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Editors: You once said that you thought theater should disturb as well as entertain. What was the play that showed you that?
Jules Feiffer: Well, there were several. Seeing Long Days Journey Into Night, Marat/Sade, Ulysses in Nighttown, Waiting for Godot. I got interested in playwriting as a result of those plays that made me go home and sit up with a drink and wonder what I had seen, who and what I was, and what I believed. And I would just stare into space, trying to put it all together, not even knowing whether I hated the play or loved it. When I finally came to the end of the processit might have been the next morningI felt such exhilaration. It was as if I had been onstage with those players, I had been part of the play! And I thought, If Im going to write for theater, thats the kind of play I would like to try to write: where the audience is a participant in the discovery that the actors make onstage. Otherwise Id rather go to a movie.
I remember Peter Brook directing Marat/Sade, where two things were happening onstage always at the same time against each other, and there was a background noise and a foreground noise and the two of them disengaged but somehow engaged and it was like a three-ring circus. You didnt know what to look at, but the response was not like theater but like life itself; all the confusion that life brings, and I thought, Of course, thats how it should be.
You know, what youre told when you take theater courses or read about theater is that there has to be an arc, there has to be a journeythat your characters have to develop. Well, they do that in literature, but they seldom do it in life. I mean, if you really want to reflect life youve got to look to sitcoms, where people are the same week after week after week. Thats the way they really are! What was the arc of our mothers and fathers? What was their trajectory? By the end of their lives, how different were they, really? Not very. They were just old, but very much the same. And when you walked into their homes you got back into the same arguments. It shocked me, as a young man away from home in my early and mid-twenties, independentI was with girls, I was leading a lifeand then Id go back to the Bronx. And my voice would start cracking again. And Id be in the same arguments and feel the same defensiveness. I was back at fifteen.
Eds: But youve never written that play?
JF: Well, in a sense Grown-Ups attempted to strike at that. I always loved confrontation speeches in plays, because its where the truth was told, and then I got to be a grown-up and realized that in life you have confrontation speeches and the truth is never told. You just tell louder and noisier cover stories, and slicker ones. So I liked the idea that in a fight onstage the truth is never quite told; its sneaked into shadows and around corners. The audience has to figure out the truth. And no single character represents it. I dont want anybody onstage who represents me. I want to be represented by the spaces between the arguments.
Eds: Do you think that makes it difficult for the audience?
JF: Ive never thought that thinking should be difficult or that arguing with oneself or with friends should be difficult. It should be fun. But the shame of it is that what I always found fun other people find difficult. Years ago, during the height of Vietnam, I was up in the Vineyard, where I have a summer house, and I gave a lift to a young hippie mother whom I had picked up on the road. And I had been depressed for weeks trying to figure out, not in a play but in life, what was going on. I couldnt connect any of the dots in the world I was living in at the height of the war.
And then as I was talking to this girl she said somethingI have no idea what it wasthat triggered something else, and I suddenly started off on this monologue which lasted from close to the beginning of the lift to the end. And suddenly I was hitting all the marks and saying things that I must have been thinking on some level but I wasnt aware of before, and suddenly I was putting it all together. I was terribly excited. And as I let her out of the car in this state of high exultation, she reached over and touched me and said, Oh, dont be so sad. Its bound to get better. And she walked away thinking I was terminally depressed when I was in this taste of near-euphoria, and I drove away screaming with laughter, crying out loud, Thats where it all goes wrong! What makes me happy makes them depressed!
Eds: Well, do you think that because of your role as a cartoonist youre somehow expected to be lovable?
JF: I would hope not, after all this time.
Eds: Because when you read a cartoon you say, Oh, its Jules, its great. People will quote your cartoons. But then they look for you in the play, and you do the maddening thing of leaving that Jules out of the play.
JF: I dont. Its just another version of Jules. Its not six or eight panels. One of the things I had to learn about writing for the stage is that you cant begin in the middle. Cartoons begin in the middle and end short of the end with a kind of observation. But if you did that as a theatrical evening it would be slight and unsatisfying. And, anyhow, why do it onstage if you can do it on paper? Second City in Chicago originally did my cartoons onstage in a show called The Explainers back in, I dont know, 59, with Paul Sills directing, and it got good reviews and people liked it. But I didnt, because it didnt add anything. It was no better than it would have been on paper. I mean, if I put it onstage and its not better than it was on paper, why do it? And since then Ive seen people, particularly a young group from Wesleyan last year, Back House Productions, do two different versions that gave the old cartoons a life that seemed to me altogether different than theyd been on paper.
Eds: What did they add to it?
JF: A kind of vitality and character insight that you couldnt have in a cartoon. The first time I worked with Mike Nichols on a play he kicked me out of rehearsal at one point. He said, I want to rehearse this scene and have you come back and look at it. And I went out and came back and saw them do this scene, word for word what I wrote but somehow entirely different from anything I had anticipated. Absolutely wild and wonderful and original and insane, and I said, Where did you get this? And Nichols grinned and slapped the script and said, Its all in here. Maybe, but it helps to have a director who can find it.
Eds: What was it that led you to write your first play?
JF: In 1967 I spent three years trying to write Little Murders as a novel. I considered it a post-assassination novel. I thought we were in the midst of a national nervous breakdown that nobody was acknowledging, and that acts of random violence were, in some respects, Cold War aberrations, anxiety and rage over a sense of aimlessness and powerlessness. But I came up with these characters and I couldnt get them to do what I wanted. So I went off to Yaddo and I reread everything I had done and I thought, God, this is just awful. And I walked to Saratoga, which is about a mile and a half away, bought a bottle of scotch and came back and drank much of it and got up the next morning thinking, Im really too good to have wasted my time doing this without some point to it. Im not that self-destructive. And I went back to the original notes, and I looked at them and said, Oh, my God! These are brilliant. Somebody should write this. Because I hadnt. I mean, I had written something entirely different; somehow the novel had gone in another direction. So, I thought, I cant go back to this as a novel; clearly, Im hopeless at it. So I sat down and started dramatizing it, and suddenly the characters I thought up for the novel took off and started saying things. And by the end of the first day I was having a wonderful time. I was a playwright.
Eds: When you were a kid growing up in the Bronx and you said to your parents, Im going to be a comic-strip artist, how was that taken?
JF: Well, amazingly, it went down very well. My mother was by profession a fashion designer, and during the Depression years she was the one who brought home all the money.
Eds: What did your father do?
JF: He opened and closed shops. His family were shop owners, and all of them but my father were successful, trimmed corners in one way or another, stayed in there and got prosperous. But my father, who could never run a business or a family or much of anything, for that matter, was a sweet, gentle man who, from the moment he left Poland didnt know what to do.
Eds: Was your mother born here?
JF: No, she was born in Poland, too. But her family moved to Richmond, Virginia, after briefly living in New York. She had no accent at all. She sounded like Walter Cronkite, except she had more authority. And my father always had kind of a New YorkEuropean Jewish accent.
Eds: And you have sisters, right? Two?
JF: The older one of whom was the Com-munist in the family. She was four years older and was the driving intellectual force in the family. For both my younger sister and myself. What we read, what we looked at, what we thought in the growing-up years was driven either by her or a reaction in opposition to her.
Eds: In your play, is she the mother or the young girl?
JF: She was a version of Naomi. But shes not Naomi. I meant to get a lot closer than I managed to.
Eds: Were your parents political?
JF: No. My parents were nice, non-observant Jewish closet liberals and closet agnostics.
Eds: Did they see your success? Did they see you become Jules Feiffer?
JF: Yes, yes. Yes, they did. With the cartoons. My father didnt live to see the plays, but my mother did. But they lived to see me being celebrated by my high school, being inaugurated into the Hall of Fame at James Monroe, where I went on- stage in the early sixties and, true to my calling, attacked the school and my parents. My parents sat there applauding. They loved it. Id been through these high- school Hall of Fame talks all through my school years and there were these former students whod go up onstage. They were buttoned-up everywhere, and they wore these terribly grown-up shoes and they had these faces that betrayed no hint of former childishness. And what they had to say was boilerplate grown-uppay attention to your parents, do everything that your teachers sayand Id sit there bored out of my mind. I could never see that any of them had ever been a kid. My fantasy was someday Id be up there and, by God, Id tell the truth. And it happened.
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