• "Only Write the Good Parts":Playwright Lucas Hnath in Conversation with Jay Malarcher

The keynote address at the 2023 Comparative Drama Conference was a conversation with playwright Lucas Hnath. His plays, known for their striking intellectual-tennis match-style dialogue, include Death Tax (2012), A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney (2013), Red Speedo (2013), Isaac's Eye (2014), The Christians (2015), Hillary and Clinton (2016), Dana H. (2019), The Thin Place (2019), and, most famously, A Doll's House, Part 2 (2017), which received eight 2017 Tony Award nominations, including for Best Play. The recipient of awards that include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Steinberg Playwright award, the Windham-Campbell Literary Prize, and the Obie Award for Playwriting for The Christians, Hnath teaches playwriting and is Head of Performance for the Dramatic Writing program at NYU. In this wide-ranging conversation with scholar Jay Malarcher (West Virginia University), Hnath shares his processes for generating ideas, researching, and teaching playwriting; the origins of several of his plays; and his use of ellipses as percussive beats.

Hnath was introduced by Comparative Drama Conference director William C. Boles (Rollins College).

In Lucas Hnath's note to actors and directors on the nature of the pacing of his play Isaac's Eye, he writes, "keep it moving"—and my aim is to follow this instruction with this introduction. Perhaps it's apt to begin by noting Lucas's meticulous attention to the way his lines should be delivered. In most of the editions of his plays you will find him urging his actors and directors not to dawdle with his language. In Death Tax he instructs to let the play move swiftly, and I'm really badly [End Page 9] paraphrasing this, but essentially, he wrote that if the play runs longer than eighty-five minutes, the director really screwed up.

Perhaps this fascination with the continuous flowing nature of his characters' dialogue can be traced to a fascination from his childhood. Anyone here know what city Lucas went to school in? Orlando! What are we famous for? Disney amusement parks, right. Growing up, Lucas had a fascination with amusement park rides, and he wanted to design his own ride, and by becoming a playwright, he essentially has fulfilled this childhood goal. Eschewing intermissions, he locks the audience into the theatre, much like we are strapped into Space Mountain, or Tron, or one of those annoying Star Wars rides. And then, as he says about each of his plays, the thing doesn't stop until it stops.

While his best-known play revisits Nora Helmer from A Doll's House, many of his other plays feature well-known figures—Anna Nicole Smith, Isaac Newton, Hillary and Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Walt and Roy Disney—and challenge the nature of how the theatre usually works. Dana H., which is a play about his mother being kidnapped, relies on the actor lip syncing to Lucas's mom's own words. In A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney, the entire production is simply a table read of a screenplay. He takes us to settings rarely seen on stage: a church where we are the congregation, featuring a full choir—"the bigger the better"; an alternative universe featuring a different fate for Hillary, Bill, and Obama; a natatorium, where a huge fight takes place in a pool at the play's end; and Isaac Newton's home, where a science experiment is conducted involving a needle being stuck into someone's eye. He admitted in an interview with Adrien-Alice Hansel, Literary Director of the Studio Theatre, "I like to write plays that are as close to impossible to perform as possible."

A profile in The New Yorker described Hnath "as a master of Socratic dialogue, a disciple of George Bernard Shaw by way of Wallace Shawn." Charles Isherwood compared his writing to a "hypercaffeinated David Mamet." And yet, despite all these comparisons, he has admitted that he feels greater affinity for the Greeks with his writing. As for his prolific output over the last decade, Hnath told D. T. Max: "Writing...

• “只写好的部分”：剧作家卢卡斯·纳特对话杰伊·马拉彻

2023年比较戏剧大会的主题演讲是与剧作家卢卡斯·纳特的对话。他的戏剧以其引人注目的智力网球比赛式对话而闻名，包括《死亡税》(2012)、《关于沃尔特·迪士尼之死的未制作剧本的公开阅读》(2013)、《红色速度》(2013)、《艾萨克之眼》(2014)、《基督徒》(2015)、《希拉里和克林顿》(2016)、《Dana H.》(2019)、《薄之地》(2019)，以及最著名的《玩偶之家，第二部分》(2017)，获得 8 项 2017 年托尼奖提名，包括最佳发挥。Hnath 曾获得古根海姆奖学金、斯坦伯格剧作家奖、温德姆-坎贝尔文学奖和基督教徒剧本创作奥比奖等奖项，他教授剧本写作，并担任纽约大学戏剧写作项目的表演主管。在与学者 Jay Malarcher（西弗吉尼亚大学）的广泛对话中，Hnath 分享了他产生想法、研究和教授剧本创作的过程；他的几部戏剧的起源；以及他使用省略号作为打击乐节拍。

Hnath 由比较戏剧会议主任 William C. Boles（罗林斯学院）介绍。

卢卡斯·纳特 (Lucas Hnath) 在给演员和导演的关于他的戏剧《以撒之眼》的节奏性质的说明中写道，“让它继续前进”——我的目标是在介绍中遵循这一指示。也许首先应该注意到卢卡斯对台词表达方式的一丝不苟。在他的大部分戏剧版本中，你会发现他敦促演员和导演不要磨蹭他的语言。在《死亡税》中，他指示让戏剧快速进行，我真的很糟糕[第9页结束]解释这一点，但本质上，他写道，如果戏剧持续时间超过八十五分钟，导演就真的搞砸了。

也许这种对人物对话的连续流动性质的迷恋可以追溯到他童年时期的迷恋。这里有人知道卢卡斯在哪个城市上学吗？奥兰多！我们因什么而出名？迪士尼游乐园，对吧。成长过程中，卢卡斯对游乐园游乐设施非常着迷，他想设计自己的游乐设施，而通过成为一名剧作家，他基本上实现了这个童年目标。他避开中场休息，将观众锁在剧院里，就像我们被绑在太空山、电子世界争霸战或那些烦人的星球大战游乐设施中一样。然后，正如他谈到自己的每部戏剧时所说，事情不停止就不会停止。

虽然他最著名的戏剧重演了《玩偶之家》中的诺拉·赫尔默，但他的许多其他戏剧都以知名人物为主角——安娜·妮可·史密斯、艾萨克·牛顿、希拉里和比尔·克林顿、巴拉克·奥巴马、沃尔特和罗伊·迪士尼——并挑战了剧院通常如何运作。《达纳·H》是一部关于他母亲被绑架的戏剧，依靠演员对卢卡斯妈妈自己的话进行口型同步。在《关于沃尔特·迪士尼之死的未制作剧本的公开阅读》中，整个作品只是剧本的表格阅读。他带我们去了舞台上很少见的场景：我们聚集的教堂，有一个完整的唱诗班——“越大越好”；希拉里、比尔和奥巴马的不同命运的另类宇宙；游泳馆，比赛结束时在水池中进行激烈的打斗；艾萨克·牛顿的家中进行了一项科学实验，将一根针刺入某人的眼睛。他在接受工作室剧院文学总监阿德里安-爱丽丝汉塞尔采访时承认，“我喜欢写尽可能接近不可能表演的戏剧。”

《纽约客》的一篇简介将赫纳特描述为“苏格拉底式对话大师，通过华莱士·肖恩成为乔治·萧伯纳的弟子”。查尔斯·伊舍伍德将他的作品比作“咖啡因过多的大卫·马梅特”。然而，尽管有这些比较，他承认他的作品对希腊人更有亲和力。至于他在过去十年中的多产作品，Hnath 告诉 DT Max：“写作......