Ellen McLaughlin

On the role of theater in tragic times.

By Natalie Buttner

Illustration by Iris Pope

Every meeting of Ellen McLaughlin’s Playwriting I class at Barnard College begins with the same ritual: Her students grab handfuls of plays from a cardboard box and spread them across the large table at the center of the room. The class finds its footing in the idea that writing great plays requires reading great plays. These copies are from McLaughlin’s personal collection and are treasures worn by repeated reading, occasionally containing handwritten notes from stars of the theatre world. The rest of the class is conducted over this feast of literature. As the semester goes forward and the class establishes favorites from the collection, these works inform the analysis of the student plays. 

Ellen McLaughlin’s own playwriting practice grounds itself in the history of great theater. Her passion for theater began young, and her acting and playwriting has taken her all over the world. Famously, she originated the role of the angel in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Recently, McLaughlin has centered her work around the classic Greek tragedies. She estimates she has written 16 adaptations to date. The second collection of these plays, Greek Plays II, was published this fall. It re-interprets such classics as Sophocles’ Ajax and Antigone and Aeschylus’s The Oresteia, as well as lesser known fragments such as a scrap of an unnamed Euripides play. Her adaptations warp these familiar stories to make them relevant to our present moment, often straying from their original plotlines. Ajax becomes a female US military soldier, grappling with sexual violence during the Iraq War. In her retelling of Antigone, death is replaced with prison and estrangement. Demeter and Persephone consider The Great Irish Famine and industrial agriculture in modern America. 

I spoke with Ellen McLaughlin on Valentine’s Day about teaching, her creative process, and how she uses great plays to make sense of our current political moment. 

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

. . .

The Blue and White: You’ve taught at Barnard for 30 years. Why Barnard? 

Ellen McLaughlin: I’ve taught a lot of other places. I taught at Princeton for a couple of years, and I’ve taught at Bread Loaf School of English. I've taught at Yale Drama School a few times. I really like the students that I work with here. I just find Barnard and Columbia students more open, harder working, more sophisticated in some ways, but just also…less entitled than other places. And they’re just more interesting to me. So I keep coming back, and I also like being part of this faculty. It's been a great place to hang my hat. 

B&W: You’ve said then when adapting these Greek plays you have to shift as a playwright to meet them because they’re already existing structures. Does the play that you are working on influence the things that you observe in your life? 

EM: You know that experience where, when you read something that’s really provocative and engaging, all of a sudden you start seeing the world through the eyes of that book, whatever it is, or that play, and all of a sudden that’s how you notice things. It's like you've been taught a language or given a particular kind of camera lens to look at the world through.

And I feel like when I’m working on something, that’s what’s going on. Everything starts to fall into meaning according to whatever I’m trying to figure out. Everything becomes very significant.

And I mean, that’s a good thing. I always feel sort of relieved when that starts happening, because it means that the play is now in the bloodstream, and all of a sudden there’s that sort of percolating thing where it’s beginning to work on me in ways that are rather mysterious. I think the Greeks are very good about that, because there’s a kind of primary colors there. These are deep, deep, difficult plays, but they’re also so specific in terms of what the world view of these ancients is. It’s so distinct. And if you enter into them even slightly, you find that there are sharp edges to the world. 

And I love the demands that the Greeks put on us, where it’s like, no, we’re going to talk about the big stuff over and over and over again, and we’re not going to let you get away with platitudes or easy answers. We’re going to continue to investigate this thing and question and re-question and pose impossible moral conundrums, you know? So that’s what I love, the ambition of the Greeks, how big this stuff is, and it’s intimidating. 

B&W: Playwriting can be very solitary, but also it’s such a collaborative process. And especially for you, you’re collaborating with people who have been dead for thousands of years, and you’re collaborating with your students, and you’re collaborating with these foundations and individuals that commission your plays. How do you kind of navigate the collaborative nature of playwriting while also maintaining your own voice? 

EM: It’s hard to be a playwright because you have to give up control at some point. And I’ve always had difficulty with that. My problem is that I do act, and so I have pretty clear ideas of what I want from the actors. But I also love actors and so want to give them their freedom to do what they do, as opposed to how I would do it. But it’s really hard to like un-grip and let a director take over and do what a director does, which is to make it their own. I think I said this in class, nobody will ever care as much about your work as you do. Nobody will ever know it the way that you do. And so any director worth their salt and any actor worth their salt respects that and has questions for you. They don’t necessarily want you in the room all the time, because they need to feel like they can do their jobs without you hovering over them at all times. And it’s very hard to leave them alone, but I have to, because otherwise I’m not allowing the actors and the director to do the work that they do. 

I don’t know. I mean, the theater is a recipe for disaster. There’s so many things that can go wrong, from the acting to the direction to the design. So that when things go well, it’s a miracle, but it is really extraordinary when everything goes right. And that’s what keeps you coming back to the medium, is that if you have that experience, nothing ever compares to it. It’s just so great.

B&W: You deal so much with war in your plays. It is a theme in the Greek plays, but it’s also so intimidating. You’ve also worked with people who have been directly affected by war. How do you approach war and what is your research process like? 

EM: Well, I've always asked myself why this is such a permanent theme in my work. Why war? Nobody in my family is part of the military. I have not experienced anything like that. I think I’ve often thought that it might have to do with the fact that when I was little, the Vietnam War was going on, and we were in DC, so we were, and my parents were, very concerned about the war. 

We had a babysitter, Billy Henschel, who was just the most wonderful guy, one of those kind kids. He told us corny jokes. And he taught me how to pluck a blade of grass and make a grass harp. Anyway, he grew up and was drafted and sent to Vietnam, and by then, I was, you know, a teenager, no longer being babysat, and I knew that he’d come back from Vietnam wounded.

And there was this huge moratorium … which was, I think, the largest anti-war demonstration in history in America. Hundreds of thousands of people came to the Capitol, and somehow I got connected. Billy was in a wheelchair, and I got connected with his group when he went, and I knew the story of how he’d been wounded. 

He was heroic. He got a purple heart for this. He was wounded in a firefight. And then went, despite being wounded, went up and rescued some other soldiers, wounded soldiers, then they were all laid out. They were put on stretchers on the top of the Jeep and the firefight was continuing, and the kid who was driving the Jeep panicked during the firefight, and he couldn’t get the clutch to work, and he went forward really jerkly, and they all fell off of the Jeep, and then he backed over them. And so those were the major injuries that Billy had. 

He broke his back and was in a wheelchair, but he’d gotten this purple heart, and he met up in front of the White House with all of these other soldiers, wounded soldiers with their medals and stuff. And I was across the street from them, and they were sort of talking to each other, and then they collectively threw their medals over the White House fence. And I remember looking at these medals just sort of glittering in the air, and then falling onto the White House lawn. And it was such an extraordinary act of protest, and it’s really stayed with me, because Billy was, had been, that sweet kid, and he was not that kid anymore. He was a bitter, really saddened old man at 25 or whatever he was, and I don’t know what happened to Billy, but I think I’ve been writing for him for the rest of my life.

I’ve known other veterans whose experience of war and their attempts to come to terms with what it did to them and who they became have really moved me, and I think I just keep on writing back into that engagement with that sensibility.

B&W: I appreciate how you allow the people who have been affected by these systems of violence to really get a voice and speak, often directly to the perpetrator, to the audience. Do you do that consciously? Or is that something that you kind of that arises naturally, just from your intentions when you approach these violent plays within the context of your experiences with veterans and refugees? 

EM: Well, I think theater really is about giving voice to characters who haven’t been heard or who haven’t been heard in the way that they are heard if you listen as a playwright, it’s always about finding that sound that feels authentic. That’s not you, but it’s the other. It’s the other speaking through you. And I feel like that’s our job, playwrights, is to give voice to people who have been underserved. And that’s the exciting thing about playwriting, is when you feel that voice arising in you, and it’s not like this planned, writerly thing that you’re in control of. 

B&W: Listening to characters, to write about war and violence, you need to be listening and bearing witness to things, even when they’re uncomfortable. Often I speak with people, and I do this myself too, who say, ‘I’m taking a break from news, I can’t hear it anymore at the moment.’ It is such an understandable reaction. How do you grapple with bearing witness and listening to people who have hard stories when, practically, you don’t have to do that? 

EM: I think right now, it’s really difficult, but I also think it’s never been more important because, God knows, there are people who don't want to hear, and it’s our obligation to our fellow men and women to listen to stories we don’t want to hear. I mean, the one thing that I hear with veterans all the time is ‘nobody wants to hear. Nobody really wants to hear what I went through, except maybe other veterans.’

We have to, as a species, listen to each other, because listening is the first step of empathy, and if we don’t listen, we are betraying our commonality with the suffering, with the innocent, with the vulnerable, with the people who are really suffering …

And not just in America, of course. I mean, what's absolutely heartbreaking this morning is what we’re doing to the Ukraine, you know, these people who have for three years been fighting tooth and nail to hang on to their country, and we’ve betrayed them completely. It’s sickening, physically sickening to me. So yes, this administration will do great, great damage to the world. 

We always knew democracy was a fragile concept. You know, the Greeks knew it was really fragile. They lost it. They lost their civilization because it’s really hard. Democracy is demanding. Autocracy is a breeze. You just let somebody else make all the decisions, and you suffer passively through them, a lot easier than having to be a citizen and pay attention and speak up for those who can't speak. 

B&W: In the introduction to The Oresteia, you wrote about how hard it was to write after 2016.

EM: And which you know now that looks like halcyon days!

B&W: Yeah, yeah! How has how you work as a playwright and as an actress responded to this most recent election? How is your creative community responding? 

EM: I don’t know how to respond to this era as an artist. I frankly find it—I’m really staggering around at this point. I’m clinging to the artists I love, both alive and dead, and clinging to friends and family and trying to find something that makes me happy every day, something that gives me joy.

But I do find that the arts have never been more relevant for me. Personally, I need to go to the theater. I need help with this, but I’m not pursuing work that is ostensibly political. I’m finding that things that don’t necessarily speak exactly to the moment are as important, as useful to me as anything that was crafted for this particular emergency in history. And the Greeks have never been more relevant because the Greeks went through this. They saw this happen to their culture, to their civilization, and they spoke about it as the country was going down. And I guess that’s what we’re going to do.

B&W: The image that has stuck with me most from reading The Greek Plays II is in the final act of The Oresteia, when the chorus is trying to wash the blood off the siblings. It immediately conjured, for me, the image of images of rubble in Gaza and Ukraine. Like, how do we ever clean up the blood? Was it a hopeful image for you? 

EM: I don’t think that what we can offer is necessarily forgiveness or atonement or rectification for the devastation, but I think what we can offer each other as human beings is we can listen and we can clean the blood off of each other’s hands, and that is an act of grace. 

The play ends in an equivocal moment. He says, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ And nobody says, ‘Oh, it’s okay.’ You leave with him continuing to apologize, but as he’s apologizing, she’s getting the blood off of his hands, and I think that’s the best we can do.

The question with the Greeks is always, what do we do about Oresties? And not just Oresties over there, but Oresties in us. What do we do about our propensity for violence? What do we do about the inexcusable acts that human beings commit against other human beings? And they never give you a nice, tidy answer. There’s never the sense of like, okay, finished with that conundrum, and now we can all go out to dinner.

It’s supposed to go from the theater to the agora, where everybody’s going to discuss it and take different points of view. Present the question, present the moral difficulty, honestly, and let people look at that for a while and see what they what they come up with. 

At this point, I’m feeling this sort of despair and just sort of confusion about, you know, how do we navigate through this moment? And I don’t know how we’re going to do that. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’m heartened by the fact that it doesn’t make me feel nihilistic about my form. It makes me hungry for it. And I have to assume that other people feel that way too. I need the theater, because it’s always been how I figured stuff out. It’s always been the way that I think through my personal problems, my sort of cultural problems. I need to go to the theater in order to think, and I’m hoping that at some point I will need to go back to my desk in order to think as a writer, that it’ll be actively working through this thing. 

B&W: Is there anything else you want to mention before we close?

EM: One of the reasons that I think the theater is vitally important right now is that it’s a form that demands that we all become this sort of ad hoc community, even if it’s only for a few hours, that these strangers in the dark who are sharing the time together and breathing the same air are in a collaborative relationship with the people on the stage who are making this thing happen, and you’re part of it. Right now there’s this kind of splintering of the society and this polarization, and we’ve all decided what we feel about everything, and we’re siloed off in our little news circuits, and we only hear what we know we can bear to hear and from the people we can bear to hear from. But there’s something about the theater that really does feel like a civilizing force, and that you sit in the dark with strangers and you watch a whole bunch of strangers up on stage doing something that you can’t control and trying to express a truth, and all you promise is that you will listen. You know, you don’t promise that you’ll be moved by it or love it, but I do think that this art form is uniquely capable of inducing empathy. And I think that empathy is the great civilizing emotion. 

I mean, the Greeks are very clear about the fact that it’s important that people do this, important that people go to the theater, because the experience of the theater is unlike any other experience, and I think they were right about that. I’ve given my life to the form because I felt it enough that I keep going back to it, even when I go see horrendous things, you know, I’ve seen enough really great things that I keep on going back to it, because it is a way of experiencing life that no other medium gives me. That’s the hopeful thing.