Jon Robin Baitz

Published Jun 4, 2012, 4:00 AM

This week Alec talks with playwright Jon Robin Baitz, whose Broadway play, Other Desert Cities, is up for a Tony later this month.

Baitz grew up in Brazil and South Africa -- transferring to Beverly Hills High School for his final year of school where he says he “became friends ... with fellow freaks.” He’s been writing ever since -- even though “writing plays has always been very tricky.” Baitz talks about the origin of the new play, his short-lived adventures writing for television in Hollywood, and the relief of coming back to the American theater. For Baitz, “it’s a privilege to be in [the theater]. I’m lucky to have found my way back to it.”

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This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing, whatever it is, whatever you do, you're our daughter, and I will love John Robin Bates has a new play on Broadway, recently nominated for a Tony. Other Desert Cities is about family dysfunction and the choices we make. There are consequences to our actions. What does that mean? How could I trust you? How could I ever be in your presence? My dear Robbie, as he's known to many, pursued similar themes in the drama he created, an executive produced for ABC Brothers and Sisters. Robbie's strengths as a playwright are magnified by the talent he surrounds himself with. Dan Sullivan directed Substance of Fire in Joe Mantello directed Other Desert Cities. Robbie Bates often writes for ethic actors he admires, like Stacy Keach and Ron Rifkin, who have worked on several of Robbie's stage and screen projects. In the theater world, you would be hard pressed to find someone who wouldn't want to work with Robbie. He comes across as kind, human and humble. During our conversation, he confessed there's been a dark side to his success on Broadway. He's been spoiled. John Robin Bates can barely think about going back to the smaller theaters. I'm ruined. I'm ruined from off Broadway now. I I sort of say things like, well, that plays an off Broadway play, it's not a Broadway play. Making fun of myself. The difference is, you know, you're in this great, great, grand old house, you know that's built for a kind of big experience, and the drama is somehow expanded. I mean, I I've listened. I never knew the difference, so I was always and when you're there, you feel there's a di at different tapestry there. When you're in a Broadway house that lends itself to the kind of the imp ward of the project. There's a lot of different things going on. You know, the audience has bought into an experience for which they've usually sadly paid more money, and so it changes the dynamic, it changes, there's more ornamentation around it in some way. The laughs change, which is odd. The laughs are sort of bigger and more expensive, and so so what was the arc of other desert cities before you went to Probably it began where in the Mitzi new House, which is the beautiful Jewel theater in the basement of Lincoln Center. I think, small, intimate, and in fact even claustrophobic. What happened was Joe Mantello, who directed it, immediately had a sense of of having to build space around things, and that when once it moved in the transfer, I actually believe the play got better in its move It just all came together and someone I did a little work on the play, and for example, what work did you do? I worked a little bit on the ending of the play, the last few minutes of the play. But it went so well off Broadway Lincoln Center. When you do that kind of thing, what is it that propels you to do that? It's just the knowledge that there's more to mind from it. And mostly it was, you know, Joe's great sort of probing sense of I think there's a deeper truth there. I think we've glossed over something or skipped over something. You have a success now on Broadway that if i'm I could be mistaken, but it's been a while since you had it to this level. This is a like Substance of Fire again. You know where you had great, great notices and people have said wonderful things about your career and your future. That was twenty years ago. I know when you look back on some of your place, would you change them? I can't. I just have to keep moving forward, right, I can't do it. I know that people do, but you know I can't fight old wars. I would find it disablingly backwards looking for myself to go back. I think some of my plays have been less successful to me than others. And to me, it's all been about the process of getting to the next play or getting to the next day. This play, though at the core of it it comes out of trying to understand the ways in which people collapse, even though the subject is not necessarily depression. I want to take two plays Substance of Fire Sullivan directed and Now You're on Broadway and had been at the mid Sea with other desert cities, and Joe directed. Compare and contrast Sullivan with Joe in terms of their director very similar. They are meticulous, meticulous miniaturists with big, expansive visions of what logic and a world are comprised of. They're both indefatigable. They never give up, They live and breathe it. Their approaches are very different. Dan has a kind of almost holistic view of of the logic of a play, and Joe because I don't know, maybe because he was an actor for a long time. Even though Dan had been an actor, Joe looks for a different kind of character logic. He's always asking and what happens next. Dramaturgically, he's very much about the engine and the motor and Dan is, well, he's also actually, he's actually all they're They're so similar that it's only a matter of their temperaments that are different. Dan is like a priest. Yeah, he's more jesuitical and then tell her was what uh? To the extent that you want to say, He's passionately, passionately dedicated to leaving no stone unturned. And I think one of the reasons he went back to acting this last year did The Normal Heart on Broadway, and I think it's because he had to re experience the the sort of dynamic of what it means to be an actor, to get under the skin of the experience and find out what kind of communicator he is with actors. By acting again. Dan has a a kind of remove about him, and Joe tends to delve, oh sort of with sword, kind of play stile play. Yeah. But they both have in common is real rigor about their work, ethic and their intellectual understanding of a subject, of a world. Sometimes, although it's not always useful, I divide directors between directors that you want to please because you want them to like you, and directors that you want to please because you don't want them to hate you. And I don't think I need to tell you which one would be which in this case, you know, because Joe seems so intense, It just seems so smoldering all the time. Well he is he No, he wants you to show him. He doesn't want to have to tell you what to do. He wants you to bring something amazing to the table every day. It's why one loves, for instance, our mutual friend Nathan Nathan Lane, because every day he brings something new, what they call him money player. Many people, I think don't understand this is not always the case that the theatrical experience movies are very, very different when you work with the director in the theater. A lot of them don't tell you this or that they edit. You know. The most famous example who I love is Joey Tillinger who Tillinger basically says nothing for the for the three weeks, and then in the last week he selects. My recollection of Joey was it was three weeks of me doing something. I'd say, what do you think? You say? What do you think? Babe? Do you think it was? I just I can't do it that way. I see it as all about stripping away and finding that kind of improvisatory freedom that's locked in the text, and that involves a combination of savv nous and analysis and getting off book really fast and being to move around really fast, and then setting joe I'm told is a stickliff for that get off books because nothing really happens until you do. Yeah, it's it's it's difficult, especially in a world now, where as I recall, you used to have five weeks of rehearsal for a straight play, we've gone to a four week rehearsal. Four weeks that goes by like like you sneeze. I like shorter rehearsals with Bob Falls, another great director. I did three hotels this last summer at Williamstown with More Tierney and Stephen Webber, and they had two and a half weeks Everything is Dangerous two and a half weeks. Tell me about when a play like Substance of Fire, How did that come to you? You know, it's interesting that play in this place share something in common. They came out of despair. They both came out of trying to write myself out of a kind of real sense of despondency and loss. And to the extent you want to talk about it, what was the despondency Back in I had been working on a play for a long time that was eventually became a play called A Fair Country, but at the time it was called Dutch Landscape. And I worked on it impossible play to do when you're young, about growing up. Did it at the Taper in Los Angeles and I lost the play. I actually lost it, you know, in rehearsal and development through nobody's fault, you know, certainly not Gordon Davidson's who directed it. If anybody was at fault, if you can even use that word because it's it's theater, it was me. I was just in despair over how did I let this happen to me. I used to work at Book Soup in Hollywood, and I borrowed the office above Book Soup to try and figure out. You know, I was no longer working there, So I was sitting up in this office above the store, and I was surrounded by books, and I thought, oh, yeah, I've read all of you. I've read you, you, you, you, you, you, you, and none of you did me any good whatsoever. I don't know how to fight. First line of substance fires. Look at all these books. The play is about learning how to fight and articulating the things you need, articulating the ways in which you have to express yourself in order to somehow achieve a kind of victory that goes beyond words what scias victory. Isaac doesn't really have a victory in an odd kind of way. He goes down with his own ship. But he's unyielding. And I think I tried to learn how to be unyielding, and writing that play it didn't do me much good. Why well, because life is life and plays or plays, and you can't actually learned that much by writing them. You have to live. Do you find that in the ensuing years you wind up going up against things that just crush you, right, they crush you. I realized that I'm not going to compare battles with television networks with going through the Holocaust. But on the other hand, the Isaac character, there are some people who they are just incapable of the happiness that leads to real intimacy because there's something that just cannot get over. I think it's very true, totally true of that character. And in his case, he has very little choice. He's locked in battle with this melancholia that won't lift, which I think people don't have a real honest understanding about. They don't know what it's like to be betrayed on like the ninth level, something really hideous. I think despair is the dimensions of one's despair are so difficult, called to quantify, so difficult to paint, so difficult to expose, and it's such a huge subject. Certainly, other desert cities is steeped in despair. You know, you said talking about network battles, But I had I sort of, you know, was ejected from my one adventure and television up to that point, I was creating brothers and sisters, and it was a very unhappy, very difficult experience for me. And again at the end of that thing, I sort of I came back east, you know, after having been west for a little bit. And what was the first thing you wrote after? About? There are three plays in my drawer because I had forgotten how to write that. This is the thing I think about with other desert cities is it's the play where I learned. I taught myself how to write again because I was so used to writing to please people. What happened with ABC, well, first of all, networks being what they are, the people who commissioned the piece and who are invested in putting it on the air end up leaving. And so you're left with a kind of in a kind of parents and not necessarily particularly caring supportive step parents slightly bewildered. I mean, the guy who really ran the entertainment division kept saying, I I don't understand why anybody watches this show, and I would say the same thing, except for different reasons. I mean, it was really it was bizarre. She would call me and scream at me. I actually said to me, I don't know who you think you're talking to, And I would you know, politely hang up and say I'm I'm leaving the conversation now. At one point I said to them, don't you feel like there's something wrong? I mean, look at this amazing cast, Sally Field, Callista Flockhart, Rachel Griffith, Ron Riffkin, Patty Wedding, on and on and on. Don't you think there should be some higher intentions, some integrity, maybe some I don't know, do you want do you want to try and get an Emmy or something. I didn't even know how to speak their language, but I thought Emmy would be something that they would recognize. And a literal quote from the head of the studio was, no, I don't need awards. The ratings are good enough for me. This happens in the first season, the first season, and you are gone after how many seasons after the first season, So it was all this takes place in one television season, one nine month period. Yes, you know, someone comes in to sort of manage the show, and they're beholden to the network in the studio, as they should be. And I'm beholden to an aesthetic and I'm an idiot for being beholden to in a sthetic. But you know, people love the show, and it went on for another four seasons after that. You maintained some participation in the show. You know, how is that possible? You created the show, You are the creator of the show. Correct. There was a writer's strike, and there was a force masure clause forced masore being active God. The studio network could use that clause to nullify any contract they had with anybody they like. I had been very vocal during that strike about what I considered at the time the very unhealthy dynamic between the producers and the writer's guild, and I wrote about this way too much. What was it? What was the name of those uh blogs you wrote on huffing impost leaving l A. Yeah, a lot of them were very insanely painful and actually lead to again other desert cities. The girl in the play can't stop writing about things that affected other people, and she wants some truth. Yeah, and then she's left with the debris. So it all came out of you know, I pick up the phone one day and I see that, you know, people's deals are being canceled, but there are people who haven't made anything. And I suddenly I'm I was gone, And I even before that wasn't sure to what extent I was ever going to go back. I knew I would have some involvement, but then I had none whatsoever. But for me, what's curious, And again you don't have to answer this question. I'm just curious, which is, as the creator of a television show, there is typically a windfall for that person as the creative that show. If that was taken away from you through some contractual slide of hand, where did all that go? All went to the network? They took it all for themselves. I can't speak to that. I'm just not going to talk about it, but I am going to say that I think it was the best thing that ever happened to me because it would have been dirty money, right. I think it would have destroyed me in some way too. I have no pride in the thing that made me wealthy. Would have made me terribly uncomfortable, and I would have felt that I had betrayed whatever promise or potential I'd set up for myself as a writer that if I was going to survive at it, it couldn't be compromised. This is Alec Baldwin, and I'm talking with playwright John Robin Bates more in a minute. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing. The idea for John Robin Bates's new play, Other Desert Cities came to him when he was back on the East Coast. I was sitting at a beach with my notebook, and I'm thinking about how to get back into it and what matters to me, and I just sort of self destructed at Brothers and Sisters. I had written about personal events that implicated other people in some way that I hadn't taken into account the consequences. And I found myself very much like the character in my play played by Beth Marvel and Rachel Griffith at various points, a writer who is a dangerous creature. And I had a note to myself play about daughter of a famous family who writes a book about her growing up in this family, something like that, the danger of telling the truth that turns out to be a lie. And at that moment, this lady of a certain age walked by me, and she looked to me like um Pat Buckley, the old doyane of New York conservative politics, the wife of Bill Buckley. Bill Buckley and I had lunch with her once and found her to be charming and engaged. And this woman walked by me on this beach with her hat and in a one piece bathing suit. I immediately felt the mother in that play. And I suddenly remembered Old California the way it was when I was a kid, and we were just in the throes of an election at the time, too were about to be and the Republicans of certainly of that period and even more so today, we're very confusing to me because they didn't seem recognizable to me as having a coherent, cohesive coach and argument for their principal positions, which had to be Prince a Bold in some way. The play just came together in one fell swoop, Old California Conservatives, the old hollywel System, Reaga Nights. I even remembered I'd gone to high school with I think, the daughter of John Gavin, and I thought, you know, because I love Touch of Evil, and there, I think, isn't John Gavin. No, he's not in Touch of Evil. He's in Psycho case in all these movies, and I thought about he was the ambassador to Mexica. That's right, as is the Stacy Keach character and my play, and I thought about your characters based on John Gavin to some extent. They're all these archetypes. At the back of all this, of course, there's also Joe Mentello, who you know, we're no longer a couple, but he's my family, my best friend, and you see, being a couple of one year two thousand and two. So it was a while and he kept saying to me, with all possible respect, nobody's waiting for the next Robbie Bates play. And you know, these are chilling words because I have so much to say and it's not coming out. My equivalent of that. As my agent said to me, he goes, it's not that these people don't want to hire you because they don't like you. He says, they don't want to hire you because they don't think of you at all. Jesus, Well, it's terrible, because the worst thing that can happen to an artist, I'm invisible. I no longer matter for me. Writing plays has always been very tricky. I don't know a lot, I don't have a lot to say. I reach things very slowly, and I I sometimes it seems facile and easy, and to me, some of the times my thoughts and my sort of expressed opinions in place seem hollow or naive, even because I know they're deeper truths always to be found and that I'm But don't you think that seeking them and being aware of that makes you more likely to find it than anybody? You didn't go to college? Did you know why you wanted educating yourself? I wish I had gone to college. It was a depressed and unsettled kid. And why I don't I think I wasn't at peace with probably any element of who I was, whether it was a sort of nascent intellectual or sort of pre expressive homosexual kid. Or where variously l A from you were born? Where in l A and you lived seven then Brazil for three years in Rio, and then South Africa for six and a half years until I was eighteen. And your father was in the condensed milk business. My father worked for a giant multinational carnation milk. Yeah, it was a condensed milk business. So l A, Brazil, South Africa, and then back to when you finally get back to la how old are you so? High School's over? I just finished high school. I'd sort of lost time through all. The trial was high school in South Africa, Like I couldn't get used to things like cricket and corporal punishment. You know, you get cane for like not doing well on a spelling test, literally caned. And I think, actually I was so busy trying to be sly and charming that I forgot how to be me. That I think led me to rebel against learning itself. So I was sort of interested in the few things. I was interested in literature history, but I wouldn't apply myself to anything except escape, and part of escape meant not going to college. I was really lonely, and I I kind of became a depressed kid, and that manifests itself. You can say, I think I did you know you were gay? Then yes, I definitely knew that. I knew that add to your depression didn't make you feel more isolated. It wasn't proactive the gay community there in talking about getting caned. Yeah, well, um, I think my parents, who loved me very much, were distracted by their own terrors. There are certain families that are born in terror and live in terror. Um conceived in terror. I need you to write a player for me. I want to be called conceived in terror? Go ahead, well, I mean death of a salesman? Is is a family that lives in terror? You were how old when you arrived in Durban? Ten? The eight years? Yeah, I was there almost eight years critical time, ten years or so all of your real back half of your childhood, your teenage years especially you are in Durban. Yes, it was seventeen or something when we left. But you had finished the high school program. No, no, I finished it in l A where Beverly Hills High. What was that like? I? You know, was the only kid I knew who rode their bike to school because everybody else's parents had given them a fiat literally, yeah or something. Who are your friends? Then? Who did you become friends with? Anyone? Oh? Yeah? In fact, Jenny Livingston went on to make Paris Is Burning, great documentary, Tina Landau, great theater director. Gina Gershawn my oldest friend from high school. We were in place together in the drama department. So I became friends with and I say this with real respect and love with fellow freaks. How are you feeling about yourself and about life that last year in Beverly Hills. I think I was scared to death still. I mean, it was just a new form of foreignness, but it had the pattern of something very familiar to me. But you know, I remember being taken to a party really early on, and I had developed a kind of weird eye beforehand for art. I thought maybe I was going to be a painter or an artist. Story. And I walk into this house and there is a giant David Hackney and next to it is a giant Mother. Well, I'm standing in front of this giant painting that's famous that I've looked at in books Thames and Huts and art books while I was in Durban at the Art Library of the University. I do the world was just very real and different, and it was easier to like have sex, and it was easier to to function. Were you writing? I guess I was sort of writing, Yeah, what were you writing? I was writing really bad short stories about alienated Paul Bull's kids adrift in foreign countries, which is basically tell you that youruth still what I'm doing. It just looks slightly the wallpay ris pretty or Now where were you living at that? I was living um on friends sofas like the parents of children. I went to high school. I was I was just a freak, you know, And I was at odds with my family at the time, you know, and I had escaped and it was just a nightmare. How do we get from there to fair country? Gordon Davidson, you know in Pinocchio where he falls in with actors. I'm walking around. I ran into this girl I knew from high school. She said, what are you doing? And I'm sort of looking for a job. I think I'm starving to death. I'm not sure, she said to me, And I should have known. She said, well, my father just fired me. He needs he has a new assistant. And I was like, well, what does he do and she said, oh, he's a film producer. Who was the producer. This is great guy, and he was. He a working producer. I'm only asking for a name. My first day at the office, he says to me, whatever you do, answer the phones, but never pick up the phone. And I was like, I don't even know what that means. And he said, you'll do fine. And he had a gang of cronies, all of whom had contempt for the studio system and had worked around the edges of it, or in it had done well, fallen out of favor, usually had destroyed themselves through my favorite thing, their own ambivalence. I found myself at home for the first time in my life win the nest of scorpions. Yes I did, I found myself. I said this, I know, yeah, because nobody is trying to pass. It's a den of thieves here. It was still the days of speaker phone, and they would have fights. They had a tower on Sunset Boulevard. They had a nest of rooms in a tower, and they would be fighting with each other and then they would suddenly be a pause. Someone would say, jeez, if you could see what I see right now, that girl walking down Sunset she is so beautiful. The fight was over nothing meant any That's right. One of the masks for a glass of water is in my first few weeks there two what do I know. You would go to the sink, bring a glass of waters, spit it out like practically on me, and say this isn't water, and I would say, yes, it's water. What are you talking about? That's water. It's I want professional water. And the whole time became about professional water. How long did that last three four like, uh four some years. No, No, but it got you the scorpions that's looking down at the women's asses for four years. And I would copy everything down. And so at the same time I started hanging around with these actors, there was a sort of an equally desperate contingent of avant gardists odd playwrights out there in l A, living on the fringes of everything. And so I lived between these two worlds, one of which was sort of drunk and druggy, and the other was insane. Megalt Noma, I can't say the word megalomaniacal. Thank you, Meg, I'm here for maniacal. You just think of the words and I'll say that, thank you. I think we're gonna be in each other. I know. It's like Bluetooth, the technology. I had to come up with a play for one of these sort of workshop things that we would put together, and one of these playwrights said to me, so, what's your play, and me bulsh fitting which is something I just did. I said, yeah, it's called ms Lansky Zelinski on the spot. I just came up with the next on those guys, Yeah, I said, yeah, it's called Ki just based on the guys in the tower, so it's just them talking and I put all my notes together and we did it and it was the first one you wrote. Yeah, now you're on Broadway. The show is a big success. People have said wonderful things about the show. I worshiped Stacy. I mean, I work. He is one of the great wild mustangs of of all theater history. And in this piece, it is that Reagan crowd, it is that Bush crowd, it is that blue blood Republican crowd, the conservative crowd. Stacey captures that. I wrote the part for him. Do you wrote the part? Oh? Yeah, I knew that there was nobody who could capture that better. Ever, we had worked together before, he had done ten Unknowns at the Taper, and it was a revelation because the character has to have a dignity as well. Yeah, Stacy brings in the guy. We sit there and go, I get it. I would have followed him. I wanted him around. He's great and I love him so much. You know, he and Joe didn't know each other, and so they got on the phone before rehearsal and Stacy says to Joe, you know, I've worked with Robbie before. We worked together before, and I know him well, and do you do you know him? If you worked with him? And how well do you know him? And I kind of know him? And we lived together for twelve years. But that's Stacy. He's like, oh damn. The great thing about Stacy is he brings centuries of actors honor onto that stage with him, the honor of honoring fellow actors, the honor of Snake, the privilege of being an actor, the privilege of being in the theater, not missing a single show in his seventies, the rituals of it, the privilege of working in the theater is the thing that has been of everything that's happened to me. Just the great honor of being in the American theater in some capacity is what I'm left with that it's a privilege to be in it. I'm lucky to have found my way back to it. What's institutionalized and working in the theater is a hunt for truth that doesn't exist in the movie business, in the television. Do you know what you're doing next? Are you onto something now that you're writing? Who knows? I can't tell yet. I just can't tell you scribbling. Yeah, I'm supposed to be doing things. I'm a mess at all times. John Robin Bates says he feels like more of a grown up as a flight When he started out in l A, he was couch surfing at the homes of his friend's parents. Things are different Now I have a home, I grow stuff, I'm responsible to people. Have a dog. I have a dogs three what's the dog's name, Trip, Trip, Yeah, he has three legs. He's a great dog. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing.

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