INTERVIEW WITH PLAYWRIGHT ALEX LUBISCHER
Education Dramaturg Ted Sod spoke with Playwright Alex Lubischer about his play Bobbie Clearly.
Ted Sod: Give us some background information on yourself: Where were you born? Where were you educated? When did you decide to become a playwright and why?
Alex Lubischer: I grew up on a farm near a small town called Humphrey in eastern Nebraska. The population of the town was about 750, and the size of my graduating high school class was 20. I loved writing and acting from very early on. In junior high, I devoured Stephen King books and tried to imitate them in would-be young adult novels I wrote on an old Dell computer. There wasn’t much theatre to see, but I acted in one-acts in high school.
I found myself drawn to movies, and I decided at a young age that someday I would move out to California to become a famous actor. Well, that didn’t happen. Or, it half-happened. I did move to California to attend the University of Southern California. I took my first playwriting class there freshman year, and sophomore year I produced my first play on campus. Putting it up, I kind of knew then that I wanted to be a playwright. There’s something incredible about getting to see a story that began in your mind realized in front of you by fellow artists. When a scene lands or a climax elicits a gasp from an audience, you know that you’ve translated an emotional experience; you’ve reminded a crowd of people about some essence of life that we’re usually too busy or distracted or exhausted or traumatized to notice on a day-to-day basis.
My favorite play is Our Town, and there’s this exchange at the end of the play between two characters:
EMILY: Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?
STAGE MANAGER: No. Saints and poets
maybe...they do some.
And I think the job of the playwright is to tell a story that reminds an audience of what it’s like to be alive.
TS: What inspired you to write Bobbie Clearly? What do you feel the play is about? Does the play have personal resonance for you and, if so, how?
AL: Because I grew up queer and closeted in a rural area of a red state, it has always been relatively easy for me to empathize with outsiders. Most of my plays are about outsiders. But with Bobbie Clearly, I wanted to write about a community—about insiders—not the pariah. I’m haunted by the small town where I grew up; I can’t stop writing about it. And I think that Bobbie, accidentally—it’s not that I set out to do this—became about me trying to love the town where I grew up, and to find understanding for a community that struggles with understanding.
At the time I was writing the first draft, there was an onslaught of mass shootings in America. In the aftermath of each shooting, the same pattern seemed to emerge. People would be horrified, then they would latch onto some reason this had occurred, trying to gather the tiniest clues to help them make sense of senseless violence. Some people would retreat from the world, and others would turn to activism—like Jane in the play. So that informed Bobbie, too: Americans have wildly different ideas about how to heal as a community in the wake of tragedy.
4 ROUNDABOUT THEATRE COMPANY Alex Lubischer
TS: Will you give us a window into the kind of research you had to do in order to write your play and how you went about doing it?
AL: The starting point for the play was a nonfiction book called The Violence of Our Lives: Interviews with American Murderers by Tony Parker. It was exactly that—a series of interviews, each with a person who had killed another human. What amazed me is that none of the testimonies felt sensational. Most were mundane. Epiphanies came slowly, if at all. A murderer’s understanding of what they had done took years, sometimes decades, to coalesce. Afterward, I wanted to write my own (fictional) interviews—just pages and pages of characters talking. I wanted to listen to members of a community not unlike my hometown. I interviewed real people, too, which helped me write the fictional characters. I talked to my Grandpa about what it was like to be the small town cop for twenty years. I talked to my friend Tim’s dad about deer hunting. I interviewed my friend Evan about what it was like to work at an Apple Store.
TS: What was the most challenging part of writing your play? What part of writing this play gave you joy? How did you come upon the idea of using direct address as part of documentation and public performance?
AL: The hardest part of writing any play is that it sucks and it sucks and it sucks until it finally works. You have to endure so many drafts of a play before it emerges as the play you imagined. I get pure joy when I’m writing the first draft of a scene and I’ve tapped into something essential in a character. Something deeply human. It’s hard to describe, but I know it when I’ve done it because I’ll have a visceral emotional response while I’m writing, and also the character will do or say something I didn’t expect, which is wonderful because that also means the audience won’t expect it. It
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