Exterview with playwright David Strattan White

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

David Strattan White recently left Philadelphia for Indiana. Before leaving, he performed in a number of plays here, got his MFA at Temple and saw his play, An Imperfect Sonnet, produced by The Cardboard Box Collaborative earlier this year.

After watching a staged reading of his new play, Simulations, David and I had the following conversation on-line about everything but the play. If you want to find out more about his new play, though, you can always check out the interview at implicit art.

________________________________

TTWP: You’re a theater guy, so I’m guessing you’ve traveled around a little bit. Tell us about a neighborhood that really grabbed you. For example, I think I thought Wicker Park in Chicago had just the right combination of yuppie amenities (like American Apparel stores and vegetarian eateries) and hipster/artist qualities, like raggedy record stores and used book shops. The last time I was there, a bunch of hippies rolled through on those double-decker bikes, and that’s the first place I’d ever seen one of those. What about you?

DSW: I’m really an alien. I’ve lived in or stayed on extended visits in several places. I can’t say that I’ve ever found a neighborhood that I was completely satisfied with. But something that I’m experiencing right now about neighborhoods is just how well my soul jives with the country. Wide open spaces and that exhausted feeling, the physical sensation of clean sweet potential contrast starkly with the angular congested feeling of the urban neighborhoods. I just wish that urbanites didn’t think that they had the monopoly on intelligence and ruralites didn’t think they had the monopoly on morality. I long for the days when a poet was a person of the earth.

My current home is a small, conservative town thirty-five miles east of Indianapolis. I love my day to day life, but I do miss the desperate need to explore the minds and souls of people that I felt in Philadelphia.

I seem to be failing answering your question. My mind is a swirl with people, businesses, ideas and landscapes. I can’t give you a straight answer on this. Sorry.

TTWP: No worries. I’m going a little bit out on a limb here and if I am, this question is going to bomb, but we’re risk takers here so I’m taking that risk. If you wrote a whole play about a video game, you must have some sympathy for nerd culture. There are a lot of genres out there in the imagined world of nerd culture. There’s horror and superheroes and aliens and cyberpunk and sci-fi and sword-and-sorcery and probably some other facets that haven’t even thought about for a while. Which genres/facets/corners of that universe are you drawn to and what do you like about them? Is it still a part of your life or is it now a part of your past?

DSW: I guess I am fascinated by nerd culture. I am a theatre nerd, no doubt about that. I love plays, and could really exist in a society where theatre was considered more important than food, reproduction and national security. I was in high school in the early/mid nineties. Back then I was more that brooding guy with the long dirty hair who wrote in his notebook all the time and read books when he didn’t have to. So that wasn’t part of nerd culture. It had been before, and it is now, but it was cool then. In light of Simulations, I am definitely drawn to the tech and videogame archetype. Although I think Betty marches beyond that and isn’t quite happy with defining herself by that standard. I like all nerds though. To be a nerd, i think, is to be obsessed with something to the point where you don’t assign value to things that don’t really matter.

TTWP: This is a great image of the young David Strattan White. I went to high school at the same time. Long hair and brooding over notebooks did not make you cool in Southeast Kansas, but it gives me hope for humanity that it was cool in some high school somewhere. If only.

So, you were once the long-dirty-hair writer. Now you are the clean-cut kind of academic looking writer. It’s a look I have a lot of inclination to myself — I’ve really become fond of the loosened tie. Does the image of The Writer grab you? Is the image a guilty pleasure? A cliche? Fate?

It’s something I’ve thought about my whole life. One day I woke up and my closet had a bunch of tweed sports jackets in it and I’m not really sure how they got there. When we met, you were rocking the blazer like you’d been born in it. So, whether you intended to have the look or not: you have it. Apparently you had a different look at one point. What do you think about the look? Or about the whole concept of “The Writer” (as long as we’re talking archetypes)?

DSW: I’m not sure whether I think about The Writer archetype as something that applies to me. Maybe it does. The blazer you mentioned is a favorite article of mine. I just try to look respectable most of the time. Maybe it manifests itself in a professorly or clean-cut way. But that’s not necessarily how I see myself.

It’s funny how we look. I like thinking about what inside us motivates us to look certain ways. It’s easy to tell in high school. Everybody picks a character from High School the Musical and dresses like them, thus declaring their tastes, peer group and identity. Everybody wants to be clear about things in high school, and, if they change, they change clearly. That’s my observation. I think, though, as we move beyond high school and discover different parts of ourself and become comfortable in a wider variety of situations, we get more and more confused about our archetype. Personally, I feel like I am an academic, a punk rocker, a skater, a romantic, a bob dylan, a cowboy, a bohemian or a harlequin on any given day. I’ve put some archetypes to bed: the stoner, the drunk, the innocent, the asshole. But there’s probably a general perception of how I present myself that is none of these and all of these.

So i don’t know why writers are supposed to look a certain way. I don’t know what a writer is or how he is expected to look.

I spent a month sleeping on the couch of a house full of playwrights. And I think that the common thread is a sort of internal fantasy world, not unlike something that Simulations is trying to explore. I get the impression when talking to very active writers that they’re always collecting, processing and translating in a way. I’ve heard people talk about writers listening to people, as in eavesdropping to hear how they talk. I think it’s more than that. It’s a constant need to collect, process and translate.

_______________________

Now check out the interview with David Strattan White at implicit art.

Bookmark to:

This entry is filed under places, visual, Philadelphia, literature, arts, social. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.