While Broadway is often the promised land for playwrights, Mac Wellman sees the Great White Way as more of an artistic wasteland.
“Broadway is a disaster and off-Broadway is not that good,” says the 71-year-old playwright. An absurdist, Wellman has written 80 experimental, avant-garde plays during the past 45 years, including Bad Penny, Crowbar and Terminal Hip (in which he creates his own language), three works that won him an Obie Award for best new American play in 1990.
While he’s had several off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway performances, it’s not surprising Wellman dislikes the safe artistic nature of most Broadway productions. “Most notions of structure are attempts to write some other play that’s already been written,” says Wellman. “There’s something false about that. I think all art should be experimental. … Life is an experiment.”
Wellman, who grew up in Mayfield Village and attended University School, started out as a poet with no interest in theater. “Gradually, I got sucked into it,” he says. “But I had to see a lot of bad plays and write a lot of bad plays.”
Honored with an Obie Award for lifetime achievement in 2003, Wellman is a professor of English and coordinator of the Master of Fine Arts program in playwriting at Brooklyn College in New York City. “I’ve taught courses in nonsense,” he says. “They’re actually terrific. The things I write sound odd, but that’s what I have an ear for.”
Playwrights Local celebrates his work during the Mac Wellman Homecoming Festival March 23-25 with productions and staged readings at Cleveland State University, the Liminis Theater and Tremont Tap House. Wellman, who plans to lead a Q&A session March 25, talks with us about three of his plays to see at the fest.
Cleveland, 1986: Set in Cleveland, this naturalistic work delves into the relationship between a daughter preoccupied by the prom and her mother. “The daughter begins to sense something’s wrong,” says Wellman. “It turns out the mother’s from another universe.”
Bitter Bierce, 2001: The play chronicles the life of the darkly sarcastic writer known for The Devil’s Dictionary. “I’ve been reading [Ambrose Bierce] since I was a kid,” says Wellman. “He makes Mark Twain look like a sentimentalist.” One scene has Bierce holding a head of cabbage while saying, “This is about as large and wise as a human head.”
Harm’s Way, 1978: The play takes on working class and political topics without the typical rhetoric of those subjects. “It’s the first play [of mine] I really kind of liked. I ended up writing about violence and guns in the vast, empty Midwest,” Wellman says. “Everybody gets angry at everybody else. I was once told that anger is emotion searching for an idea.”
