15 Questions With Christine Evans

Christine M. Evans, new to Harvard’s Creative Writing department, is known for dishing on everything from organ transplantation, to the move from “the land Down Under,” to the secrets to writing a really great play. This year, Evans is teaching playwriting and screenwriting to beginners and advanced students. FM, for its part, decided to get some tips from this script aficionado for its work in progress, “Waiting for Gilpin.”

1. FIFTEEN MINUTES (FM): You have written five plays, one of which is currently being produced. Which one is your favorite?
CHRISTINE M. EVANS (CME): That’s a really tricky question. My favorite play is always the one I am working on in the moment, and at the moment that’s “Trojan Barbie: A Car-Crash Encounter with Euripides’ Trojan Women.” It is having a reading in Providence in about a week or so. But I love all my plays when I am doing them. I would feel like a bad mother if I had to choose just one.

2. FM: What is your favorite play that you have ever read?
CME: Again, that is so hard to choose. I think right now my favorite is Caryl Churchill’s play, “A Number.” I really love it because it presents such huge ideas in such a compressed way that it really resonates for a long time for me. It is very multifaceted. I love really expansive,crazy, theatrical plays like “Dead City” by Sheila Callaghan.  I am especially intrigued by this one because I will be teaching it this semester, so I have been really getting inside of it lately. It is a revision of “Ulysses” seen through the eyes of a modern-day woman living in Manhattan. It is very expansive, theatrical, and language-oriented.

3. FM: Which playwright has been most influential on your work?
CME: Paula Vogel is my teacher and ran the MFA Playwriting Program at Brown, and then I guess Sarah Kane and Caryl Churchill. So many people. Though I have to say Shakespeare, of course. Beckett, and I think Maria Irene Fornes too, and I include her because her work has nourished an amazing flowering of the Latino theater in the U.S. 

4. FM: What are you working on right now?
CME: There is a new, baby play that I have just started. The working title is “Organ Failure” and it is a play about the international black market in organ transplantation. But I want to mix it up with fairy tales about lost and transformed body parts. That’s kind of all I can tell you about that at the moment.

5. FM: Recently you won the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award, does it come with any cool perks?
CME: There is a cash prize which was really nice. And I got a little wooden plaque that I could put on my wall too. Like a tennis trophy.

6. FM: What is the secret to writing a really great play?
CME: Well, I think the key is imagining the world before you put it on the stage. Really spend time imagining the world and then grappling with some type of burning question—something that hurts you or makes you curious or really pulls at you—that needs to be answered in theatrical form. I think one of my favorite sayings is “Write what you don’t know about what you know.” I really like that because there is that sense of questioning in there and being taught something and exploring.

7. FM: What is it like to watch your plays being performed?
CME: It ranges from hellish to wonderful, depending on the context. It’s very joyous when you have a really good collaboration with the director and cast, and then it’s an amazing thing to see the play coming to life. When it can be very painful is when the production is fighting with the play’s style and rhythm. It’s all about what marriage you have, whether you have a good partnership with the company producing it. But...the thing that it is not like is watching what was in my head unfold on stage. When you involve other people it takes on a life of its own. It’s like watching something come alive in its own way.

8. FM: If you could have any director direct one of your plays who would be it?
CME: Off the top of my head, I think Les Waters is a really wonderful director.

9. FM: Have you ever written for the silver screen? Is it something you want to explore further?
CME: I have written some, but I haven’t had anything produced yet. I have done a lot of script readings but my background is more strongly in drama. [...] It is a form I am really fascinated by and it shares so many qualities with playwriting. Each form helps me to think in the other one. The tools you need for dramatic writing cross over between the media, but the actual media is very different. You have to think in images and spare dialogue in movies whereas in the theater you have a compressed space and bodies on stage.

10. FM: What is it like being on the Creative Writing faculty at Harvard?
CME: It’s very exciting. I am really thrilled to be among fiction writers and poets and other literary types. I am hoping to really build cross-over relationships. I am trying to find ways for my playwrights to see their work on its legs. The strength is that there are so many literary people, the challenge is connecting them to production because playwrights need to see their work on stage. I am hoping to build bridges to see if new plays can become part of the landscape here.

11. FM: You are teaching four courses this semester in the English department. What do you think of Harvard students?
CME: So far I really love the students here. They are very motivated to write, and very eclectic, actually. They are coming in with very different interests and backgrounds.

12. FM: You hail originally from Australia. Why the move to the U.S.?
CME: I came over here to do the MFA and playwriting at Brown and then went on to complete a Ph.D. at Brown.  I was just sort of here by then.

13. FM: What has been the greatest challenge in going from Australian theater to American theater?
CME: Trying to get the rhythm and tone and mood of the theater here has definitely been the biggest challenge. Tuning my eye to American speech has been quite a difficult thing but quite a beautiful thing. There is this expectation in America that plays end on a positive note. There is this need for redemption. The religion in this country is very deeply embedded. Australia is a much more cynical place. Several of my favorite playwrights are British and they tend to be more comfortable with gritty, hard-hitting difficult things. That desire for uplift in the theater has been something that has been quite new for to me.

14. FM: You have been in the U.S. for seven years now. How do you like the weather here compared to Australia?
CME: I complain about it all winter every winter. I don’t see the point of winter.

15. FM: We feel that. You graduated from Brown. Who do you root for during football games?
CME: I have only just learnt the different between baseball and football, so I am little bit behind in my cheering.