Rutgers University is a massive institution, but when taking a class with Jason Grote, one forgets that there’s nearly 30,000 Scarlett Knights dispersed among the school’s various campuses. One should expect no less from the critically lauded playwright behind 1001 and Maria/Stuart, not that Grote needs to mention his rave reviews to win the class over — his quick wits and wealth of knowledge take care of that. And whatever the subject Grote’s teaching — be it composition, screenwriting, or otherwise — his students, like the audiences who attend his plays, will leave having laughed, been entertained, and gained some valuable insights.

Ben Kharakh: When did your interest in writing develop?

Jason Grote: I used to write my own comics as a kid, which were generally incomprehensible to anyone but me. I would also “direct” other kids in stage productions that were based on stuff that already existed, like Star Wars or the musical Sweeny Todd. In high school, I studied acting at a performing arts school and attempted some playwriting and sketch writing there — none of it very fruitful. Around the same time, I wrote an embarrassingly bad sci-fi novel about werewolves in a post-global-warming world, heavily derivative of the Frank Miller comic The Dark Knight Returns. A popular girl who sat next to me borrowed it and started reading it. She liked it and started circulating it among a bunch of other popular girls, and when they were done, they would give it back to me and I would keep hand-writing it in this little journal in serialized form. I never knew where it was going and I never finished it. I studied acting and directing in college in the early ’90s, and therein wrote my first real play, which was entirely derivative of John Patrick Shanley’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea and Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story. It won an award and was produced, and seemed more successful and fulfilling than my acting work, so I set out to become a playwright. I had no idea what I was doing, practically or artistically, for a long time, but eventually I wrote some odd short plays and produced them in Equity showcases throughout my 20s. I also did some film writing with a DIY indie director, but that never really went anywhere. Eventually, I decided to get an MFA and formalize my education.

BK: What role did theater and cinema play in your life growing up?

JG: My parents really had no idea what was or wasn’t appropriate for kids, so they would take me with them to everything — sometimes this was stuff like Fantasia, Superman or Star Wars, but occasionally it would be something like Barbarella, or Animal House (both of which I saw when I was six), or the incredibly weird David Bowie movie The Man Who Fell To Earth. I remember being mildly traumatized by that last one, but at the time, I chalked it up to the fact that I was a kid and had no idea what was going on generally. But then it came on TV when I was in college, and I realized, no, it really was a weird-ass movie all along. I saw my first play, an NYU production of the Kander & Ebb musical Cabaret, when I was four or five years old, and was totally enchanted. It was a good production, and even though I had no idea what was going on, I liked the music and the spectacle. It had fog machines, women in lingerie, Nazis — all very arresting. A few years later, I saw a horrible community theater production of it, and that was the first time I realized that the script and the production were two different things. Mostly, I got into it because I really wanted to be a child actor. I would have paroxysms of jealousy over child acrobats at the circus, or the little boy from the movie E.T. The trajectory from there to writing was incremental, and mostly accidental.

BK: What changes did you notice in the quality of your work and the way in which you produced it after you got a formal education?

JG: I do have a lot of problems with the MFA system generally, and the school where I went — but there was a level of professionalism in my work now that wasn’t there before. My sensibility and my discipline as a writer were pretty much already in place, but I got a good education in form and structure, and lots of tricks to fall back on. It also helped me learn how to learn — there are so many terrible books on how to write a play or screenplay, and it’s pretty hard to find good theater among the white noise of NYC (or at least it was before blogs and Time Out), and grad school helped me sort out how to focus my time and energy better. Finally — this took a few years after graduation, but I realized that I shouldn’t always listen to feedback. In my first year of grad school, I wrote a comedy screenplay that won a minor departmental award. It was funny, but there were some holes in the plot. I kept trying to fix the holes, and by the time I graduated, the thing was an unreadable mess. Then, three or four years after the fact, I realized that none of the people complaining about the plot problems were funny or had written comedy, including teachers. I had mangled the script trying to please them, and they weren’t even funny. If you’re laughing, who cares about a watertight plot?

BK: You teach now. What have you learned from teaching?

JG: It’s fairly common for writers to teach, especially playwrights, as it’s next to impossible for even a successful playwright to make a living without supplementing it with other work, almost always from either film/TV or academia. On the whole, teaching creative writing has been good for my own process. It’s been said that we truly learn something when we have to teach it to someone else, and developing a curriculum right after grad school helped me to reinforce the valuable lessons I learned there, and jettison the less-valuable ones. It helps keep me sharp and helps me troubleshoot, both in my own work and my peers’. I’m always thinking about structure and ways to make something better. This summer, I’m teaching a radio playwriting class in the MFA program at Hollins University in Virginia, and I’m being very frank with everyone that I’ll be learning right along with them. I’ve been co-hosting a radio play show on WFMU since last fall, The Acousmatic Theater Hour. It’s helped me develop an ear for Radio Theater and learn more about what people are doing in the medium, but my role is more like a DJ or curator than a producer. I have no idea how to make Radio Theater, so we’re going to listen to a lot of good contemporary audio art — Gregory Whitehead, Joe Frank, Scharpling & Wurster, Clay Pigeon, maybe even some stand-up comedy, spoken word, or skits on rap albums — and try to learn from it. I should come out of that experience better able to create work for radio. Eventually, I hope to produce a radio version of my next stage play, a commission from a downtown New York company called Clubbed Thumb. If I don’t wind up moving to LA and/or going into TV, I’d like to head a graduate program someday.

BK: You’ve alluded to your writing schedule a few times so far. How would you describe it?

JG: Totally erratic and oriented around deadlines. I’ve managed to be fairly prolific since I’ve left grad school — I’ve written six full-length plays, eight or nine short plays, one screenplay under contract, some spec treatments, many articles, and some ensemble-created generative work, all while maintaining a blog and doing a radio show, teaching full-time, traveling constantly for productions and workshops, and doing administrative work for theaters and, for one year, editing a section of The Brooklyn Rail. Not all of my work in this period has been great, but at least a some of it has been very successful. So, obviously, I’m prolific, but I have no idea how. It feels like most of my day is wrapped up in minutiae like answering e-mail or goofing off on the web, or reading comics and magazines. It helps that I’ve been involved with play development organizations like the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, New Dramatists, P73, Clubbed Thumb, and The Lark, because these give me a reason to generate new pages and a place to hear the work read aloud. I prefer to write as slowly as possible, because I think it actually saves time in the end. In situations where I’m under the gun, I usually write badly. My first idea is always derivative or hackneyed, and I think it’s the same for most writers. In a case like that, I usually wind up spending more time rewriting than I would have if I just spent more time on the first draft. Ironically, though, I do very well under really intense pressure. I’ve participated in something called the 24-Hour Plays a few times, where a play is written, rehearsed, and performed in 24 hours, and the results have actually been pretty good — but in a case like that, I just try to be funny and don’t worry much about anything else.

'1001' New York

BK: What are some of the valuable lessons that teaching has enforced, and the less valuable lessons you’ve ditched?

JG: What is or isn’t valuable constitutes a difference of opinion: I had many teachers, especially in the area of playwriting, who basically said you had to write standard kitchen-sink dramas or follow Aristotelian precepts or whatever, and if you wanted to do something else, you were wrong. You didn’t have a difference in taste or opinion — you were flat wrong. I don’t really like that type of work, but they’ve got a point: that’s the kind of thing that most of the bigger theaters are doing, and if I aspired to being on Broadway, then I should be doing that kind of work. Ironically, my film and TV teachers at NYU were much more adventurous. I think that had something to do with it being in New York City: film in New York tends to be more cerebral and indie, while New York is also the cradle of Broadway, which is deeply conservative (as is most of Off-Broadway too, actually). I think it also has to do with the fact that TV/film is more of a business. First of all, this means that the formula is more internalized — that anyone sitting down to write a screenplay already more or less accepts the dominance of three-act structure. And second of all, when business is booming, it becomes a “difference engine” — it gives creators incentives to innovate so they stand out from the pack. The one truly worthless lesson of grad school was that there is a “right” or “wrong” way of creating work. The other issues were less like lessons and more like general bullshit that one probably sees everywhere — stuff where I knew my time was being wasted on things I already knew, or on meaningless platitudes. The valuable lessons were more numerous: that every story has been told already, and originality is in the remix; that all narrative is political; that dramaturgy is an if/then proposition; that writing is less about inspiration than it is about construction. I had a great sitcom and sketch comedy teacher named Charlie Rubin who gave me tons of practical knowledge but who was also a generally wise person with a great sense of humor. Also, I learned where to look to further my education — for example, we never studied writer/director Richard Foreman at NYU, but I learned about him there and went to see his shows, bought his books, and listened to him on Ubu.com (some of which we’ve played on the Acousmatic Theater Hour).

BK: What are the problems that you see with the MFA program?

JG: The biggest one is that many universities use them as a cash cow: students go into five or six figures of debt getting a degree that, unlike an MD, JD or MBA, will probably not make them any money, or at least the amount of money commensurate with the debt they take on. There are some programs that are free because of an endowment, like Yale or Brown, and other public universities like Brooklyn College, UCSD, or UT Austin that give excellent instruction, but by and large it’s a system wherein graduates have to earn money to pay down student loans, so often they wind up teaching at other universities, thereby perpetuating the system.

'1001' Los Angeles

I don’t know what the answer is. On the other hand, the presence of MFA programs and the student loan system have enabled many people to enter creative fields, where previously those fields were mostly open to just to people with trust funds and/or family connections (for whom it’s still considerably easier). They’ve also replaced an apprenticeship system wherein young, aspiring artists would move to low-rent bohemias in major cities and starve while learning from older artists. That system isn’t ever coming back. They also offer access — administrators in nonprofit theaters look at new work from the big grad programs, those big grad programs hire people from the big nonprofit theaters, and so on. A lot of people I know from late ’90s Fringe theater have gone on to some degree of success, but there is a little bit of a glass ceiling for non-MFAs, at least in theater. In principle, I oppose limiting access like this, but if anyone could submit to any place they wanted without an agent or some other kind of intermediary, there would be no way to organize or process everything.

BK: How has writing for the stage affected the writing you do for the screen, whether it be cinema or television?

JG: Generally, teaching me about the way narrative functions. I’ve also learned that a good script should be a good read, if only because so many people have to read it before it gets produced. I also feel like a play should only be a play, not a TV show on stage, so on the other hand, screenwriting should take advantage of the strengths of that medium.

BK: To whom do you turn when its time for the process of feedback and revision, and how do you engage in this process?

JG: Writers’ workshops are invaluable at this stage. There are a few for screenwriters (as well as endless classes, especially in comedy venues), but they abound for playwrights — they’ve actually reached the point of absurdity, as there is lots of foundation and grant support for new play “development,” which is cheap but not enough for new play production, which is risky and expensive. But the good side of this is that there are lots of organizations where a playwright can hear his/her work and get feedback on it, welcome or not. For my first few years out of undergrad, I joined a writers’ group in Hoboken, New Jersey. There were some good writers and smart people in the group, and others who were not so great and/or were unresponsive to my work. I was often very frustrated and many times felt like it was amateur hour, but I would still go out of my way to get to Hoboken every Tuesday, sometimes taking one bus into Port Authority and another back into Hoboken, frantically running off typed pages from an unreliable photocopier in a Bodega on Washington Avenue, spending money I didn’t have just so I would have a reason to write. While I don’t think my writing from that four-year period is any good, it did develop, and one thing did lead to another — I started producing in those Equity showcases which led to longer shows at the New York Fringe, which led to grad school.

BK: What was it that brought you to teaching specifically, and how did your first teaching position go?

JG: I knew I was going to need some sort of job immediately after getting my MFA, and up until that point, I had visited a lot of classes and conducted a lot of workshops. Around the same time I was doing the Fringe shows (’99-’00), I was doing a lot of street theater — I worked closely with Reverend Billy and The Billionaires for Bush (or Gore) and some other groups, developing performative protest campaigns, and would get invited to places to talk about it. So right around graduation, I started sending out resumes like crazy and found out that adjunct jobs in the New York metro area are plentiful but that they barely pay anything. So I did this for a year, sold books and CDs on Amazon, and lived on nothing for a year. I found I had an affinity for it, and by 2004, I started full-time at Rutgers. I briefly considered getting a PhD, but I thought — correctly, as it turned out — that the best path to better teaching gigs would be to develop my writing career. Sure enough, that came to pass; I haven’t applied for any tenure-track or chair positions, but I’ve been approached by a number of universities to teach or do residencies.

BK: You mentioned that many playwrights, even many successful ones, supplement their income in some way, be it in academia, TV, etc. How has the issue of financially supporting yourself and the desire to do so using your creative faculties affected your writing and your life? Is this an issue that you grapple with?

JG: I try not to think about it too much. Sometimes it does get very stressful, and it’s tricky to juggle any kind of creative work with a day job. I do wish I had more time to devote to writing, but that isn’t always a solution. I went to my first artist’s colony in 2005 and it drove me crazy — I think I thrive on being busy. Sometimes teaching actually helps my writing. Sometimes I’ll have to familiarize myself with a topic for school and I’ll become fascinated by it, and eventually I’ll write a play about it. At least two of my plays, 1001 and Darwin’s Challenge, were inspired in part by two writers I had to teach at Rutgers: Edward Said and Stephen Jay Gould, respectively.

BK: When you started writing, did you have any plan in mind as to how you would go about becoming a playwright whose works are produced or a writer whose work is seen by others?

JG: Nope. I’ve just been bouncing from one thing to the next for about 16 years. I’ve had a general outline of my goals, but no five-year plan or anything like that.

BK: When is it that you began to incorporate the elements of commentary, whether it be literary, socio-political, or existential, that appear in your works today?

JG: I think I’ve always had some degree of political awareness and interest, just from the household I grew up in. I can’t remember exactly when I decided I wanted to take this stuff on in my work, but I do remember that, in the early ’90s, I was trying to submit for grants and things, and everyone wanted political work (the irony is, it took me years to learn how to do that, but by the late ’90s Republicans in Congress slashed arts funding, and most places don’t want political work anymore). In 1994, a year after I graduated, I saw Tony Kushner’s Angels in America on Broadway and read a play called The Kentucky Cycle by Robert Shenkkan. Both of these blew my mind and changed the way I thought of political theater. From those, I went to Berolt Brecht, a German playwright who had influenced both Kushner and Shenkkan. It was around this time that I started doing political activism in New York, and this furthered my political education. Not everything I write is capital-P Political, and even my more political work tends to question itself — I hate “political” theater that seems predicated on making everyone in the room feel good about themselves for being liberal. But all narrative is political, because by creating a narrative, the writer is inventing or expressing a cause-effect relationship: situation A leads to result B. That’s an inherently political construction. Sometimes the politics is part of the “how” of the work, rather than the “what.” For example, most of the work we air on WFMU isn’t all the political, but the very existence of an independent free-form radio station like WFMU is radical.

BK: When is it that you came to think of yourself as a writer and what, if anything (for you), separates one who aspires to write, one who does write, and one who is a writer?

JG: I actually don’t think anyone is anything, other than broad categories like “human” or “mortal.” There are these little status categories by which people judge one another’s legitimacy, and yes, there are definite markers of professional status, but really, I don’t think these mean very much. Obviously, things like a graduate degree or getting published or produced, or selling a script, or getting tenure are all important, but I’m a strong believer in doing it yourself. If it helps anyone to say “I am a writer,” then they should go ahead and do it. That said, a couple of years after I got my undergrad degree, an ex-girlfriend told me, “You say you’re a writer but you never write anything.” This wasn’t entirely fair (I had been writing, just didn’t have much to show for it), but it was a good motivator — I started co-producing those Equity showcases so I could have something to point to. The ex-girlfriend wasn’t impressed, obviously.

BK: Although you say you usually work without a grand plan, what is it that you plan to do now, or perhaps in the foreseeable future?

JG: Near-term, I want to start working in television. I plan to start with comedy-writing opportunities in New York, like Letterman or The Daily Show, but also writing spec sitcom and feature scripts and the like. I’ve made a small number of industry connections over the past couple of years, and I want to take advantage of them before they fade away. As of now, I’ve got three play commissions outstanding and other plays that need rewriting and development, so I’m not exactly quitting the theater — but it’s a small, frustrating, and often hidebound world, and once my current commitments are done, I’ll have about ten producible plays out in the world, which is plenty. Unless I win some major awards or something (and perhaps even then), I’m thinking it’s almost time to move on. I am interested in ensemble-based or generative theater, which is more like performance art (examples of this type of thing are The Wooster Group, Cynthia Hopkins, or Reggie Watts), and will probably continue to do that. But as institutional theaters drift toward more commercial work, playwriting is losing its appeal to me — if I have to write within a rigid, prescriptive structure anyway, why not just do it on TV? Longer-term, I seem to have inadvertently sparked something of a minor renaissance in the world of radio plays. There’s no money in that, but as an art form, it’s totally wide open, and I think there’s lots of interesting work to be done there. Eventually, I’d like to write some books.