The first line of Dante’s Inferno reads, “Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” In The First Line of Dante’s Inferno, a play written by Kirk Lynn, a woman finds herself in a dark forest searching for her missing sister. An unnamed narrator describes this woman trapping rabbits and engaging in tumultuous trysts with a local ranger, while a second, older ranger watches them both. The narrator (along with the audience) watches all three.
There is always a gap between the events of a play and the representation of those events on a stage. It is rare that a car on stage is really a functioning car. Every play calls for some suspension of disbelief. The First Line of Dante’s Inferno, written in prose, draws attention to this gap. In this production, currently at La MaMa, directed by Christian Parker, the three actors speak both their dialogue and much of the narration, letting the audience imagine narrated action. Without losing the emotional intensity of performance, the play draws the audience’s awareness to its artistic choices and the possibility of choice.
Reading The First Line of Dante’s Inferno in late January, I found the play-in-prose style to be more than just a creative choice for the stage; the play’s format made reading it a distinct and complete artistic experience. Soon after reading it, I spoke with Kirk Lynn and Christian Parker, whose longtime friendship was evident in the humor and geniality of our conversation. We discussed writing at the intersection of prose and drama, Christian’s questionable choices in pets, and what belongs on stage.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Annie Rasiel: I really loved reading this piece. It felt like I was reading fiction, which I know is by design. I kept reminding myself, “It’s a play! Read it like a play!” Did you always intend for this work to be staged, or did it begin as prose?
Kirk Lynn: It was always for the stage. I often look for a formal game, for lack of a better term, to help my brain compose and to keep myself entertained as I compose. I think a lot about how, as a culture, we don’t read enough plays, that plays are kind of off-putting to people for some reason. Did you read Lincoln in the Bardo? That’s a play!
AR: It’s a closet drama!
KL: It’s a play! George Saunders is lying to us all and collecting Pulitzer Prizes! I wanted to formally engage with the question of how we share plays with people. Live theater is great. It’s one of the best things in the world when a play is good and you’re there, present, and it feels like it can only happen once. But prose is such a beautiful, personal experience, and you can take a break and walk your dog, and your novel waits for you so patiently. When I really love a novel, I slow down as I get toward the end, because I don’t want it to stop. You can’t do that with plays. So I’m engaging with how to share dramatic material with people. I love stage directions. Directors and actors know that really great stage directions are a private conversation between writers and their collaborators. I wanted to share that with the audience.
AR: I have a question about the audience.
KL: Are they up to our standards? We don’t know. We’ll meet them in a few days.
AR: That’s a great starting point. Does the audience deserve you? [They laugh.] As you were writing, did you have to remind yourself that you were writing for the stage, or did you let yourself just get lost in the prose?
KL: I mostly let myself run away with the prose, but I think you can tell it’s for the stage all along. There are certain theatrical moments written into it, like when he throws a can of peaches and then shoots it with his gun, and it rains peaches. What a stage trick!
AR: How did the fact that the play is written in prose shape early rehearsals?
Christian Parker: We have the good fortune of working with Kellie Overbey [actor who plays Anne, the woman searching for her sister], whom we’ve been talking about this play with for 10 years. The three of us had time leading into rehearsals to talk about the interplay of direct address, narration, and dialogue, and whether those roles were all versions of the same character or required moving between different characters. She had clear notions of how she might want to approach that from the beginning. A lot of the conversation was about how to make sure that the overall story was clear and how to use the collision of those two approaches to the story to enhance theatricality, so that it’s all part of a play.
KL: My memory is that when we first played with it I chickened out and formatted it to look like a play. We had to learn to trust the material.
CP: That was Kirk’s impulse at the first reading. We chatted about how it would work for a staged reading, how to break up the prose into different voices and divide the narration. Part of what’s interesting about the narrative voice in this play is that it’s a mystery to the audience. It’s even a mystery to the reader. The theatrical revelation of the narrator’s identity at the end is part of what lands the play. I always felt like there had to be a way to divide up the text so that the actors could feel like they had a through line—so that they knew who their characters were—but that honored the prose impulse.
AR: So the actors read the narration out loud?
CP: They perform it! The actors perform narration as direct address to the audience. The intention is that the audience is held in a state of curious uncertainty about the origin of that narrative voice. Just as soon as the narration has been spoken, the actors are back in dialogue. There’s no transition between the two; they just switch.
KL: They perform about half of the pure prose sections.
AR: As I was reading the script, I kept thinking about how there’s so much great prose and feeling almost sad that the audience wouldn’t get to experience all that beautiful language. How did you pick which parts of the narration the actors would perform?
KL: The classic technique of arguing. Christian and Kellie tended to want more narration, and I wanted less, which felt strange as the writer.
CP: I love the prose. I think we all agreed, though, that there was more narration undergirding dialogue scenes than we needed in order to tell the story—which is not to say that it isn’t excellent writing! It is! But in terms of keeping the energy level high and keeping the ball in the air dramatically, we wanted to make sure that it was as lean as it could be. That’s the case for any play, really. When you’re reading prose, you can sit back and enjoy great writing. In theater, you need to keep the action moving. It’s about rhythm. But it’s such a language-driven play that every choice we made in the rehearsal room was about sharing that language and allowing the language to be the primary element the audience experiences. We don’t want to layer so much design or physical activity on top that the audience can’t hear what’s there.
AR: So much of the narration is description of the setting and of characters’ actions, which, in a traditional script, would be stage directions. How much of that are you trying to physically create or represent on stage, and how much do actors perform through reading those descriptions?
CP: That was one of the essential questions that we had to address from the beginning. We create an atmosphere more than a literal forest. There are signifiers of forestness, but we’re not in a literally-rendered space. In terms of the physical action, my instinct was always that to physically render actions that actors also narrate would be redundant. If there isn’t any physicality, though—if actors aren’t enacting the actions at all—then why is it a play? We wanted it to be metaphorical and allegorical but still a play. We’ve worked hard to find a spare physical vocabulary that allows the actors the freedom to explore their physical impulses within the dialogue and to develop a relationship with the audience in the narrative moments but doesn’t override the text by trying to physicalize what the text already explains quite vividly. It’s hard to describe that without giving it away by a specific example.
KL: Let’s do a scene! Right now!
CP: Shoes, for example—there’s a lot of business around taking off and putting on shoes. If the actor took the time to do those actions while also narrating them, it would be too slow. The actors often embody the movements without doing them. The language is so vivid that we have to leave the audience room to imagine what’s there, rather than just showing them everything in literal detail.
AR: There’s a moment in the prose where a character is described as naked, aroused, and dancing. When I got to that moment, I thought, I bet they aren’t staging all of this literally.
CP: Haha, no.
KL: So disappointing for American theater!
CP: We actually just restaged that section yesterday. It’s not done in any literal detail. There’s an actor onstage describing his own character doing those things and embodying that in some way. I want the audience to imagine it explicitly without the actor having to do it. My hope is that they will be more entertained and intrigued by the image they conjure than watching a real guy do something potentially problematic on stage, or just extremely vulnerable in a way that isn’t serving that scene. There’s a version of this play, probably in a particular setting, in a particular time and place, where you could get more literal and explicit, but we’re not making that choice.
AR: As a writer, there are always questions like, What can I ethically ask of an actor? and How would seeing this impact an audience? Would it take them out of the story? This approach is an interesting—I don’t want to say work around, because it isn’t—way of thinking through those questions.
CP: As we found the physical vocabulary for this play, it was important to me that it was never a workaround, that it was always in service of the moment in the story. I don’t want anybody to see this play and think, Oh, I wish they’d been more explicit. I wish they’d been more literal in the staging. I want it to be theatrical and simple but evocative, so that the images that are described in the play really land. This is the collective approach that we’ve discovered to do this. I never think there’s only one way to do a play. I don’t think it’s the only way to do this play. It’s how this group of people, with this time and place and these resources came together to tell this story.
KL: My brain is delighting at the notion that we made these choices together. How does it work for this room, for this group of actors? I tell my students all the time that the great luck of my life is that I pretty much only make work with people I love. My life as a theater maker is really defined by long term friendships, like with Christian, the Rude Mechs [a theater company of which Lynn is a founding member], and other connections across time. I had a Weinstein TV show deal fall through when [Harvey Weinstein] got exposed. At that moment, it felt like, Oh my God, all that money just disappeared. But ultimately, I’m lucky. I only make things with people I love! Christian and I talked about this play for more than a decade, just thinking, How can we get in a room together? By the time we were making choices about how we’re going to move and what we think is thrilling, sexy, and violent, those choices were grounded in mutual understanding and trust and a real love of working together. Even disagreeing with each other is fun.
CP: One of the joys of collaboration is to have another set of eyes. Everybody has their defaults. It can be hard to know if you’re playing it too close to the vest or too safe. Kirk or the designers or one of the actors can say to me, “I don’t know. I don’t think that’s actually what you’re going for.” It’s useful. At the end of the day, what’s fun about doing the work is solving the problems, building the house together.
We had a moment yesterday in rehearsal where we were looking at a fight, a very pivotal moment in the play. The actors were getting used to the simple staging and stripped-down fight choreography. I realized that all of the actual danger that’s possible in this scene, a scene where the characters could actually hurt each other—and maybe one of them even wants to be hurt—had to be present, even if not staged literally. The choreography is a series of very simple moves and gestures in keeping with the established physical vocabulary of the play, but it still needs to feel dangerous. We had a conversation about how the actors can fill this simple movement sequence with their voices and with the intent that’s located in the narration. The scene’s power comes from the somewhat lean, straightforward language of the narration, not dialogue.
AR: That reminds me of acting in a fight sequence and that feeling of being comfortable in the choreography and realizing, Uh oh. This doesn’t feel dangerous to me anymore, so I need to make sure I’m keeping the panic in my eyes.
CP: You need to find the danger. This scene ends with a comic beat, actually. The tone of the play shifts back and forth so much that the play becomes a study in constant contrasts. I needed to set things up to collide tonally, which can be technically challenging for actors. [To Kirk] Feel free to contradict me at any moment!
KL: I’m loving it! I’ve been away. I get to come back this week. I’m excited.
AR: Oh yeah, Kirk, you’ve been largely absent from the rehearsal process. [Lynn lives and teaches in Texas.] How has it felt not to be in the room?
KL: I was in the room for ten years! I was there for the first week of rehearsals, too, and I joined on Zoom once. I read the rehearsal reports and chime in once in a while, and Christian and I talk on the phone.
CP: The good news is that we had talked about this piece so much that by the time Kirk flew back home, we knew what we were trying to accomplish. We knew the scaffolding and the story of the play. I never had to call him and say, I don’t understand this scene.
KL: Although, wouldn’t it be fun if I show up and I’m just like, “No, no, no, no, no! This is terrible!”
Christian laughs.
KL: It would be too late! We don’t have much rehearsal time left.
AR: I’m picturing you asking, “Why aren’t you staging all this? Why are they reading the stage directions out loud? What have you done to my play?!”
KL: Oh god.
CP: Who’s laughing now, Kirk?
KL: I really am excited to be back.
AR: I’m excited to see it! How much Dante was in the room as you were developing the play?
KL: Dante was in the room! Kellie introduced me to a really fantastic translation by Mary Jo Bang. Some people are like, “Huh. Weird title.” Others get the reference and immediately identify with that feeling of being totally lost in life.
CP: I’m of two minds about it. Dante’s Inferno infuses the text in all kinds of subtle ways. Dante is welcome in the room! Deep knowledge of the text is not necessary for the audience, though. In fact, the first line of Dante’s Inferno is quoted in the play. The audience gets all the Dante they need. There’s a danger, particularly in a fairly quick rehearsal process, of getting bogged down in intellectual conversation about the content and themes of a play. These actors are really smart, but it’s more important to focus on what is happening for each character moment to moment. Mostly we were talking about the story of the play, not The Inferno.
AR: It’s one influence.
CP: Right.
AR: What has surprised you about finally producing this play that you’ve been talking about for a decade?
CP: It’s so much more expensive and difficult to put up a play than one would hope. I’ve worked for a long time in theater in New York, and I’ve had the good fortune of working for some larger institutions, within which I was doing a lot of the producing work, but doing an independent production—even in partnership with a very supportive institution like La MaMa—is really challenging, especially if you want to be true to the vision that you have for the play. We don’t even have a lavish production in terms of bells and whistles. Things are expensive right now. That’s the reality.
KL: For me it was just the simple joys of, like, I want you to do a funny voice with a rabbit. The joy of telling jokes, or of kissing or rassling or playing. It’s the basic sense of what it is like to be alive.
CP: Things are so fraught in the world right now that it’s been a blessing to disappear with actors every day into our weird, strangely-temperature-controlled rehearsal room with a loud heater, especially because the play has so many opportunities for silliness and play. One of the themes of the play is what happens to people in the woods, how they go a little crazy, a little feral, a little wild. The characters also become childlike in a way, more impulsive. Even alongside the adult themes, there is this uninhibited, childlike play in the performances and in the text. It’s been fun to have the actors rolling around on the floor.
KL: It’s like “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” [a poem by WB Yeats about an uninhabited island in Ireland on which he spent summers in his youth]. It’s a place you can go in your heart and mind. Ultimately, three of the characters decide to go back to their lives. You can’t live inside a joke, or a date, or a play. Ultimately, you need to reengage with the shit that matters, as sad as it may be, or tough as it may be.
CP: It costs them something to do that, but they make that choice.
KL: If you want to live inside a joke, or if you want to live inside a poem, you can’t be a parent. You can’t be a good partner. You can’t be a good friend. Eventually you have to disengage from fantasy to do the nuts and bolts of living, as disappointing as life may be.
AR:. Do you realize you just summarized a song from Into The Woods? You essentially quoted “Moments in the Woods.”
CP: There are eternal themes and tropes in this play. There’s some Midsummer Night’s Dream in there too.
AR: Oh my god, of course: fleeing to the woods to escape the structure of society and then returning to your old life transformed., Do you imagine that these characters are transformed by the end?
CP: I think all of them are. They’re all kind of shaken. They’ve woken up to their deeper animal selves. I think we leave them unsettled. They aren’t resolved, but they are absolutely changed. The magical spell that has been cast over them through this experience in the woods is lifted, and reality hits them in the face with all of its challenges and opportunities. They’re regrouping around that reality and heading back out into the world. It’s not finished, though. The last image is them walking away to go home. We don’t see them at home later, having resumed their lives and cooking breakfast.
KL: I think it’s fun that they are walking hand in hand, but we know that they’re going to part from each other—or, at least, I think they’re going to part from each other.
CP: I think they are.
AR: My last question is about this prose-theater writing style. Is this method the right way to tell this specific story, or would you return to this style?
KL: It’s absolutely something I want to return to. It’s fun! Should every play be this way? Absolutely not. Should any play be this way? Who knows?
AR: To be determined!
KL: Some people might end up saying that no play should ever be this way! We will see how people respond. But it is fun. Earlier, when you and Christian were talking about how you can learn fight choreography so thoroughly that you lose the sense of danger, I was thinking about friendship and marriage. Eventually you can settle into roles and forget the deeper, more complicated weirdness that’s underneath them, what brought you together in the first place. I think that this form brings out the real richness of theater—it makes us examine what belongs on stage, which parts are private to us, and how we negotiate those things together.
It always excites me when writers push form to new places. Lincoln in the Bardo is an example. There’s a novel I’m obsessed with called Conversations with Beethoven. It’s by Sanford Friedman, who was also a playwright. The conceit is that late in life, Beethoven went deaf, so people would write down what they wanted to say to him. That’s the text of the novel: only what people write to Beethoven, nothing he says in return. There are these great moments where a character will write something like, don’t yell at me, and you realize that Beethoven’s been yelling. I’m also thinking about Sheila Heti’s recent alphabetical diary. It delights my brain. I’d love to keep playing around with these questions. Can I invite people to read the play if they don’t get to see it? Can I invite directors and actors to co-create what belongs on stage and what doesn’t? It’s an invitation in both directions
CP: One of the fun challenges of doing the show has been figuring out how to actually do it, how to turn the text into a theatrical experience for the audience. I don’t think the audience will be sitting there imagining what the text looks like on the page. The audience will just experience the play. It would be cool if they then read the play and see that’s what a play could look like. That’s such a nerdy thing to suggest, and I don’t know how many people go off and read a play after seeing it, but it’s exciting to me that this work exists in two forms. It’s a play that is actually a good read on the page. I always tell my students that it takes practice to learn how to read a play, and especially to enjoy reading a play. This is a satisfying read and something totally different in three dimensions. It’s cool. I hope Kirk does continue to do this. I think it presents certain challenges to readers and institutional theaters who might look at it and say, I don’t know what this is, at first glance, but that’s not a reason not to do it.
KL: And if you only end up working with people you love, you don’t have to worry about that! People will get it, or they’ll at least be interested. They’ll at least ask, “Why the hell is he doing this?”
CP: That’s why La MaMa is such a great partner for this show. It’s a place where they support you as you come together to figure it out.
KL: Oh look, my dog’s here, my cats, I got everybody. Where’s your dog, Annie?
AR: My dog is locked in the bedroom because she likes to bark during interviews.
KL: Christian isn’t a dog person.
CP: I’m a cat person, though I don’t have either at the moment. I’m allergic to most dogs, which has prevented me from having a closer relationship to the species writ large.
KL: Your opening night present is a puppy, so get ready.
CP: But I’m allergic! I’m allergic to cats too, but not as much. I had a hermit crab for a while when I was eight. I decided I really liked hermit crabs, so I got one.
KL: That would be the worst opening night present. Live crabs for everybody!
CP: It was not a great pet.
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