We’d like to highlight a particular feature within Issue 16.1: a play-in-progress by Dan O’Brien. Usually in these “Why We Like It” posts, the CR staff pens a note about what we like. However, this time, we’ve invited an outside guest to contribute: Alison Carey, director of the American Revolutions project at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Here’s what she has to say about Newtown (read an excerpt here):
Alison Carey: The opening act of Dan O’Brien’s latest play, Newtown, is heartbreaking and nauseating: Nancy Lanza is speaking to her son, Adam, the night before he kills her and then twenty-six children and staff at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School. Nancy’s monologue, twenty pages of confusion, desperation, self-justification and loss, is not an easy read; we know what is about to happen, even if she does not. Dan O’Brien, unsentimental and meticulous in all his work, draws on research, imagination, and personal experience to give us a specific and heartbreaking glimpse of the moments before the world ends.
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater co-commissioned Dan to write a play about the place of guns in our country’s story, as part of American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle, OSF’s multidecade program of commissioning and developing thirty-seven new plays about moments of change in American history. One of the core tenets of the program is that writers write what they want to, because then we get great plays. This means that the portrait of the United States created by all thirty-seven plays together will be impressionistic rather than boxed around a structure. This is all to the good— history is complicated business.
Some of the complications in this particular depiction of history lie in Dan’s personal connection to the dynamics of the Lanza family. “I was particularly haunted by the mother/son relationship at the heart of it, and the mystery of guilt and responsibility they share (to some degree) for what happened,” Dan wrote to me. Reflecting on his brother’s suicidal depression and his own OCD, he added, “I suppose I’ve never known, nor can ever know, how much my mother’s (and my father’s) mental illness contributed to or caused the mental illness of their children. . . . The mystery of the cyclical nature of abuse has always been central in everything I write. ” Many of us have mental illness in our families, of course, but most of us are not able to turn it into a deeply self-aware and finely sculpting scalpel of historical illumination. Dan is.
For those of you who know Dan’s work, this ability is not surprising. Dan won the inaugural Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History for The Body of an American, an honor he shared with Robert Schenkkan for his American Revolutions–commissioned All the Way. The Body of an American explores the relationship between war photographer Paul Watson and a picture he took of a murdered US serviceman in Somalia in 1993. Dan wrote the play after beginning an email conversation with Watson, and the resulting portrait of what haunts men is riveting.
In 2016, Dan was diagnosed with colon cancer, now in remission, and he wrote about theater postdisease for Literary Hub in 2018. “The more I write the less I include: only what feels most necessary, potent, dangerous, often what comes to feel destined, if not obvious, like ‘Why didn’t I think of that before?’” You can feel that as you read this first act of Newtown— nothing is a waste of time. The structure of the play, which will go from Nancy’s singular voice into the political response to the shooting, is a great reminder of Dan’s storytelling confidence. You need to know this first, audience, so it will haunt you as you experience every moment that follows.
Once you have read this first act, I encourage you to watch for the play to come to the stage and go see it. Go see it twice. We do not know when or where Newtown will premiere— plays find the home they need. (Personally, I would like it first performed on the floor of the United States Senate, with the senators’ pants glued to their chairs and all the doors locked to keep them in.) As remarkable as Dan’s language is on the page, plays are written to be performed. Bill Rauch, who directed the world premiere of Dan’s The Body of an American, says this about Dan: “I found every single rehearsal to be its own amazing journey because of his steady stream of insights. Dan is a brilliant poet with his language, but also a total theater maker who thoroughly understands every aspect of our art form.”
As the Director of American Revolutions, I think about history a lot. One of the questions I get asked, both by newly commissioned writers and theatergoers, is when “history” starts. I don’t have an answer. The writers decide it for us. What I have learned from them is that history is much less about time than we might think. History is the things we need to know about, the things that compel us to try to understand, the things we can’t change except by dismantling them into their parts. There is joy in history but, more often than not, history is the things that still hurt us. Like Newtown.
In a 2014 piece for the New Yorker, Andrew Solomon quotes Adam Lanza writing that he was “not satisfied if information related to me is not profound enough. I could not learn anything from the ninth grade history textbook because it did not explain events to a sufficient extent and did not analyze the implementations of the events.” This may not be an accurate reflection of a true inner longing in Adam; in reference to Adam’s Asperger’s diagnosis, his father (fairly or not) described “the arrogance that Aspies can have.” And I do not want to sentimentalize the insights of a mass murderer. But as someone who thinks about history a lot, I find it painful to see its telling criticized by someone who would go on to be such a grotesque part of it. No, I don’t think better textbooks could have saved those children. But I do think great tellings of history will help us to a better future.
And that’s where Dan O’Brien comes in.
(Find out more about American Revolutions here.)
Alison Carey is director of American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s multidecade program of commissioning and developing thirty-seven new plays about moments of change in United States history. Carey is cofounder and former resident playwright of Cornerstone Theater Company, which creates work with and for communities in Los Angeles and across the United States.
