Billy McEntee’s Slanted Floors is an intimate exploration of a couple, Kaplan and Teddy, as they go through their day apart and then come together at night. The twist? We don’t watch from a distance: we are in their home, an audience of six sitting around the living room and eating dinner with them. Eventually, the fourth wall —already tenuous— is pushed almost to a breaking point, exploring the flimsy relationship between storyteller and audience, and the act of durational listening. The play — directed by Ryan Dobrin, and starring Kyle Beltran and Adam Chanler-Berat — is staged in McEntee’s own apartment; it was fitting then, that he sat on his couch for our online interview a few days ago, as we delved into the characters’ relationship to screens, and whether our day only begins after we close them.
Francisco Mendoza: When you wrote the play, was the expectation that it would be performed in your home?
Billy McEntee: When I got to the phase of actually writing it, yes, but it started because The Brick does a Salon of short skit thingies and I participated last year but at first didn’t know what I’d do. So I thought: why don’t I just do a seven-minute version of my day, condensed and sped up, and make it weird? That became the seed for the show, and it’s what the audience sees first, the various things that occur during Kaplan’s day at home as a freelancer. Then, I thought: what comes next?
FM: When I was watching your show, there seemed to be a tension: what is dramatic, and belongs in a play, and what is domestic and doesn’t? Because it’s not like we are sitting in the audience watching a set of a house — we are in the house. Your house! So, there’s almost a promise in the very form that we’re going to witness real life, right? But at the same time, we don’t, because there are moments, as you said, that are sped up, that are multimedium, that demand suspension of disbelief. And there are moments that rely on sound or lighting cues that are unnatural to what would actually happen in real life. How did you navigate that?
BM: I appreciate you naming that. I think we wanted to know when we were settled into naturalistic domesticity and when we could break from it, and why we’d break from it. I think in the two main cases where we break from it, it’s when the two characters are kind of opening up their minds and showing us their worlds and their thinking where it felt like we could give each that opportunity and theatricalize via lighting and sound.
FM: It felt like the play had two starkly different moments — and I don’t say starkly as a judgment, but as a literal assessment.
BM: Yeah. We see Kaplan at home alone, and then we see Teddy come home after his day of work.
FM: It’s been such a long time since I’ve lived with someone, but watching your play put me in that mindset of when it was a priority to achieve some sort of emotional stasis before going to bed. Not just cleaning up or doing dishes, but also making sure that the person I live with is not upset with me. I am not alone, and therefore that guides my actions.
BM: Damayanti, our stage manager, said it’s a show that’s 9 to 5, then 5 to 9. First we see the privacy of Kaplan’s 9 to 5 at home alone, and after work, one has to negotiate space when sharing it. The person who’s coming through that door doesn’t really understand the day you had, and you also don’t really understand the day they had. So we see partners trying to make their worlds match and come together, share a language and emotional state, even though they are coming from different places. That feels very true to my domestic experience, obviously, because this play is somewhat auto-referential, but hopefully it resonates with people who — even if you don’t live with a partner — come home and then something about your emotional landscape or headspace needs to shift because you’re no longer in one mode and now you’re sharing a different one.
FM: I want to name something that’s perhaps a bit of a spoiler, but at a certain point, Teddy, the one who comes home, shares a story that posits a “parallel present” where certain people have decided to live off the grid, away from mass media, in a sustainable manner. This idea comes up in the play itself, I think. The first part is mediated by a lot of online interactions. We, the audience, don’t exist, since we’re not diegetic: Kaplan is alone, and we witness him in his aloneness. But he is “in communication” with others, at work. That seems to say that real life doesn’t start until there’s a second person to witness you — that the promise of the internet, of connection to the world at large, is not actually true. I wonder if you had that in mind as you wrote.
BM: That’s a really beautiful point, and I think that is the intention, and something that we’ve been discovering. The first part of the play is so tech-heavy. It is like all those tabs that are sitting on our desktops (probably) as we speak to each other here, and how we sift through them. And then we get the analog, opposite of that via Teddy’s arrival to show us that contrast, and also, like you were saying, maybe we’re not activated or seen until we are opposite another person.
FM: Teddy’s story is predicated on the idea that one of the characters living off the grid wants to rearrange her context so that a different part of herself can emanate. She wants to reconnect with a different group of friends that she used to have because, as Teddy tells us, she misses that version of herself. Which, of course, we could say, “If you miss that version of yourself, be that version of yourself.” But what she’s saying is, “I cannot be that version of myself if I am not in the context in which that version emanated.”
BM: Yeah.
FM: And it’s almost like: if we think back to the first part of the play, there’s no version of self in that part because the screens are pulling the attention or are driving Kaplan away from himself, from his body. There’s a recurring joke in that part where Kaplan keeps asking himself, “Wait, have you peed yet?” Like, he’s so disconnected from his body that he has to ask himself if he’s peed. That speaks to the power of the screen to shut us off even from ourselves. So, it’s not like I’m actually manifesting my true self. My true self is perhaps being constricted from arising because I’m so distracted.
BM: Yeah, I think that’s a really astute way of analyzing how his day operates and what it does to his body and his ability to connect with himself. I do think Kaplan has an ideal and dreams and amazing thoughts, but all of the swerves of the to-do list and tasks and tabs have this gravitational pull that keep you seated. And then you disassociate from your bodily needs and sense of self.
FM: Right. And not to spoil things, but the sort of, if one could call it, the climax or crux of the play is a fundamental failure of the partners to connect around something that’s meaningful to one of them. So, if I were going to describe from each of them what the problem is, one of them would say, “I shared something that is meaningful to me and it was received in a way that implied that it wasn’t for you.” The other would say, “I’ve been put in what one could call a ‘professional expectation’ of response when I am in fact in my house. In my house, I should not be forced to receive things and analyze them and have brilliant things to say about them. I could just be tired from my day and have nothing to say.” Can you talk more about that disagreement?
BM: I think you nailed it in a very fair way. I think it’s also, what I’m realizing now, is that it’s the longest amount of time that Kaplan is sitting still. He’s listening to this very long story, sitting still, when he is used to, as we see him in what we call “Act I” of the play, doing a different task every eight seconds and maybe never even completing a single one. Now he’s being asked — as I think the audience is being asked, because what we do on our phones diminishes this power — to sit and listen and absorb and respond or engage or not engage.
FM: It’s funny because the disagreement echoes an earlier joke in the play when Teddy says he recalls a moment when a young playwright was having a reading at a theater and the artistic director fell asleep, and Teddy empathizes with both. He says “that poor playwright, you know, that was their big break.” But then he says “but I totally get the artistic director.” It’s almost like he is acknowledging the possibility of being overloaded; even without meaning to, sometimes you just don’t have space for something. So when I look at Kaplan’s side of things, I guess the question at the core is: what has overwhelmed you? Are you overwhelming yourselves with things that are important or useful?
BM: Yeah, I think that’s fair. I don’t think that we’re meant to criticize where either partner is coming from, but to just understand their truth in their day. And I hadn’t thought about that callback to the artistic director sleeping joke, but I think that that’s really valid and tells us there is always a storyteller and always an audience — and the bridge between them is tenuous, and neither party can control the other’s ability or intention. But I think this play’s small audience kind of acts as that bridge between Kaplan and Teddy. We are the device that is trying to connect these two people in a way because we’ve both witnessed them. But how are we activated or not by each of them as they offer us a piece of their day?
FM: I felt very in my body when I was watching it because I was in such evidence, you know what I mean? It seems like your thought was, “I will bring audiences here and we will watch each other closely to make sure we’re all listening.”
BM: I think I think that’s right. And, just sit in that strangeness and listen fully to the sound of people doing things in an apartment and understanding the everydayness of it. I think this play was created out of my own hunger to have us practice durational listening and sitting in gray areas between two ideas, because art is very practical. It won’t give us an answer, but it’ll give us discomfort in a comfortable place and let us feel that in our body and store it and help us navigate the world. We’ve put a frame on that even though there’s no proscenium per se. Although we’ve been joking, my apartment does have two prosceniums that become portals. You look through the bedroom door and through the kitchen and there’s a rectangular box that kind of becomes the stage for Kaplan as he watches the story. So we do get these unique vantage points that become more “theater” than we would have expected — which is to say, theater can really be anywhere.
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