This fall, MTC presents the world premiere of The Receptionist by Adam Bock, directed by Joe Mantello. Adam’s work has been produced in London, Edinburgh, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Toronto, and New York. His plays have earned awards as well as critical and audience acclaim. Last season, Adam won the Obie Award for playwriting for The Thugs, which was produced at the SoHo Repertory Theatre. This spring, Playwrights Horizons will produce the New York premiere of his play The Drunken City. Play Development Associate Annie MacRae sat down with Adam to talk about his exciting upcoming year.

AM: Last summer, there was a workshop reading of The Receptionist at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference with Jayne Houdyshell in the title role. Are you looking forward to collaborating with her again?

AB: This has been a lucky little play; it got going so quickly. I only wrote it last year and then developed it in Colorado with Andrew Leynse, the Artistic Director of Primary Stages. I was given six days notice before going up to the O’Neill, and luckily Jayne was set for a play that had dropped out. When they said do you want Jayne Houdyshell, I said “Yes” so quickly because she’s perfect for the part. Right after that, I did a couple of readings for MTC and was lucky enough to get Joe Mantello to sign on as director.

AM: Joe is renowned for his collaborations with playwrights on world premieres. What are you most looking forward to in the rehearsal room?

AB: This play feels pretty solid, actually. But I’m curious to see what I’ll trim and pull back. I haven’t worked with Joe before though, so I’m jazzed to see what shows up and how we handle it.

AM: You haven’t done any major rewrites since the O’Neill?

AB: Just little tweaks. Each play is different for me. Some just come out and I leave them alone because they’re in good shape and have an organic feel. Others I have to go in and knead and push and pull. The shape of The Receptionist is what it should be. At the O’Neill, my goal was to find out how it would play. The receptionist is the center of attention, but she’s stuck behind a desk. How do you make that active? Where do you put her so she’s not upstaging everyone? I knew the language worked; I didn’t know if the space would work. We found out that it could. Now Joe’s doing something entirely different.

AM: David Korins will be designing the set for The Receptionist.

AB: He’ll also be designing The Drunken City this spring at Playwrights Horizons. He’s the designer I’ve worked with the most. He recognizes that my work needs to be simple on one level but also complex. Sets can either be just the place where things happen or something more can be revealed as you go along, in the way a play reveals itself. It’s great for the set to tell a joke or to have some sort of transformation, so it is alive and a character too. For example in Swimming in the Shallows, David found this one moment where the shark had to swim by that ended up being gorgeous and overwhelming. Then in The Thugs, he concentrated on the rain, the elevator and the shape of the room.

AM: What are you working on now?

AB: I have two plays in the works. One I wrote five years ago called Thursday, which I rewrote last spring after Trip Cullman and I did a reading. And The Flowers, an odd little play about a gay theatre troupe. I’m interested in the idea of the gay ghetto and whether we keep ourselves in it. I use a theater company to explore what roles we’re allowed to play and how we use these roles to fulfill what we can’t in the real world.

AM: Do you always try to work on a new play while you’re in rehearsal?

AB: I had a teacher who told me to have another piece in the works during a production otherwise too much pressure gets put on one play. I’ve always tried to do that. It’s important to know that it’s not the only play. If you think of it as the last play it doesn’t get to breathe because you’re watching it too carefully. I’m really lucky this season, because I have two plays; so it doesn’t put too much pressure on either and they’re very different. I also have another smaller production out in San Francisco, and I’m starting to write a movie.

AM Will it be your first screenplay?

AB: Yes.

AM: Did you work in television at all when you lived in San Francisco?

AB: No, it’s my first anything else.

AM: You’re originally from Canada?

AB: Yes, Montreal. I just had my first production out there. They translated Swimming in the Shallows into French. I didn’t know how they would do it because there are a lot of American colloquialisms. It’s also going to be done in Greece this summer.

AM: You studied with Paula Vogel and Mac Wellman at the Brown MFA playwriting program. Did they influence and encourage you to experiment with form and structure?

AB: Yes, Paula’s a brilliant teacher. What she does is make her students realize that there are many different ways to tell a story. She exposes them to all types of theater and devices. She made me realize that I don’t need to put a play in a kitchen. I’m always looking for a different place to put a play. Suddenly it looks new to people and they can hear again because they’re not used to it. When you think of the Brown playwrights—Sarah Ruhl, Nilo Cruz and Jordan Harrison—we all take those risks.

AM: There is definitely a Brown style, in a very positive sense. The playwrights who come out of the program all have distinct voices and don’t mimic Paula’s.

AB: She won’t let you, actually. She believes in the personal voice. She always asks what would happen if you pushed yourself a little. What’s great about theater is you’re alive in the room as the art is happening. There’s very little between how the actors are behaving and how I’m behaving, except I’m not speaking. They’re not on celluloid; they’re not a machine. That’s why I love theatre. It feels like a community sitting down together, remembering we are part of it and we are not powerless. Other art forms make you feel like there’s nothing you can do to change it, that you don’t need to be there. In theatre, you have to be. It doesn’t happen if the audience isn’t there. An audience can hold up a play by watching so carefully and helping the actors. I love watching, hearing audiences and working with them to make something.

photo by Henry Leutwyler