BORN WITH TEETH is lighting up the stage on the West End. I saw it recently and it’s a terrific game of cat and mouse, between Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Can you talk about how the idea for this play was born and how it developed?
LIZ: A few years ago the New Oxford Shakespeare editors announced they had proven that Marlowe had collaborated with Shakespeare on the Henry VI history play cycle. This was electrifying news! I’d been reading about both of them and reading their work since I was a teenager; in particular I had read The Reckoning by historian Charles Nicholls about the death of Marlowe, the mystery of it. And I just had an instant sense of who they were, how radically different they were; their voices were immediately vivid to me. I was also aware of how dangerous a time it was, when the queen was inventing the secret service and even a popular playwright could be hauled in and tortured if he was suspected of subversion. In our own time of creeping authoritarianism it felt like a potent context. All of that was the spark for the play.
I wrote it over the course of a year, in Manhattan cafés, week-long retreats in Brooklyn (thank you, Writers Army), even partly in Paris and Brittany. Then I got a couple of actors into a room to read it (thank you, Ross Cowan and Seth Higgins) and invited Rob Melrose, a friend and director I’d worked with over the years, to hear it. He felt it was ready for production and began to pitch it to theaters. Then within a few months he became Artistic Director of the Alley Theater and after a Covid shutdown delay (during which it had a trans-Atlantic invited Zoom performance with Emily Carding and Margo MacDonald), premiered it there.
BORN WITH TEETH started at the Alley in Houston, and then had productions at Asolo Rep, the Guthrie and Oregon Shakespeare Festival and some others before crossing the pond to be produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company. How has the play changed during these various runs?
LIZ: Actually, all of those US productions you mention were one, the original Alley production that moved intact to the Guthrie, Asolo, and OSF (the last with a change of cast because of timing conflicts). I went along with each jump and made small tweaks, but the text was pretty stable. After that there were a handful of other productions, notably at Aurora Theatre Company in Berkeley, before the rights were paused for the London production. That’s when I began to revise. The RSC co-artistic director Daniel Evans who directed that production on the West End felt that the British audience has a different relationship to Shakespeare from a US audience, and he asked me if I would be open to exploring changes. Which I certainly was! Some of them had to do with tweaking or expanding the ways Will and Kit responded to each other, and I think the main difference ultimately was in allowing Shakespeare to maintain more mystery, in particular at the end.
You often write plays that use historical events as a jumping off point. THE SALONNIÈRS seems like a classic French farce to begin with, but its set on the eve of the Revolution, and you can feel that tension rising underneath the love affairs. And WITCH HUNT takes up the story of Abigail Williams and Mercy Lewis ten years after the Salem Witch Trials, with Abigail trying to understand what - figuratively - possessed them. What is it about historical events that appeals to you as a source of inspiration?
LIZ: I started out writing science fiction plays, apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic, before migrating into historical plays (though I do occasionally manage to stumble into the present) and those have a lot in common. Scope for playing with heightened language, which I love. A way to look at our present moment through an oblique angle. And at some point I noticed that all my work has to do with people recreating civilization after catastrophe, or protecting it during one, whether on a macro or micro level. Apocalyptic stories or ones set in historical turning points lend themselves to that.
And finally I’ll say that I like championing historical figures and putting them in a new light. The historical salonnières invented the modern fairy tale, though only folklore scholars remember to give them credit. Abigail Williams is mainly known from Arthur Miller’s Crucible as a wicked teenaged temptress, when the real Abigail was a powerless eleven-year-old servant. The story of Christopher Marlowe having been killed in a bar brawl over the bill persists after centuries, when in fact that was the story established by his killers, professional liars. Of course, in the process of my writing plays about them I am only making up new stories for my own purposes, but I do try to go to original sources and let it be grounded at least in truth.
Your play WET, OR, ISABELLA THE PIRATE QUEEN ENTERS THE HORSE LATITUDES doesn't have a specified time frame, but feels like it's the 18th or early 19th century. Is there a historical inspiration for WET or Isabella?
LIZ: There is but it’s a fairly free one. Wet or, Isabella the Pirate Queen Enters the Horse Latitudes isn’t strictly historical, it’s more of a fable. In fact I thought of it from the beginning as my version of a Shakespearian romance. So that’s one inspiration, and of course legendary female pirates like Anne Bonny, Mary Read, and Zheng Yi Sao, and the glorious tall ships era of the 17th–early19th centuries. It has to do with the romantic idealization of life at sea, of freedom and power, that is so seductive, of utopian dreams and the power of love. Also, traditionally I have liked to write female leads, to give women the kinds of parts they don’t often get to play, like the mythic force of nature that is a pirate queen!
Your new play DEAR ALIEN is scheduled for production at the Alley next spring. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
LIZ: Dear Alien is a present-day play, an existential comedy about a shambolic advice columnist. It began with my addiction to advice columns, and my wish to redeem myself by treating it as research! Asking myself why the form is so compelling. Mainly I wrote it as a way of exploring the tension between alienation and hope in our modern world, a friction I think we’re all living with very keenly. I heard Dear Alien’s voice (they are never given any other name, and are meant to be playable by any gender) vividly from the start: they are witty and outrageous and deeply flawed, and I just let them talk and followed where that led. It began as a one-person play but when the Alley became interested in it the idea was raised of expanding the cast; it now has three characters, and I think it works really well. Especially as we have such a great cast for the Alley premiere: Dylan Godwin, Melissa Molano, and Brandon Hearnsberger, each of them absolutely luminous.
