Tuesday, September 1, 2020
Bookpleasures.comwelcomes as our guest playwright and novelist, Susan Rubin. Susan has
been writing plays for over twenty years and her work has been
performed in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Baltimore, and
Cuba. Her works have been produced at the New
York Theater Workshop, Baltimore Center Stage, the Los Angeles
Theatre Center,
where
she was in residence for 6 years, and LA’s Bootleg
and Circle X theaters.
Susan
has written nine fully produced plays winning recognition from
the Los
Angeles Times and LA Weekly and
prestigious Garland and Ovation awards, and she received 20 years of
support and commissions from the Los Angeles County Arts Commission
and the Cultural Affairs Department of Los Angeles.
She
has also written twenty-five documentaries, seen by thousands on
college campuses and through screenings by organizations (and at the
White House Commission on the Status of Women), on topics like
domestic violence, early and forced marriage, untested rape kits and
women’s reproductive rights and other feminist subjects. Susan has
also written for Funny
or Die.
Her
debut novel, The Road
Not Taken has
recently been published.
Good
day Susan and thanks for participating in our interview.
Susan:
Hello, thanks for inviting me!
What
do you consider to be your greatest success (or successes) so far in
your career?
Susan:
Tenacity. I have had to push very hard to write the kinds of plays I
wanted to write. I used to be so sensitive that hearing a remark
about something in the play that was derogatory, would cause me to
want to go sit in the car with the windows up and the engine on. I
have learned over many years that all art is subjective: what is
fascinating to one audience member may bore the hell out of the
person they are with. It is a success for me personally that I can go
on and do my work knowing this.
The
plays I wrote that mean the most to me or are the most successful to
me are my first play, club
termina,
which
took place in a cloud and was inhabited by women who had died of
breast cancer.
The club was a stepping-stone to their next existence
and to get there, they had to perform a song, a monologue, a dance
solo that showed what they had learned from their previous existence.
I lost several very young friends to the disease and I knew that to
dramatize it would take music and humor. I found the music and I
wrote the humor. The success to me was that I had honored my friends
who had died. I had told their stories because they no longer could.
And audiences were moved by it.
My
play Immortality
was
a riff on the Simone de Beauvoir novel, All
Men are Mortal.
In her book she uses an immortal count, Fosca, who falls in love with
an avaricious actress who believes that since he is immortal, if he
loves her, she will be remembered through all time. I took the book
and made it into a Broadway play starring an ambitious actress, and a
mysterious man who early on showed her that he was immortal.
I could
write funny scenes, and also tell a love story. I captured the sense
of the novel, certainly not at her depth, but at a level that was
entertaining and popular.
My
last play, Liana and Ben was about a woman who made a deal with the
devil and her time was up. She had not fulfilled her part of the
bargain, and her life was in danger. It was a success in my mind
because I dealt with a lot of issues about what the meaning of life
is, while the clock ticked the whole time on this woman’s
existence.
Those
were my favorite plays. And you will notice that Death is strung
through all of them. I am not a dreary person, but I know that death
is a problem we all face. It makes for high drama, and lots of humor.
In my first book, The
Road Not Taken,
there is no death, everything still exists if it ever existed. Much
easier, thanks to the Space/Time continuum!!
Norm:
How many times in your career have you experienced rejection? How did
they shape you?
Susan:
My first piece ever produced was a one woman show starring me. It was
nicely written, strange, but interesting.
I performed it at the Los
Angeles Theater Center (LATC) as it was being closed down in a
contentious fight with the city. LA Times Theatre Critic, Ms Sylvie
Drake, mistook me for somebody on the side that was against the
theatre.
She took an entire page in the LA Times to lambast
everything from my French accent to the obvious emptiness of my soul,
my total lack of talent as an actress and a writer.
When she was told
that I had actually been chosen by the LATC artistic staff because
they considered me one of them, she was very chagrined. I was
suicidal. Every night I had to go on stage alone, with a tiny
audience, and bare my soul. But ultimately, I thank Ms Drake because
it gave me an iron will. And because (to be a bitch) every play she
really liked, died on the vine, and the writers with them.
I am still
here, still writing. Still enjoying being an artist. Nobody could
ever be as cruel as she had been. I might have been singed in the
flames of her vitriol, but I came out very strong.
Norm:
How do you deal with criticism concerning your plays, documentaries
and now your debut novel, The
Road Not Taken?
Susan:
I was hired to write the 25 documentaries, and if they had not been
done well, they would never have been shown. I was given critique
throughout the writing process, and I liked it. I was writing about
very ugly things going on in the world, when somebody helped me to
say it better, make it clearer, I was glad.
Public critique for the
book has so far been mostly extremely positive. The one or two not so
great remarks are hard to hear. It takes me some peanut butter and
jelly and a couple of hours of the original Law and Order with
Michael Moriarty, and then I feel justice has been restored and I am
over it.
The plays are different. Audiences used to rely on reviews
for a decision about whether or not to go see a play. That gave the
reviewer a kind of power that is literally awful. I can’t use PB
and jelly to soothe that because it effects how much the play is
seen, and it stays in the paper for the whole run.
I have spent hours
fantasying how I would answer the critic if I ever encountered them
(these are basically revenge visions which never come to pass). I
survived by talking to loved ones and supporters.
I have been
reminded endlessly that the criticism was one person’s opinion. The
weirdly worst part of criticism in the theatre is the reviewer who
has loved the play and has no idea what I was writing. I have had a
play favorably compared to the X Files. I have never watched that
show.
I have been favorably compared to Sarah Ruehl, a big deal Off
Broadway playwright turned TV writer. I have never seen anything she
has written. Recently the book was compared to books by Alice Hoffman
and Tom Robbins. That was cool. Although I initially thought it said
Tim Robbins. Oh well. I read a review only if I have to, and try to
remember that what the critic means as a compliment may insult me to
death.
Norm:
Do you ever dream about your characters particularly the ones in your
debut novel?
Susan:
I am a terrible insomniac so I’m lucky if I dream at all. My cats
poke me in the face every hour on the hour demanding treats. My
husband suggests, since my insomnia is serious, that I don’t
respond to the cats anymore and they will stop doing it. Ha.
Have you
ever opened your eyes out of a twenty-minute respite from not
sleeping and stared into a pair of green tabby eyes? I do it several
times a night. Good luck ignoring it. I give them treats then they go
away and I lie with my eyes open for an hour. When I go through
periods of time when the insomnia goes away, I have been dreaming
lately about the theatre because I feel I have left it behind.
The
book gave me a freedom of storytelling that I will never give up. Not
to mention that Covid currently makes theatre impossible. In these
rare dreams, I am surrounded with characters some of whom connect
with the people in the book.
There is one man named Tim. When he
comes to me in my dream it is a link because it is the name of one of
my protagonist’s lovers, and it is the name of my last theatrical
producer. Mostly I consider dreaming to be a big luxury I rarely
have. But do I think about my characters? Yes. When I sat down to
write the book, they seemed to come out of my sub conscious as if
they had been waiting my whole life to tell this story.
They ran the
keyboard, they corrected me quickly if I took a wrong turn. They
wrote the book for me. I am careful to thank them in case I ever want
to write another book.
Norm:
If you could invite three writers, dead or alive into your living
room, who would they be and why?
Susan:
Simone de Beauvoir, William Shakespeare, and Rene Balcer.
Simone
was known for her treatise on sexism The
Second Sex.
I don’t need to be educated on the many ways of misogyny. I found
the book unbearable. But her novels, from All
Men are Mortal,
The
Mandarins, She Came to Stay,
these books did what I wanted to do: tell the truth in a fascinating
way from a specific point of view.
As much as she wanted equality for
women, she, like me saw the faults that women suffer as human beings
who are not treated the way men are. This turns some women into a
worse enemy than any man could be.
I will not mention my family
members, but my mother and sister (ok I will mention some of them)
have hurt me more than any injustice I have ever faced. And it
doesn’t stop with them. I have worked for feminist organizations
that were not my idea of the New World we want.
Female friends have
betrayed me in ways that were dreadful. Men? I don’t really respond
the same way. Maybe because I am afraid of women. So when I read De
Beauvoir’s words, and realize she is angered not frightened by some
of the contradictions in women’s behavior, I feel strong.
William
Shakespeare. I was a sloppy student, smart enough to get A’s
without reading most of the material. I went to London when I was 18
and saw the Zefferelli movie of Romeo and Juliet.
When they died,
since I had only read the first part of the play in school, I
literally couldn’t breathe.
A nice English usher suggested that I
stay through to see the beginning again, and then at the
intermission, get the hell out of the movie theatre as they were
happily getting married.
From then on, I wanted to know Shakespeare’s
work, and I studied the RADA technique of performing his work for 4
years. When I’m in a particularly sad mood I will mutter “A
glooming peace this morning with it brings/ the sun for sorrow will
not show its head/for never was a tale of more woe/ than this of
Juliet and her Romeo.”
I find his language inspirational. I have
written some fine stuff, but nobody can really touch him for poetic
monologues.
Rene
Balcer was an original lead writer for Law and Order. In the first
four years of that show I watched it like a zombie. The story lines
were filled with the quest for Justice.
A quest I am desperate to go
on. Balcer created (under the genius of Dick Wolf), a world of smart,
attractive people seeking the world I wanted to live in.
He did it
over and over again. I will not bore you with my ability to quote
verbatim many scenes from many episodes. Sometimes my husband sees it
coming as tears fill my eyes and I begin to speak with the characters
(yes I have it on video, and I watch it to this day). He gently
leaves on some excuse, the cats need dinner, the doorbell rang (no,
it did not), but for whatever reason, he knows that once a certain
scene starts, I will weep, speak the dialogue and then feel the world
is a better place. He returns for the last part of that cycle.
Norm:
Could you tell our audience a little about your debut novel,
The
Road Not Taken?
Susan:
The book is about a woman who is widowed at 50 and moves back from
the suburbs to her childhood home in Greenwich Village.
She becomes
involved with a group of 100 individuals, the Lost, who are 50
million years old, and who landed on the earth as it cooled down.
Through them, she is taken on the Space/Time continuum where she sees
her dead parents, her recently deceased husband, and meets Isis,
Osiris, Set and Nephthys the seminal mythological characters of
ancient Egypt.
She goes back to Weimar on the eve of Hitler taking
power. She kills a Nazi. She becomes a warrior, a priestess, a seer
just like Deborah from the Bible. Don’t worry if you don’t know
Deborah, she gets about four lines in the Old Testament.
My character
is given a lover, one of the Lost, with whom she learns about loving
freely without having to live in the suburbs. She becomes best
friends with Vincent Van Gogh when she is shown by her mentor from
the Lost how to climb inside a canvas -- which she then does
frequently, visiting the painter in Arles, where they drink massive
amounts of absinthe, and he points out to her that she has done
nothing with her life, and must find her given talent and exercise
it.
Eventually she meets a Yoruba Priestess who teaches her the
strength of human spirit. Not religion. Spirit. The Priestess shows
her how human spirit can defeat any enemy. Now the character knows
what her talent or Contract with Creation is, and she ends the books
with a monologue, requested by the Lost, on her opinion of planet
earth, and the merits of keeping it going. She and I do not agree,
but I gave her the room to have her own opinion.
Norm:
How did you become involved with the subject or theme of your book?
Susan:
I started out wanting to write about a woman who meets her twin
sister and kills her. Instead, the twin she meets becomes her mentor.
As for theme, I am interested in the possibility of creating meaning
in one’s life no matter at what age. I find it fascinating to fly
around on Space/Time and see the past as it existed in the moment.
The real world, tick tock, tick tock, is not of much interest to me.
All of my work is about impossible places and people. I have always
been horrified by death. In this book, I almost make peace with it.
That’s because, in astrophysics, if you have existed, then
somewhere on the Space/Time continuum you still exist. I see it as a
huge video tape on which is every moment of every life, every
conversation, every sexual experience that ever happened. I am aware
that this is not for everybody. But for me, the idea that matter nor
spirit can be created nor destroyed gives me the hope to go on.
Norm:
Would you say that the publication of your first novel is the
culmination of a lifelong dream?
Susan:
Yes. Because I feel, from the early response, that my book is
meaningful to a wide spectrum of people. I have always wanted to
write art that can be popular but not dumbed down. I think this book,
like it or hate it, is smart. I think if a librarian in Hempstead,
Long Island can go on and on about it, and a critic from Midwest Book
Reviews also gets it, then I have written something that many types
of people can read and enjoy. That has always been my goal although
some of my plays were a little far out for that to happen.
Norm:
What does the title of your book represent?
Susan:
The life you didn’t live. The possibility that you still can. The
obligation we all have to ourselves and to our universe to contribute
our talents. Van Gogh and the protagonist have an argument about
whether every person has a talent if they are willing to look for it.
For me, that is the truth. Everybody has a contribution to make. And
not making that contribution will leave you empty and unfulfilled.
Norm:
What were your goals and intentions in this book, and how well do you
feel you achieved them?
Susan:
My goals were to tell a great story. At the beginning it was a
vendetta against my older sister and I was going to try to write
“Brat Ferrar” which Josephine Tey already wrote, about a twin
brother who has been missing but returns on his 18th
birthday
to claim half of the inheritance of his family’s wealth.
Problem
is, the other brother killed the twin ten years ago. So the whole
book is an effort to explain who this Pretender is. I love that kind
of mystery story, but much as I admire that, my goals are to explore
life and death.
In this book, without knowing it ahead of time (as I
mentioned I got great help from my characters) I wrote a lot about
cruelty. My family was cruel, although we loved each other. I have
learned not to be cruel: a hard lesson to learn. I think it is among
the most important things we can talk about as a species. As for the
strength of the story, I feel it is different than most things I have
read. Surreal but very real. Straight out of my subconscious mind.
Please enter cautiously.
Norm:
What do you think most characterizes your writing?
Susan:
A slightly smarty pants tone that I try not to allow to become
insulting. Wit. Imagination and imagery that are unusual. An approach
to sexual pleasure that is loving but not terribly restrictive. An
urgent desire to make the world a better place, hopefully without
being didactic.
I am from Greenwich Village. I have irony in my soul,
and I am not a traditional thinker. I have become excited by the
Boson particle lately because it taught me about Space/Time, and how
the universe developed.
This influenced me a lot since Death and I
have never made peace with each other. I lived a different childhood
that many. To say my parents didn’t notice what I was doing would
be a gross understatement.
I was frequently alone in Harlem at 15
coming out of the train station looking for a cab. I rode the subways
alone at 5. I shoplifted until the detective at Bloomingdale’s
caught me. Some of this is typical urban adolescent stuff.
I sat in
nightclubs at 16 and listened to rock bands that were influential in
the coming political movements which I became part of. I wanted to
join the Black Panther Party and was deeply insulted when they
rejected me.
I am a restless woman who had cancer at 30 and was sure
Death was sitting in my living room laughing at me. All of this stuff
makes me irreverent, as a writer.
My family story is not so funny so
I made it funny. My father died from bad egg salad. My mother died on
opening night of my play, Immortality.
I have used all of these experiences and the awful things I saw in
the documentaries I wrote, and I have turned my stories into non
naturalistic worlds where wonderful things happen that can’t
possibly happen.
In the book I see my father a lot, after his death.
That hasn’t actually ever happened. I think I am a magical
surrealist writer with a deep sense of humor as the only survival
mechanism I can really count on. I don’t much like reality, so I
don’t write about it.
Norm:
The
Road Not Taken
is
your first novel. Did you enjoy the process? How was it different
from your typical format writing plays and documentaries?
Susan:
I have never loved writing anything so much as this novel. Partly
that’s because I have enough experience writing to feel good about
my chops.
It is also a huge relief not to write plays where you have
to balance out scenes so that each character fulfills its arc. Then
after you sweat your brains out to create good language for the
actors, they complain that their costume makes them look fat. I know
this because I was an actor for many years and nobody was as whiny or
nervous as I was.
Writing this book was heaven. The characters spoke
to me from inside my head. Sometimes making suggestions, sometimes
just marching off ahead of me so I was typing as fast as I could to
keep up with the story they were telling. I think I am a storyteller.
Not a playwright. They are similar but not the same. The plays were
great training, and some of my monologues were fascinating (at least
to me). But my novel is a story. And I am good at stories.
As a
little kid in the disgusting lunchroom at my school, everybody wanted
to sit with me because I told stories at lunch every day. Even kids
who hated me wanted to hear my stories. As I stuffed down my meatloaf
I made up fantasies that to this day, are similar to my book. I like
dark caves with walls built of rubies and emeralds and strange
creatures sitting inside the room in the cave. I guess I like
storytelling because it is deeply subconscious for me. And there’s
no place weirder or more fun than my subconscious mind. At least for
me.
Norm:
Did you learn anything from writing your novel and what was it?
Susan:
I found out that story telling is easy for me. Although I started out
wanting to write about a woman who meets her twin sister and then
kills her, the book very quickly corrected me.
It was amazing to see
the words pop onto the computer screen in complete defiance of what I
thought I would write.
The novel is a solo act. I like it. I have
spent years in theatre companies, and I loved it. Especially the
after the show trips to restaurants where we all laughed and drank.
But at this point in my life, nothing fulfills me as much as a quiet
room with my cats lounging around licking themselves, the silence
that is my backyard, and a group of characters who I really liked.
One of the romances the protagonist has is with a man I was shocked
to recognize about halfway through the novel: my dance teacher from
when I was in my 20’s. I realized how much in love with him I had
been. Although it is way too late (and we are both way too married)
to fulfill this now, I could live out every fantasy in the book. And
I did, and it was thrilling.
Norm:
Where can our readers find out more about you and The Road Not Taken?
Susan:
On my WEBSITE you
can find every documentary I ever wrote, every play, my web series
for Funny or Die, my blogs for Ms magazine. And of course, there is
biographical material about me.
There is also something called
Mapping the Book which is a series of blogs getting posted one at a
time where I talk about something adjacent to something in the book,
and then connect it loosely.
I ask for people to communicate with me
if they want to and I promise I will answer. I ask questions that are
salient to the book: “Have you lived the life you were intended to
live? If not, why not? Is it too late?” Stuff like that. My
website is a treasure trove of info about the book, about my past
writing. More than anybody really needs to know about me!
Norm:
What is next for Susan Rubin?
Susan:
I hope to stay with this book for a while. I am writing more Mapping
the Book blogs because they help with building an audience for the
book, and they are so much fun.
I am doing a bunch of online
interviews and blogs for bookstores that are COVID shut downs.
I look
forward to writing another book but not now. This book was a test
case. And I feel like the answer to my internal question is: “Yes,
you can spend the rest of your life writing books.” That is an
enormous joy and relief to me as I am a lousy cook, totally non
domestically oriented, and my cats and my husband cannot stand to see
me sitting around all day watching TV.
Norm:
Thanks once again and good luck with all of your future endeavors.
Susan:
Thank you, Norm. This was fun!
Reviewed By Norm Goldman of Bookpleasures.com