BH> In your play The Happiness Machine, you seem to establish radio talk show host Larry Tarkovsky as a figure of divinity.  He is the omnipresent, disembodied voice who hears the “prayers” of those who call in, he lets the death of Chessman play out rather than intervening, and – in a Christian sense – he takes the “sins” of the listeners upon himself (his catch phrase being “I weep, so you don’t have to”).   But the character of Larry undergoes a change throughout the play, in contrast to the changeless and unwavering depiction of many religions’ divinities.  He seems to move from an acerbic but playful view of human tragedy to a realization that a person can choose whether or not to help bring about positive change in the world.  Does this transformation represent – rather than a change in the gods – a change of mindset in our world in regards to religions that are based on hierarchy?  When Tarkovsky leaves the studio at the end to join the other characters, does this follow with the classical Greek concept of deux ex machina – and what kind of god is it that joins with humans to watch the execution of an innocent man?

DS> These are very interesting questions, but I’m afraid my answer will disappoint. The short answer is no, I did not intend Larry to be god-like.  Slightly fantastical, yes, but nothing more. I wrote The Happiness Machine when my father died, I wrote the play for my father, a few months after I’d written a short story about him called “Habitat,” where a man cheats death by becoming miraculous. And then this image formed in my mind: a man, alone, in a radio station, broadcasting nonstop.  And I knew he had to be a bit fantastical, something like Miss Havisham who never leaves her house and never changes out of her wedding dress for 40 years…But then Miss Havisham also plays with people’s lives, doesn’t she? The connection to my father, of course, is only obvious to me: I tried to describe his solitude, the isolation he experienced during a long illness, his internal exile. Larry embodies that kind of unhappiness. And he can only connect to the outside world like a man quarantined, from a distance, but from that distance he’s reaching out to those who need him. When he leaves the station at the end of the play – and perhaps this is clear only in the staging – he doesn’t join the others in witnessing Chess’ execution. He leaves because he no longer believes that the world needs him. The people he’s been talking to, these troubled, brilliant, cruel, imperfect people, have moved on, perhaps because of him. I have a very silly comparison in mind, but here it is: Larry is a bit like Dr. Who. If there’s trouble, he simply materializes. He can help some people (by the end of the play Jean’s had his revolutionary moment, Dominique gets her love story, Gabe finally speaks her mind), and not others. As a god he would be too neurotic, petty even, perhaps pointless. As a being who happens to be a little miraculous, he is a much more effective character, I think.

BH> How do you think The Happiness Machine represents subversive activity, whether it be political, artistic, or political/artistic?  At times it seems largely teasing and playful.  Do you think, with the current state of the world, it’s necessary for a writer to preserve a sense of playfulness?  Is playfulness itself subversive, or can it also dull an important idea? 

DS> I think the only thing that can dull an idea is something Peter Brook once called “deadly theatre.” Deadly theatre is very serious (it takes itself very seriously), it is concerned with “issues, ” it never cracks a smile for fear it might lose the authority of its carefully crafted arguments…in a word, it petrifies anything it touches.  Political theatre often makes this mistake. Plays are so focused on “the message,” that they forget to be plays. A few years ago Peter Greenaway made the same argument about film. He said, “we have seen a hundred years of cinema prologue,” but film is just beginning to realize its potential. To treat film as if it were just narrative, to forget it’s a visual medium, is to misuse it. The same thing happens on the stage: one often forgets that there is life beyond dialogue, beyond the faithful rendering of lines. To me playfulness, theatricality and the spectacle are interchangeable notions. Dialogue is important, yes, and it is often playful, but it is only one of the elements with which I like to play. I was once told (by someone who took theatre very seriously) that to write a scene for a play as if it were a scene in a film, and to consider music, choreography, and art as important as dialogue is to subvert every tradition theatre holds dear. If that’s the case, then I think we need a new theatre because it is in those moments of intertextual collage that I play, freely, with all the fields, all the systems of communication that allow me to truly stage a spectacle. I find playfulness liberating. Let’s not forget, also, that I come from a country that has survived decades of communist dictatorship only because it had a strong sense of humor. To put it more precisely: to laugh is to survive.

BH> In The Happiness Machine, lots of different art forms collide: Edith Piaf and Marilyn Manson, The Dark Knight  and Kubrick’s 2001, Tennessee Williams and Harold Pinter, Magritte and Mona Lisa… plus all of the art created for your show “Habitat,” which then became props on the stage.  With your play using elements of collage and art installation, and with your entire artistic idea occurring in three stages (art show, play, and short story), are you setting out to create something along the lines of Gesamtkunstwerk?  I guess an easier way of putting it is: why do you choose to bring different art forms into one space?  Do they play, dance, or fight?

DS> I think, without realizing it, I’ve already answered this question. I am a semiotician. I believe the world is a system of systems of communication (Gabe makes this point early in the play), so I cannot conceive of a play only as a piece of dialogue spoken on the stage. The space of the stage is there, the human silhouette is there, so why not exploit it, why not think of words and movement and music and lighting as moments in a fluid exchange not as separate devices?  I said I often begin plays with an image, not a story. I also start working on plays because a piece of music obsesses me, something about its rhythm and “texture” makes me want to stage something that compliments it…and so a play evolves out of this dialogue between the fields. 

BH> There seems to be a commentary about plays running through The Happiness Machine, especially with Dominique’s “overplaying” and Chess’s lines, “This is a play, a product of someone’s imagination.  It’s not true and it’s not real.”  At times it was reminiscent of Hamlet’s advice to the players; at other times like Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt.  What was your intent during these moments?

DS> I often use metatheatrical elements to remind the spectators that they’re watching a play. Not like Brecht did, loudly, brutally, often cruelly, but mainly because I’d like them to appreciate the spectacle. This connects to everything I’ve just talked about. People are trained to go to the theatre and just follow the story. I often work against that either by staging simultaneous scenes that force the spectators to choose what to watch, or by reminding them that what they see is make-believe. This way they’ll pay attention to the elements of the spectacle: the light, the music, the paintings, the movements are there to be noticed – artistic statements by themselves – not to quietly support the dialogue and then fade in the background.

BH> I admit that I had not heard of Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu before you sent me your translations of two chapters from her novel Balaurul – but, after I read them, I couldn’t believe her name isn’t more widely known in America.  Do you see a possibility for this to change, and how might this renewed interest come about?  Are any of her books currently available in English translation?

DS> Papadat-Bengescu’s books are translated into French, mostly.  As far as I know only one of her novels was translated into English. I decided to complete the translation of The Dragon after publishing a chapter of it in Margaret Higonnet’s anthology  Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War I (Plume, 1999) and then other parts of the novel in Wherever I Lie is Your Bed (Two Lines World Writing in Translation – online edition). There’s been a lot of interest in the book after that, and I’ve been working on it on and off for years now. It’s my quiet obsession, but now it’s finally done and I hope someone will love it as much as I do. Papadat-Bengescu is an incredibly impressionistic writer, one of the most influential Romanian writers of the 20th century.

BH>You described Balaurul as a hybrid text, then pointed out that a reader unfamiliar with Papadat-Bengescu’s life might fail to see the elements of hybridity.  Can you comment on how memoir/war narrative/novel come together in this book? 

DS> The war narrative is the most obvious genre, but people unfamiliar with Hortensia’s biography will not know that she volunteered as a nurse during the war and that most of the encounters described in the book – episodes when the main character spends time with wounded soldiers and refugees – are inspired by real events. Naturally, events are fictionalized, but beyond the novelistic impulse that shapes the memoir, there are many things of interest to historians, sociologists, students of literature, things not mentioned in our history books. I was shocked, for instance, by her description of the town under occupation. The enemy is distant but polite, courteous almost, while the allies behave abominably. These are the uncensored perceptions of someone who lived through the war, was part of it, whose life was changed by it forever. So the novel is partly a memoir, a meditation on the nature of cruelty and suffering, and partly war narrative, all framed – I should say contained – by the fictional form.

BH> At times there seems to be a lovely wildness in Papadat-Bengescu’s disregard for conventional sentences.  Does this make a translator’s job more or less easy?  More or less enjoyable?

DS> The brutally honest answer is: this makes it hell. On the one hand, there’s the madness of translating phrases, entire sentences even that are so “unhinged” grammatically, that they hardly make sense in Romanian. On the other hand there’s the well known fact that Hortensia makes up words when she can’t find an existing one that communicates precisely what she wants it to communicate. This is both a great challenge for the translator and an enormous joy, the moment when you know you’ve captured the spirit of the thing because a word for word translation never works. You have to go for the idea, the rhythm, the mood of the piece. The most difficult thing for me was convincing editors not to “tame” her sentences for fear the public wouldn’t understand her writing. Hortensia tamed is Hortensia betrayed, and what’s the point in that?