Marlane Meyer considers being able to write for a living to be her greatest achievement. In addition to several plays, including ETTA JENKS, WHY THINGS BURN, and THE CHEMISTRY OF CHANGE, she has also written numerous episodes of Law and Order and CSI. Meyer enjoys writing for television because it’s easier than writing plays, and it’s the way she first discovered theatre.

Meyer’s first experiences with theatre were plays on television—particularly Peter Pan, which was the first time she saw a woman “doing the fun things that boys get to do.” These plays seemed different to her somehow, more exciting, more entertaining. In college she discovered The Open Theatre and was thrilled by the poetic expressions created by Susan Yankowitz for that company. Other influences she cites include Mad magazine, monster movies, screwball comedies, Edgar Allan Poe, W.B. Yeats, Dorothy Parker, T.S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams.

Playwrights that are important to her work include Beckett, Pinter, Mamet, and Irene Fornes. For Meyer, writing plays is more personal and more satisfying than writing for television, but because it therefore scares her more, she struggles with insecurity about it. That insecurity kept her from liking other playwrights’ work for a long time. Working at the Los Angeles Theater Center’s new plays contest and seeing what worked and didn’t work in the plays of other young playwrights helped her grow as a writer.

Plays for her grow out of a nagging feeling, an argument, or an image that doesn’t go away until she addresses it in a play. Her relationship with her plays, however, is more intuitive than intellectual. The Aristotelian model of well-made three-act plays that she learned in graduate school serves her well when she’s screenwriting, but her very long and intense process for writing plays is instinctive. THE MYSTERY OF ATTRACTION is the play in real time that she’d always wanted to write. She discovered that it was to be so along the way, when long sequences kept appearing that wouldn’t allow themselves to be cut.

THE MYSTERY OF ATTRACTION exemplifies Meyer’s beliefs that extremes of good and bad qualities exist in every person, and that humans can be impulsively evil. The characters all have more than one side to them, and these revelations come in pieces that often shift and disorient the viewer’s perspective. They tell the truth without being honest, they talk without really communicating, and although they seem to be clear about their connections to one another, this knowledge does not lead to personal growth.

While some critics praise Meyer’s ability to stand back and let her characters struggle without judging them, others have found the male characters in THE MYSTERY OF ATTRACTION to be so ignorant, so quick to blame women for all the “nasty things” they have done and plan to do, and “so forthright about their swinish behavior” that the playwright’s surreal and “alternate reality…fails to move.” This is a fascinating point of view in light of Meyer’s declaration that she likes to write in a man’s voice.

Sources: Marne Hunt, “Tension in the Kitchen” - American Theatre 15:7; Heather Mackey, “Get to Know Your Demons” - American Theatre 11:2; Jody McAuliffe, “Interview with Marlane Meyer” - The South Atlantic Quarterly 99:2/3; Teri Reynolds, “I Did It For You” - The South Atlantic Quarterly 99:2/3; Marilyn Stasio, “Legit Reviews: Off Broadway” - Variety 389:9.

[November 2006]

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