PLAYWRIGHT: Phyllis Nagy

Playwright, screenwriter and director Phyllis Nagy was born in New York City and has lived in London since 1992. She was Writer in Residence at the Royal Court Theatre in London and is currently writing for the Royal Court Theatre, the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her plays include Weldon Rising, written in 1992, first staged at the Royal Court Theatre; Butterfly Kiss (1994), first staged at the Almeida Theatre in London; The Scarlet Letter (1995), first staged at the Denver Centre Theatre; Trip's Cinch (1994), first staged at the Actors Theatre of Louisville; Disappeared (1995), first staged at Leicester Playhouse; and The Strip (1995), also first staged at the Royal Court Theatre. Her adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel, The Talented Mr Ripley (1999), was first staged at Watford Palace Theatre in 1998. Never Land (1998) premiered at the Royal Court in 1998.

Her work has been performed widely throughout Europe, Australia, Canada and the United States. She translated Chekhov's The Seagull in 2003 for the Chichester Theatre Festival and Claudine Galea's The Idiots for the Royal Court Theatre's International Programme. She directed the first productions of Disappeared and The Scarlet Letter in the UK, and the Italian-language premiere of Never Land in Rome in 2001.

She has most recently been working as a writer/director in film. Her first feature film, Mrs Harris, premiered at the Toronto Interantional Film Festival in September 2005. She adapted Patricia Highsmith’s novel, The Price of Salt, into the screenplay for Carol, directed by Todd Haynes and nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2015

PHYLLIS NAGY: Critical Survey

Before her move to London in 1992, Phyllis Nagy was struggling in her attempts to succeed as a playwright in her home country - at this point, not one of her plays had been produced professionally in the US. As soon as she arrived in London, however, her fortunes changed dramatically: all her plays were produced within a very short space of time and her reputation as a significant and original new playwright quickly became established. Four of her plays from this dynamic early period - Weldon Rising, Butterfly Kiss, Disappeared and The Strip - are collected in Plays One (1998), for it is these four that introduced Nagy to the British public in the early 1990s. She continues to enjoy a stronger reputation in Britain than in the US.

Nagy's humour is sharp, biting and cynical, and there is a raw and refreshing honesty about her depictions of modern-day society. She is particularly attuned to the moral and spiritual apathy of modern life, especially in urban culture. She comments that 'much of my work thus far has concerned itself with the ways in which individual destiny (sometimes seemingly random and sometimes seemingly spooky and pre-ordained) controls individual morality (and vice versa)'. Though she engages sharply with the social world, much of Nagy's work has a surreal quality. In Weldon Rising (1996), Natty Weldon is a timid, self-deprecatinghomosexual, whose lover has been murdered. The setting is New York city during a catastrophic heatwave; in the meat-packing district, Natty is trapped in this bizarre and overwhelming furnace in which physical sweltering is symbolic of social and emotional claustrophobia. He is accompanied by his lesbian neighbours and a transvestite called Marcel who speaks in the third person: 'And once again, Marcel lifts Marcel's weary shell of a body and entertains the troops. Marcel wears a dress so Marcel can gather all of humankind underneath'. Throughout the play, there is a large-scale map of the meat-packing district onstage, and in the final scene Natty steps right through it and disappears.

Many of Nagy's characters are, like Natty, frustrated, unfulfilled and seeking escape, new horizons and a new sense of identity - like their author, they challenge the conventions and categories that mould and restrict them. Elaine Aston discusses the difficulties of categorising Nagy's work, and suggests that she deliberately defies categorisation: for example, she is, to a certain extent, a feminist writer, but does not fit easily alongside other feminists. Nagy's characters, along with her work as a whole, seek to avoid labels and definitions: 'Her characters appear as "foreigners" to sexual, social, cultural and national systems that seek to fix or locate them' (Aston, Feminist Views on the English Stage: Women Playwrights 1990-2000). This may be partly autobiographical - as a gay writer and a transatlantic emigrant, Nagy is no stranger to the experience of challenging conventional expectations of gender, culture and nationhood. However, her work explores far beyond the autobiographical, and her characters subvert boundaries and conventions in many different ways. This is often quite severe and dramatic, and Nagy does not flinch from exploring the gruesome and the hard-hitting: in Butterfly Kiss (1994), Lily Ross is pushed and moulded by her parents, and ends up murdering her mother in a violent and exaggerated burst of self-assertion, while in the mystery thriller, Disappeared (1996), Sarah Casey disappears altogether - which calls to mind Natty's dramatic exit in Weldon Rising. The Strip (1995), a structurally complex play which is set mainly in Las Vegas, features Ava Coo, a gender-defying character described by theatre critic Michael Coveney as 'a big-busted butch amalgam of Madonna and Judy Garland'. The Strip contains the now-famous opening line: 'Female impersonation is a rather curious career choice for a woman, Miss Coo.'

During this dynamic period in Britain in the early 1990s, Nagy adapted Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter (1995). At first glance, this may seem like a vastly different project to Nagy's other early plays, switching from modern-day New York and Las Vegas to 17th-century Puritan Boston. However, it is not difficult to see why Nagy was drawn to Hawthorne's story, for it highlights the chilling dangers of rigid morality and social oppression, and its heroine, Hester Prynne, displays remarkable inner strength and dignity in her attempts to be true to herself. In Nagy's adaptation, the narrator and focal-point is Hester's daughter, Pearl, the free-spirited child who embodies her mother's tenacity, courage and individuality.

Never Land (1998), set in a village in southern France, is a tragi-comedy that once again explores the yearning to escape from one's present reality and create a new existence. The creation of a longed-for fantasy is shown to be both funny and disturbing, as eccentric Henri Joubert allows his obsessive love of 'Englishness' to dominate not only his own life but that of his family: they must speak in perfect English at all times, while Henri wears English suits and performs scenes from Fawlty Towers. Though there is much comedy in this, there is also poignant sadness: Henri's English obsession clearly stems from a deep-rooted unhappiness and sense of dissatisfaction, and his wife and daughter (who is quite disturbed) are trapped within Henri's fantasy life. Nonetheless, there is a genuine love within this family, and Nagy's play skilfully intertwines comedy, tragedy and moments of heartfelt emotion.

Nagy's adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's 1955 novel, The Talented Mr Ripley, was first performed in 1998 (pub. 1999), though subsequently overshadowed by Anthony Minghella's 1999 film version. Nagy explores in detail the dark psychology of Tom Ripley, a psychotic individual who is devoid of empathy and morality, and lacks any clear sense of self-identity. In Ripley, therefore, the sense of psychological displacement and confusion is at its most dark and disturbing. In 2003, Nagy's refreshingly colloquial version of Chekhov's The Seagull was produced at Chichester Festival Theatre, based on a literal translation by Helen Molchanoff. The following year, Nagy returned to the US for her first feature film, Mrs Harris (2005), which she both wrote and directed. Based on a true story, the film stars Annette Bening as Jean Harris, the headmistress of an exclusive girls' school who murdered her former lover, diet guru Dr Herman Tarnower. The original true story of Jean Harris had shocked the American public and sparked a field-day amongst the tabloids, for it revealed the hidden darkness that can lurk behind apparently respectable middle-class life. However, although it is a tragic tale, Nagy's version abounds with mischievous black humour and satire.

• British Council Literature (2010)

MICHAEL COVENEY’S INTRODUCTION TO PHYLLIS NAGY: PLAYS 1

The four plays collected in this volume emerged in London (one of them, Disappeared, at first on tour) in a concentrated period of time of just over three years in the early 1990s and established Phyllis Nagy as a playwright of distinction and individuality.

She has not (obviously) been lumped in with the new laddish and loutish drama that has made such an impact in the wake of Trainspotting (novel, stage play and film). Nor does she quite tally with the feminist writers of the Royal Court in the 1980s, many of whom bit the bullet on sexual politics, parturition and mother-daughter relationships without really challenging ideas of form and style.

The first thing you notice about these plays, apart from their continuous, restless theatrical dynamic, is the line by line quality of the writing. Expletives and slang are deployed rhythmically, never gratuitously. Whereas much contemporary playwrighting is egregious, anorexic, short-winded and uncultured, Nagy write sinuously and elegantly, working consistently towards a theatrical coalescence of plot, dialogue, and swiftly changing scenic representation that is as exciting as it is unusual.

And she sounds up to date. Well, she is up to date. The Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas, whose Sphinx-like exterior dominated the action of The Strip, was only built in 1993. The climactic mood of meltdown and Armageddon in Weldon Rising reflects the author’s visceral response to recent waves of violence and paranoia, some of it homophobic, some of it general, on the streets of the West Village in her home city of New York.

The characters are in search of destinations, new adventures, changes of pace, alternative varieties of excitement. Their stories are tales of exodus and disenchantment, of fear and loathing, of mystery and imagination.

In Weldon Rising, the bereaved Natty Weldon, consumed with cowardice and dismay, steps finally through a giant onstage map of the meat-packing distric and out of the play. In Disappeared, a tense mystery thriller revolves around the unexplained exit of Sarah Casey from a bar in Hell’s Kitchen.

In Butterfly Kiss, Lily’s decisive act of matricide - an ultimate statement in social and domestic defiance - is unravelled within an antiseptic white New York prison cell. And in The Strip, Ava Coo’s cross-country mission to hit the cabaret circuit in Las Vegas is complimented by other pursuits - spiritual, criminal, and investigative - in a rich transatlantic tapestry of coming and going.

This may be fanciful, but I suspect that the writer herself, an American now living in London - she visited the Royal Court on assignment for two weeks in 1991, fell in love, and stayed - is fired by her own experience to express and explore other dreams of leaving. And it is because these stories are bedded in ideals of emotional and sexual possibility of fulfilment that they resonate so effectively in performance.

Their tone is deceptively flippant, because, outside of Tom Stoppard, Caryl Churchill and David Hare, we have become accustomed to the unmusical and the unpolished in modern British playwriting. Nagy has a sardonic, mordant and often playfully cruel tone in her writing that fits the fantastical scenarios and defines her world of strange contemporaneity.

The opening line of The Strip - “Female impersonation is a rather curious career choice for a woman, Miss Coo” - has already achieved classic status not only for its deliciously subversive sentiment, but also for its alliterative beauty and its unexpected emergence from an opening sequence of Madonna’s “Rescue Me” and introductory tableaux involving all the characters.

Other favourite lines of mine include, “There really aren’t any junkets to Siberia”, the bad news for a client in the wonderful travel agency scene in Disappeared, the pay-off to the parenthetical story, in the same play, of Sarah’s fiance’s uncle trying to breach the closed-down Sea World at San Diego on an away-day trip and impaling himself fatally on the railings - “At least he didn’t stay in California long enough to catch the cancer”; and the exasperated response of the redneck mass murderer Lester in The Strip on hearing Yvonne Elliman’s beautiful recording of “I Don’t Know How To Love Hom” - “I know it comes from some fucked-up Limey musical thee-a-ter thingamajig with a band of hippies humping Jesus . . .”

Weldon Rising has a good first line, too: “I might have been beautiful.” This sounds both romantic, lke Tennessee Williams, and wistful, like Sirt Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night. The physically nerdish Natty, trapped in the epicentre of a city on heat, is a discreet homosexual (“I can’t dance and leather makes me squeamish”) who sells lamps while the lights are going out all over town. His lover has been murdered, stabbed rashly by a rude boy shouting “fuckface faggot”.

The incident was witnessed, and is re-enacted, under the gaze of two quarrelsome neighbourhood lesbians, Tilly and Jaye, whose own relationship floods the stage in tandem with the main event. Further commentary is provided by an outrageous transvestite, Marcel, who speaks only in the third person (because he is the third person, he explains.)

The quartier is vividly imagined, as in a Willaims play of the steamy South, and the rising heat feeds back reports on the radio of a plane exploding on take-off, of a bus melting on entering the Holland Tunnel, and of all the bridges collapsing (“So much for the bridge and tunnel crowd” is a typical Nagy reaction quip). The play is drawn into this terrifying situation, its theatricality defined in the fate of characters cast adrift but bravely trying to reclaim the world and each other. Natty embodies feelings of both guilt and helplessness. The lesbians, who met by chance at the airport, cool down with crates of stoeln beer and finally resolve a physical impasse by making gloriously explicit love in the white heat of apotheosis.

A similar, though cooler, poetic and musical synthesis informs Butterfly Kiss, which is not to be confused with a rather vulgar British lesbian road movie of the same title that subsequently appeared. Lily is indeed a musician who promises her mother a concert of songs before shooting her in the head.

The theatrical cross-fading and flash-backing demanded by the play was beautifully realised in Steven Pimlott’s Almeida Theatre production, which seemed nonetheless to be played in a constant theatrical present.

The play in performance achieves, or should achieve, a Mozartian classicism in its deployment of information. Aspects of Lily’s experience are revealed cumulatively, though not chronologically. Her father, a lepidopterist, sets her up as a girlfriend for his ex-Marine buddy. The actress has to segue from being a fourteen-year-old beach tease into casually flirting with her future female lover in a woman’s bar. The Lolita parallels - and Nabokov was a lepidopterist - are obvious but the variations anything but.

At the same time, Lily’s relations with her mother and equally obnoxious grandmother are spikily chronicled in scenes that are as hard-edged as they are dazzlingly well written. Her mother, a former switchboard operator, thinks that, because she drinks, she looks like Tallulah Bankhead, which puts one unavoidably in mind of the attraction the role of Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman’s Little Foxes held for the real-life Tallulah: “a rapacious, soulless, sadistic bitch who would’ve cut her own mother’s throat.”

If Tennessee Wiallms comes to mind during Weldon Rising, the technique of poetic deliquescence in Butterfly Kiss surely owes something to Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman. There is even a tawdry variation on Willy Loman’s motel mistress, a spurious Countess of the cabaret and lover of Lily’s father who declares her seedy aspirations with the triumphant remark “J’habite Queens”.

A more conventional sort of unsolved mystery is the subject of Disappeared in which, like Lily, the heroine Sarah Casey disavows all domestic expectations and strikes out into uncharted territory. The discussion of what may or may not have happened is bookended by the present tense scenes in the mid-town bar where Sarah was last spotted alive.

Nagy always intermingles her lead stories with other, complementary narratives, and although she may not get the interaction quite right here, she does create a superb secondary lost soul figure in the character of Elston Rupp, who accosts Sarah in the bar in the guise of an entertainments attorney. Rupp, in another guise of a bankruptcy trustee, seeks that junket in Siberia. So, who is he? We learn of his employment in a thrift shop, where he assumes the identity and the clothes of donating customers before penetrating the world and pursuing dastardly business. The play has a nagging thriller richness and a valedictory tone that may well reflect Nagy’s own farewell to New York.

Like Tony Kushner, whose landmark Angels in America was first acclaimed in London before becoming a hit in New York, Nagy has made a reputation here partly, perhaps, because her local obsessions come up sharper when seen out of their immediate cultural context. We can relish her characteristic exotica, her details of language and topography, in a fiercer focus, as we do those of Sam Shepard, another great poetic American monitor of specific landscapes and weird and winding adventures.

The playwright’s ambition (to date) peaks in The Strip, where all the variouis strands of action seem to be manipulated by Otto Mink, a sleazy, shadowy figure not unlike, as my colleague Paul Taylor pointed out, the Duke of dark corners in Measure For Measure. Ava Coo, a big-busted butch amalgam of Madonna and Judy Garland, may be no virginal Isabella, but there are Pompey Bums and Elbows around in the shape of a gay fitness freak, Martin, and his dissatisfied pawnbroker friend, Tom.

While redneck Lester unwittingly wanders into a gay bar in Earl’s Court (just like a place back home, “where a fella can hook up with his buddies, take a break from the missus and the kids”) and meets Martin, his wife, plus baby redneck, diverts to Liverpool with Tom.

Meanwhile, a lesbian journalist turned private detective pursues Lester. And Ava, equally adored by the repo man who has come to impound her car, and the journalist, takes of to Las Vegas where, coincidentally, her mother is cleaning toilets at the club and recording letters to her daughter which she never sends.

This is a dizzyingly complicated narrative, but one in which all the strands are meticulously controlled and brought climatically together in Las Vegas where the entire cast witnesses an eclipse of the sun in the shadow of the Luxor Hotel.

The play’s structure is both a variation, and a sophisticated advance, on that of Weldon Rising, and I remember leaving the theatre amazed by the achievement and struck with the sort of terrifying panic over writing about it that a critic only feels after seeing the best work of either Tom Stoppard or Sam Shepard.

I think a reading of these plays will convince you that Nagy belongs to the top class. She has managed to strike a rich and personal seam of experience without sounding as though she is fulfilling an agenda. All the time, she is trying to write great theatre, not setting out to shock, or to catch the latest wave in the fashion stakes.

I count it pertinent that she admits to having once been a devilish and pernickety researcher on the New York TImes Magazine; she’s a theatrical intellectual who cares deeply about words and their meanings and inflections. That’s the Stoppard strain. (Maybe this has something to do with her Hungarian antecedence; Stoppard’s is Czech.)

And the Shepard? She loves sports, music, gambling. She knows a lot about all three. And, like Shepard, she has a fantastic knack of translating those enthusiasms, and her lust for life and travel, into the quintessence of art and the registration of human endeavour, and of love, both transient and lasting, in a bristling network of damn good stories and startling theatrics.

- Michael Coveney

July 1997