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Interview with IN playwright Bess Wohl

Q: Does IN draw at all on your personal experience? What were the circumstances in which you came to write the play?

Bess Wohl: I began the play when I was working as a tutor for a very elite New York tutoring company.  I had a lot of students in Greenwich, Connecticut, so I would take the Metro North train—just like Sara—from New York to Greenwich every day. During my commute I started jotting down ideas, observations and chunks of dialogue in my little notebook. I was aware that I was entering the lives of my students and their families at a very fraught moment. The students truly believed that their whole future was on the line, and the parents were often balancing an overprotective urge with the knowledge of their child’s impending departure. I was balancing conflicting feelings of my own: responsibility for my young charges, envy at their great wealth, true desire for them to succeed, fury at the injustices of our economic system, and frustration with myself for the part I was playing in—as Sara says—“helping the haves have even more.” Because I couldn’t resolve all this in my mind, I began to explore it theatrically.

Q: You preface the play with the following quotation from Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1838 study Democracy in America:

“It is strange to see with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue their own welfare; and to watch the vague dread that constantly torments them lest they should not have chosen the shortest path which may lead to it. A native of the United States clings to this world’s goods as if he were certain never to die; and he is so hasty in grasping at all within his reach, that one would suppose he was constantly afraid of not living long enough to enjoy them.  He clutches everything, he holds nothing fast, but soon loosens his grasp to pursue fresh gratifications.”  

How do you feel this resonates today?
 
Bess Wohl: Well, of course it’s a generalization. But I do feel there is something distinctly American in our short attention spans, our workaholic nature, our need to constantly upgrade our cars, our houses, our wardrobes. It’s the ambition of the American dream, and while it’s immensely admirable in many ways, I think it can also create a feeling of never being able to relax and enjoy what we do have, and of always striving for what’s just out of reach.

Q: You’ve set the play in 2004, before our current recession. Did you have any socio-political reasons for placing it then?

Bess Wohl: Yes, I wanted to look at what kind of attitudes got us into this mess!  It was a time when many in the financial sector felt that they could live by their own set of rules—a mentality that is definitely shared by the Anders family.  I wanted to explore the consequences of this way of thinking, and the primal desires behind it, from pure greed to the need for security to the pull of both familial and romantic love. Ultimately, I was interested in looking at how these traits are not limited to one socio-economic sphere, but are universal and, for better or worse, very human. d