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[Garcés continues]... on the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of style, like Craig Wright, but I think their investigations of structure and where larger social and political issues and art meet—those interstices—I can't help but think that those have really been an influence on my thinking. In a way, working with someone as fiercely independent and idiosyncratic as Kia or Eduardo Machado—I'm just throwing names out of people I've worked with the most over the last few years—their fierce commitment to their voice and work has helped me bolster my commitment to my own work, and trust that I should be doing it, whether I'm successful or not. That it's not only worth doing, but that it is sort of vital. It must be done. You can argue that a play by Kia or a play by José Rivera or by Arthur Miller doesn't ultimately change the world. We are no longer living in a time in which plays change the world. I think that's probably right on some level. But I certainly wouldn't want to live in a world without the plays of Kia Corthron, or José Rivera, or Lucy Thurber, or an infinite number of playwrights.

And I do think the accumulated voice of these artists does affect the world on some important level. Our definition of what it would be to be human would be drastically different if these people weren't doing their work. To contribute to that in some infinitesimal way seems important, because it feels like it's what I'm here to do. I don't think it is any more important than contributing to, say, engineering or being an accountant. Those can be important and vital and honorable ways to live your life, but it's not my way. It's not better, but it seems the way that I have to do it.

Directing plays has certainly increased my understanding of how dramatic action works on stage, because I think my plays aren't particularly conventional. The more I understand how those conventional or unconventional works work on stage, just the dynamics of it and how it affects an audience, the better my play structures work, regardless of their so-called conventionality or lack thereof. So I think directing helps me undertake in a smarter way ambitious structural projects. Successful or not, I think I'm at least smarter about it. I have a better sense of what may or may not work, even if I start pushing it to the point where it doesn't work. I think I have a better sense of the odds of it possibly working.

LRS: How do all of the things you've done lead into one another? I'm not going to ask you which one you like best. That's the question everyone asks me, which seems irrelevant.

Garcés: Yeah.

LRS: I'm curious about how acting, writing, and directing lead into each other for you.

Garcés: I think acting and writing came from two really different impulses. I think writing came from a desire as a child to express yourself, whatever the fuck that means, thank you Madonna. But to articulate, to investigate my relationship with the world. I think performing came out of intense insecurity and vanity. You know what I mean? I think it's almost purely a manifestation of my insecurity and my vanity. As a child, I wanted to be on stage, I wanted people to applaud me and say I was good. And handsome, and desirable, not necessarily sexually, though certainly sexually, but also just desirable as a human being. So you get on stage and you dance and make people laugh and you get applause and you're cool.

Writing's hard, performing's easy. I don't say being an actor is easy. But that's different than sheer performance. I still do some acting, and it's hard, it's hard as anything else.

I don't think I'm ultimately a very good actor, because I don't have the commitment or the interest. I love performing still, certain kinds of text, but now I'm more about the text and the presentation of the text, which is what interests me, and less about the performing. I'm not keenly interested in taking my clothes off in the public in the way that real actors do, really exposing their vulnerabilities and exposing themselves.

I don't really feel acting led anywhere for me, except in my fleeing from it when I realized that it was no longer something that made me happy. Once the applause and being told that you're good is not interesting to you, why be an actor? That happened to me pretty early on when I got to New York. I was lucky. I did a couple of really cool shows with some great directors downtown, and was sort of miserable, and so I fled.

I had no intention of writing plays. Plays just started happening and I started writing. I just allowed myself to find out what that was. I had imagined myself as a prose writer, perhaps even writing poems. I really thought of my writing and acting as very different and had no ambitions to be a playwright. It would take me like fucking four weeks to write a single fucking paragraph of prose. And I'd work on the goddamn sentences and I would get so immersed in these fucking things and I would get nowhere. It would take me five excruciating months to write

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