[p. 3 of 5]

[Garcés continues]... novels in dialogue, and it's possible that some day I'll take that on. I've thought about it occasionally, but anytime I've started a project in that direction, it's become a play. And plays are not easier to write than novels, I don't expect, so it's not necessarily about ease. Plays take years to write, a real full-length play—they're very complicated objects. But it's just what speaks to me rather than prose. At least now. It could change.

LRS: What are some of the things that you've been reading recently that excite you?

Garcés: I read Paul Auster's Invention of Solitude recently, which I thought was really beautiful and remarkable. I was very moved and affected by it. By both what it says about being a writer and about being a human being. I read Conscience of Zino. I think it's also known in English as Confessions of Zino. Italo Svevo's book. It was given to me by a friend. I directed The Dear Boy [by Dan O'Brien] and the playwright was somewhat obsessed with James Joyce. We were both Joyce heads, so that was good. He wanted to give me an opening night present, but giving me something by Joyce would have been redundant, considering we've both read most of him. So he gave me the Svevo—who Joyce semi-discovered, or at least upped the ante in his fame by introducing him in this literary circles, which is why I think he's remembered. So he gave me his best-known book and it's fantastic. So funny, and deeply disturbing in a great way. And the ending is really sort of beautiful. The narrator is unreliable in every way—nothing he says is true, but, at the same time, he's not necessarily lying. It just exposes, not exposes, but meditates on how we are constantly rethinking our lives, and how full of shit we are, and how pompous we are—I certainly identified with it.

I read King Leopold's Ghost, by Adam Hochschild, about the Belgian Congo. Quite good. I certainly knew about the colonization of the Congo, but not in as much detail. It was pretty well written and it was upsetting and good. I've been reading some Joseph Conrad as well.

LRS: I really wanted to ask you about directing other people's work. It's interesting to me because, like you, I have a multidisciplinary approach to artistic expression, but they're all separate, compartmentalized. Also, I'm curious about your voracious interest in history and place (in terms of what you're reading), yet your plays seem to be very hermetic worlds with people fighting over a particular perception of truth or power or love. What's that—some people would say disparity—about, and how is it related to the way directing other people's work affects your work? Just two different questions getting at what seems to be a theme.

Garcés: Did you see customs?

LRS: No. I've seen only little bits. But I don't know the whole play.

Garcés: I think customs is an extremely claustrophobic play as opposed to a play of mine [The Site] or certainly points of departure. But at the same time there's a real sense of the wider world encroaching on these individual lives. I guess when I write about individuals dealing with forces of history, it always comes down to the real specific interactions that people have. I feel like the pressures from outside coming down on a person tend to seal that person up. The ball around them just gets tighter. So I think the play then becomes more enclosed, if you will, than some of my other plays. So while you have a sense of the danger approaching from the outside and the actual historical forces at work, it tends to crush the personal air around the person into a smaller and smaller place in the world.

It's sort of trite, but there is a sense for me that the individual is really isolated. Searching for connection, searching for family, in spite of every odd, searching for God, in spite of the fact that there is no God, searching for truth or meaning in spite of the fact that there isn't any, and searching for love, in spite of the fact that it's probably chemical, we don't know what it is—but we're searching for all these things. And I just feel—not feel, it's my conviction that that is the human dilemma. That's what we do. I think drama is about exploring that particular dilemma in different circumstances. And that's why it's an ongoing exploration.

I've got this play, suits, about all these guys in an office building hopelessly banging up against each other. It's monstrous—no one will ever produce it. It comes out of my experience working with the Board of Education. For a year and a half I had to create a show. There were three directors for one show. Mostly we sat around doing nothing. I watched many episodes of South Park. But there were all these artists there, people who had their own hopes, dreams, desires, and yet they were so confined and suffocated by economic forces, by the force of their own fears, by social forces, and it was fascinating to me. I had no stake in it. They could have fired me and I would have walked out of there with a smile on my face. I mean, I couldn't afford to be fired, but at the time I just fucking didn't care. When I left, I just left. I didn't even have another job, I just left. I was just done, you know.

But talk about hermetically sealed rooms. There'd be like five or six people closed off from the world with all these giant dramas, happening in tiny little spaces in tiny little lives, that ultimately came from tiny little reasons.

I think this happens regardless of whether you're the president or prime minister of France or a humble playwright at New Dramatists, or whatever. It's the same little human passion.

LRS: And that's where we can understand the forces at work, that's what fits on a stage.

Garcés: But also it is the forces that make things work. It's not even the smaller picture, the big picture, to me it is the picture. These small passions are the passions that move things. They're not substitutes, they are actually it. King Lear is a very little man in a very little world to me.

LRS: Or it makes me think of South African playwright Athol Fugard and how his plays always have just a couple of people, but it literally came from the fact that you couldn't have more than a few people of different races in one room.

Garcés: And that is actually the drama of South Africa, not a representation of it. And it's little men in little rooms everywhere, whether good or bad or in between, we're all mostly gray. That is history.

The other question you had was...

LRS: Directing other people's plays and if that affects your own.

Garcés: I can't help but think that it must. I certainly in no way shape or form write like Kia Corthron, who is a major playwright, or someone

[continues...]