An Interview with Anne Washburn and Chisa Hutchinson
In the “Language Issue” of The Dramatist (Jan/Feb 2016) Tina Howe interviews Anne Washburn and Chisa Hutchinson. The subject is inventing languages. Both Washburn and Hutchinson have created and utilized imaginary languages in plays.
No stranger to make-believe idioms, Tina Howe leads a remarkable discussion. One that goes beyond an appreciation of what’s murky, unclear, and ambiguous in the theatre. As an interviewer she is articulate, manic, and uniquely qualified.
Tina Howe is best known for zany and irreverent plays that explore feminine terrain with Ionesco-like absurdity. During the interview the three women lapse into fluent playwright-speak, a language of its own, that is a pleasure to read. If you have the opportunity, read the interview in its entirety. It’s well worth it.
Howe ingeniously peppers the interviewees with questions, a half-dozen at a time. This strategy opens up a broad field of inquiry for Washburn and Hutchinson to respond to. One that fits the subject of order growing out of chaos. Quickly both of the interviewed playwrights hone in on what they want to say.
Tina Howe and Imaginary Languages in Drama (alain kementieva fantasy)
Germ Idea for a Play in Zurich
Anne Washburn describes the genesis of her play The Internationalist. The play grew out of an experience she had while visiting Zurich as a document manager for a Swiss re-insurance company. She recalls hearing a story told, in English for her benefit, by a Swiss colleague.
–about a woman who thinks her cat is being attacked by a fox and rushes out into the backyard to save it, and wrestles what she thinks is the cat away from the fox and then discovers that she is holding a weasel instead, and the fox is looking at her in astonishment, and the weasel is looking at her in astonishment, and then the weasel and the fox exchange a look. It’s just a wonderful story about communication and miscommunication.
Then another colleague follows up this story with one that begins in English but lapses into Swiss-German and never returns. This story puts Washburn into the position of guessing at its meaning sonically. Intuiting a hypothetical, personalized fictive meaning according to the rhythms and cadences of the story told in Swiss-German.
Anne Washburn, author of THE INTERNATIONALIST
The delight of this experience inspired Washburn to invent an imaginary language for The Internationalist. Interestingly, Tina Howe asks her if she worried about how the audience would receive language that sounds like gibberish.
Washburn’s response suggests a commitment to her own ideals. That is, not writing defensively to please a potential audience. She says that her larger concern was whether the actors would be able to memorize large swaths of nonsense.
But the question remains. What about contemporary audiences and imaginary languages? In this age of rational speed thinking and demands for clarity in dramatic art, can an audience appreciate what they can’t easily grasp?
Sex Toy at an Alien Wedding
Chisa Hutchinson says that her play The Wedding Gift is an attempt to write about the horrors of slavery with a play that is neither literal nor hyper-real. By setting The Wedding Gift in an exotic otherworldly setting and adding an imaginary language, she could carry home the point of slavery being a ubiquitous threat. One that will dog us even in the future. Or within alien civilizations.
The language barrier makes the theme of the play come across more viscerally. Hutchison describes her play:
The Wedding Gift is about this guy, Doug, a regular guy, who just finds himself one day in a cage at this otherworldly wedding and with no fucking idea what’s going on. And there are these human-like creatures, very tall and imposing, who are speaking this weird language. It becomes clear that they’ve just gotten married. There’s this parade of gifts and Doug is the last, the biggest, most luxurious gift who’s wheeled out in this cage and inspected and scrutinized.
Hutchinson says that she spent an unusual amount of time, at least for her, writing the play. Over a year. Much of The Wedding Gift was written during lunch hours and Sunday afternoons. In that time her imaginary language became complex and sophisticated enough so that the playwright found it necessary to write a dictionary for her new tongue.
Chisa Hutchinson, author of THE WEDDING GIFT
Inventing a language seems to me such a daunting task. At least at first. Then if you give it further thought maybe its just imitating what we’ve already done as children. Inventing our own form of expression. We did this in the face of a parent language that we couldn’t yet tackle. As children we could create our own important sounds. Why not as adults?
The Pleasures of Not Understanding
For me, the highlight of the interview comes when Anne Washburn digresses on “the pleasures of not understanding, or of having to really work to understand.” Washburn warns against dramaturgy that endeavors only to clarify when mystification has its own dramatic advantages.
To this point, she gives the example of not completely understanding the lyrics of a song and creating a whole different meaning for a song than the one the lyrics suggest. Sometimes our erroneous take on the song is more enjoyable than the one we have once the words are understood. Then she makes the point that Shakespeare, even in his own time, wrote speeches that were considered unintelligible. With this considerable head of steam, Washburn makes a perceptive point. One that encapsulates the interview’s topic.
Is unintelligibility sometimes the by-product of really potent expression? Or is it something we enjoy in and of itself because it is the highest potency of expression? [. . .] I think it’s both. Splitting some kind of difference.
Birth and After Birth by Tina Howe
This interview was gratifying for me as a think twice blogger. It advances and pushes forward a core motivation for this site. Often the best plays invite the spectator to work for comprehension that goes beyond first-time thinking. A good play transcends spoon-feeding the rational mind. Maybe some part of us functions best when we are like a child again trying to reach the elusive beyond. To bridge the unintelligible with our imaginations.
Imaginary languages offer the listener opportunities to wow back.
Conversely, there’s making a play so plain it’s an insult. “Straining for clarity can be deadly,” Tina Howe warns.
Though inspired by the interview, I felt it wasn’t complete. As one would expect. One way to bring the discussion full circle, for me anyway, was to find a Tina Howe play in which she deploys an imaginary language. To this end, I’ve read the exhilarating Birth and After Birth. A play that I attended in 2006, when it was an Atlantic Theater Company production.
Tina Howe, interviewer and author of BIRTH AND AFTER BIRTH
Birth and After Birth addresses the question of whether a woman needs to have a child in order to be fulfilled. This question is brought to dizzying, intoxicating heights with the entrance, in the second act, of Mia. A childless anthropologist who specials in the young of exotic, far-away cultures. Read Birth and After Birth. See how far the unintelligible and your imagination can take you.
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