Interview with L.B. Deyo, Playwright, about APPREHENSION (Oct 9 - Nov 1), by Brian Paul Scipione
After being fortunate enough to attend a readthrough of LB Deyo's play Apprehension, I was equally fortunate to sit down and talk to Deyo.
“Apprehension follows Joe, an ordinary man facing a slew of memory & interpersonal struggles— or so it seems. As his grasp on reality and memory begins to erode, the relationships he holds most dear become collateral damage in a deeper unraveling. What begins as self-doubt morphs into a haunting exploration of identity and the hidden machinery behind human experience.”
-- From the Holi Shamoli Productions Press Release.
Apprehension can be seen Oct. 9-Nov. 1, Thurs-Sat, 8:00 pm at the Hyde Park Theatre. Tickets are available at www.apprehensionpplay.com
Click HERE for CTXLT production page.
Brian Paul Scipione (BPS) - Why did you choose to write this story as a play? Because I know you've done other fiction work in the past and so you've made a conscious decision to move to drama with this.
L.B. Deyo- Yes, I honestly have been writing books for quite a few years now and have been frustrated by, sort of, an inherent aspect of writing which is that it's not interactive, that it's not an exchange with people. And I thought, well, you know, I could write a play and then people would be experiencing it right in front of me and I would know to some degree how they were reacting to it. So, that really appealed to me.
BPS- I feel like the themes of this piece are big enough for a novel. Are there any thoughts on expanding on it? Because overall, it's very philosophical.
Deyo- I think it probably could be, but you know I just finished a novel right before writing this that I worked on for several years. And I actually got a literary agent and had him send it around, and when I didn't get anyone to buy the novel, I really felt like it was time for me to make this change and see what I could do in this new medium.
BPS- Let's talk about this specific production. Anybody that's been in the Austin theatre scene for a long time is going to be able to tell by just glancing at the cast that it's basically a super group of Austin theater talents. You know, kind of like the Austin version of “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.”
Deyo- It's like a dream come true. A chance to work with all these amazing people. So much credit goes to Chris Shea who sort of discovered this play and put this group together. It's an amazing feeling to see them working on it. To see people like Brent Werzner, Jennymarie Jemison, to see Sonnet Blanton directing, to see Jeff Mills, and Michelle Keffer. Everybody is just doing such a phenomenal job. It's really thrilling.
BPS- I’d like to talk a bit more about the play itself. A textbook question is why this story right now? Was that a conscious decision? What inspired you to write it?
Deyo- Well, I think that it's definitely a reflection of current events and more generally, it’s sort of the general tenor of our times. It seems the feeling that I think so many of us have is that it's harder and harder to get agreement about basic truths and basic facts, whether they're true or not. These shared assumptions, that almost any society in history has been able to take for granted, seem to be getting questioned on a daily basis. I think a lot of us feel like we're standing on shaky ground, with a shared basic understanding of how the world works.
Then, on a much more personal level, I have long experience with psychological difficulties, depression and so forth. I'll tell you my experience of depression and anxiety is that it's extremely difficult when you're going through something like that, that doesn't have outward signs that convey to people why you're behaving in the way you are. Why you don't seem to be able to do the things that other people can do easily. It feels very urgent, at least to me, to succeed at this difficult task of communicating those things. It seems like almost a matter of survival to say "I'm not myself right now. I'm not able to do the things that I normally would be able to do, handle the things I would normally be able to handle, and I need you to understand that and understand why that is."
Over the years I’ve given it a great deal of thought. I've come up with all sorts of analogies to try and explain to people. One analogy I use is a burn victim. If you were a burn victim you would be obviously outwardly showing the signs that you were burned and people would recognize that immediately and understand that you needed to be in a hospital and so forth, but when you when you are seriously depressed you may be in just as much pain or nearly as much pain as a burn victim and yet look completely normal. The people around you cannot understand at all. Cannot begin to grasp why you are behaving so strangely. Why you're acting like you're in pain. In that sense, my play Apprehension is in some part a further attempt to analogize the experience of a depressed person and to try to reach out to people and connect with them about it.
BPS- I wanted to know your overall thoughts on two things: the tone of Apprehension and the theme of Apprehension because both of them are very big, kind of like juggernauts.
Deyo- The tone of the show is a comedic take on a horrifying situation. So, I guess you could call it a kind of a black comedy, like Doctor Strangelove. The play is supposed to be funny, it's supposed to keep you entertained in a lively way. The opposite of what you might expect from a show that deals with things like depression where you would expect it to be very heavy and gloomy. With the cast doing such a great job, they're all so funny in their roles and they do such a great job keeping that energy up and keeping it light in a weird way.
But of course, it is very dark and scary subject matter and so it combines those two things. I had a lot of influences with tone and with theme, from things like Hitchcock, Rosemary's Baby, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Movies and other theatre that tried to strike that balance between suspense and horror and also humor and wittiness. So that's what I was aspiring for. I’ve always loved this sub-genre of suspense that deals with the idea that people are conspiring against you.
When I was a little kid, I saw, like, The Dick Van Dyke Show. They had an episode where he has a dream in which people have these walnuts on the back of their heads. And if this person had a walnut, then he's part of this conspiracy. It's funny, of course, it's ridiculous! Why do they have these walnuts? But it's really a kind of scary show. I've always just found that so interesting and entertaining. The idea that people are not who they appear to be, that they are acting against you surreptitiously.
I was saying the other day that human beings are a little like bees. We are absolutely dependent on one another for our survival. A human being on his own is not going to make it, he won't be able to find food, he won't be able to survive, for the most part, I mean, there's some exceptions. There are outdoors people who can do it, but you know what I mean. Basically, we need other people, so it's natural that our emotional reaction to feeling like people don't like us or don't want us around is really a terrifying feeling. It's basically like being told by your ancient hunter gatherer group you are now an outsider, and we will not suffer you to be around us, and so you're going to die. There's something so visceral and primeval about this reaction that I think we all understand to one degree to another.
BPS- I can definitely see that in the plot of Apprehension. As far as the theme goes, I found what seemed like either inspirations or references to Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and Lovecraft via Stephen King.
Deyo- Yeah, Kafka and Dostoyevesky are both mentioned by name and Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence idea is mentioned. I'm not sure if I was consciously aware of mentioning anything about Lovecraft, but I certainly wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was in there via Stephen King reference. [BPS Note - Eternal recurrence is a concept which suggests that time repeats itself in an infinite loop, and that the same events will continue to occur in the same way, repeatedly, for all eternity.]
BPS- One of the real fascinating things about this piece is that the struggle is both internal and external. The character’s mental and psychological struggles are battling for screen time with the story’s actual plot. How does one create that as a playwright?
Deyo- I don't know. It’s my first play and so I just did my best. There's definitely conflicting and competing ideas that you want to get all on stage. It's a balancing act for sure. There's philosophical ideas that I wanted to share and there's deep emotional feelings that I wanted to convey and get the audience to experience, but of course you have to have the story. It's got to be strong, it's got to keep going, it's got to have that that flow, that arc, et cetera. I get a lot of people to read my stuff and give me feedback and I'm very responsive to that and I think that helps a lot.
BPS- Well you’ve done an absolutely taut job of keeping everyone immersed in the lead character’s struggles mentally and then everyone's, like, coming into that bubble and then he gets out of it and then he's into it again. The tone and interplay among the characters were very much like early Mike Nichols films like Carnal Knowledge or Polanski’s Carnage and I think that speaks to what you were saying earlier about it being a comedy piece at heart.
Deyo- I’m not sure if I really set out to make it funny honestly, and in fact I didn't. The first scene isn't funny, but as I was writing the second scene, and this guy's talking to his psychiatrist the absurdity of the whole situation just started coming out. And honestly that comes out of my experience of depression. It's like I'm sitting there telling you how much pain I’m in. How the world is just crumbling around me and yet there's nothing wrong in my life. My life seems perfectly fine and you're trying to understand what the hell I'm saying. There's something very comic about it because it’s, like, what the hell am I talking about, you know? It's absurd, it's inherently absurd, and I think that a lot of human interaction is really absurd in the same way. We are competing for resources. We are trying to reproduce. We are trying to secure our territory, and all these sorts of animal functions, but we're also trying to be polite and to be liked. The cracks are bound to show through and there's bound to be something kind of funny and ridiculous about it.
BPS- That sums it up really quite well. I made another note saying that ‘the introspection is blazing: like Sartre on speed.’
Deyo- Well, I think that is one of the things about this internal/external stuff. It’s really derived from what we've been talking about: the person who's in a crisis, the person who's facing an emergency, is not able to be selfless and is not able to focus on things that other people would normally find important. He's not going to be able to participate in in life because he’s focused inwardly on surviving. So, when you see a person who is going through this, you're looking at a person who is trying to focus on the external world but is unable to. That also is part of the comedy.
Imagine if you stepped into a bear trap and yet you were not in the woods somewhere, you were in your office and people are still coming up to you and saying, "Can we still get this by 2:00’?" and you're, like, ‘Well, yeah, but my leg is in a bear trap.’ I think life affords us with things like that and that's an example of the internal versus the external. Take Sartre’s Nausea for example; that's what the whole book is like. He's on a date with a woman and he's taking her to the movies and they're trying to watch the movie but he's having these bizarre thoughts, incredibly intrusive thoughts, that are of corruption and decay and stuff like that, and he can't participate in this ritual at least not at that moment.
BPS- That's the whole existential crisis right there and what it seems like Apprehension is about. I'd like to end on like another textbook question, which is "What do you hope audiences will take away from this piece?"
Deyo- I think that for me, the question is not what will they take away from it, it's really what will they express to me? How can I learn from them after they've seen it? I'm putting out a statement of sorts, we are as a as a cast and crew, but I love the conversation. I want to hear people's reactions to it, and I want to hear what they think. I don't have any idea what people will think. I hope they'll enjoy it. I think people probably have had experiences like this of their own, and I would love to hear about them, their experiences, that's what the invitation is.
BPS- Well there's certainly a lot there to respond to, that's for sure.
This interview has been edited for both clarity and brevity.