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[Garcés continues]... don't really have basements. There've been three productions—one in Miami, one in Chicago, and one here [New York]—and where they wound up locating the three plays was vastly different. I think they were very cool, all very grounded, but the ethnic makeup of the casts was wildly different, particularly because there's no indication in the script and I didn't really interfere with the casting here or in Chicago. In none of the three casts were all the actors Anglo, which was interesting to me because in this country, with the state of American theatre, one would typically think that would be what would happen. One of the lead actors in the play was of South Asian descent, we've had Latino actors, a Vietnamese actor in Chicago, but very suburban America, and in terms of what people think of as suburban American I think it's been cool. The three basements and the three suburbs were really, really distinct. The one in Miami felt very urban, actually—a sprawling urban-type city—but it felt suburban in a really urban-sprawl-type city unlike Miami. Whereas the one here felt suburban in the sense of really far from the city. I like to leave that kind of openness.

LRS: That's something that I think is really notable about looking at your plays on the page. There is a lot of openness there. Whether it's your use of dashes, or lower case, or even just using initials for the characters. Some one could say that is just typing quickly, but I have a feeling it's a little bit more than that for you.

Garcés: With all the shortcuts you have on a computer, it's pretty easy to just program in the character names, and it's pretty fast. But the negative space on the page for me is the space in which everything happens in the play, not really when people are speaking, which is kind of like in life. A person doesn't walk around with their name all the time, "MICHAEL MICHAEL MICHAEL!" And on the page when you see it, it's, "Oh Michael's speaking! Oh, Michael's speaking." I want to take that away from the experience of reading it.

And certainly the dashes are interpretable as pauses, as beats, as instantaneous turns, as many, many different things. I want to keep the notation as spare as possible so it can be interpreted. I think each one of those dashes means something. But what it means is left purposefully neutral. Same with capitalization, keeping everything as neutral as possible, thus open to interpretation. I find that it's more exciting that way.

I direct as well, and as a director, I'm not interested in preconception of what the thing should be. I think that's boring; I could do that by myself, I could write a novel. But what's interesting is when you get into a room with a bunch of performers and a text and find out what the text is at this particular moment in time, in this particular space, with these particular people, and this particular audience that comes to see it. Again, it's the specifics of place, both the imagined place and the actual place, that are immensely important.

I get tortured about [my notation] all the time. People have a hard time reading my scripts—some people do, at least, because of it. But I just find it crucial for me to, to...it helps me write it. As soon as I start adding stuff, it feels a bit false. I was tortured into writing some stage directions with Acts of Mercy in order to send it to funders. And now I am literally being tortured by that, because now I have the set designer saying, "Well, but you said this scene was...." And I'm like, no I fucking didn't. I did that for funders and I don't know why you have that version of the script. I wanna kill somebody. It locks you into things and locks people into limiting ideas. And I'm just not interested in that.

LRS: I feel that has to do with why you write plays as opposed to novels or short fiction. Because there's something about this interaction and something about a discovery that happens with actors that illuminates things that you feel never could have been seen. It's sort of like you get to be in on what someone's reading responses are in a way that you wouldn't be able to as a novelist. Tell me about that, why theatre versus fiction?

Garcés: Part of it is I am interested in text that is alive in the world and text that leads to discovery. I find theatre is about being performed, being alive onstage and alive in a person's body and alive in the room. And it's about that interaction with audience. I find that stimulates and speaks to why I write in the first place. For me, writing prose reinforces the feeling of isolation that you have when you're writing. Writing a play, you're alone in a room at 3 in the morning, but you're still writing towards the possibility of it being alive in that way. And open to interpretation. I'm interested to see how people think of my work and how people respond to it. Seeing a production is actually seeing a response to your work. And seeing various productions of a play is seeing several responses. Some of which you'll agree with, some of which you'll vehemently disagree with, some of which are disappointing, some of which are exciting, some of which are beyond what you would have imagined, and that's all part of it. Even when you're disappointed, even when you disagree, it's still a response. That is probably one of the most exciting things about being a playwright.

I also find writing prose excruciatingly painful. And dialogue comes to me. Just in terms of temperament, dialogue just happens. I'm not really interested in filing in the white spaces. So I find it excruciating to write prose. I read novels, I consume novels like crazy. I think I enjoy reading novels more than I like reading plays, although I read plays for work all the time, so that may have something to do with it. People have written

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