband had recently concluded an epic odyssey of living in 13 New York City apartments in one year — including stints in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bushwick, Crown Heights and Prospect Heights — sealed the deal.

Majok (pronounced “my-ok”) was born in Bytom, Poland and grew up in New Jersey and Chicago. She received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago and an MFA from the Yale School of Drama. She has taught playwriting at Williams College, Wesleyan University, SUNY Purchase and worked as an assistant to Paula Vogel at Yale.

Because Majok was hopscotching between Lubbock, Texas — where she taught a one-week workshop — overseeing rehearsals for “Cost” and getting ready to decamp to Williamstown, our “conversation” was conducted via email. Here are excerpts:

 

Eagle: Before we discuss your plays, a quick Brooklyn question: Having sampled life in four different neighborhoods in the borough, where in Brooklyn do you think you’d like to reside permanently?

Martyna Majok: During our period of moving around the borough, my husband and I were low on funds, so we really only got see what Brooklyn had to offer that was free — Prospect Park, the Brooklyn Public Library (which has a great drama section), the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and the Polish stores in Greenpoint — although we weren’t able to live in either of those places. I’d probably like Brighton Beach. Wherever I can eat pierogi and drink vodka by the water.

 

Eagle: Your dialogue and stage direction for both “Ironbound” and “Cost of Living” primarily consist of simple, declarative sentences. How did you come to that “voice”?

MM: I suspect it comes from my upbringing — the working class mouths I grew up with and around. And the mouths of those whose first language wasn’t necessarily English.

Eagle: In terms of influences, am I correct to detect Mamet, Beckett, Pinter?

MM: Nope. The writers who have most influenced and moved me are Junot Diaz, Raymond Carver, Jhumpa Lahiri, Andre Dubus, Dorothy Allison, Danny Hoch, Sarah Kane, Caryl Churchill and Conor McPherson.

 

Eagle: The hardscrabble, stark, yet ultimately resilient psyches and temperament of your characters reminded me of one of my favorite Hemingway lines from “A Farewell to Arms”:

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are very strong at the broken places.”

MM: That’s actually from the only Hemingway novel I ever read. I remember writing it down when I read that line the first time. It’s a perfect string of words and an incredibly perceptive way of characterizing people in this world. If you want to use that quote to describe my characters, I’d be honored. Most of my characters do not come from easy lives and they spend much of the plays fighting for something beyond what they have and against what’s attempting to hold them down. There’s a fire that burns in the “broken places.”

 

Eagle: Darja in “Ironbound” has a limited English vocabulary and her syntax is often jumbled, yet she is very precise in defining and declaring her needs and desires. Also, because she does have a limited vocabulary, she gets to the point quickly. (“We are not having nice conversation.” “I can’t trust ‘understanding.’ I can’t trust ‘try.’”) Did you know from the moment you started writing “Ironbound” that this was how you wanted her to speak?

MM: Darja’s English is similar to my mother’s and the people I grew up around. She learned it not in school, but through living and working in America as an adult. It wasn’t even a choice I was conscious of making. It’s just the way I knew this character would speak.

 

Eagle: In your performance notes for “Cost of Living,” you instruct the actors that “[S]elf pity has little currency in these characters’ lives. Humor, however, has much.” This would seem also to apply to the characters in “Ironbound.” Is this a code by which you yourself live? And how did you know you wanted to express this as a playwright?

MM: When I first started seeing plays, they didn’t include my experience of the world; I had to seek out the stories that featured immigrants and folks that do not come from means. And stories that do not treat these characters as subordinate, stupid or as sidekicks — [stories] that did not see them through a lens of pity or otherness [and stories] that captured the humor and the clear-eyed perspective, the fire, the mistakes and the striving, the ambitions and intelligence and resourcefulness of these lives.

I wanted to present these stories with depth, dimension and drive. Because these were the people I knew. Not that they/we were noble saints or heroes, necessarily. But that they/we were full and complex. I also think humor is the best tool we have as dramatists to disarm an audience and encourage them to get to know a certain character they might not think twice about in life. And, as a writer, I think that if you know how a character talks and what their humor is like, then you know a lot about them.

 

Eagle: To again quote Hemingway, “Write about what you know.” Does that apply to “Cost of Living” and “Ironbound?”

MM: Definitely for those last two plays. They’re set in geographies I know well and peopled with characters that are composites of people I know. But I think even when I wrote a play about a place I’d never visited, I was writing about the things and people that set me alight, the themes and types of characters I keep returning to. To quote Marsha Norman: “You’ve gotta write from your stuff.” I think we writers write about what we know to understand what we don’t.

One thing I know: whatever the medium — theatre, film, TV — we’re going to be hearing from and listening to Majok for many seasons to come.

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“Cost of Living” opens June 29 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and runs through July 10. For more information, visit www.wtfestival.org.

 

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