The world is on fire, a phrase that is said so often recently it feels void of all meaning. The phrase ought to be taken figuratively, but in Lillian Mottern’s new play Moonshiner, which runs through April 4 at Adult Film, it’s very much literal. It’s 2019 in Los Angeles and three girls wait out on a rooftop as fires rage around them as they try to work out their relationships to each other and themselves. Language expands and contracts as the fires ebb and flow, painting a portrait of the apathy arguably plaguing us all in the face of destruction.
I sat down with playwright Lillian Mottern and director Danica Selem, to chat about the play, about collaboration, and about the mysticism surrounding the West Coast.
This interview has been edited for both length and clarity.
Lindsey Walko: I know you both went to Columbia. I’m at Columbia too! Did you work together while you were there?
Danica Selem: We were together in a class because we were in the same year as Columbia. I really liked Lillian’s writing and then we actually got randomly paired to work together on a 10 minute play. I was hoping I would be paired with Lillian and I was really excited that that’s what happened.
Lillian Mottern: It was the same for me.
DS: And then we worked on another project together the next year.
LW: What show was that?
DS: It was actually Moonshiner, the play we’re doing now.
LW: Oh my god, that’s amazing. So, this is the first full length play that you guys have done together. Do you feel, three or four years later, like you and the play have changed?
LM: That’s a good question. I think the play has undergone a lot of rewrites in this production, so it feels like it’s a little bit more aligned with what I’m interested in currently. The structure of it has stayed the same, but I definitely think a lot has changed since then. I feel like I’ve really changed a lot too.
DS: We started working on this play in that first class together, the ten minute version. Then it evolved into a full production at Columbia and then we did a reading of it in London this year as well. For me, it feels like the same play, but a much more mature version. I loved everything that was in it the first time we did it, but now I feel like now it has just what it needs to have.
LH: Yeah, definitely. There was a similar feeling I had when I was doing that show the first time. I wanted to put every single idea I ever had into one play. But thematically, I just had so many different ideas for this particular one. It’s a pretty personal play in a lot of ways – coming from LA, there was so much in the city that I wanted to write about. I had to end up choosing only a few themes to explore in Moonshiner. I realized that I can write many other plays that will explore the rest of those ideas.
LW: I feel that way every time I write a play, like it’s the last time I’ll ever do it so I have to say everything. But what’s so beautiful is then you get to work on the play with other people and get to see what specific themes your collaborators are interested in, and then in a way, shape it to that. What did the 10 minute version start out as?
LM: It was a show that I had started writing in American Spectacle.
LW: Lynn Nottage’s famed class.
LM: Yes! It was my last piece I wrote for her. I can’t remember the prompt but what I can remember is that I had an image of like three girls sitting with their feet in a pool. That version was much more focused on their meeting with this older woman landlord who runs the building of the roof they’re sitting on. I don’t remember it super well, though, at this point.
DS: I know someone was eating an orange.
LM: Yeah, there was a lot of orange consumption in that.
DS: The first time I read it, there was such an atmosphere. I’m also an architect and there was such a clear visual world and a very dense atmosphere that was so, so specific and something I just don’t find in a lot of plays that I read. That’s what drew me to Moonshiner. And also the phenomenon of Santa Ana winds, which are these winds that make people, women especially, go crazy. They start the fires and the heat and pressure make people go mad. These winds have all the same lore as winds that exist in Croatia, where I’m from, which was totally crazy to me because they’re such distant and culturally different parts of the world.
And all of that is still there, the visuals of the fires and the blue pool and the three girls, kind of stuck in this world. My obsession now is more with the writing and the text and the dialogue of it, and embracing that it’s a play where nothing happens – intentionally. That was, for the longest time, our biggest conundrum. We did a reading of it in London and two wonderful artists, Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat, were very encouraging about embracing the Beckettian nature of the play – letting it be about the rhythm of the speech and the language. The language speeds up and falls apart and that’s theater too.
LM: The play when it was first read, it was described as being a vibe. There is a lot that happens and it is atmospheric, but ultimately it is just these girls waiting. In no other place really besides the theater, can you make a piece of art that is just that.
LW: And yet also still, there is such an undercurrent of suspense and tension. Beckett is such an apt comparison. I was also thinking a lot of Sam Shepard as I was reading- it reminded me so much of True West, in the specificity of language, in the way that language breaks down and the really complex relationship between these three girls. And of course, the West Coast of it all. I’m curious, what effect does producing this play, which is very much about Los Angeles, in New York have on the piece?
LM: I love Sam! As a writer, he’s really inspiring because he did a lot of that work on California in New York. And I feel like there’s something about stepping away from a place that allows you to write about it more. I think there’s an Ernest Hemingway quote about that where you can’t write about a place unless you’re not in it. Leaving LA to come to New York was really helpful for me as a writer in understanding more and looking at LA with a more critical eye. Doing it in New York, I think people are responsive to work about the West but there are a lot of elements that you feel like you can explain more of it. People won’t just know it innately. It’s exciting.
DS: When people ask me about Moonshiner, I tell them it’s like if someone combined Sam Shepard and Joan Didion’s writing into a voice of a generation in their 20s now. I’ve spent a bit of time in LA. I’ve never lived there. But LA, like New York, like many other places, are familiar to all of us because, as Wim Wenders said in the 70s “the Americans have colonized our subconscious”. And then there is this idea of being stuck, not knowing what’s going to happen that is also familiar to us all. I kind of hate talking about COVID, but it’s a thing that we’ve all been through. So even if people have never been to LA or never heard of LA, there’s something about how the girls are stuck in a place, looking at the world burning down and falling apart and they don’t know what the future is going to be. That’s a very relatable feeling.
LM: I think LA can work as a really good metaphor for many different things and my theory is that it’s kind of a perfect consolidation of everything that is interesting but also everything that is wrong with American mythology. There’s something very fantastical about it, but also there’s a feeling like you can’t leave. I’m obsessed with Urban Theory and the writings of Edward Soja and Mike Davis, particularly in terms of LA. It’s a city surrounded by desert. In a way, you’re trapped. It ended up revealing itself to me that this was the story I wanted to tell with the play: what I perceived as our generation’s proclivity for stagnation – whether it be because of nihilism, overstimulation, or whatever it is. I’m interested in this idea of being stuck.
DS: Something Lillian has spoken about before is that LA is such a dystopian city. There is something about it that feels like the end of a culture. It’s also a city that really shouldn’t be where it is. There’s something about it that feels like it could be eaten up by the desert or the ocean or the fire at any given moment. And it’s so huge! All of that becomes the thing that surrounds these girls on this rooftop.
LW: I love this idea of being stuck, which the girls clearly are. They’re not only stuck on the roof and in LA, but also in their relationship to each other. I found it so relatable, this idea of being stuck in other people’s perception of yourself and but then also stuck in your own perception of yourself.
DS: Something that is really exciting for me about this play are those girls, and the one older woman – I find them so atypical in terms of what the canon usually offers. And I really recognize myself in them too. They allow me to have so much fun working with the actors playing them. Very specific types of actors are drawn to this play. We’ve been lucky to really have an amazing cast every time we’ve done it.
LM: We have a really wonderful cast working on the show. And we’re also bringing back the original lighting and sound designers, who were able to capture the atmosphere so well.
DS: They both love this play! They’re brilliant designers and when we finished the first production at Columbia, they told me how much they wanted to be a part of future iterations.
LW: It’s so nice to see the evolution of grad school to the real world – both in the work and in the relationships. Can I ask, to close, what your favorite thing about working with each other is?
LM: I feel that Danica is a dream director. She is so generous in her willingness to work on a piece that’s in development. We’ve developed this piece for, as you know, a while, and she’s always willing to talk to me about it and explore the themes. She always has a really genuine excitement about the show, which is really fun for me because I think playwriting is such a nerdy and solitary thing. Like you’re so interested in one thing that you want to write a whole piece about or many maybe many pieces. She’s just so wonderful to work with in the room. It was always really important to me to find a director to work with who would make the actors feel very comfortable and allow them to be quite playful. It’s just been so exciting that we ended up finding each other. I feel super lucky.
DS: Thank you. That’s so very generous of you. I genuinely think Lillian is a brilliant writer and also really generous in terms of rewrites. We talk about a little thing in the room and then she comes in with new pages for the next day that are brilliant and stemmed from this small conversation. There is the skill and craft of writing that I’m really into – both the themes and the dialogue and how it feels like people really speak this way. She nails it so perfectly and it’s extremely exciting for me to read it again and again. We’ve worked on this play a lot and I always enjoy seeing what changed and what becomes clearer and how it all comes from this one small, subtle shift. And also, I really enjoy being in a room with her. I love all of her feedback always, and I always feel a huge amount of respect from her. It’s a really lovely way to work. She lets me be the director and then that allows for me to be really generous in how everyone else can participate in the process and how everyone’s voices can be heard. She also works with actors in a very specific way. She hears them speak her text and then does little adjustments to still make it her words, but in a way that works for the person who’s actually embodying it at the moment.
LM: Danica just gets it – she respects my work and I trust her direction. I’m so glad we met in class.
DS: Kudos to class!
Tickets for Moonshiner can be purchased here.
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