Just Written Volume 25: Will Arbery
Hi Friends,
We’re thrilled to feature playwright Will Arbery in this newly-relaunched volume of Just Written.
One jarring aspect of seeing matinee theater in NYC is you often emerge into sunlit, crowded (pre-pandemic) midtown Manhattan. I felt this bizarre gap most following Will’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning, after which Holly and I walked to the subway, and rode downtown to meet friends without saying a word to each other. (We debriefed a few days later.)
Heroes follows four alumni of a conservative Catholic college, reunited to celebrate their mentor’s appointment as President of the college, a gathering that turns into a night of debate and chaos—“haunting” is a word often used in write-ups of the play for good reason. I can’t recommend seeing it enough if the opportunity presents itself, but you can also read it. Many of you know it’s been an obsession of mine.
Will was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Heroes of the Fourth Turning. His play You Hateful Things is currently under development, and he worked recently in the writer’s room of HBO’s Succession. He holds an MFA in writing for the screen + stage from Northwestern University.
- Joseph
What are the tools of the trade you can't live without?
I do most of my thinking and writing on the Notes App. Each project gets its own Note—a basket of ideas—snippets of dialogue, relevant quotes, worklists, notes from producers, images, marginalia. I’ll add things to the Note throughout the weeks and months, until the collected scraps are so plentiful that it feels they must cohere and I gotta write the thing. Also, I have a little (real, physical) notepad that my mom sent me, with a buffalo on the bottom of each sheet. I write my to-do list for the next day on that buffalo notepad.
What is your writing routine?
There’s the ideal version of it and then the real version. Ideally, I wake up around 7:30, and the internet on my phone and laptop have already turned off the night before. I make coffee, and then I write with no internet from 8 till 11. Then the rest of the day I can work out, cook, have calls and meetings and walks and emails. Almost all of my writing is for performance, which means that’s intensely collaborative, so those phone calls and conversations are a huge part of the writing process. Talking things out with producers and directors and actors and designers is just as fulfilling and productive as the lonelier writing—but those creative conversations are more productive if I’ve spent some solitary time with the work that morning. It’s a constant struggle though—sometimes my morning doesn’t look like that at all. During the pandemic, I developed a new morning routine—making coffee, playing some classic country tunes, listening to The Daily, doing the NYT Crossword and Spelling Bee while I respond to emails, and just generally vibing—but I discovered that it was really getting in the way of my writing. So now all that vibing has become my reward after some internet-free writing time. Again, that’s the ideal. This morning, I went right to the vibing. Because I really don’t want to do this screenplay revision that’s been hanging over my head.
Where do ideas for your plays come from?
It’s usually an idea that terrifies me. Something that feels impossible. Usually there’s some central inarticulate mystery to the thing, and if that mystery sticks around, I know that I have to write towards it. Put another way: there’s gotta be a haunting. All my plays are ghost stories. So even if there’s something very real and known and categorizable on the surface—conservative Catholic politics, small town public works administration, sister dynamics, outsider art—what keeps me going, what makes it a full-length exploration, is something much scarier and unknowable.
As COVID upended regular rhythms and practices this past year, how have you continued to cultivate creativity?
Honestly, I can’t believe my luck. My play Heroes of the Fourth Turning closed in November 2019, which gave me enough time to go out to LA in January to land some film/TV opportunities, and then in February of last year I went out to London to work in the writers room of Succession on HBO. Then I came back on March 1 and the world shut down. For the rest of this year, I’ve been sustained by the film/TV work I was able to book in the nick of time. I’ve been able to rent my own apartment for the first time. For a decade, trying to make it in the theater, I’d been barely scraping by, in a near-constant state of panic about rent money, and if my play had opened just a few months later, and had been affected by the pandemic… well, I almost certainly would have had to move home to Wyoming. Just sheer luck. During the past year, I’ve been deepening my friendships—I’m lucky to have the most remarkable friends—while also learning how to be alone with myself and my work in a new way. It’s been a gift. I’ve called it my “art monk” phase. It’s been a year of intense contemplation and solitary creativity. I was so afraid of COVID because of bad lifelong asthma, and in January of last year I’d also received somewhat scary health news. So I was determined to get healthier. My relationship to my body has been the major change in the past year, and it’s had a major effect on my writing. I’m just happier. And it makes me more productive. Even though writing is still impossibly difficult most of the time.
What encouragement and caveats would you give to someone thinking about getting an MFA?
I think it was the right move for me, but I’m also glad I spent a couple of years in New York before I decided to go back to school. Those years of struggle and confusion made me clearer in my goals for grad school. I came in pretty sharp and hungry. Plus, I self-produced a lot of work in my two years before grad school, and that made my voice more muscular and weird and specific. Also, I’m glad it was only a two year program. Three years would have been too long. Also, I have A LOT of student loan debt now. Like a lot. That’s a huge caveat. So if you care about the evil fiction that is money, maybe be mindful about choosing a program that’s funded. But if you do go the grad school route, I’d just encourage you to do as much as you can during that time! Take classes that aren’t in your department. Be hungry. Most schools have film equipment—try to rent that equipment and make films! Write a lot. Don’t lose your weirdness. And most importantly, be supportive of the other writers in your cohort. There’s such a scarcity mentality in this country, and it’s so ugly when art intersects with capitalism. Don’t let that worldview into your heart! There’s enough opportunity to go around! Support your peers.
Your work is shaped by your Catholic background and upbringing. How do you write about something so familiar with both compassion and criticism?
To be honest, it helped that I had about five years in my twenties of avoiding the subject entirely. Faith has always been an important subject for me, but there was a time when I was really avoiding writing about the specificities of my upbringing. I was writing plays about like… Justin Bieber. Truly. Then, at a certain point, I realized that I was being called back to investigate my faith and my parents’ tradition. It’s been an extremely difficult and rewarding process. I’m constantly learning more about these ideas and beliefs that I took for granted as a child. As I’ve said before, to deny myself my own particularity was not what the world was asking of me. Writing about faith feels vocational. And when it comes to balancing compassion and criticism, I just try to keep it extremely honest. I don’t try to pre-determine that balance. I have to keep it instinctual. I have to root the work in love. That’s the only way forward. So even if the work can seem gnarly and dark and painful, hopefully it’s undergirded by fierce love.
Tell us about the process of taking a play from script to production.
It’s so hard to get a play produced. I wrote 8 full-length plays before I got a professional production. But during those years, I was self-producing, making work with friends, and trying to sharpen my theatrical voice through the physical act of making. Plays are obviously meant to be performed, which means that there’s only so long you can work on the text before you need to hear it with actors, get it on its feet, collaborate with directors and designers and try to see the thing through. (God, I miss all of that so much right now.) The reason I started in theater is that you don’t really need money to make it—my first obsession was film, but I couldn’t afford a camera. I could, however, put on a play in a park or a living room, or I could do a dance piece with my friend under the BQE. This is all just to say that I spent about 7 years building deep artistic relationships outside of institutional theater. But during that time, I was getting coffee with everyone. I didn’t expect anything of anyone—I didn’t think of it as “networking”—I just wanted to know the people who made up my community. And those friendships took years to cultivate, but eventually I felt like I knew everyone in the audience when I went to see a play. And I would apply to absolutely every playwriting submission that I discovered. I actually used to maintain a Google Doc called Play Deadlines, which I would update almost daily, and other people could update it too. Friends like Jeremy O. Harris were just starting out too and we were so supportive of each other, boosting each other any chance we got. Finally, I started getting into a couple of workshop/development opportunities. And I got into a couple of young writer’s groups, like Youngblood. I received a monumental amount of support from a company called Clubbed Thumb, who took me into their Early Career Writers Group, and a couple years later they commissioned, developed, and produced my play Plano. That went well, and it was a game-changer for me. Then bigger Off-Broadway theaters were interested in me, and then Playwrights Horizons offered to produce Heroes of the Fourth Turning, which I’d been writing and workshopping since even before Plano. I thought no one would ever produce that play. I’d been told before that it was “too dangerous.” But now that I’d had this one downtown success, people were more willing to take a risk on me. Anyway, everyone’s path is different. But it’s helpful to remember that this business is nothing but people. It’s just people people people. And genuine enthusiasm for the people and their work… it goes a long way.
What does your workspace look like?
It’s not the healthiest practice, but I tend to write in bed. I look like a sea otter when I do it. Hands up by my neck. I don’t know why it works for me. Perhaps it’s because, as a physical act, writing horizontal feels like it gets closest to the dream-space. And unconscious writing often feels like the best writing. I love looking at a scene and thinking: “When did I write this? This feels beyond me.”
What we’re reading:
Joseph: A week and a half ago, I took my professional engineering exam - the month or so leading up to it required 30-40 hours of study each week on top of my regular work (for better or worse, I always cram). I was unable to read much during that time and during these 10 post-exam days, I’ve enjoyed sitting down to do anything other than study. Lauren Groff’s novella What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf? stole my attention a few days ago. Groff’s fiction is ambitious; it’s risky, and it works - this novella following a family of bankers from Boston is no exception.
Cort: Boomers and Stickers in Devil Town by Peter Blair. At some point, we all choose to either leave or stay in the places, communities, and institutions that shaped us. This essay draws on two of my favorite things—Friday Night Lights and Wendell Berry—to explore what it means to stay or go.
For past volumes of Just Written, visit our archive. If you have questions, thoughts, or suggestions, just reply to this email. See you next week.