An interview with playwright Nadja Leonhard-Hooper

Maria Striar: What’s your relationship to Chris Durang?

Nadja Leonhard-Hooper: I love him so deeply. I wrote this play in part to say thank you, and I’m sorry we didn’t get to meet in this lifetime.

My dad died two summers ago and for a while afterwards my brain didn’t really work- I couldn’t follow conversations very well or keep track of names or even the names of certain vegetables (asparagus? Get over it) and I couldn’t read. The words just made no sense to me and I didn’t care what was on the page. I guess I was “depressed” lol. Then I started reading Chris Durang! I read…a lot of Chris Durang. I would wake up in the middle of the night and read Chris Durang and then fall back asleep on the couch. The plays were so funny, and so dark. And the darker they were, the funnier they were. And the funnier they were, the darker they were. The satire was sharp and angry and fearless and felt genuinely dangerous. It changed my brain and changed my life.

MS: Is there a play/scene/character moment in his work that really speaks to you?

NLH: My favorite Chris Durang play is Laughing Wild, I think. It begins with two very long monologues- one by a gay man who is trying to keep his life organized and sane, and one by this straight (?) woman who is really deranged and wandering the streets of New York. They show up in each others monologues because they have an altercation in a grocery store where he is unknowingly blocking her path to the tuna fish so she physically attacks him. I’m laughing just writing the description. The play is completely relentless and it takes a long time for things to start to coalesce and come together, and even then it only does so in a dream-logic sort of way (eventually the Infant of Prague shows up and hosts a TV show). Every new thing just feels like a true artist being like AND NOW, THIS!! which made me laugh hysterically and also was exactly what I needed to internalize creatively at that time.

MS: How did this play come about? 

NLH: I needed a new gynecologist. My friend Mona said, oh, I have a great gyno. At the appointment with my new gynecologist, I was like, so I hear we have a friend in common. I’m friends with Mona. She recommended me to you.

And the gynecologist, who was normal, was like…oh….I don’t think I know Mona. 

And I, too friendly, was like ohhhhh you know Mona. Your patient Mona! 

And she was like n… no I don’t think I know Mona. 

And then she did the exam on me right afterwards, so while she was penetrating me, I got to thinking: I was being very strange and dumb. Of course the gynecologist wasn’t going to say oh yes Mona! That would be…illegal. A HIPPA violation. I was being too informal with the gynecologist. I was being inappropriate with the gynecologist and now the gynecologist was fingering me because that was her job. So I wanted to write about that feeling.

MS: When you saw the prompt  and invitation for this commission process,  did you know what you wanted to write about? Do you usually work this way, and was it helpful to you? What surprised you about what came out?

NLH: I had written the scene about the gynecologist/ fingering, and I had sent that to Clubbed Thumb to apply for the biennial commission, and I didn’t know anything else about the play. Everything else was thanks to the prompt and / deadlines of the writers group, which I will be forever grateful for. My writing is so bad when I know what I’m trying to do. It’s just not alive. It’s so important that I be in a state of psychosis and not knowing when I first start writing. Then when you edit you have to be like, okay….what clues has the unmedicated woman left for me? But you have to respect the unmedicated woman. That’s what I love about Clubbed Thumb. Clubbed Thumb respects the unmedicated woman.

One other thing about that- Clubbed Thumb decided to do this play before there was a final scene. If I had had another year to work on this play before it was produced, I think there is a really good chance I would have ruined it by normalizing it to death. This is the superpower of this company: Passion, Discernment, and Agility. 

MS: Why 1983?

NLH: I was reading all this Chris Durang and marveling at how dangerous his writing felt. I noticed that my thoughts were feeling wild but my playwriting was feeling tame. I wanted to write a scene in which two women have a kind of weird disturbing interaction– where one woman says some things that the other woman finds really hard to believe. #Believewomen! I wanted to put a woman in the position of having her feeling of #believewomen challenged. That felt dangerous to me. Setting it in the 1980’s gave me psychic permission to let them say things that felt problematic. I’m interested in a time period as kind of quotation mark or a frame around a piece of art. “Well it was a different time.” What will that frame let us accept? And then what if there are weird anachronistic moments? What if time starts getting slippery around us?

MS: Have you ever been flashed? 

NLH: I haven’t. And why is that?? Do you think there’s something wrong with me? Is there something about my face that suggests I wouldn’t be satisfying to flash? I think I have had remarkably few unwanted public sexual encounters with men. I had my ass grabbed once at the 1st ave L stop. A man on the stairs coming up from the subway asked me to stand lookout for him while he smoked pot. I nodded solemnly, (fuck the police!) and stood guard (??) as my comrade lit what my drunken mind only slowly came to understand was a crack pipe and blew it into my face. Darn. I made my way up the stairs and he grabbed my ass and followed me for a few blocks. I guess a guy grabbed my ass another time at a bar too. And there are some other things that start to come to mind now that I’m actually thinking about it…(Though of course, I am with the statistical majority of folks who have had many more strange and upsetting sexual experiences with people they know than with strangers.)

See- this is how it always happens for me– someone will say, has this ever happened to you? And I’ll cheerily say no, actually! I’ve led a very blessed and safe life! but then with a little time to reflect, memories will start to trickle in like the ones above– memories that I don’t THINK traumatized me or really even shaped me. But then again I do tend to dress like a 12 year old boy in public, and carry myself in a certain way, perhaps to avoid being looked at. And I do write really perverted things.

So that’s an inner monologue that I was interested in exploring in this play- the voice in my head that says no, it was fine. That was fine. That was fine! I’ve never been hurt by a man. Men are fine! Which is a defense mechanism that can be really useful and can also split your psyche.

MS: Do you feel deranged?

NLH: Yes!!!!! I do. I think we all do. People have been saying that to me after the play- that the play is what it feels like to be alive right now. God help us all! But then again, I think sometimes it can be very pleasurable to be deranged. You know? I think derangement can be really painful, but it can be a place of pleasure and power and freedom.