Transcript
Julie: Our guest today is one of the most outstanding, and I’m going to call him young, writers in the state, in the country, certainly in Salt Lake City, Matt Bennett. He has written 17 plays, all of these have been produced, 12 radio plays, 26 short plays, a full-length film, two short films, and a novella. It’s remarkable to me that you have such an impressive output, and thank you so much for talking with us.
Matt: Thank you for doing this.
Julie: The subject of this series is how writers do what they do, not what they have done. This is your list of what you’ve done. I want to know how you do it. Can you take us through an ordinary day, an ordinary writing day? How does it start? Where are you? Do you have to have special things? Do you need special things to drink, to eat? What is an ordinary writing day like for you?
Matt: Good question. Well, I’ll start off by saying when I’m writing, I’m writing. When I’m not writing, I’m not writing. I have had periods where I have a very strict routine and write every day, but I’m also an actor, and when I’m in acting mode, I have to be in acting mode. I can balance the two at the same time, but for me, it is a creative gear change, and so I just need to be focusing on my acting while I’m acting. And when I’m writing, I can become quite obsessed, and I can write up to 12 hours a day, but I prefer not to. I prefer to write chiefly in the morning. I don’t get up and start writing right away. That’s rare for me. Rather, I’ll get up, I’ll exercise, walk around the neighborhood, and in walking around the neighborhood, I might write three lines of poetry or something that I noticed from my walk to get myself into the creative mood, and then I’ll usually write till noon or one. I’m pretty strict about taking a lunch, and I might walk in the afternoon, and then I’ll return to it, and sometimes I’ll edit what I worked on in the morning, and sometimes I’ll go forward. I guess one of my habits or superstitions, maybe, is to not finish a scene when I’m working, because it’s too difficult to come back and face the blank page the next morning. It’s too much work. There’s a lot of work in setting up a new scene, and so I will try to leave off at an exciting point so that I come back and I want to write the next line of dialogue.
Julie: Every writer does it so differently, and we all think we did it, so that’s how everyone does it. Remarkable day. Thank you. That’s really impressive and cautionary in a way how long it takes, how long that appointment with yourself lasts.
Matt: Yeah. When I have a new idea for a play, I would say, I spend at least a week or two weeks sketching it out and testing it. Of course, it depends on what it is, how long it takes to write, but sometimes it’s three weeks, and sometimes it’s two months to finish a rough draft, just depending on what it is. I wouldn’t say there’s a set time it takes me to finish a rough draft.
Julie: I’m going to circle back just a tat. Then you do something the equivalent of making an outline. Is that right?
Matt: Again, it depends on the piece. I would say if I’m doing slice-of-life where the dialogue is very naturalistic and maybe it’s set all in one place and it’s just a few characters, I might not outline it.I would just have this strong idea, an image in my mind, how it starts, how it ends, and I would feel it out. If I’m working in straightforward realism or comedy, then I would create some sort of an outline beforehand, at least a scene-by-scene outline and know who’s in each scene.
Julie: Tell me how much is inspiration and how much perspiration? How much of your work do you feel as if is totally inspired and how much is really sit down and duke it out with it?
Matt: Well, I’d say like a lot of writers when I was younger, I would send out rough drafts, and I was quick to think that a play was done earlier than it was. More recently, I have come to accept that my hardest rewrites are going to be around draft four or five, that my middle drafts are going to be the hardest drafts to write. So there’s a lot of perspiration in the middle stage, even if it only takes me three weeks to write the rough draft. At some point, I’m going to have a rewrite that’s going to take me at least a week or two weeks where I’m going to tackle a different note every day.
Julie: A different note. Who is it that gives you the notes? Is it from you or do you have a reader or some readers whom you trust? Some respondents to your work that you trust?
Matt: More recently, I have tried to read my own work and rewrite my own work before I share it with anybody so that I’m not sharing the rough, rough draft. I didn’t do that when I was younger, and sometimes I still don’t. That has become a part of the way that I work now.
Julie: Try to be your own critic in a way.
Matt: Yeah.
Julie: Mm-hm.
Matt: Years ago, I saw a panel with Nancy Myers, the screenwriter, and she had a really simple piece of advice, but it stuck with me. This was maybe 10 years ago. Somebody asked her a general question about how much do you work on a piece before you send it out? And she just said, don’t share it with people before you’re ready. And that stuck with me. And my standards for what ready are have gotten stricter probably over time.
Julie: If you send out an early draft and then you send it back and say, oh, I rewrote this, they’re not going to read it again.
Matt: Right.
Julie: So, you’ve blown your case.
Matt: Right. And there’s a double bind faced by a lot of playwrights in the development world. You don’t want to send out something that’s too rough and you don’t want to send out something that’s too worked on or they’ll pass it over, but they don’t want it to be so rough that it couldn’t stand up in front of an audience with 10 hours of rehearsal.
Julie: Yeah, that 10 hours of rehearsal.
Matt: Almost, no.
Julie: We don’t really call that development, I don’t think.
Matt: No.
Julie: That’s what we get a lot of times.
Matt: Right.
Happily, we get that.
Matt: Right.
Julie: Do you have any playwrights that you look to who’ve been inspirational or particular plays that you really value that taught you something as a writer?
Matt: Yeah, of course. I could come at this from many different ways. In terms of my early influences, plays that I really got stuck on and wanted to know how they worked and how they did what they did, one of them was The Dining Room by A.R. Gurney, which I saw a college production of and looking back, it may not have been a brilliant production, but I went home and I wept for a day and a half just thinking about those characters and wondering how I could do that. And also Twilight Los Angeles, 1992 by Anna Deavere Smith, which is a one-woman play. But when I first saw it, I didn’t see it done by Anna Deavere Smith. I saw it at the American College Theater Festival and it was a production staged with many students. And at the time, I think I had been working on Clifford Odette’s Waiting for Lefty around that same time as an actor, and they felt of a piece to me. And I hadn’t written anything like that, but I knew I wanted to. And so I think that one was really influential in terms of my sociopolitical trajectory.
Julie: Anna Deavere Smith listens or records detailed responses from the people who were actually at an event and then she recapitulates that as an actor. And the ACTF production, I hadn’t heard of anyone doing it like that, but it’s an interesting idea, really is, because she does 20 characters easily and recapitulates every cause, every, uhh-umm, it is completely accurate.
Matt: I don’t know whether they got permission, but I thought it was brilliant.
Julie: I think it would be too. It’s a wonderful idea.
Matt: Yeah. Another play, American classic play that has stuck with me is The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, which must be many people’s favorite play. In particular, it is the scene with the gentleman collar. I just go back and back to that scene and the exquisite tension he builds in that scene in a completely subtle way, particularly the moment where the gentleman collar and Laura are dancing and you begin to suspect that they are going to trample on the glass unicorn and then it happens and it ruins the spell. I saw a great, great production of that in 2013 in New York, directed by John Tiffany. What was the actress’s name? Celia Bulger, I think Cherry Jones.
Julie: Amanda. Was she Amanda?
Matt: Yes.
Julie: Yes. Can you talk about the notion you have of an enlarged cast? Most of us are hesitant to put more than three or four people in a play because it’s an economic issue. How do you do that? And you do it.
Matt: It might come naturally to me because I’m a character actor and I want to play many characters. The play that’s being read at Plan B in September is called The Mill and the Machine and we’re workshopping at Westminster University this next season and it has 23 plus characters and I made myself create a doubling plan with five actors. I don’t think it could be produced with five actors. I think you’d need seven, eight, ten would probably be the ideal number. And I wrote the rough draft of that at the Helen Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico last fall. Because I had some extra time during my residency I decided I would write something I wouldn’t normally write at home that I would otherwise discard and so I just decided to be bold and tackle a big intellectual but I hope still dynamic physically dynamic subject on stage. A place called The Mill and the Machine. The mill refers to the rumor mill and the machine refers to the propaganda machine. I was listening to an audiobook as I was driving to Taos, New Mexico called Invisible Rulers by Renee DiResta which is about the history of propaganda. She has written and spoken quite a bit about the Russia interference into the 2016 election here in the United States. Our new book is about the history of propaganda and there was a chapter in there called The Mill and the Machine and I thought great title. I had been reading other books on this subject and on the drive this idea began to emerge about a play in many parts that would be pseudo-historical and skip through time. And so each vignette deals with the emergence of a different information technology. The printing press, the telegraph, the radio, television, internet, and then there’s a coda at the end about artificial intelligence. So when I wrote it I didn’t have any plan for how the doubling would happen or where it would be produced except for I vaguely understood that it would probably be produced on a university campus.
Julie: Why could we ask you that?
Matt: Sure. Because it’s too big for small theater.
Julie: Because universities need roles, particularly women’s roles. And they are interested in the more the better.
Matt: Right. And I wrote it all gender neutral.
Julie: Did you?
Matt: I did.
Julie: Interesting.
Matt: Yeah. So I knew it would probably be too big for small theater companies and I knew that medium large theater companies wouldn’t be interested in something so weird. And so I wrote it vaguely understanding this is going to, if it ends up anywhere, will end up on a college campus.
Julie: Yeah. That’s an interesting market. But I have a couple of places essentially for college, even though I didn’t write him that way. But that is a market that is unique. And if we are always going after Broadway or after professional theaters, first of all, they’re extremely risk adverse now. And we might want to rethink where it might live and be done in a more consistent way. Thank you. Talk to me just a tad. You don’t have to do much with this. But I’m interested as how you as a writer are responding to these times. What are you doing? Sounds as if you’re influenced by the politics of this time.
Matt: Yeah.
Julie: Anything else that bothers you or inspires you?
Matt: I’ve written a lot of sociopolitical stuff. And I would say the main shift that has happened is that I have changed from dealing with it naturalistically and realistically to working with absurdism. And strangely, if you look back on the 20th century, that was how playwrights dealt with fascism in the 20th century too. Maybe because one, it’s safer to be less direct. And because at this moment, there’s so much wrong that it’s easier to work metaphorically. It’s easier to work with characters that transcend time. And that just get to deep human needs versus, say, the control of information and violence.
Julie: You are so smart. I want to ask you something about how you do your research. Your plays are always loaded with so much incredible insight. And I suspect a lot of research. How do you do that? Study the background of a play or study the background about plays? It was a specific challenge for my latest play, Tested Water, which I’m writing with Elaine Jarvik. We actually had advisors. And so it made it easy. We had a journalist from the Great Salt Lake Collective we could lean on. So there was a terrific resource there. And we read most, if not all of their articles. We also had Darren Perry from the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone to give us feedback on using nature spirits in the play and on our use of indigenous language and on the approach in general. And we also had a biologist. And we toured out to the Great Salt Lake. And she talked about the biology of the play and about brine shrimp. And she had books to recommend. Then, of course, there was history. So I was lucky enough to write this at our residency. And so I had a lot of time. And I was able just to take a break from my writing and read a whole book if I wanted to over two or three days and then return to the writing. And enough time that if the writing wasn’t productive in a day, I could throw it out and come back to it a day later. I have taken a page out of your book. I remember you once in a Plan B lab saying that you prefer to do the research after you’ve written the rough draft. And I do that more and more often because early on, I would procrastinate through research. And I would become beholden to the research. And that would bog down the play. And the primary task, of course, is to create something entertaining and engaging. And so you have to make sure that you’ve got sturdy, dramatic bones.
Julie: Great.
Matt: Yeah.
Julie: Thank you. In your personal life, you were for a while an employee of Pioneer Theater. And then you quit. And I thought, oh, fabulous. And I think that you remain a full-time writer. Is that right? Actor, director. You’re a man of many trades. None of them pays exactly well. But are you a full-time artist now? Is that really true?
Matt: It is really true. I would say I was a theater administrator for 15 years, 13 years in the business office for Pioneer Theater. I ended as the interim business manager, and then I was part of the great resignation. During COVID, I saved up a bunch of money, talked through it with my wife, and we figured out how she could support me. And I do earn money, enough to buy groceries, if not to pay our mortgage. And I work part-time for the University of Utah. Still, I work as a simulated patient in the School of Medicine and the College of Nursing as an actor. Most recently, I did two simulations that involved the death of a parent and PTSD. And I found those really fulfilling, actually. And it’s nice to have that when I need it on the side. It’s been about four years now, and I have not burned through my savings. I still have savings, and we’re working it out. We’ve been very frugal. We’re two frugal people. And we’ve talked about me returning to theater administration, but she’s not eager for me to do it. It really has been a gift, because I’ve been able to write pieces I wouldn’t have otherwise written. I think that when I was still working full-time as a theater administrator, and I had to budget my time more wisely, I picked and chose according to what I thought would work out, what I thought would get produced. I’ve now had the luxury to work on bigger pieces, to write another broad comedy. I wrote a play called Will It Go Round, which is my first vignette play. The Mill and the Machine, I guess, is my second. But Will It Go Round is a play that is really five vignettes in Utah civil rights from 1964 to 2020, each one in a different decade. So it’s really five 10-minute plays, five short plays. And I really don’t think I would have tackled that otherwise.
Julie: Thank you. The fact that you have managed to figure out how to live on what you might make is the task at hand for all of us. That’s an amazing story. I’m inspired by that. Living your life as an artist is smart and thoughtful, and praise your wife too.
Matt: Yes. I’m aware it’s a privilege, but at the same time, I have given up a lot. We have a truck from 1993. We held on to our Prius from 2007 for far too long. And there’s a lot to do around our house.
Julie: The advice I used to give students who are going to be artists or playwrights, don’t get in debt, don’t get out of school with your degree, whatever it is, and go buy a car that’s very expensive or a house. Don’t do that. Hold on. Debt will kill you and it’s over. You spend the rest of your life trying to get out.
Matt: I do feel some shame over the fact that I never got a master’s degree, but it was part of a conscious choice of avoiding debt. Even then, had I gone to a master’s program right out of my bachelor’s program, that would have been 2002 and it would have been much cheaper then, but still probably $50,000 or so. And I’d probably still be paying.
Julie: As a person who ran one of those programs, I’m going to tell you right now, you don’t need it. You did it on your own and you learned how to write. And that’s what a master’s program often does is give you the experience of being a writer. And that’s lovely. But you’re more than there. I have one more question. You come from Utah. You were educated in Utah and now you live in Salt Lake. In fact, you grew up in Taylorsville, which is near Salt Lake. As an artist, how do you find the community, the artistic community, the theatrical community in Salt Lake? How do you find that? Do you find it satisfying? Whatever.
Matt: I do. I would say when I travel out of Salt Lake and I talk to other theater people about the scene here that they feel envious. When I talk to theater people from Seattle, they don’t feel like there’s as much new work being done by small theater companies there, that there are more of them competing for fewer slots. And there’s a scrappy scene there too. And of course, lots of itinerant theater being done. And I’ve been a part of that recently, but there’s just not as much new work. It seems like being done in Seattle, which is a much bigger city and an older city.
Julie: And considered a great theater city.
Matt: Yeah. I recently was talking to somebody from New York and she said she was pleasantly surprised by how humble theater people here are. Even when they have long storied careers and accomplishments, we just aren’t as a striving bunch, I guess. I think that’s true. I made a conscious decision years ago not to get an agent and not to try to place myself in other cities because, not that I wouldn’t like that, but I want to be dedicated to the local arts scene.I want it to grow. I want it to be better.
Julie: And thank you. That is the answer we all needed. Write where you are, write about the people you know, and that makes theater local, which it is, has always been. It exists in other places besides London and New York.
Matt: Right.
Julie: Thank you, Matt. God, this was amazing. Thank you so much. I appreciate you and I admire you. It’s an inspiring life and an inspiring list of work. Thank you. And please continue.
Matt: Thank you.
Julie: You’ve been listening to Calling the Muse, a series of interviews with Utah playwrights. I’m Julie Jensen, your host, and the audio engineer is Rod Daynes. Thank you.