Young Playwright Talks About Entering his 30s, Becoming a Writer and Selling his First Screenplay
Noah Haidle is barely 31, and already he’s had two plays produced at South Coast Rep. This month brings a third, Saturn Returns, which debuted at Lincoln Center last fall.
Saturn tells the story of Gustin, a crabby but endearing 88-year-old retiree in Grand Rapids, Mich., haunted by memories of the women he loved at 28 and 58. It’s dark and funny and thought-provoking, the kind of play that stays with you after you leave the theatre.
Haidle, who is himself originally from Grand Rapids and who now lives in New York, was in town for a few days near the beginning of rehearsals. He sat down with us and talked about getting his first big break at SCR, what he doesn’t try to do when he writes, and what happened after he read his first play in high school.
SCR: Where did the idea for Saturn Returns originate? Haidle: I was on the phone with someone, who was asking me questions much like these, and she asked how old I was, and I told her, and she said, ‘Oh wow, you’re in your Saturn Returns.’ She happened to be the newspaper’s theatre critic as well as their astrologer. … She explained to me the phenomenon of Saturn Returns—that it comes back every 30 years and dismantles and changes a person’s life, and so I thought of the structure of the play and then filled in the pieces from there.
SCR: When you say “it comes back” you mean… Haidle: I mean—and I don’t know if I believe this, but this is what I’ve been told—that the planet Saturn returns in its orbit to the place [it was in] at your birth and affects your life irrevocably. And so I’m now exiting my first Saturn Returns, and it’s been quite a doozie, much like the play.
SCR: In what way? Haidle: Well, I was engaged to be married, and now I’m not. So that was quite different. I moved to California and then moved back to New York, and found out that my father was terminally ill.
SCR: Tell us about your relationship with SCR, because this is not the first play you’ve done here. How did the relationship develop? Haidle: On the cover of Saturn Returns it says, ‘For Jerry, who threw me to the wolves.’ When I was a young’n I was supposed to have a reading here at PPF, and a play dropped out, and Jerry [Patch] called me late at night and said, ‘Noah, we’re throwing you to the fuckin’ wolves.’ And then they produced a play of mine called Mr. Marmalade, and that was my first production ever, and that was about five years ago.
SCR: It was supposed to just have a reading and it went to a full production? Haidle: It was a full production, and then it was my first production in New York, and yeah, he threw me to the wolves, so that’s why Saturn is dedicated to him.
SCR: Is a play ever finished? Because I’ve noticed that rehearsal reports sometimes say, ‘Noah has given us new pages.’ Saturn Returns has already been performed in New York, but you’re still rewriting parts of it? Haidle: Sure. Someone much smarter than me said that a play or a novel or a poem is not finished, it’s abandoned, and I believe that to be true. I don’t think you could ever be finished with anything, because then what would you do the next day? To a degree, you have to say you’re done and walk away. But I have plays that are published, and I remember one night I woke up and took [one of my plays] off the shelf and changed some lines. So yeah, it’s never over.
SCR: What do you hope people take away from your plays? Haidle: I don’t know that I’ve ever written a play wanting to tell anyone something, because I don’t know why my opinion about love or life or loss or anything would matter to someone. I don’t like it when playwrights talk about, ‘I’m channeling something.’ I don’t really believe that. I don’t believe it’s my job to tell anybody anything, because who am I to tell anyone anything about life? I don’t particularly think my opinions about life are that original or important, so I’ve never written with the intent of having someone learn anything or leave with a message.
SCR: So does that mean you’re writing just for you? Haidle: I suppose. I think it was Mr. Kurt Vonnegut who said, ‘You know you’re doing well when you have an audience of one.’ And I think I have an audience of one… I will not reveal my source. (Laughs.)
But with film and TV and plays, it’s impossible to imagine all the people who encounter your stuff. If you think of all those people, you would be completely debilitated, and you would never write a word. You’d think, ‘Oh my gosh, all those people out there will be seeing it, and thinking about it, and judging it, in a way.’ And so, the narrower your scope is, the more freedom you have to express yourself.
So I don’t think about all the people. That would make me afraid.
SCR: Let’s go way back to your beginnings. Why playwriting? Haidle: I remember as a child I was gonna be a garbage man, and that didn’t work out. The tests were too much for me. And then I was going to be a physicist, and then I realized I couldn’t synthesize anything in math. So when I was 17, without ever having seen a play, I picked one up and decided that was what I was going to do.
I put myself on kind of a private course of study and read at least one play a day and took notes, and for all those of you out there who want to be playwrights, I used to copy plays by hand, or on a typewriter, like line by line. I think I’ve done all of Mr. Shakespeare, all of Mr Chekov, and many other Americans.
I didn’t know anyone in the arts—my parents, we didn’t go to the theatre. My theory was that if I read enough, eventually, I’d be able to say something of my own. And so that kind of came true.
SCR: Do you remember what that first play was that you picked up and read? Haidle: Yes I do. It was Our Town by Mr. Thornton Wilder.
SCR: And did you have to read it for a class? Haidle: Yes, it was an assignment for junior English, and it was the first play I ever read. Well, I guess I’d read some Shakespeare, but I didn’t really understand it at the time, so it didn’t seem like a play.
SCR: Our Town must have really spoken to you. Haidle: Yes.
SCR: Do you remember how it spoke to you? Haidle: In a little voice that went like this: ‘I wanna be a playwright.’ Or no maybe it was like in The Shining, the little kid: ‘Noah.’ (Laughs.)
Like any great piece of literature or music or any great piece of art, it brought me outside of myself in a way that made me feel—and this might be overstating the case, but it’s true—that I didn’t belong in Michigan, that I needed to get out, that I needed to go where people did this thing. Without any resources or knowledge or connections, I just decided that this was what I wanted to do.
And I didn’t really tell anybody about it until graduate school. I kept it to myself because I was afraid it would kind of take it away. There were a lot of people in college who would say, ‘Oh, I’m going to be a writer, or I’m going to be an actor,’ and I just said, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to be.’ It was kind of a secret.
[Our Town] made me feel that I didn’t know who my family was; I didn’t know where I belonged. I just knew that it wasn’t there, and I needed to leave. And so I did.
SCR: So what’s next? You sold your first screenplay? Haidle: Yes. I sold my first screenplay to a company called the Kimmel Company. The last movie they made was Synechdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman’s movie. So we’ll see about that.
SCR: And as an interesting coincidence, the actress in Saturn Returns here at SCR, Kristen Bush, was in Synechdoche, New York. Haidle: I didn’t know that.
SCR: She played the Michelle Williams role. Haidle: Kristen!
