Bess Wohl. Photo / Walter McBride
New York playwright Bess Wohl looks out her Manhattan window, reflecting on how her play Grand Horizons not only made it to Broadway but is about to take the stage "halfway across the world" in New Zealand.
I live on 12th St in Manhattan and, out the window of my office I look right down one of those New York canyons where there are tall buildings on either side. Because I live on the 10th floor of a pretty tall building, I can see all the way down to the World Trade Centre. Even right now [at around 8.30pm] I can see One World Trade, which is actually a beautiful building. There are these geometric planes on either side of it that catch the light from the sunrise and then the sunset, so it's really nice.
There are a lot of buildings in between and I can see all these tiny little windows with different people in them and different lives being lived. It's a classic New York cityscape, where every apartment window has a little story in it.
I always have this fantasy of renting out an entire empty building and giving an audience binoculars and earbuds and putting them across the street to just watch the different stories through the different windows. I think about that a lot. I love the feeling that I'm looking at all these different lives and people are looking back at me; it feels communal in a nice way.
It's really good, people-watching. Grand Horizons debuted at the end of 2019, beginning of 2020 and … that came from watching one of my closest friends, whose parents announced they were getting divorced — they were both in their 80s and it threw him for a loop. So I was watching that through my own little window, I guess, seeing what he was experiencing and what he was going through.
He was sort of immediately thrust back into his childhood … even though he was an adult who was well-established in his life, so there were tragic and comic elements to it — which he would fully admit — and anytime something's sad and funny at the same time, that intrigues me in terms of, "Is there some kind of play there?"
Also, when I first conceived of this play, years before, I was on the verge of getting married myself so I was thinking a lot about marriage and what it means to commit to someone over time — is love sustainable over time? I think sometimes you write your deepest fears — and I have many deep fears — but one of mine was finding myself at the end of a long marriage, not having expressed the things I wanted to express or not having really been seen and not having lived, inside of it. And that's the situation for the characters in my play. I guess there was a little bit of therapy in it and a little bit of … seeing if it resonated with anybody else — and clearly it did, for better or for worse. (Sorry if it did!)
[Grand Horizons ] was my "Broadway debut", as they say. It's something that I certainly never thought I would achieve in my life. It was commissioned by a not-for-profit theatre who said, "We want you to write us a play and we'll put it on Broadway." I was like, "Yeah, okay, that will never happen." And then it happened. It was surreal.
It's a feminist play and it's intentional that [the main character] is the only woman in her family — she has a husband and has two sons and she's like this island surrounded by men who have objectified her and not seen her as — as she says in the play — a whole human being.
At the time, I was the only woman with an original, non-adaptation piece of theatre on Broadway. The thing that actually bothered me, as much as being the only woman in that position, was the way that nobody seemed to think that was a problem or even remarkable. It was frustrating, it just felt like, "This is the kind of water that we're all swimming in and we have to accept it and live with it."
I felt it a bit less because our director Leigh Silverman, who is also a woman, assembled a strong female creative team. There was a very great and intentional push for a lot of female representation in our cast and company so, in a way, I think we created our own little utopian world.
My hope is that things on Broadway are changing, but it's too soon to tell. We closed on March 1 [2020] and then about two weeks later, the whole world closed. So right now, Broadway is in such a precarious position; a lot of things are changing and no one seems to know how much they will change.
Covid changed the way I came out of the [Broadway] experience and I'm still trying to understand my place in the world of theatre-making now. New York has been in such a state of arrest — there are still posters up for Grand Horizons in the subway stations even though it was two years ago here. But really, so as long as somebody somewhere wants to put my plays on stage, that's kind of it for me. I don't aspire to anything other than that.
It's surreal that it's going to New Zealand. To be able to communicate with people halfway around the world in places that I myself have never actually been, it's really a thrill and I'm so curious about how this play, in particular, resonates with different audiences in different ways.
As told to Siena Yates
Grand Horizons, written by Bess Wohl and directed in New Zealand by Jennifer Ward-Lealand, will show at Auckland's ASB Waterfront Theatre, February 8-March 5.
The show will continue under red traffic light restrictions with a reduced audience capacity and social distancing. There is also a "Peace of Mind" policy for ticket-holders impacted by Covid. For more information visit the Auckland Theatre Company website at atc.co.nz.
A live cook-off featured ox heart, wapiti, wild boar and plenty of edible wildlife.