The following interview, conducted in 2014, is excerpted from Jeffrey Sweet’s What Playwrights Talk About When They Talk About Writing (Yale University Press).
FEIFFER: The only class I taught in playwriting was [at Yale]. [Robert] Brustein1 called me up and he said, “Jerzy Kosinski was supposed to teach a class in playwriting and Jerzy tells me he’s going blind and he can’t teach. We have to find a replacement. You and I have talked about you teaching. Will you take over the class?” And I started laughing about Jerzy Kosinski2 going blind; I didn’t believe a word of it. I can’t remember if it was known by that time that he hadn’t written his books, but I don’t think it was out yet. He was somebody I knew and been entertained by and I liked him enormously. But I almost never believed a word out of his mouth. And so I didn’t take his going blind seriously. But I thought, “My friends are always telling me I should teach, and so why not try.”
I asked for [plays by the students] in advance to see some of their work and figure out what to do. And one of them was this kid named [Christopher] Durang. He sent me a play called Titanic. And I thought, “What the fuck do I teach him?” And there was also a kid named [Albert] Innaurato and so on. Just an amazing group of young people. But Chris was the one I fell in love with, more than any other. And something I said in class about Titanic he put in a play collection. He quoted me: “A prepubescent temper tantrum.”
SWEET: When you came to the class, did you have any theories about how to teach playwriting? You didn’t go through formal training yourself.
FEIFFER: Not ‘til this minute.
SWEET: But obviously you figured out a course of study for yourself somewhere along the line? Or is that too formal a phrase for it?
FEIFFER: Yes. What course, what study?
SWEET: The first time your work was put onstage was as a special project in 1961 in Chicago by Second City.
FEIFFER: What made Second City such a natural for me to fall in love with and work with was that I had always improvised on paper. My basic thought process to this moment is making it all up as I go along. After it’s made up, I then start organizing it and try to give it form if the form has not emerged. Often, the form will take care of itself. If you’ve got the right story to tell, the form invents itself as you’re doing it without thinking about the form. But I’ve always been an improviser, you know, without even thinking that that’s what I was doing.
[Second City director] Paul Sills wanted to put on the cartoons, and that became the show called The Explainers, which later became Feiffer’s People. The second act included longer pieces like “Passionella” and “George’s Moon.” I thought Paul was a wonderful director for Second City–traffic guiding these guys. But for cartoon characters that were written on paper, he had very little to add or seemed to want to add. Mike [Nichols] came out to see it and said he wanted to bring it to New York, but he wanted to do another version of it. I happily handed the whole thing over to him to do whatever he wanted. Mike was directing for the first time. Lewis Allen was the producer. He put up the money to try it out at the Hunterdon Hills Playhouse and to bring it to New York. Mike got Steve Sondheim to write some songs for “Passionella” that were going to be part of the show. Steve had not yet done A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. He wrote a couple of songs that were just extraordinary. And Mike put together a company of actors; some of them were wonderful, some of them were so-so, but mostly they were good. Ronny Graham and Dorothy Loudon. Dorothy Loudon was so brilliant in everything that she did. She was loud, she was noisy, she was funny. I loved her.
I was getting an education. At Second City, I understood these cartoons don’t belong on stage because they’re cartoons and they have no life. In rehearsal, what we were now calling The World of Jules Feiffer, I thought this is great stuff, but I don’t belong on the same bill with Mike and Steve. They’re too good for this. Everything they’re doing seemed to be upgrading material that was not up to their own level. I didn’t feel that I belonged in that room. I felt embarrassed. I didn’t want my first play on Broadway to be carried by Nichols and Sondheim. If I was going to write for the theatre, I wanted to be a legitimate playwright, and not to become a hit because of the favors of my friends.
SWEET: But along the way you did learn.
FEIFFER: For me it all comes out of having something to say. Politics and my anger. And my determination to say something about America that wasn’t being said. All that starts with—not the need to be funny or to write a play—but a need to blow everything up. “Look, you fuckers, don’t you know what’s going on out here? Pay attention!” And figuring out a theatrical or fictional way of saying it and inventing characters to go along with it, who then would take off in their own directions. I knew that if I expressed my rage and anger as much as I felt, there’d be no audience. I had to learn sleight-of-hand. Pretend that this was pure entertainment, and make it very funny, but deliver this impassioned, anti-authoritarian, anti-military argument.
I first started thinking playwriting in terms of TV writing, because of Paddy Chayefsky and his kitchen sink dramas. Paddy was a friend.
SWEET: And he went through a kind of metamorphosis into a satiric vein himself after the kitchen sink stuff.
FEIFFER: And for all I know I might have been an influence on that. He was in a rage, but he was always in a rage about everything, and it showed.
SWEET: You were talking about the starting point for your plays is some kind of rage that you have to transform into a form.
FEIFFER: By the time I was 50, the rage had somewhat dissipated, but it took all that time.
SWEET: Was there a moment when you said, “Oh, I know how to do this”?
FEIFFER: At the end of the first day’s work on Little Murders, I knew I could do this. I had never known it before, but I did the first day’s work. I was having such a good time, and I knew I could make the characters do pretty much any goddamn thing I wanted to, and I didn’t suffer over it, and I had an easy time, a fun time, writing it. I thought, “I’m a playwright.” Now, the two or almost three years to write my novel, Harry, the Rat with Women, I never for a moment thought I was a novelist. The more I worked on it, the more I realized that I was just determined to get it done, but I was not a novelist.
SWEET: Did that lead you to think about the differences between writing novels and plays? Why one was a good fit and the other wasn’t?
FEIFFER: This is odd for somebody who does what I had always done for a living. I’ve never been very observant. I don’t see things. I see people and expressions and how they move and how they sit, and I can draw any person in any pose that they get into from my imagination. I don’t need anybody posing for me. But I don’t know what this table looks like. I don’t know what this house I live in looks like. I don’t see inanimate objects. Until [I wrote my graphic novel], Kill My Mother, I never drew a car in my life. I could not draw cars. The first airplane I’ve ever drawn is in that book, and I had to Google “airplanes.” All the backgrounds that are rich in that book were things I didn’t know how to draw. I just don’t see these things.
I love the naturalist writers. I love the evocative writers. Tolstoy when he writes about nature. Steinbeck writes about scorpions crawling across the railroad and the names of trees. The only way I can name a tree is to make up the name for it, because I don’t know what any of those trees are. I don’t know the name for anything in nature. A novelist has to have that, some minimum level of equipment, where he knows what’s around him. And I don’t.
But what I do know is how people talk. What’s always interested me, and [what] remained one of the mainstays of my comic strip, was people speaking in code. How you say one thing when you mean another. That’s basically what my work has always been about. That helping to decipher the codes in which, from childhood on, we are taught exist, and yet when you expose the code everybody denies that there is one.
SWEET: Someone talking about acting would call that subtext.
FEIFFER: Of course, there’s subtext when a good actor goes to work with a good director. The [Mike] Nichols production of Angels in America for TV. Al Pacino, who plays Roy Cohn, listening to this kid who is worried about his marriage. Pacino/Roy is very sympathetic and very close to him and trying to be very helpful and fatherly, and you can see him making the moves on him, just very subtly, nothing sexy, but a touch here and touch there. I sat there and I held my breath. I could not believe what he was doing, because it was so gorgeous, and it was so clear. That to me is subtext at its finest.
But [what I’m talking about is] beyond subtext. It’s telling us what really is true as opposed to what appears to be happening. Now sometimes that involves subtext, other times not.
What I loved about playwriting was—up ‘til then I had to figure out how to do all that stuff in six panels or eight panels. How far can you go [in that space]? You couldn’t expose [code] in a real relationship, with two people or three people talking. That requires a scene which a comic strip isn’t going to allow you (unless it’s a graphic novel which wasn’t being done at the time and I wouldn’t have been interested in at that time). But the chance to create for myself, theatrically, the equivalent of what I saw onstage in O’Neill and in Miller in Death of a Salesman, the Biff-Willy confrontation scene–[where] you slowly reveal–or a character comes to reveal–a truth. The difference between Miller and me that I’ve discovered over the years is that he thought, as in the Biff-Willy scene, that you arrive at the climax and you know what the truth is. And I decided years later that you never know what the truth is, and the characters never know what the truth is. Because if you do a confrontation scene, which is supposed to lead to a climax, which was act three in those years. But in life, act three is followed by act four, act five, act six... That confrontation is followed by other confrontations. There is no such thing as discovering the truth. It’s all the facets, all the different angles.
SWEET: And participants have their own version of what happened, and they were both right.
FEIFFER: Someone may be more right than the other, or the playwright may favor one of the people, but you have to give everyone his argument. [Except, what] Arthur would do—there’s always the lawyer character or the architect—some middle class guy with a degree that Miller never got—and you know that’s the good guy. What I determined, from the beginning, was that there weren’t going to be good guys. Nobody was going to represent my point of view. My point of view would be in everybody. All the characters, together, if I do the job right. If there’s an argument to be made here, the argument comes in putting together all the contradictory things that everybody says, as opposed to one single character speaking the truth and a light bulb flashing.
SWEET: Your cartoon work consistently depicted the corruption of logic. Frequently you have somebody start off with a statement and then there’s a modification to the statement so that in the last panel they’re saying exactly the opposite of what the first statement was. This carried over into your play The White House Murder Case, which of course came out before Watergate.
FEIFFER: Yes.
SWEET: Which is essentially Watergate but that people in your play spoke better than Nixon and his gang did.
FEIFFER: Well, [in that play] I had a liberal president. Not Nixon, but a good guy who wanted to do what was best. His wife gets murdered, and by the end the “best thing” to do is cover up his wife’s murder in the White House because otherwise he would not get re-elected and those other guys who were a lot worse would be in charge of the country. So, your own wife is murdered and you end up participating in the cover-up. What mattered was policy. And what really mattered was their retention of power. Basically that’s all that counted.
SWEET: I always wanted somebody to run that in rep with my favorite underestimated Shakespeare, King John, which predicts Richard Nixon.
FEIFFER: [A] Broadway producer called me up at the time of [the] Gore-Bush [election]. He wanted to put that play on just before the election. So we had a reading of the play. And he got a wonderful cast including Alan Alda and Tony Roberts and invited an audience that was made up of potential backers. It played like gangbusters. It was incredible. Alan was wonderful, everybody was wonderful. And we all went out afterwards to celebrate and drink. And then it became clear that the backers didn’t want anything to do with it. No reason was given, but clearly it scared the shit out of them. This was some 25 years after the play’s premiere, and it was still too hot. There was a message in there that was still too hot for Broadway.
SWEET: I imagine that you know that there are certain plays that are related to certain periods in your time, and certain experiences, and certain plays that you wrote earlier that if you wrote them now, you would write them differently because you’re a different writer.
FEIFFER: I’m a different human. There was a celebration of Mike [Nichols] at MOMA, and after they screened Carnal Knowledge, I said to him, “I wouldn’t know how to write that anymore.” And he said, “I wouldn’t know how to direct it.”
SWEET: You seem to be one of the few people who is able to start from theme and make a persuasive play. I find usually when people start from theme, some life goes out of the play.
FEIFFER: I’ve always thought that, too. I thought White House would be my last theme play. I loved writing White House and Little Murders, but I thought, “I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to start with the characters and have the characters tell me what the play is about. And not really be all that sure where I’m going until the characters lead me there.” So pretty much, that’s what I’ve done since.
It was perhaps beginning with Carnal Knowledge that I was thinking [for] the first time of not leaving any fingerprints. I didn’t want to sound like playwriting or dialogue. And I remember years later I stopped in to see the movie, after not seeing it for years. Watching one of the college campus scenes, I sat there thinking, “They’re making this up, I didn’t write this.” And it thrilled me, because there’s not a thing they said that I hadn’t written. But it sounded improvised to me. And I loved that, I loved that. I love it coming out of the characters and not out of the writer.
I swore after Elliott Loves that I would never do another play. I said to Mike during rehearsals of Elliott, “This is the best I have in me. if this doesn’t work, I’m out of the business.” (And he said, “Me, too.” And I knew he was lying.) But if all this work that I did out of pure love was going to continue to be critically rejected, I was no longer making money that could allow me to be a playwright by avocation. With young children in my life, I needed to find ways of making money. At one point I could get a movie a year, to write a screenplay which they never made, and that would give me a couple of hundred thousand dollars and that would be fine. But that stopped happening when they caught on to me. For two or three months, I’d write something that I actually liked but I knew they wouldn’t make it and they never did.
SWEET: You must have had a strong sense of the difference between writing for film and writing for stage.
FEIFFER: Yes. Writing for stage is for yourself and writing for film is for money. Only with Nichols did it really work [for me in film]. Because he and I were working so closely together, and I knew that he was totally on my side.
SWEET: And he also had the power to exercise on behalf of the script.
FEIFFER: I knew also that when he found something wrong with something, it wasn’t because it was Hollywood bullshit. Even when I disagreed with him, I had to seriously consider what he was saying. Playwriting was always fun. Screenwriting became fun as a secondary enterprise. But, other than Carnal Knowledge, I never took it that seriously. It was mainly for the payday. Then I would try to get involved and I would try to do work that I thought would make a good movie. But I understood that I wouldn’t be doing this at all if I wasn’t getting a lot of money for it to pay the rent.
SWEET: One of the things that I’ve been bringing up is the contrast between American and British playwrights. In England they are often allowed to tell big stories. We in America are not allowed to tell big stories anymore. John Guare had that one huge play at Lincoln Center, Free Man of Color. And the other exception is Robert Schenkkan and All the Way. It surprised everybody by actually breaking even and making a couple of bucks. But American playwrights think we can’t do more than ten people or we’ll never get it on.
FEIFFER: Ten people is a mob! Jesus Christ! Four or five at the tops.
SWEET: One of the reasons nobody revives Sidney Kingsley is today you can’t afford to have 35 people on stage. You can’t hire an actor to come on and do five lines.
FEIFFER: I liked Kingsley. I liked Detective Story.
SWEET: Detective Story is a hell of a play. It may be old fashioned but once you give in to it … it takes you to the end.
FEIFFER: Those old guys were terrific. When I first came on the Dramatists Guild Council, these guys were on the Council with me. Marc Connelly, was a sweetheart. He was deafer than I am now, and he was the warmest and most ingratiating. As deaf as he was, I’d see him at off-Broadway plays in the front row thinking he could hear. There I was, a little Jewish cartoonist pretending to be a playwright and I was on the Council with Connelly and Kingsley and Paddy Chayefsky. How’d that ever happen? I could not believe it. I could not believe I was in the company of these extraordinary people.
SWEET: Back to teaching at Yale... When you were working with young Chris Durang, aside from encouraging him and telling him he wasn’t deluded and that he was doing something valuable...
FEIFFER: I didn’t know how to teach at all. I didn’t go to college. But I had them bring in their plays, I cast the plays among the students, we read the plays, and we sat around and talked about what worked and what didn’t work and what could have been strengthened, where the story went. [I would read the plays we were going to talk about] on the train up to New Haven. To figure out how I was going to be smart about them and what I would have to say. And also, I’d have an essay point or two in my mind to make in relation to the play and theatre in general. While we had these plays to talk about, that went very well. There was some good stuff being done.
And then we ran out of plays. And [then] there was a lot of complaining going on about the School and the way they were being treated. And there was a lot to complain about. To get a play on, you had to find a director in the director program to do the play. Or you would not get a play on. And I thought that was outrageous. I thought that was inexcusable.
SWEET: So the directors were deciding what did and didn’t get on.
FEIFFER: I heard enough of this and finally I went to Howard Stein, who was running things while Brustein was in London, and I said to him, “This is bullshit. These guys are here to see their work done and the only way they can learn is to see their work on stage.” And he said, “No, they are going to have to work in the professional theatre and this is a way of teaching them about the real world…” Howard, who never had a job outside of the academy in his life, was telling me, who had never worked in the academy, what the real world was like, and he had not a clue. I lost all respect for the whole operation.
SWEET: So you did it one year?
FEIFFER: One semester.
And in addition, because I was too busy being their friend, I couldn’t get these guys to write assignments. They would bring in nothing. Because I was too busy being their buddy, I didn’t have the wherewithal to lay down the law and say: either get this in by next week or you guys are flunking. The next time I taught, which was at Northwestern, I thought, “How do I do this differently?” And the first thing was: don’t be their friend. I’m their teacher, not their friend. That means I can be a nice guy and I can be helpful when I can, but I can’t be good old Jules. Because they will take advantage of it just as your children take advantage. That was an important lesson to learn. Be as helpful as you know how to be, be as friendly as you know how to be, but make it clear: this is what you do, and if you don’t do it, you have no business being in this class.
SWEET: What was the official title of the Northwestern class?
FEIFFER: It was a humor writing class, which involved them writing a one-act play, just as I do now at Stony Brook Southampton. At the end of the semester, I have them write a one act play, but up until then I have humor pieces, which are based on whatever idea I come up with. I want them to get outside the voice they normally wrote in. [A voice] is a good thing to have, but it also becomes a trap because you think it’s the only way you know how to write or can write. You become secure in that, and therefore, instead of it being an advantage, it can easily become a disadvantage because it leaves you terrified of doing anything else.
So, the first thing I have them do, because it’s humor writing and humor is often about victimization... Somebody has done something you take great umbrage at—not anything major—but you are very pissed off about it. Write about that, either in the first or third person, but write about that. And then we read it in class and talk about it. And I say, “For the next assignment, you’re the other person. And you write from the point of view of the person who did something to you.” It turns them topsyturvy and they have to have another argument and another voice, and they have to start thinking in a different way.
SWEET: Can you talk about specific responses that interested you?
FEIFFER: The students I used to have in the first six or seven years of the class [in Southampton] were often the beaten-up dregs of society who had gone into self-exile in Southampton. They were broken by drugs or marriage or divorce, some had been in jail, and they all had stories. And they all had a level of motivation and determination about them. But they all had stories. And I helped them tell their stories and put perspective on their stories by giving them humor. I really felt as if I was making a contribution. I really felt as I never felt doing a comic strip. Readers [would say] “how much you’ve helped me” and I never believed any of it. But I could see the results here. I could see the difference in how somebody wrote in a month or so, and it had to do with what I was doing. I thought, “For one of the few times in my life, I’m doing some good here.” And I loved it.
But after a while the students became more the middle class: nice twenty-year-olds from middle class homes who had gone to NYU or the New School or Columbia or Hunter, hadn’t had that much happen to them, and who didn’t have stories, and weren’t that interesting. And I couldn’t alter that much, and I ended up not caring that much about them. So that’s why I stopped after this year doing that class and starting a graphic novel class. We’ll see how that goes.
Being a writer comes out of need. I need to write. I need to write because I need to put things down because I need, even if I don’t understand what it is, to say whatever it is that’s making me do this. Or I need to paint, or [make other] art. I need to get this out of me. I’m not even sure what it is I’ve got to get out. In those early students, I found that need. In the later ones, it’s more an exercise in a writing class would be run, let’s see what it’s like.
I had one 55-year-old Irish woman from Queens in the class who was the oldest one there, who had a checkered family background. She was writing everything from what she knew. She could be very funny and very crazy and overwrought, and she was a pain in the ass. She’d get mad at me and she and I would get into fights in front of the class. But she was a real writer and she had things that she had to get out. And I loved her. She was wonderful.
Look, anybody with a brain knows, “There’s so much that I don’t know, that I have to figure out.” If you’re an artist, you’re obsessed with finding a way through, not to the answer—although you may fool yourself into thinking that there is one—but to something that completes the puzzle a little bit. At least enough to stop haunting you for a couple of minutes before you go on to the next part of the puzzle. And that’s what artists do. That’s what painters do. That’s what composers do. That’s what writers do. And if there’s not that need to do that, I don’t know why you’re doing it.
1 Then the dean of the Yale School of Drama and the artistic director of Yale Repertory Theatre.
2 Kosinski (1933-1991), a best-selling Polish-Jewish novelist who had survived the Holocaust, allegedly produced some of his books through a combination of plagiarism and ghost writers.
