6:30 - Cocktails

7:30 - Dinner, Dancing and Entertainment

Casual Western Wear Encouraged

The 2023/2024 Season

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or call 561-514-4042 ext. 2 for more information.

The Science of Leaving Omaha was commissioned by Washington University and produced there in 2021. PBD’s production marks the play’s professional world premiere. The piece was inspired by a 2020 article in The New York Times by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn about the disintegration of working-class communities across the country and its devastating toll from one generation to the next: limited education, joblessness, and broken families.

CWL: I was doing a lot of research on something very different, and I didn’t have a play in mind at all. I read this article and realized I wasn’t totally aware of our country’s complete abandonment of the working class and that it affected about a third of our society. I found it stunning, and the article made it far more personal. And I started thinking, “What are the options for the young people of that generation?” The article is about what happened to their parents.

So, I started thinking about two kids, and wanted to find an environment that was unique. There was a confluence of ideas: I was talking to a guy who lives down the street from me who runs a funeral home, and the crematory idea came to me. I just thought it would be nice to have the lead character underground, working a night job, hiding from something – at the time, I didn't know what she was hiding from – and then a character from the outer world would come in almost mythologically and try to save her in a way. And then I just tried to mess around with all that. So, it didn't come from an “aha” moment. It was sort of a slow erosion of ideas that came together. I said, “Okay, here's a girl who’s in a basement mortuary: What happens?”  

As soon as you land on a play that is born of some kind of political thought, the first thing you want to do is push the political thought aside and deal with real characters, so that you're not writing about an issue. It took me a while before I came up with Iris and then with Baker, and at that point I know I also wanted an intrusive character, who ended up being the mall cop, Sally.  

CWL: I don’t know; I think I just liked the sound of the name. I’ve never actually been to Omaha, so I had to do a lot of research. I also started researching crematories and process and became fascinated by it all.

CWL: The gestation period of not writing it was longer than the writing of it. It only took about three or four weeks to write. But the research probably went on for several months before that.

CWL: It wasn’t – until I got to the end. Originally, Iris was probably in worse circumstances than she was at the beginning of the play. But when you write, you spend time with these people and try to understand their behavior, and you get attached to them. So, I had to uplift in some way. The label I’ve been stuck with is that I write about serious issues, often political, and use lots of humor. And the plays are often about people sort of reaching through the grotesque or the dullness of daily living and finding something beautiful to keep them going.

Q: You retired from Washington University, and The Science of Leaving Omaha was your “farewell” commission. But before the play was staged there, it actually was given a reading in PBD’s Drama(in the)works series. How did the play evolve along the way?

CWL: The play was supposed to be done in 2020 at Washington University, but Covid came and we had to postpone. Then Bruce read the play [Bruce Linser, manager of The Dramaworkshop and the director of PBD’s production] and we did the reading at PBD. It was very helpful; I got a lot from it. Washington University greatly benefited by PBD, and they did a lovely production there. There were more rewrites, and a few months later there was a second reading at PBD, this time as part of the New Year/New Plays Festival. So, we arrived here with a pretty solid script. I’d say three-quarters of it was basically there to begin with, but at every stage of the process the play has changed and grown and altered. I was very lucky to have that simultaneity between PBD and Washington U’s production, and then learning from the Washington U production before I came down here.

CWL: When I was a student in college, I tried to be an actor; I quit that by popular demand and became a director. At my college, they did this unique thing: they would select two students who had done well and honor them by giving them a project to do. And then you’d get Distinction for it. They came to me and asked if I wanted to do a Distinction project. I said, “Hell, no. You want to honor me by making me do more work?” But I thought about it and went back to them and said, “You know, I’ve always wanted to try to write a play.” So, I wrote a play called Till Death Do Us. . ., about my parents’ divorce. That hooked me. In my late 20s, early 30s, I had two plays done beyond college. I’ve been writing most of my life.

CWL: Being a Midwest guy, I moved to California and lived in the Bay Area. I worked for some theatre companies out there. I co-founded a company in Berkeley called Upstart Stage, which did new works. I was the resident playwright. Then I got involved with Sacramento Theatre Company, and when the artistic director moved to Geva Theatre Center [in Rochester, NY], he took me with him as playwright-in-residence and literary manager. Then I left there and went to Washington University.

CWL: No. I decided I didn’t want to be in Rochester because I hated the weather. I learned so much there, and got so many advantages from being a literary manager and playwright-in-residence. Several of my early professional productions were done there. But I decided I wanted to go back to California, and after three years in Rochester, I resigned. Someone at Washington University heard I was leaving, and called to find out if I wanted to interview for the position of playwright-in-residence there. I didn’t; I had no interest in going to a college at that time.

But I was talked into checking it out. I sat down with the chairman, and he said, “If you come here, we will give you free rein to go do all your work, and we will commission work from you.” They offered me a two-year position, and I said, “Okay. I can delay going to California for two years.” After two years, they asked if I wanted two more. And then two more. Then they just told me to stay as long as I wanted to. So, I did. It was really nice and a good job because they gave me freedom. My fear was to go there and just end up an educator. But my most prolific period of writing was probably my first 15 years at Washington University. I was taking 20 trips a year, flying out to different productions. It was great. And I’d come back and teach – and I found I liked teaching.

Q: Did you find that with certain plays, like The Science of Leaving Omaha, being around 20-year-olds was helpful to you, even just hearing the way they talk?

CWL: Sure. A lot of my plays, not just the ones written for universities, are about younger generations. I've always gravitated towards writing about what young people are up against in the world now, compared to what I thought I was up against back in the day. It’s a very difficult world right now, and students are bearing the scars. They’re harder to teach. That’s part of the reason I retired. Most professors complain now that they are as much a counselor as they are an educator. And that makes the job so hard. I was starting to see some of that towards the end of my tenure. I thought, “Maybe it’s time to step away.” Plus, when you get to be a certain age, you realize you’re like 50 years older than your students and no longer have your finger on the pulse.

CWL: Definitely. I can’t be that specific about it, but the inventiveness of a young mind versus a 70-year-old mind. You get a lot from listening and talking to them, and you also get a lot out of teaching, because it forces you to organize your thoughts around the thing that you've been doing most of your life. I know how to write a play, but do I know how to tell somebody how to write a play or teach somebody how to write a play? I didn’t. I found that out in the first few years. I was a pretty bad teacher for a couple of years. I’d read all these books on playwriting because I was freaked out about teaching, and books are generally awful on teaching playwriting. So, I just took the things that I liked, and I think I ended up being a pretty good teacher after falling on my face a couple of times.

CWL: One of my students, Marisa Wegrzyn, who’s still a close friend, has had two plays produced in New York and is the head writer on the HBO series Goliath, starring Billy Bob Thornton. I had another student who started Theatre Seven of Chicago and has had several plays produced. I’ve got about a dozen students out there doing great – they have better careers than I do [laughs]. I’ve actually gotten knocked out of festivals by students of mine. We’re both finalists to get in, and they get in and I don’t.

CWL: That’s why I retired, and it’s pretty much all I’m doing. Since I retired, I finished a novel and a short story, and now I’m working on a new play. Write, write, write. Whether any of it goes anywhere is a question. But I still enjoy writing.