When Deep Blue Sound announced its residence at The Public Theater, the playwrights in my MFA program were thrilled. Their response gave me an inkling as to what kind of playwright Abe Koogler must be: a playwright’s playwright, the type of writer that younger practitioners admire for a fresh take on the form. In speaking with Koogler, I realized he’s not just a playwright’s playwright, but an actor’s playwright writing plays attuned to the rhythmic nature of speech– the feeling a word can have in one’s mouth– with a focus on the inherent musicality of ordinary conversations. This linguistic sensitivity comes from experience. Koogler was first an actor. Realizing he found delivering other people’s work limiting, he turned to writing. It was this transition that supplied Koogler with his artistic approach and the thematic tendency of his work. Attempting to make what happens on stage as close to life as possible, Koogle writes plays with political undertones existing in tandem with quotidian concerns. Relying on a trove of memories and impressions to fill the stage, Koogler thinks up scenarios of individuals making sense of their place within systems, as large as a corporation or as as small as a relationship. Perhaps it would be best to describe Koogler as a people’s playwright, as that seems to be the subject to which he is most dedicated. Read on to learn about Koogler’s background, how he arrives at ideas for his plays, the impulse behind Deep Blue Sound, and how, in his dramatic practice of musicality offers its own catharsis.
————————————————
Eve Bromberg: I come from, with reason, a generation of Annie Baker fans. She speaks to people around my age. Did you study with her while you were at UT?
Abe Koogler: She was not at UT when I was there. I studied with playwrights Steven Dietz and Kirk Lynn. Lynn runs the Rude Mechs Theatre Company in Austin and Dietz has plays produced around the country. They were great great teachers and it was a great program in general, but no Annie and I didn’t cross paths when I was at UT. But she teaches there now and I admire her work greatly and have been influenced by it.
EB: Staff Meal (2024) was partially a response to COVID shutting down indoor dining in New York and your upbringing on Vashon Island in Washington– how restaurant culture was not as much a part of the culture there. How do you get ideas for your plays?
AK: I used to think I should sit down and come up with specific worthy ideas and then try to write those ideas into plays. I no longer think that. Now I have a big black spiral-bound book and anything that seems alive or interesting to me, whether it’s an image or a piece of music, something I read in an article, or some personal detail from my day, I put it in the book. I don’t expect these things to show up in a play for years, if at all. Deep Blue Sound took twenty-five years of filtering my experience of living on the island before the play came to be. I sit every morning and try to be receptive to whatever is there that morning and sometimes the little germ of an idea will lead to the next germ of the idea and it will slowly become a full play. What I find is things I read or thought about years prior will suddenly remerge in a play as I’m writing it. If there’s a kind of density of images and ideas and themes that I know have been on my mind for many years that are working their way into whatever it is I’m working on, I know it’s going to be an interesting piece. Deep Blue Sound came because I wanted to write something symphonic with a lot of voices working at the same time. I’d written about the island I grew up on in another play called Advance Man, which was done in grad school, but I wanted to revisit the island because it’s such a distinct place with characters I know so well. So, I guess, I had those loose goals for Deep Blue Sound but I didn’t have any concrete plans for the play. The places it went and the form in which it emerged were a surprise to me.
EB: The play deals with The Death with Dignity Act that was passed in 2008-9. Are those the years in which the play is set? Is there a set year of the play?
AK: Not necessarily. I knew that assisted suicide was legal in some form in Washington State, and at the time of writing, I had a friend who was considering using it. This personal connection was how the Act worked its way into the play, but the play takes place in the loose present, the time in which I was writing in 2019. I subscribe to the local paper on the island and there had been a series of articles about the health of the orca whales in the water outside the island–whether they were being disrupted by the sounds of the navy ships passing and how pollution was affecting them. I’m always interested in political, economic, and ecological themes, but I try to come at them in a way that isn’t heavy-handed.
EB: Politics as an overlay to your characters’ lives.
AK: Yeah, I think all my plays are about people trying to make sense of their individual lives in the context of larger economic and political forces that are working on them. The most important thing is how they’re making sense of their lives, but they exist within these larger sometimes violent systems while trying to retain their humanity. My play Fulfillment Center (2017), for instance, is about people in and around this Amazon-style shipping center. The work is very tough and hard on their bodies.
EB: Instances where the individual is not meant to matter.
AK: Exactly. Most often, however, my ideas for plays are sound impulses, like a rhythm or a melody. Deep Blue Sound had such a particular rhythm, kind of like a body of water that’s sweeping over you. The characters actually say they tell the audience, to give up and not hold onto little things as these sounds and characters wash over you. To just let it happen– let it wash over you. It was a sound impulse at first.
EB: Was there a sound impulse for Staff Meal?
AK: Yes, I wanted to start by writing short bad scenes with very little text to them. The first scene of Staff Meal is two people saying hi and then the scene ends. These short sequences continue and those tiny minimalist bursts develop and build. From the initial clipped very short scenes eventually emerges a very long monologue. It’s the steady development of a single sound impulse.
EB: You grew up in Washington State and then came to the East Coast for college. Did you feel a particularly large culture shift?
AK: Absolutely. I went to Yale as an undergrad and there was a particularly great theatre scene on campus then. I was there at the same time as Clare Barron, Agnes Borinsky, Lila Neugebauer, Sara Holdren, and a bunch of people who are still very active in theatre today making great work. There were all these undergraduate productions happening all the time, and at the time I thought I wanted to be an actor, so I was acting in a lot of them. I think being around so many talented artists and so close to New York City was very exciting for me. I was also really interested in politics at the time and thought I’d pursue politics as a career, so the East Coast was also exciting for that field: being around a lot of people I’d only encountered in the news. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I didn’t feel I was at the center of American culture. The idea of being in the center of culture became a very exciting prospect for me. Even after I graduated from my grad program at UT Austin, I briefly considered staying in Austin and having a great community and making theater there, but I kept getting pulled back to New York City. It felt like the most exciting place to be.
EB: You didn’t go straight to graduate school, right? What did you do in the interim before pursuing an MFA?
AK: After college, I worked in politics for a while. I worked in California on a local campaign as an assistant campaign manager. I then moved back to New York to study acting at the William Esper Studio. I did a two-year Meisner training program there. It was at Esper that I realized I was shy, I didn’t like being watched, and often felt constrained by acting–like I couldn’t be my real self. I then started writing plays. I did a workshop at LAByrinth Theater Company where as part of the workshop you wrote and produced your own play. It really unlocked something for me immediately; I knew that there was so much more there to explore and that I could be artistically free in a way I couldn’t as an actor.
EB: So many people I’ve spoken to trained at Esper! You’re in great company.
AK: I think Meisner Training is amazing. I loved my time there, it was so exciting for me because you’re learning how to listen and respond to what is in front of you and that is a skill that has really served me as a writer– being alive in the moment, listening and responding to what is actually happening for you when you sit down to write. This is a skill you can carry into any artistic discipline. It’s almost like a religious practice.
EB: Because you were an actor, do you feel you are more attuned to speech and the effect of utterance when you sit down to write?
AK: Yes. I think a lot about what words feel like in peoples’ mouths. I’m very– though maybe all playwrights are this way– connected to the physical experience of saying words. How you can affect actors and audiences through the rhythms and melodies of words, which comes from being an actor and speaking words out loud: having the experience of a not-so-great script with lines that feel wooden. How working your way around a sentence can be a challenge in that kind of script. And then, on the other hand, the pleasure of getting something that’s rhythmically connected to human speech. It can be so idiosyncratic that it’s almost bizarre but also fun. Fun to speak. I think actors really respond when they’re speaking something that sounds like someone thinking.
EB: Are you a musician by any chance?
AK: I am not! My older brother is more of a musician, but even so, musicality in plays is the most important thing to me, above all else. I actually don’t listen to a lot of ambient music in my actual life, I prefer silence or a podcast.
EB: I’m sorry to speak in such Theatre Graduate School terms, but, do you think musicality has its own catharsis?
AK: Absolutely, absolutely! Sometimes what makes an audience experience catharsis is pure rhythm. The content of a line is of course important, but for instance, there’s a climatic speech delivered in Deep Blue Sound that’s effective only partially because of the content and largely because of the rhythm. The larger rhythm of the play and the rhythm of the individual lines, when written and performed well, have a physical effect on the performer and the audience. Humor, of course, is one hundred percent rhythm. You can say something that’s not funny on stage, but if you say it in the right rhythm then it will be funny.
EB: Do you aim for catharsis in your work?
AK: I’m always looking for some kind of catharsis, even in the weirder plays, attempting to create some kind of opening in other people. Not like a weeping thinking about their childhood catharsis, but…
EB: But a sort of completion, or altered state?
AK: A shift that’s tied to emotion in some way that opens up a corridor in their mind, if only for a second.
EB: The main character of this play, Ella– played by Maryann Plunkett– is dealing with a terminal illness and she’s choosing to end her life. How much is her suffering meant to be the rest of the cast’s concern? Is it meant to be a solitary journey for Ella?
AK: The thing about Ella’s story is that everyone around her does want to help. They want to be part of this death. But she is having a very particular psychological experience where she doesn’t want her friends to know that she’s dying. She wants to keep it to herself and not make a big thing of it because she’s struggling with feelings that her life has been a waste, and that she hasn’t amounted to enough. There’s shame and fear around what it means to actually die and there’s deep denial.
EB: And Ella’s attempt to deal with her death, while nebulous, is far less nebulous than attempting to deal with the erosion of ecology. Are those two phenomena, in conversation with each other?
AK: I suppose so, though I didn’t do any of this on purpose. In retrospect, that seems to be the case. There is an overwhelming feeling of things being outside one’s control in this play. Ella doesn’t have control over her illness, and all of the characters feel like they can’t quite get their hands around what it is their lives have added up to or what they’re doing next in their life, and they don’t ever figure out what happened to the whales. They’re surrounded by these larger mysterious forces even in their relationships with each other. There are many relationships in the play where people can’t quite figure out what is happening between them at any given moment: are they having an interaction that is platonic, romantic, or is there some undefinable thing that’s drawing them towards each other or repelling them away? That idea is very interesting to me: experiences that are unnameable but still working on us.
EB: Ambiguous interpersonal relationships– is that a theme for you?
AK: I think so, yeah: personal relationships that are pushing beyond the bounds of what they’re supposed to be. I’m interested in what happens when a new element enters a relationship that isn’t supposed to be there: acquaintances suddenly pushed into a much deeper knowledge of each other, work colleagues who are forced to see each other as human beings. People become destabilized when they don’t know what their role is supposed to be in an interaction. I think that’s very compelling to watch onstage.
Deep Blue Sound, a Clubbed Thumb production, is at The Public Theatre until April 5th. You can purchase tickets here.
Leave a Reply