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[An excerpt of this interview originally appeared in the 2015 Season In Review issue of #TheDramatist.]

Lisa D’amour’s plays swell with life. Airline Highway, her latest, is near to bursting with love for its characters, the down-and-out denizens of New Orleans’ Hummingbird Motel. After a run at Steppenwolf, Airline Highway lights up Broadway’s Samuel J. Freidman Theater on April 23^rd, adding the Great White Way to her wide-ranging resume. On her break before a preview performance (opening night a week hence) Lisa and I wedge ourselves into a booth at Westway Diner, between a glass case of desserts and the pervasive dull roar of the midtown dinner hour. Even in the hustle and bustle, Lisa is bright and collected, twinkling with the daring spark that runs through all her work.

Matt Minnicino:  You’re in a very crazy, sensitive time [right now], so how are you? How’s it going?

Lisa D’Amour:  Good. It’s going great. We’re in our last couple of rehearsals for Airline Highway. It’s been a busy couple of weeks because we’ve been rehearsing in some new ensemble members and I’ve been making some changes to the play, and so it’s very full days. It’s very full days.

Matt Minnicino:  Do you have a lot of crossover from the Steppenwolf production in terms of cast and crew?

Lisa D’Amour:  Yes. I would say, like, three-quarters of the main characters have come with us. There are nine main parts and three of those actors are new. And then there are seven smaller roles. One of those actors came from Steppenwolf and the rest are all new. So, when you look at the whole thing, it’s about half and half. Half new, half old.

Matt Minnicino:  And is that, what is predicating some of the changes? Are you changing it for people, for new audiences or are you just realizing things with the script?

Lisa D’Amour:  I would say it’s a combination of two things: things that we learned from the Chicago production that we wanted to change. You know, it’s a new play, it’s a big play, so once we’d rehearsed as much as we could and started watching it after we couldn’t make any more changes, we’re, like, oh, we think this, this and this. Then the other thing is the Steppenwolf stage is not really a proscenium stage. It’s almost a thrust. The Steppenwolf stage is really expansive, and you can kind of feel the hotel and the blue sky, and the play was actually a fair amount longer and I would say a little bit more raggedy at Steppenwolf.

Matt Minnicino:  What do you mean by raggedy?

Lisa D’Amour:  Some of the monologues went on more tangents, and I knew it. There were some details that maybe didn’t seem like directly related to the plot. And somehow in the Steppenwolf space, you could really hold that experience because you kind of felt like you had pulled up at this motel and were hanging out spying on people. It’s a really different feel than the Manhattan Theatre Club space, [which is] a proscenium. You’re focused in on this motel, and something about that makes you want to focus on the plot a little better. And weirdly, I don’t think it feels less ragged in MTC, even though it is. It’s much tighter at MTC, but there’s something about what your expectations are about that space that couldn’t hold everything that I had in it. There were some things where I’d be, like, “Oh my God, we can’t cut that line.” And then we cut it and I’d be, like, “Oh.” And I kept [thinking] it’s going to feel like a regular play. It’s going to feel too neat, and then I’d go, “Oh, it still kinda feels like a raggedy mess, actually ‘cause it’s Broadway.” You don’t expect it to be that way.

Matt Minnicino:  But do you – you kind of like that?

Lisa D’Amour:  I like the raggedy mess, yeah. And what I’m going to do on the published version is take a note from Suzan-Lori Parks and put those lines in italics and parentheses and say “Do ‘em if you want; don’t do ‘em if you want.” Because I love ‘em. They’re not exactly texture, but they’re just part of the play that’s not directly related to plot. There are a lot of things that come at you from obtuse angles in this play. They’re unexpected, so –

Above: From the MTC production of Airline Highway – photo by Joan Marcus

Matt Minnicino:  I’m excited to see it. Are you conscious of the Broadway-ness? That’s the big question, I guess.

Lisa D’Amour:  To be perfectly honest, it hasn’t really crossed my mind much until yesterday or the day before because we’ve been working so hard. Every day I’m in the theater like, “What can we do? What needs to stay? What needs to go?” But now that I don’t have to do any more work, oh my God, oh my God. Yeah. It’s not so much the Broadway-ness. It’s a show in New York, which is not really officially my hometown anymore, but I’ve lived here for years. I also feel a little like I don’t yet understand the community of Broadway or how this show is fitting in with the other Broadway shows because I don’t really go to Broadway shows. I saw Fun Home when it was downtown, but I haven’t seen anything else around me, so I don’t even know what I’m in conversation with. It’s a weird feeling. Yeah. So I don’t feel – I’ve never known which way my plays are gonna go in terms of critical response. It’s always been a wild card, so I’m not holding my breath about that. It’s just a weird feeling of, “We’ve done everything we can do. Here we go.”

Matt Minnicino:  It’s interesting that you mentioned Fun Home. That’s something that we’ve been discussing, looking at stuff like  The Kilroys and The Lilly Awards we were very conscious of this being your first Broadway show, you’re also, I guess, technically the only living woman with a straight play on Broadway right now. Do you have thoughts on that?

Lisa D’Amour:  I keep forgetting that detail. I think I’m really proud of that. I’m proud not just that I’m representing my gender, but also this play takes place over the course of one day, but it’s got an unusual musical structure that is not your typical linear play, which you often associate with men. Not that only men write those plays.

Matt Minnicino:  It’s true, though. There’s a kind of Aristotelian something to a lot of male plays.

Lisa D’Amour:  Yes, so it feels like a big risk for me to be bringing this play to Broadway with this kind of unusual and expansive structure. My whole career has been built on taking wild risks, so I feel like I’m staying true to my personality and my aesthetic by doing so. There are some ways that we have tailored the plot a little that may be a bit more for a Broadway audience, but not much. Not much. You still have this feel of this ensemble that’s bursting out of the proscenium. And I’m really proud of that. I don’t know which way it’s going to go critically.

Above: From the Playwrights Horizons production of Detroit – photo by Jeremy Daniel

Matt Minnicino:  I think you should be proud. My first reading of your work was Detroit, as is, I guess, a lot of people, they have that kind of baptism. So knowing I was going to interview you, I ended up reading all about your expansive background in devised work that I had no idea about. You’ve probably gotten this a lot, but you talk about taking risks. Is this your biggest risk or do you think one of your other projects was more risky in terms of its structure or what you were doing with it or what you were saying with it?

Lisa D’Amour:  Well, this is a pretty big risk within the context of straight theater, you know, because I have this career in sort of regular theater. I [also] have this career that happens maybe more outdoors or in galleries – or theaters that I turn into galleries – so, I feel like maybe the biggest risk that I’ve taken is a show that I did when I was quite a bit younger called Landmark 24 Hours on the Stone Arch Bridge. It was a piece that I created with five collaborators in Minneapolis. There was a bridge that I fell in love with across the Mississippi River. It used to be a railroad bridge and now it’s a pedestrian walking mall, just across the Mississippi, and so I invited a dancer, an installation artist, a videographer, my collaborator, Katie Pearl, who’s a director, and a composer to create basically 24 hours of interlocking performances from sunrise to sunrise. And some of them were very obvious, like a dance that took two hours to traverse the bridge. Others were almost hidden, like people painting pictures with water on the bridge. There were musical compositions that happened on boats that went under the bridge, but they were all designed to make you look at the landscape in a different ways. You would pick up a guide to the performance so you knew what was going on when. But it was giant, and we produced it on a very small budget, and I bet there were, like 150 performers when all was said and done. And I had no idea what I was doing, and I was doing it with these people.

Matt Minnicino:  So Airline Highway with fifteen [actors] is nothing compared to that.

Lisa D’Amour:  Yes. And then years later, Katie Pearl and I did this eight-hour performance How To Build a Forest, which premiered at The Kitchen. And that was, for a regular theater, kind of a risk too because the only real words that you hear in the piece are actors that are in the audience. And then the people in the audience can come up on stage and go inside this forest as we’re building it, so it’s this durational piece. Now we’ve presented it four or five times at universities. We’re presenting it in New Orleans also. It’s kind of amazing. And also, I have to say, those pieces, I raised the money for them myself, so that’s a whole other thing. So it’s funny, I mean, this feels like a risk, but –

Matt Minnicino:  Different kind.

Lisa D’Amour:  It’s different in that I’m not having to produce it. I’m not having to literally raise the money and market it, which I’ve had to do for a lot of my pieces, and because I make so much of my work on my own, the stakes are high with this piece, but it’s not like if, for some reason, the critical response doesn’t go well, that it’s going to end my career because a lot of my career is based on work that I make happen myself. I think that’s really important for playwrights to hear. The world of commercial theater, and even some bigger nonprofit theaters, is pretty fickle and unpredictable. But when you take the work into your own hands, find that community to work with, you have the power to make a life for yourself.

Matt Minnicino:  And that’s what you can build. I mean, in my pretty limited experience compared to yours, you can build an ensemble of people that you like along with gonna be able to work with and come back to and have –

Lisa D’Amour:  An ensemble or a writers group or whatever it is!

Matt Minnicino:  Any kind of family or community. How did theater happen for you? How did you end up in that realm of doing these huge pieces? I was reading a little bit that you had an outdoorsy growing up.

Lisa D’Amour:  Yes. I mean, I’ve always been interested in making things, even in my childhood, and then I did theater in high school and majored in theater and English in college in Jackson, Mississippi. In terms of the way my career looks now, I really [trace] it back to Austin, Texas, where I went to grad school, and –

Matt Minnicino:  The Michener Center?

Lisa D’Amour:  Yes, well, I was in the theater department, but I got some funding. It was, like, the first or second year of the program in the mid-’90s. And I was there at the perfect time. The – there was a great head of the program then named David Cohen, and also there were all of these theaters just bubbling up in Austin. So Salvage Vanguard was just getting started, the Rude Mechs were just getting started, Frontera at Hyde Park Theater, which is no longer, was just getting started, and so there were just all of these people – some had moved there, some had grown up there – that were making theater. A lot of times the university is very separate from what’s going on in the community, but for some reason, there was a lot of overlap when I was there, and so I was taking playwriting classes during the day and then, like, moonlighting at night making, like, a piece of the parking lot across from the theater with my friends, and that happened for, like, three years, and Frontera was bringing in these really amazing artists like David Hancock, who’s a really great playwright; Erik Ehn, who has the program at Brown. He would cycle through, like, every six months to teach a writing workshop or get one of his plays produced. Laurie Carlos, who’s a director/writer. And then the younger people like Ruth Margraff and Daniel Alexander Jones were being brought in by this theater and just so much was happening at the time. And so I feel like that’s when I really started making devised work and writing plays at the same time, and I moved from there to Minneapolis when I got a Jerome Fellowship at the Playwrights’ Center and the trend continued. I was writing plays and then I got a Jerome Performance Art Commission to produce a solo performance installation at Intermediate Arts, so it just kind of – it’s been like this all the time.

Matt Minnicino:  How much solo work have you done?

Lisa D’Amour:  I’ve done a lot, but I don’t do it anymore.

Matt Minnicino:  Are you going to do it again?

Lisa D’Amour:  I ran outta time.

Matt Minnicino:  Is it much harder to devise solo work, personally or psychologically, do you think?

Lisa D’Amour:  It’s – no, it’s not harder. It’s just a different kind of energy. I may do it again. I bet I’ll do it again sometime, but the PearlDamour projects are getting bigger. I think I’m a really good performer, but I don’t know that I was born to do it forever, so – so yeah, I did a lot between the years of 2000 and 2007. I did at least two or three solo performances with PearlDamour. They’re all in the PearlDamour website: http://pearldamour.com.

I also got really roped into performing this Yoko Ono piece called Cut Piece, which is very intense. I recreated it for a retrospective at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, but basically you come into the audience, put some scissors down in front of you, sit down, and invite them to come up one by one and cut away pieces of your clothing. I wound up performing it in Germany and then at a visual arts center in North Carolina – so I was just doing a lot of pretty intense…

Matt Minnicino:  I’ll have to look into that one.

Lisa D’Amour:  …solo work. It was actually a huge playwriting lesson for me because it sounds like sensationalism, and then when you sit down, as a woman, with the scissors and everyone in the audience has their idea of what’s this going to be. And with no words, they come up one by one, and everyone has – everyone cuts in a certain way. So if you’re, like, if the audience comes up and is, like, this is bullshit. I’m going to cut off your sleeve. That’s a huge dramatic event and the audience is, like – and if someone else is, like, that was bullshit: I’m going to cut off – cut away some of my own shirt and put it in front of you. You know, so it’s this call and response in the audience while I’m getting more naked and more vulnerable, and I realize, like, oh my God, you don’t need any words. I was, like, you actually don’t need any words to have an intense theatrical experience. And every time I’ve done it, it’s been a different – and every time I’ve done it, there are always people staying after going “What just happened?” So it’s cool the way my performance art informs a lot of my writing.

Matt Minnicino:  I feel like I shouldn’t take up too much time with this story. One of my weird few connections to performance art was that my parents lived in New York in the ‘60s and ‘70s and they were involved in Fluxus, which actually –

Lisa D’Amour:  Oh wow.

Matt Minnicino:  Yeah, so they actually – they knew Yoko back in the day, not well, and they would – they talked about these boxes, Flux Boxes, and some of her performance pieces. I remember being, like, what – what are these? This isn’t – these aren’t plays, this isn’t theater, this isn’t art! What is this? When I was a kid, not having any idea, and just as I grew older, realizing how fascinated I was by those risks and that, like, that very personal way of doing art.

Lisa D’Amour:  Yeah, she’s incredible, and I’ve actually incorporated a lot of her instruction pieces into my playwriting classes and the workshops I teach, so she’s really amazing.

Matt Minnicino:  Do you think that now, with all of where you are now, is it going to be harder? Is there going to be any kind of lamination over going back to devised work, doing crazy stuff, or do you think you’re still going to be able to balance them?

Lisa D’Amour:  That’s a really good question because I feel like what’s happening in my playwriting career is I’m getting more plays produced at the same time that PearlDamour is getting more funding to do their work. It’s not enough funding to really hire administrative help, however. So it’s enough for the project, but we’re still trying to be the administrators, and that’s what’s getting really difficult. Not making the art; just planning the art.

Matt Minnicino:  Is PearlDamour is based somewhere, or are you always traveling?

Lisa D’Amour:  We’re kind of always traveling, yeah. Katie is finishing her MFA at Brown right now, and now I’m in New Orleans, but we’ve always lived in different places.

Matt Minnicino:  Where’d you meet Katie?

Lisa D’Amour:  In Austin. During those glory years. Yeah, yeah, and we kept making more together ever since, so – but you know, we already have, like, after Airline Highway opens in September, we’re preparing a piece that I was writing this morning, actually, called Lost in the Meadow, and it’s going to be in this giant meadow at Longwood Botanical Gardens and the audience will sit on grass with headphones and watch these characters traveling the paths and hear what they’re saying. So I’m trying to figure that out right now. And then in October, we’ll present How to Build a Forest at the CAC in New Orleans. And then we’re still working on this big piece called Milton – which is the play we’ve written based on five visits we’ve been taking to five towns named Milton – that we premiered in Milton, North Carolina, last year, and we’ll do it in Milton Freewater, Oregon, next year, so my plate is pretty full with PearlDamour, so I don’t think it’s going away.

Matt Minnicino:  That’s so exciting. I was, I guess, frantically looking to see if there was anything I was missing today that I might ask you, and I ended up reading an old review, I guess, was it in The Guardian, of Detroit being done in England.

Lisa D’Amour:  It was in England a couple years ago. It was between Steppenwolf and New York.

Matt Minnicino:  Yes, and did you – with PearlDamour, did you ever do international work before? Reading Detroit, and with this knowledge of Airline Highway – I’m sensing that these distinctly American locations really play into your work, or that you’re sensitive to them in your plays. Do you find that, internationally, there’s been a different reception to your work or has it been received the same way?

Lisa D’Amour:  I haven’t done international work with PearlDamour. Detroit is running in two different towns in Germany right now, and apparently got really good reviews. And it’s going to run in Melbourne and Sydney next year, so – and it also ran at Chile, Santiago, I think, so – so I sort of know how it was received. I think it was all received pretty well.

Matt Minnicino:  I feel like no matter where it is, it speaks to something that is going to almost be in any country at any time in this sort of economic world that we’re living in, but I was just curious about that because some people might be – some people write plays where you can really just sort of transpose it, but I feel like there’s a very unique sense that plays like that are tied to our cultural narrative. Do you feel like that has a lot to do with your writing or maybe not at all? I know that there’s a lot of New Orleans and there’s a lot of Post-Katrina going on in this new play. Has that always been in your work or have you just recently kind of tried to wrestle with it?

Lisa D’Amour:  I think it’s a little recently, but I – I feel like it evolved organically.  I mean, I feel like writing – writing sort of – I’ve definitely written – I feel like almost all of my plays have been ensemble plays, even when they’ve been small. So even if you think about Anna Bella Eema, which is a really early play that’s three women speaking and seeing a ghost story, there’s no lead character there. And it’s dealing with people living on the fringes of society, so I think if you look – if you look at my work, you’ll see a lot of elements that you see in Detroit. Cherokee, which just closed at Woolly Mammoth, and Airline Highway, but I feel like maybe as I’ve gotten older, maybe I’ve been less afraid to put just a little bit of a political spin on it. They’re not overtly political, but there’s a little bit of a message about holding on tight to your identity and don’t let somebody else define you in all of them.

Matt Minnicino:  Do you feel like that’s even very much in the devised work?

Lisa D’Amour:  The devised work – God, it’s all so different! All the PearlDamour stuff is so different. I think the devised work is more of an aesthetic adventure. I think the political part of the devised work is that it doesn’t fit inside any kind of one form. It’s all – we’re always trying to create a new form.  I may question: what is a play, what is an installation. So it’s not – which I think is political, but it’s more about just trying to crack people’s brains open and think about form.

Matt Minnicino:  Make them think a different way. Great.

Lisa D’Amour:  I haven’t really – now suddenly it’s feeling like I have this crusade in my career, but I don’t feel quite that way. It’s just who I am and what I’m experimenting with.

Matt Minnicino:  Have you been able to see – because Detroit, obviously everybody talks about that. That one really blew up.  Have you been able to see many of the productions of it?

Lisa D’Amour:  I would say a handful.

Matt Minnicino:  A handful.

Lisa D’Amour:  I’ve seen the one in Minneapolis and the one in Washington, D.C.  I was involved in that one a little bit at Woolly. The one in Detroit at Hillberry Theater.  I’m going to see the one in New Orleans this year. And – oh, and the one in Colorado Springs. My brother was in that one, so I flew out to go see that one.

Matt Minnicino:  He’s an actor.

Lisa D’Amour:  Yeah, he’s in Airline Highway.

Matt Minnicino:  Oh wow.

Lisa D’Amour:  He’s one of the smaller parts and he’s the understudy for the main one. There’s a picture of me and my brother in an earlier edition of The Dramatist. Rob Florence from New Orleans wrote an article about me and some other stuff, and there was Todd and me in our Mardi Gras costumes.

You know, I feel like one thing that I think could be interesting for playwrights to hear is that I feel like Airline Highway emerged really organically from the needs of Steppenwolf – the needs of Steppenwolf and then my own intuition, in that it was a Steppenwolf commission and I was trying to think, well, what does Steppenwolf do best? Thats ensemble – how could I write for an ensemble. And I thought, well, I’m really interested in trying to write the way I hear New Orleans, which is very multi-vocal, many different kinds of people talking at the same time, and people – and many people who are fiercely trying to hold onto the rituals and tradition of New Orleans even though they know that the money that’s coming in after Katrina is a good thing. It’s a very poor city, and so there’s this real thing of: you need tourists, need their business, but when you could move your – they don’t know anything about what New Orleans was like before, and so what are we losing.  And so I was really – when I started writing, I didn’t know Steppenwolf was going to produce the play. You never know what they are. But it was really important to me with that commission that I tried to – I set out to write for Steppenwolf but it was important to me to really stake things out for myself. And I think that can be a really hard thing writing to commission, thinking out: I’m not changing myself for the theater. I’m trying to meet the theater where they are. And it’s a head trip, man. And I’ve written commissions that have gone awry, but this one I felt actually – and then there was a lot of work with Steppenwolf to try and kind of make it what it is now. ‘Cause the first commission had so much overlapping dialog you hardly knew what was going on.

Matt Minnicino:  I guess we can close with this, but I do want to ask, obviously this is the big thing on your plate, but do you know what’s next? Are you working on anything right now?

Lisa D’Amour:  You know, right now I’m only working on the PearlDamour stuff. There’s an MTC commission called Cutoff that’s set in South Louisiana, in a town called Cutoff, that I wrote a draft of that I’ll probably return to soon, but it’s been a while since I’ve been able to look at it.

Matt Minnicino:  So it may be the next play.

Lisa D’Amour:  It may be, yeah.  But I often – I feel like what I want to do next is clear my head and just start with an idea that’s completely my own and not for any theater. I haven’t done that in a while.

Matt Minnicino:  Well, I wish you the best at that and with the premiere and the opening. I think it’s going to be great.

Lisa D’Amour:  I think so too.

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