Russell Leigh Sharman, a featured playwright for TheatreSquared's 2020 Arkansas New Play Festival, is currently an assistant professor of practice in the Department of Communication at the University of Arkansas, but even before that, he's lived a big life. The filmmaker, writer and anthropologist, who pens both screenplays and plays, worked in Hollywood for more than a decade; his resume includes studios and production companies like Warner Bros., Disney and Real FX. His film credits include "Apartment 4E," which he both wrote and directed, and his book credits include "The Tenants of East Harlem" and "Nightshift NYC." Sharman answered three questions for us about his upcoming involvement with TheatreSquared's 12th annual Arkansas New Play Festival.
Q. How long have you been writing plays? What do you find most compelling about the medium?
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Last year’s Arkansas New Play Festival introduced TheatreSquared audiences to these plays:
“Blanket Statements” — By the LatinX Theatre Project, it was a devised work created by the members of the company, under the mentorship of Ashley Edwards.
“Ain’t I a Woman” — By Na’Tosha De’Von, was a one-woman show that was “a funny, heartfelt story of the woes and wonders encountered by girls on the journey to womanhood, as seen through the eyes of the playwright and performer.” De’Von was an MFA acting student at the University of Arkansas.
“Carlo at the Wedding” — By Bryna Turner, was a “comic and heartfelt play about a woman attending an ex’s wedding.” Turner is a Brooklyn-based playwright whose play “Bull in a China Shop” premiered at Lincoln Center, where it was a New York Times Critic’s Pick.
“He Did It” — By Rachel Lynett, was a story about three friends who “are about to get the green light from a major production company. They’re about to get everything they ever wanted. Except that Jefferson has been recently accused of violent crimes. Ada and Lex both know he did it. Now, they both must decide what’s more important: their career success or ending a vicious cycle?” Lynett’s work has been featured at the Kennedy Center and Barrington Stage Company.
“Teen Dad” — By Adrienne Dawes, “subverts the popular regional theater ‘kitchen-sink beach house play,’ when Abby, a precocious emo-goth teenager, orchestrates a surprise reunion for her mother, Tanya, and birth father, Tom, with the help of her mom’s fiance/healer, John.” Dawes is an Afro-Latina playwright originally from Austin who studied comedy at The Second City in Chicago.
A. I've been engaged in some form of dramatic writing since my undergraduate days back in the early '90s -- mostly for film and television, which I've been doing professionally since 2008. I wrote my first stage play around that same time, and it had a short run way Off-Broadway in New York, where I was living at the time. What I found most compelling about the form, compared to film, for example, was the immediacy of it -- both in terms of how quickly you could move from script to performance, but also the immediacy of audience engagement and reaction. There's really nothing quite like it. I actually adapted that first play for film, and while that was satisfying for other reasons, it never had the same visceral impact as seeing it live, embodied by actors living it out in front of a crowd. Oddly, I didn't write another play until I moved to Arkansas a few years back. That one, "Among the Western Dinka," was part of the 2018 New Play Festival at TheatreSquared, and it was just as thrilling. In between, I've written for just about every studio in Hollywood, but nothing compares to that live, on-stage experience, the immediacy of it.
Q. The plot of your play "The Interrogator" sounds fascinating. Can you tell us a little bit about how you became interested in that particular time in history and why you were motivated to create a play around it?
A. The play concerns P.O. Box 1142, the code name for a secret Army-Navy interrogation camp set up during World War II to extract human intelligence from captured German soldiers and U-boat crew. The existence of the camp was only recently declassified, just around the time that many of the men stationed there were entering their late 90s and early 100s, if they were still alive at all. The National Park Service had begun interviewing as many as they could find, and I heard a radio story detailing some of their experiences. Three facts about the story hooked me immediately. First, that it was built in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in Alexandria, Va. No one had a clue there were 100s of Nazi officers being held a stone's throw from suburban kitchen windows during the war. Second, that the interrogators were trained to extract information by building rapport and persuading the prisoners to cooperate, not by using any form of torture or physical duress. And third, the only men they could find -- and they were all men -- who were fluent in German and understood German culture intimately enough to befriend these Nazi prisoners were recent refugees from Europe. And that meant almost all of the interrogators were Jewish. They had joined up with the Army to go over and fight the Nazis, and now they had to befriend them on U.S. soil in hopes of getting useful intelligence.
The implications for our current divisive political climate were immediately apparent, not to mention our nation's increasingly reactionary fear of foreign "others" and our troubling relationship with torture and human intelligence in the decades since World War II. If a group of young, Jewish refugees from Hitler's genocidal war could sit across from Nazi officers and find enough common ground to get useful intelligence without violence, then truly anything is possible.
There are a thousand stories to tell about those five or so years the camp was in existence, but the play focuses specifically on one interrogator, a composite character based on the dozens interviewed by the park service, and his relationship with two Germans, one a composite character based on several Nazi prisoners and the other a U-boat commander, Werner Henke, who was an actual prisoner at the camp. Spoiler alert: Henke was the only casualty at the camp. He was shot trying to escape.
The camp was razed after the war and almost all documentation destroyed. Everyone was sworn to secrecy. But fortunately, the National Archive has a handful of folios with carbon copy transcriptions of actual interrogations. The play is largely based on those translated transcripts, much of it verbatim. But I also weave in a little intrigue concerning the German rocket program. With scant documentation, I can't say for sure that info on the V-2 rocket was exposed at the camp. But I can't say it wasn't either!
Ultimately, this is a story about our common humanity, that even in the most extreme circumstances, humans can find a way to show mercy, to extend grace to others and ourselves ... and if not forgive entirely, then at least not perpetuate hate. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: "Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that."
Q. Joanna Sheehan Bell, TheatreSquared's director of marketing and communications, said that the hope is that the play fest will be re-scheduled for a later date. Can you tell us a little bit about how this workshop/performance opportunity aids in the development of your play?
A. The New Play Fest at Theatre Squared is an incredible opportunity for writers. Toiling away on the script in isolation, hearing it in your head, only gets you so far. You need to know how an audience will respond and engage the material. But almost more important that the audience are the actors who will embody the characters. They are your most immediate gauge of authenticity, whether what you have written rings true. The New Play Fest offers this really unique opportunity to rehearse with actors for several days, put it up in front of an audience and see what's working (and what's not). Then you get another several days of rehearsal and another performance, to try things out, experiment, refine, explore. For two weeks you're writing and re-writing furiously, giving the actors new pages on a daily basis, even when you thought there was nothing left to say. It's really two weeks of intensive development, constant feedback, and audience engagement. And it's absolutely thrilling.
NAN What's Up on 05/24/2020