An interview
with Legacy
Playwright
CHARLES MEE
and Director
TINA LANDAU
Legacy Playwright Charles Mee returns to Signature with a new production of his play Big Love, directed by
longtime collaborator Tina Landau. Mee was Signature’s Playwright-In-Residence from 2007-2008,
a season that saw the New York Premiere of Iphigenia 2.0 (directed by Landau), and the World Premieres of
Queens Boulevard (the musical) (directed by Davis McCallum), and Paradise Park (directed by Daniel Fish).
Mee’s season highlighted his distinctive interest in adapting classical works and his collage-like method
of writing that incorporates music, text, and movement. The colorful, dream-like worlds he creates are
characterized by intense visual imagery, lyrical writing, and exuberant energy. Mee’s extensive body of
work includes fifty-one plays and counting that mix highbrow and lowbrow, antique and modern, digital
and analog to create stories that are utterly contemporary, yet rooted in a political or historical context.
We are very excited to have Mee back at Signature with his first Legacy production.
Mee and Landau sat down with Literary Associate Sarah Rose Leonard in the midst of casting to
discuss one of the oldest existing plays, a unique kind of forgiveness, and what it’s like to work in
an artistic environment where anything goes.
Signature: How did you start working together?
Charles Mee: We were riding in a car with Anne Bogart.
And I met Tina, and I don’t understand what happened
but we immediately fell in love, and we wanted to work
together right away. Then within a year or two we did
Orestes 2.0, right?
Tina Landau: Right. I had just done Euripides’ Orestes
at the American Repertory Theater, and I don’t know
what possessed you to trust me to do Orestes 2.0,
but you somehow did, and then the rest is history.
CM: It was really amazing, we did it on the banks of
the Hudson River with En Garde Arts in 1993. Right
behind there was a pier that had burned down like
seven million years ago, and it was just this rusted
metal outline. From a certain angle it looked like
the outline of a Greek temple.
I love theatre that’s a combination of music
and movement and text, and Tina’s the master
of that. We use all the elements of American
musical comedy but in a different way, kind
William Jackson Harper and Laurie Williams in Paradise Park at Signature Theatre, 2008.
teens, and I just thought, for the fun of it, that we’d see
My Fair Lady on Broadway. But I wanted to get tickets in the
first row, all the way over on the side, so that you could see
offstage as well as onstage, and you could be close enough
to see the actors’ makeup, and you could see the stagehands,
so that you’d see the real show and the artificiality and con-
of the world of Pina Bausch, and that’s what
struction of it at the same time. So anyway, we sat there and
we both just instinctively and deeply and
a guy in the second row leaned forward and said, right into
insanely love like crazy.
my ear, “This is the real world.” And I thought, “Wow, who
said that?” I turned around to see who it was, and there was
S: Chuck, you started working in the theatre in the 1960s, but later worked as an
editor of an arts magazine and wrote
books about American foreign policy.
What made you return to playwriting?
nobody there. I thought, “Oh. If I’m hearing voices, I’d better
pay attention.” So then I went back to writing plays.
TL: I have never heard that story! I’m so glad we’re
being interviewed.
CM: I got involved in anti-Vietnam
War politics, and then I wrote about
American international relations, not
as an historian, but as a citizen for
S: Chuck, people are very physical in your plays, and both
of you are drawn to that. Why is it important to you that
your theatre be so physically embodied?
fellow citizens. That went on for
CM: You know, I think maybe for me it’s a vicarious life,
about twenty years. By that time I
Charles Mee.
because I had polio when I was a kid, when I was fifteen,
had kids who were in their early
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and I’ve had crutches ever since. I don’t dance, I don’t jump, I
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