Inaugural Season Text Development & Writing + Executive Producer
Interview w Jonthan A. Goldberg
Can you start off by telling me what you did on the project?
Sure. I was the writer for the project. I did the scripting and the edits and the shaping and the overall structure of the season.
How did you get involved with A Simple Herstory?
I’ve known Jocelyn [Kuritsky] for a long time. I met her through another actress, Jessica Pohly. I got my MFA from Tisch in Dramatic Writing and Jess Pohly was part of this acting group there, and she knew Jocelyn, she introduced us. And Jocelyn has been in several of my plays over the years and we just stayed in touch, and she knows my sensibilities and my interests. She thought I'd be a good fit for writing about Victoria Woodhull, coming at it from a historical bent but in a strange and sort of odd way.
Where do you think that sensibility comes from?
I mean, it probably just comes from being a weird, nerdy kid who was obsessed with history and presidents and comic books and pulp novels and just working in a bookstore [during] my high school years and seeing theater and just, uh, being sort of a weird, indoor kid.
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in north, uh, north Jersey, Northern Jersey.
Who would you describe as your direct influences, the playwrights who really started to impact your your mature or sensibilities?
The first one that I ever fell in love with in middle school was Oscar Wilde, I read everything he ever wrote. I read a lot about him, and his sort of humor and structure I really connected with. So that's my early development. And then as I was getting more into theater, I'd say Wendy Wasserstein, her epic structure stuff. That's really good. I mean, Shakespeare of course is just always a sort of background radiation, always sort of influencing you one way or another, just existing in the universe. August Wilson, I really liked the whole century cycle, his themes and genres within that epic scope. Tony Kushner, of course, for his deep historical nerdery as well. And Charles Ludlam is a huge influence, Theater of the Ridiculous. Some Brecht. I always move towards epic structure, plays that really take big risks and try to put as much on stage as possible and not be limited to unity [of time and place]. Large scale, big thematic structure, large sets, big ideas – that’s what I gravitate to. And usually also humor. Paul Rudnik is another one. Caryl Churchill, of course, too. Really anything that challenges form and structure and plays with tropes. Tom Stoppard, in that same vein of playing with our notions about historical figures, with what we think we know about the world, turning them on their head structurally, or playing with them with time and space.
Had you been doing much non-theatrical writing before the pandemic?
Yeah, I had already done a podcast, a musical podcast, The Fall of the House of Sunshine, with Matt Roi Berger, which is a serialized musical with three original songs in every episode. That is a strange epic story about, uh, puppets and God.
And I have another podcast coming out in October, The Land Whale Murders. Set in the Gilded Age in New York. And it's about a group of scientists. Friends are trying to stop a group from destroying the city and there's a missing whale, and it's sort of zany and weird and just a fun comedy thing.
Awesome. Is that going to be a full season?
Yeah, 13 episodes, about half hour each episode.
Ok. So here’s the question that Jocelyn has for all the actors: What historical figure would you want to haunt you? Talk me about ghost stories as it pertains to Victoria.
Actually I think I gave her that question, and now I don't want to answer it. It’d be the most fun to be haunted by someone who really loves to clean. Someone to clean up after me, like a reverse poltergeist. Who, like, instead of knocking things off the shelf, would just put all my books order. A clean-freak ghost would be great. But, like, a historical figure or someone is hard. It depends on what level of haunting we’re talking about – like, around me all the time constantly critiquing me?
Like in the Victoria Woodhull context. Like if you were having a seance, who would you call?
Oh, well, Oscar Wilde would probably be super fun. Right. I mean, you'd have a good chat. It’d be hard because he probably wouldn't want to haunt me, you know, like taking, taking the ghost position of having to hang out with me all the time too. I mean, we’d probably both have fun for like a couple hours and then it starts to get, you know, like in the podcast. But he wrote a couple of stories about ghosts haunting people, so he kind of knew a thing or two and it’d probably be fun to show him modern stuff.
You'd be like, well, that's legal now.
OK, here's another question we are culturally at this inflection point, I think, um, and I am curious to hear from various members of the theater community practical ways to make our field more balanced, more inclusive, more just.
Theater is inherently expensive. I mean, I think one of the things that really hurt theater [is] the loss of local theaters, like amateur companies. Like that's sort of instilled. I think a lot of people still love going to shows. It's just that now that has sort of moved online, like YouTube and some people now, instead of good creative outlet through live theater, they just make videos and stuff. We’ve sort of been silo’ed into our little niches and we can really kind of pursue our really individual idiosyncrasies and find the 10 other people in the world who like it too, versus sort of having to make friends within a community of people who didn't necessarily fully agree with us.
Now we can choose a much narrower group of people who are more closely-aligned. And there are benefits to finding your community, for people who are outsiders, to feel loved and accepted instead of having to conform. But I think a theater of the people has been really hurt by the fact that theater is so expensive and so locked behind location and time and money. I mean, even the Public Theater is very expensive and that's supposed to be theater for the people. And even though Shakespeare in the Park is free, the system makes you stand online all day to get tickets, you know, and this idea of standing in line is actually bougie - the idea that you can wait for it, you can sit in line for four hours away for a ticket to see a play.
Even the way we consume things now, it is harder for theater to hold your attention. I think for people to sit for four hours or something, fully focused on one thing, it doesn’t work. Because our lives now are so scattered, and we're on our phones all the time and we're watching TV or we're, like, listening to podcasts. We're multitasking a lot more. And in a theater, the audience is actively building the world as much as the actors are, right. It's not a passive experience to share a dream. Whereas with film it is more passive...you know, I had one teacher who said the reason theater has to have an intermission is that it’s work, the audience needs that break from building the world together. It's harder for people to give in to expending that energy when there's so much other stuff to do.
And we're being worked so hard anyway, as a society that, you know, giving yourself over to like a four hour thing -- you look at like how long plays were in the fifties, like all the O’Neill plays -- theater has evolved out of that. You look at how theater originally started, as a religious sort of festival. And then in Shakespeare’s time, plays were really long, but you weren't really solely focused on them. You were also sort of looking around, your attention coming in and out, which is why it's structured the way it is. And it wasn't really, I think until Wagner and the idea of turning the lights off on the audience became possible. Before that the house lights were up and you could look around.
I mean, just reciting poetry used to be a very common thing, an average farmer could quote poetry to someone, they could just recite.
Another part of where theater is calcified is subject matter. So much of it is about rich people in one house, having a sad conversation about being sad. And it's often just about budget, right? Easier to cast four people and put them in one room and have them talk. We are imprisoned by realism.
And I think it's also that those plays read well at a staged reading. I mean, look at the theater development process: plays that are very visually inventive or have a large visual component, when you're doing a staged reading, people don't understand what they’re hearing because they’re not thinking it, it isn’t right in front of them to see. But without a set, those plays that are just people having a conversation, they read really well and people are like, Oh, I connected really well with it. The development process has a limited imagination. Producers are afraid of anything that’s more of a financial investment or a risk.
Budgets of theaters are tiny and it's scary.
But also -- they’ll do A Midsummer Night's Dream for the umpteenth time, because people will buy tickets to that.
You have to be willing to train your audience to like taking risks. If you're always feeding them a very safe thing, and then they don't all buy tickets for the weird thing that you're also putting up, it’s not necessarily their fault that you haven't helped them process it. That’s also the role of critics: to help people understand and see things in context versus just, you know, being like, Why don't you get this? You do have to have the commitment to educate people and to give them the background to understand things, instead of making it a closed system where like, well, if you read all of these Molière plays then you’d get why this is funny. But then you have to understand that you're playing to a limited audience, right? If it's all just insider theater jokes...
Theater is unique in our culture. It should be for everyone. In the sense of catharsis and the original Greek sense, there was like a communal sense of suffering that we can all feel together. And we can all connect with each other as human beings, because we all are going through this painful moment together, we all have pain. In a play, watching this person suffer, watching artifice, we realize this, everybody feels empathy for, say, Oedipus. Yes, he’s a king, but that doesn't mean that he doesn't suffer. And the privilege of the king doesn't mean that his pain isn't also real to him. Even though he's not suffering the way, like, one of his subjects who is like living in poverty and is suffering that way -- that is also suffering -- but like, we suffer through Oedipus because we see it on an individual human level, and we can all feel that. And then when you look next to you and you see another person feeling it, and then you realize that everybody in that room feels it, that's like a religious experience, a transcendent experience. Because we are all -- audience and actor and everything -- all feeling this together. And that's what theater can do uniquely.
Podcasts don't really have that because everyone's listening asynchronously, everyone's on their own time. Well, there is that moment, like where enough people listen to a thing and then find each other and talk online or in person even and say I listened to this thing. I saw this, those water cooler sort of moments, to use an old sort of an outdated metaphor, but it’s another form of the town square, which we've largely lost.
It’s online. I mean, social media sucks. But also: this is where people talk. This is where we find each other now.
No, definitely. It can be a positive thing, but it's also... I mean, it probably took about 200 years after the printing press to really understand how to use it in a positive way.
Ugh, hopefully the world will stay cool enough long enough for us to discover the true power of the internet. Ok, last thing. Do you have any projects that you want to plug?
The Land Whale Murders, that’s the main one. And The Fall of the House of Sunshine. I don't have any theatrical stuff coming up currently, but I've just been living out the dream through podcasting, making just as much no money doing that as I did doing theater. So it's fine. Yeah. I mean maybe one day. That's a different kind of fulfillment, even though in a capitalist system so much is measured through a monetary lens, but you gotta find more than that. There's more than just money in the world.
Sure. I was the writer for the project. I did the scripting and the edits and the shaping and the overall structure of the season.
How did you get involved with A Simple Herstory?
I’ve known Jocelyn [Kuritsky] for a long time. I met her through another actress, Jessica Pohly. I got my MFA from Tisch in Dramatic Writing and Jess Pohly was part of this acting group there, and she knew Jocelyn, she introduced us. And Jocelyn has been in several of my plays over the years and we just stayed in touch, and she knows my sensibilities and my interests. She thought I'd be a good fit for writing about Victoria Woodhull, coming at it from a historical bent but in a strange and sort of odd way.
Where do you think that sensibility comes from?
I mean, it probably just comes from being a weird, nerdy kid who was obsessed with history and presidents and comic books and pulp novels and just working in a bookstore [during] my high school years and seeing theater and just, uh, being sort of a weird, indoor kid.
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in north, uh, north Jersey, Northern Jersey.
Who would you describe as your direct influences, the playwrights who really started to impact your your mature or sensibilities?
The first one that I ever fell in love with in middle school was Oscar Wilde, I read everything he ever wrote. I read a lot about him, and his sort of humor and structure I really connected with. So that's my early development. And then as I was getting more into theater, I'd say Wendy Wasserstein, her epic structure stuff. That's really good. I mean, Shakespeare of course is just always a sort of background radiation, always sort of influencing you one way or another, just existing in the universe. August Wilson, I really liked the whole century cycle, his themes and genres within that epic scope. Tony Kushner, of course, for his deep historical nerdery as well. And Charles Ludlam is a huge influence, Theater of the Ridiculous. Some Brecht. I always move towards epic structure, plays that really take big risks and try to put as much on stage as possible and not be limited to unity [of time and place]. Large scale, big thematic structure, large sets, big ideas – that’s what I gravitate to. And usually also humor. Paul Rudnik is another one. Caryl Churchill, of course, too. Really anything that challenges form and structure and plays with tropes. Tom Stoppard, in that same vein of playing with our notions about historical figures, with what we think we know about the world, turning them on their head structurally, or playing with them with time and space.
Had you been doing much non-theatrical writing before the pandemic?
Yeah, I had already done a podcast, a musical podcast, The Fall of the House of Sunshine, with Matt Roi Berger, which is a serialized musical with three original songs in every episode. That is a strange epic story about, uh, puppets and God.
And I have another podcast coming out in October, The Land Whale Murders. Set in the Gilded Age in New York. And it's about a group of scientists. Friends are trying to stop a group from destroying the city and there's a missing whale, and it's sort of zany and weird and just a fun comedy thing.
Awesome. Is that going to be a full season?
Yeah, 13 episodes, about half hour each episode.
Ok. So here’s the question that Jocelyn has for all the actors: What historical figure would you want to haunt you? Talk me about ghost stories as it pertains to Victoria.
Actually I think I gave her that question, and now I don't want to answer it. It’d be the most fun to be haunted by someone who really loves to clean. Someone to clean up after me, like a reverse poltergeist. Who, like, instead of knocking things off the shelf, would just put all my books order. A clean-freak ghost would be great. But, like, a historical figure or someone is hard. It depends on what level of haunting we’re talking about – like, around me all the time constantly critiquing me?
Like in the Victoria Woodhull context. Like if you were having a seance, who would you call?
Oh, well, Oscar Wilde would probably be super fun. Right. I mean, you'd have a good chat. It’d be hard because he probably wouldn't want to haunt me, you know, like taking, taking the ghost position of having to hang out with me all the time too. I mean, we’d probably both have fun for like a couple hours and then it starts to get, you know, like in the podcast. But he wrote a couple of stories about ghosts haunting people, so he kind of knew a thing or two and it’d probably be fun to show him modern stuff.
You'd be like, well, that's legal now.
OK, here's another question we are culturally at this inflection point, I think, um, and I am curious to hear from various members of the theater community practical ways to make our field more balanced, more inclusive, more just.
Theater is inherently expensive. I mean, I think one of the things that really hurt theater [is] the loss of local theaters, like amateur companies. Like that's sort of instilled. I think a lot of people still love going to shows. It's just that now that has sort of moved online, like YouTube and some people now, instead of good creative outlet through live theater, they just make videos and stuff. We’ve sort of been silo’ed into our little niches and we can really kind of pursue our really individual idiosyncrasies and find the 10 other people in the world who like it too, versus sort of having to make friends within a community of people who didn't necessarily fully agree with us.
Now we can choose a much narrower group of people who are more closely-aligned. And there are benefits to finding your community, for people who are outsiders, to feel loved and accepted instead of having to conform. But I think a theater of the people has been really hurt by the fact that theater is so expensive and so locked behind location and time and money. I mean, even the Public Theater is very expensive and that's supposed to be theater for the people. And even though Shakespeare in the Park is free, the system makes you stand online all day to get tickets, you know, and this idea of standing in line is actually bougie - the idea that you can wait for it, you can sit in line for four hours away for a ticket to see a play.
Even the way we consume things now, it is harder for theater to hold your attention. I think for people to sit for four hours or something, fully focused on one thing, it doesn’t work. Because our lives now are so scattered, and we're on our phones all the time and we're watching TV or we're, like, listening to podcasts. We're multitasking a lot more. And in a theater, the audience is actively building the world as much as the actors are, right. It's not a passive experience to share a dream. Whereas with film it is more passive...you know, I had one teacher who said the reason theater has to have an intermission is that it’s work, the audience needs that break from building the world together. It's harder for people to give in to expending that energy when there's so much other stuff to do.
And we're being worked so hard anyway, as a society that, you know, giving yourself over to like a four hour thing -- you look at like how long plays were in the fifties, like all the O’Neill plays -- theater has evolved out of that. You look at how theater originally started, as a religious sort of festival. And then in Shakespeare’s time, plays were really long, but you weren't really solely focused on them. You were also sort of looking around, your attention coming in and out, which is why it's structured the way it is. And it wasn't really, I think until Wagner and the idea of turning the lights off on the audience became possible. Before that the house lights were up and you could look around.
I mean, just reciting poetry used to be a very common thing, an average farmer could quote poetry to someone, they could just recite.
Another part of where theater is calcified is subject matter. So much of it is about rich people in one house, having a sad conversation about being sad. And it's often just about budget, right? Easier to cast four people and put them in one room and have them talk. We are imprisoned by realism.
And I think it's also that those plays read well at a staged reading. I mean, look at the theater development process: plays that are very visually inventive or have a large visual component, when you're doing a staged reading, people don't understand what they’re hearing because they’re not thinking it, it isn’t right in front of them to see. But without a set, those plays that are just people having a conversation, they read really well and people are like, Oh, I connected really well with it. The development process has a limited imagination. Producers are afraid of anything that’s more of a financial investment or a risk.
Budgets of theaters are tiny and it's scary.
But also -- they’ll do A Midsummer Night's Dream for the umpteenth time, because people will buy tickets to that.
You have to be willing to train your audience to like taking risks. If you're always feeding them a very safe thing, and then they don't all buy tickets for the weird thing that you're also putting up, it’s not necessarily their fault that you haven't helped them process it. That’s also the role of critics: to help people understand and see things in context versus just, you know, being like, Why don't you get this? You do have to have the commitment to educate people and to give them the background to understand things, instead of making it a closed system where like, well, if you read all of these Molière plays then you’d get why this is funny. But then you have to understand that you're playing to a limited audience, right? If it's all just insider theater jokes...
Theater is unique in our culture. It should be for everyone. In the sense of catharsis and the original Greek sense, there was like a communal sense of suffering that we can all feel together. And we can all connect with each other as human beings, because we all are going through this painful moment together, we all have pain. In a play, watching this person suffer, watching artifice, we realize this, everybody feels empathy for, say, Oedipus. Yes, he’s a king, but that doesn't mean that he doesn't suffer. And the privilege of the king doesn't mean that his pain isn't also real to him. Even though he's not suffering the way, like, one of his subjects who is like living in poverty and is suffering that way -- that is also suffering -- but like, we suffer through Oedipus because we see it on an individual human level, and we can all feel that. And then when you look next to you and you see another person feeling it, and then you realize that everybody in that room feels it, that's like a religious experience, a transcendent experience. Because we are all -- audience and actor and everything -- all feeling this together. And that's what theater can do uniquely.
Podcasts don't really have that because everyone's listening asynchronously, everyone's on their own time. Well, there is that moment, like where enough people listen to a thing and then find each other and talk online or in person even and say I listened to this thing. I saw this, those water cooler sort of moments, to use an old sort of an outdated metaphor, but it’s another form of the town square, which we've largely lost.
It’s online. I mean, social media sucks. But also: this is where people talk. This is where we find each other now.
No, definitely. It can be a positive thing, but it's also... I mean, it probably took about 200 years after the printing press to really understand how to use it in a positive way.
Ugh, hopefully the world will stay cool enough long enough for us to discover the true power of the internet. Ok, last thing. Do you have any projects that you want to plug?
The Land Whale Murders, that’s the main one. And The Fall of the House of Sunshine. I don't have any theatrical stuff coming up currently, but I've just been living out the dream through podcasting, making just as much no money doing that as I did doing theater. So it's fine. Yeah. I mean maybe one day. That's a different kind of fulfillment, even though in a capitalist system so much is measured through a monetary lens, but you gotta find more than that. There's more than just money in the world.
This interview was conducted by Kyra Miller, 2021.
* This interview has been edited for clarity and cohesion.
* This interview has been edited for clarity and cohesion.
