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Playwright’s Notes

Civilization (All You Can Eat) was inspired by an exercise I did at the Lincoln Center Directors Lab in 2006. That year, Anne Cattaneo, the director of the Lab, had directors, playwrights, and actors split into groups and devise small theater pieces based on the methodology of various theater companies. Among other groups, I’d experimented with Joint Stock, the British company that included Caryl Churchill and Danny Boyle among its members. To oversimplify, Joint Stock would pick a topic and have a number of discussions, interviews, and exercises around that topic. After some months of this, a playwright would leave with all the raw materials generated from these sessions and use them to build a play. This is a different approach from, say, the interview-based theater of a play like A Chorus Line, in that the playwright had the complete freedom to ignore the material, or use it in a lateral way, or include more theatrical, abstract, or literary references. The topic our group chose was food, probably because everyone would get hungry in the basement of Lincoln Center and the food options around that part of Manhattan aren’t great. But the topic is, obviously, broad and includes sociology, anthropology, ethics, politics, ecology, cooking, the sensual enjoyment of food, family, personal history, and nearly every other variety of human experience. I liked the work I generated from this lab, but the material wasn’t anything I could use and it only kind of belonged to me. 

In 2008, Maria Striar, the artistic director of Clubbed Thumb, approached me about a commission funded by the New York State Council on the Arts. I agreed and asked if we could use the Joint Stock method; I’d assemble a small group of actors and we’d work together, talk to each other, and cook for each other. We got support from the Lower Manhattan Community Council, which would provide space for working artists and companies in unused office space in the Financial District. It was an extraordinarily strange experience: in an actual bank vault deep beneath New York City, a few blocks from the Stock Exchange in the midst of the greatest economic crisis of my lifetime, I would work with some of my closest friends and collaborators, sometimes literally breaking bread with them. We would often see other friends in their own companies, also working in this vast, oppressive, anxious space. After a little of this, I left with the stories and fellowship from the workshops, but also the cumulative terror of the global capitalist system as it unraveled, the optimism of the Obama campaign, the personal struggles of the artists with whom I’d been working, even my own despair and doubt about the state of the world and my life as a playwright. All of this circled around food. Food is fellowship, it’s love, it’s power, it’s a commodity, it’s violence. Food is money, food is stress, food is pleasure.

The play itself is an ensemble piece exploring fragmented and confused lives at the dawn of the Obama era. Everyone in the play is disenfranchised in some way, and needs fellowship but doesn’t know how to get it. Also the centerpiece of the play is an actual meal on stage. And also it’s a comedy.

By means I no longer remember, I settled on a protagonist named Big Hog, an industrial farm hog who developed language and became a feral hog and then, eventually, a successful businessman (or woman). The developing language of the hog was an invention, inspired both by the work of Temple Grandin on animal intelligence, and by the poetry of Gertrude Stein. The role was eventually performed by two of the best actors with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working, Tony Torn at Clubbed Thumb and Sarah Marshall at Woolly Mammoth. 

In 2009 and 2010, the subsequent play was developed in multiple workshops by Clubbed Thumb, including at Playwrights Horizons and at the Sundance Theater Lab, where it was directed by Daniel Aukin. It was translated into German and read at the Voices of Change Festival for New American Plays, in Bielefeld, Germany, in 2010. It was mounted in Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks in 2011, in a stunning production directed by Seth Bockey, and had its world premiere in 2012, in an equally stunning but very different production directed by Howard Shalwitz at Woolly Mammoth. Since that time, it has had productions in Austin, at Salvage Vanguard Theater (also in 2012), and Los Angeles, at Son of Semele Ensemble (in 2013). It is very much a document of its time—actually, a document of 2008, three years before it was shown to an audience. It documents the very beginning of the romance with Obama, the backlash against Obama, and the dawn of social media. It was, perhaps, ahead of its time. I neither take joy nor pride in how it seems to have predicted the rise of Trump and the further unraveling of our national discourse; it wasn’t hard to figure any of that out if one was enough of a pessimist. I hope that it continues to have a future in the world, if only as a way of helping us figure out just how the hell we got here.  

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   Contributor’s notes

   Introduction & Table of Contents

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