6 distinct voices with an L.A. link

The six women gathered around the table share an addiction, a need to expose the most private thoughts in the most public ways. Much of their time is spent alone, creating works of art that can exist only with the help of others. They are destined to keep moving from place to place, job to job, pursuing what many dismiss as quixotic (OK, crazy) dreams.

“I love writing plays,” says Jessica Goldberg. “I love those moments when all of a sudden there are people talking and I need to say it on paper. Those are the times when I feel the most alive.”

No one understands the sweet afflictions of a playwright better than another playwright. As Goldberg speaks, her colleagues -- Bridget Carpenter, Naomi Iizuka, Sarah Ruhl, Alice Tuan and Annie Weisman -- smile. This group is especially close. The playwrights became acquainted in classes and writers’ programs, on productions or, as several like to say, “We met through your work, when I read -- or saw -- your play.” Over the years they have been writing buddies, poker partners, protegees and mentors, friends. All have ended up in L.A., where -- some with ease, some with difficulty -- they have found a home in the area’s growing community of artists. All have emerged as distinctive, exciting voices in the American theater.

On a recent rain-drenched afternoon they got together in a rehearsal room at the Mark Taper Forum to discuss how and why they write, their influences and mentors and the peculiarities of a playwright’s life.

“As a writer, I’ve had my different eras,” says Tuan, a feisty freethinker onstage and off. “At one point there was rage: yellow in a white system; girl in a man’s world. All that angst came out. The Asian American, period. The cultural schizophrenia. Then it was ‘Get out of the negative quadrant and get into the world.’ I had this hypertext phase in which narration was randomly chosen by the audience so there was no authorial control. Then there was my little porno era. The history era. Now I’m into pop.”

Whoa, everybody says. Porno?

“That was really about dealing with the purity culture,” Tuan explains. “About being bored by the American theater. I had this play, ‘Ajax,’ about four people getting together to have sex. It was done as a reading but never produced. We can talk about how hard it is to get new work done. This was an example of what’s impossible to produce.”

“You mean what’s illegal to produce,” Weisman says.

Tuan’s wild, self-guided tour prompts a round of True Confessions.

“I’m always so impressed by how Alice can be so articulate about documenting her plays,” says Ruhl, who seems to be as serene as Tuan is blunt. “Maybe it’s because I started in poetry, where there’s a certain amount of inner quiet you need to write.”

Her own history may best be defined not by eras but by two major works, a mini-trilogy of passion plays -- running from 16th century England to Reagan-era South Dakota -- and “The Clean House,” a quirky, emotionally resonant comedy that has made her one of this season’s hottest playwrights.

Weisman says she embraces an idea she was taught early: Write What You Know -- albeit with a twist. In her breakthrough play, “Be Aggressive,” darkness invades the sunny world of high school cheerleading as Weisman explores “adolescence, both in people and in my hometown, San Diego,” and inspired by an incident involving family friends, “what happens when an unexplainable, violent act occurs in a place where there’s no real outlet to deal with it.”

“I got excited about bringing grief and cheer together onstage,” she says. “I write comedy. I hope that the ironic pairing of ideas and events is something that people haven’t experienced before. Laughing is a different way to communicate.”

Goldberg, on the other hand, draws from deep, almost subconscious sources -- “angst and naked emotion” -- to create provocative dramas about restless souls adrift in a brutal world. “Maybe that makes me more of a Write What You Feel playwright,” she says. She calls “Refuge” “my first play I really love,” because the story of a young woman trying to care for her disabled brother and Ecstasy-popping sister was written shortly after her own brother was diagnosed with a brain tumor. It “was one of those things you write that you are not conscious of writing later.”

“When I first started out, my work was all sort of, um, what’s the word? Vomit-y?” She looks around and sees the others nod. “Yeah, so, vomit-y. Sometimes I am more controlled about it. I like it now when I have less control, when I’m not as conscious of what I’m working on.” Goldberg says she’s now more aware of “politics, agenda and craft in my writing -- but I still like a good story.”

“You mean when you started out you were more indulgent?” Tuan asks.

“It’s the experience of getting judged or criticized,” Weisman says. “I went through a period of feeling self-conscious. I read about what other people said about my work. It froze me. You get over that.”

Who needs reviews?

Ruhl asks if anyone reads reviews.

Nearly all of them look at her in horror. Only Tuan says she does: “Reviews are like, I don’t know, your relationship with the city your play is running in. It doesn’t have to do with you.”

“Well,” says Weisman with a smile, “that’s the evolved viewpoint.”

Iizuka says she never thought about defining herself as either “a thinking playwright or a feeling playwright. I hope I am both of those.” She looks for ideas by immersing herself in the library rare-book room or by getting off at a freeway exit she’s never taken before, stopping at a diner and eavesdropping. “Polaroid Stories” is Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” set in the world of homeless teens. Her “36 Views” is a study in truth, love and art, inspired by Hokusai woodblock prints but also by identity questions raised by her mixed ancestry. (She is half Asian, half Latina.)

Sometimes, Iizuka says, she can’t remember writing certain plays and can’t remember who she was when she wrote them. “It’s a little alarming.” She also is astonished at how personal certain things are. “Or, maybe, how unaware I was of how personal things were.”

“Sometimes I cringe,” Goldberg admits.

Carpenter, meanwhile, is trying to become more open in her writing. “I don’t want to hide the things that are important or to hide myself. The great playwrights -- Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams -- are visible. I would like to be among those who are brave enough to be visible.” Her most popular play, “Fall,” follows a rebellious girl’s adventures at swing dancing camp. Even works that don’t have music in them feel musical because of the way she uses language and story rhythms. Carpenter begins to describe her current projects, then raises a hand to stop herself. “I want to make clear that when I talked about visibility I mean visibility versus autobiography, which is sort of prurient and cheap. Everybody wants to know, ‘Which one is you?’ ‘Did that happen?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘No.’ They’re all me. They’re none of them me.”

She turns to Goldberg. “And, you know, the things that make you cringe I would probably find the most beautiful. I would get extremely moved to know that, something secret about you.”

Learning to write is easy, Iizuka observes. “The hardest thing is getting to where there’s a lack of self-awareness. When you don’t even realize there’s a 50-foot drop and no net.”

The women name mentors who helped them take the plunge and become playwrights. For Carpenter, Ruhl and Tuan, it’s the same person: Pulitzer winner Paula Vogel, with whom they studied at Brown University. “Paula is a phenomenal teacher and a phenomenal theater creature,” says Tuan. “I felt jolted awake by her.”

“Playwriting can be such a solitary pursuit,” Carpenter says. “Paula showed me that it doesn’t have to be that way. Circles rise together. There is no superstar. You need to see that you’re in it together.”

Vogel’s generosity toward younger writers, Ruhl says, has produced “an entire culture of playwrights.” Ruhl benefited from such generosity not only directly but from Carpenter and Tuan, who graduated ahead of her. “I looked up to you,” she tells them. “It also was great to know that when you are moving to L.A. and are scared out of your wits, you can call Alice.”

“You encouraged me too,” Weisman says to Tuan, recalling the late-night writing sessions they spent with another then-aspiring playwright, Kelly Stuart. “We would meet in this very room, and you were so enthusiastic about the content and that feeling of urgency. Paula shared that with you and you carried that on.

“Support for artists gets misunderstood,” Weisman continues. “It’s seen as either charity or flattery.” Finances are always a worry, but one can figure out how to earn a living, piecing together teaching jobs, grants, commissions and prizes. (Or even, as she and few of the others have done, write for Hollywood.)

Sustaining an artistic life, however, requires the help of people who are ready to counsel, console, kick you in the behind and, most of all, listen. “You have to feel like you’re being heard,” says Weisman, “especially if you’re not getting produced or published.” It took her a long time to find such a community in L.A., but “the momentum is there. It’s kinetic. It keeps building.”

Iizuka says her extended family of artists reaches from Austin, Texas, to San Francisco to New York. Even when you’re at home, several women add, cellphones and e-mail have made it possible to read out loud to friends anywhere. Unlike other kinds of writers who are famously reclusive or jealous, playwrights tend to cluster and collaborate.

“You’re in the trenches together,” Tuan says.

“It doesn’t matter if you like each other as people,” Carpenter says. “It doesn’t matter if you like each other’s plays.”

Oh, yes, there are, as Ruhl puts it, “a handful of persnickety playwrights” out there.

“But a lot of the positioning that’s done among playwrights is done by theaters,” Weisman says.

Why do you think they need to do that? Tuan asks. Why all the labels?

“I don’t think of myself as a woman writer,” Carpenter says, bringing up one label that each of them has had attached to her at some point. “I think of myself as a writer. I’m interested in stories. Spectacle. But I’m not naive about it. Other people will do what they do, deciding when it’s useful to say, ‘She’s a young woman writer.’ ‘An old woman writer.’ ‘An emerging writer.’ ”

Weisman refused to be included in an anthology of women playwrights. “I asked what other books they had and they said, ‘Best Plays.’ I asked who was in that. It was all men. So I said no to the women’s book. They ended up putting me in ‘Best Plays.’ ”

“Jessica and I are in the women’s book!” Carpenter cries.

“I know,” Goldberg sighs. “I hadn’t thought about it until she mentioned it.” She adds that she doesn’t think of herself as a “woman writer,” but she loves to write about women. “I don’t know if it’s a symptom of anything, but I do.” What attracts her to female characters? “Well, I’m a woman. I have a mother....”

“There are so many awesome women characters that never get to see the light of day,” Tuan laments. “So much of what gets produced is male-dominated. That’s why I love being able to create characters, characters you don’t get to see. Not just women. Men too.”

“I don’t balk at the label of ‘woman playwright,’ ” Ruhl says. “In the sense that we have such a long history of women playwrights.”

“Oh, I’m ready to cast off the mantle,” Weisman says. “Some people say it’s disrespectful. It’s not. ‘Thanks a lot, ladies, for opening that door.’ Not that there aren’t obstacles to overcome, but I feel that more of my identity comes from where I am from: Southern California.”

Comparing the coasts

Oh, yes, besides gender, there’s the pesky matter of geography.

“Growing up in L.A. you always felt like New York defined the best art and the highest culture, especially for theater,” says Tuan, who like Weisman and Carpenter has lived here since she was a girl. (The others moved west because of personal relationships.)

Tuan didn’t understand how different the cities were until she went away to school. “New York is so organized -- the streets are even in a grid -- and with L.A.’s there’s some kind of decentralized narrative.”

New York’s streets are on a grid, Weisman says, and so are its theater people. “The career paths are pretty clear. That’s how they organize and draw their values and their relationships. In L.A. there is no map.”

“You can be more focused on your work here,” Carpenter agrees, “for good and ill. Sometimes you miss the fact that people don’t care as much. Other times, it’s freeing.”

That freedom helped Ruhl to write “The Clean House,” in which a doctor’s tightly wound world unravels after her maid refuses to clean. It opens at South Coast Repertory on Friday. When she came to L.A. two years ago, Ruhl says, she sought employment to subsidize her work, but “no one would hire me, not to teach, not even in a bookstore. I took this as a message from heaven to write every day.”

While L.A. may be a good place to write plays it’s a tough place to get them produced. “The theaters are interested in work that already has been validated,” says Ruhl. “In Chicago, where I’m from, it’s different.”

Goldberg and some others argue that New York doesn’t really do this either.

“Here it feels like the Taper is the grande dame of the city,” says Tuan, who got her start through the Taper’s mentor-writer program. “I came to realize that I’d never get produced there, just development and association deals.”

She and the others bemoan the shortage of playwright-friendly venues caused by cost constraints, market forces, cultural timidity and the number of actor-driven companies. They applaud the smaller and midsized houses that devote themselves to bringing new or unusual theater to life.

Goldberg mentions the Evidence Room.

“They do very eclectic work,” Iizuka says.

“They are committed to their writers,” Carpenter says.

“And their audiences,” Weisman says

Tuan calls artistic director Bart DeLorenzo “a genius at making theater a scene.”

Iizuka says Highways in Santa Monica also creates the feeling of an event, something everybody says is essential in Los Angeles.

Contrary to popular belief, Iizuka says, “There are so many people -- young people -- writing in the American theater, especially in L.A. And they are writing really exciting plays, the kinds of plays I’ve never seen before.”

Unfortunately, many of these works may never get seen at all. “It’s so dry vision-wise out there,” Tuan says. “People want to be entertained. And comfortable. It’s a polite time.”

Rather impolitely, the women around the table start rattling off the names of local writers they’d like to see get more exposure.

“Yes, yes,” someone yells. “More names.”

As they pull on their jackets and prepare to leave, they call out: Julie Marie Myatt. Yehuda Hyman. Julia Cho. Julie Hebert. Anne Garcia-Romero. Kelly Stuart. Charlayne Woodard. Michael Sargent. Hilly Hicks Jr. Doris Baisley. Sujata Bhatt. Nic Cha Kim....

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Of notable projects past and future

BRIDGET CARPENTER

Highlights: “Fall,” “The Faculty Room,” “The Death of the Father of Psychoanalysis (& Anna)”

Next up: A collaborative political piece at the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival this spring

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SARAH RUHL

Highlights: “Melancholy Play,” “Eurydice,” “Late,” “Orlando,” “Passion Play”

Next up: “The Clean House” opens Friday at South Coast Repertory and runs through Feb. 27

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NAOMI IIZUKA

Highlights: “Polaroid Stories,” “Tattoo Girl,” “17 Reasons (Why),” “War of the Worlds,” “Skin”

Next up: “36 Views” is running at the Laguna Playhouse through Jan. 30.

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JESSICA GOLDBERG

Highlights: “Good Thing,” “The Hunger Education,” “Refuge,” “Sex Parasite”

Next up: “Get What You Need,” about a couple caught in a struggle over identity and ideals, will open the Mark Taper Forum’s New Work Festival in March

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ALICE TUAN

Highlights: “Last of the Suns,” “Ikebana,” “Hit,” “Iggy Woo,” “mALL,” “Ajax (por nobody)”

Next up: Teaching writing at the James A. Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Austin

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ANNIE WEISMAN

Highlights: “Be Aggressive,” “Hold Please,” “Snapshot,” “Thrift of the Magi”

Next up: “The Essential Alice,” a musical adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s novels, at La Jolla Playhouse