The "Bard," Bogosian and baseball: Get to know IU Theatre Department's newest husband-wife team
Ken Weitzman is an award-winning playwright and former documentary and TV writer whose plays cover topics ranging from baseball history to Jewish mysticism. Amy Cook is a director and researcher specializing in the intersection of cognitive science and theories of performance with a special interest in contemporary productions of Shakespeare.
Indiana University's Department of Theatre and Drama hired both members of the married couple in 2008. Here, Live at IU talks with Weitzman, a visiting professor who directs the department's playwriting program, and Cook, an assistant professor, about their inspirations, their creative processes -- and even the "romantic comedy" style story of how they met in college.
Cook and Weitzman originally met in an acting class in college at University of Michigan. "I thought he was cute, but we didn't have any kind of real relationship then," Cook said.
"She did flirt with me," Weitzman added. "This was a morning class, voice and acting, and we often came in not totally coherent or ready to jump into the exercises. Amy came in one morning and whispered to me, 'Do you want me to ruin your day?' This was a very intriguing statement. I of course said yes, and she sang (the 1980s Starship song) 'We built this city . . . we built this city on rock and roll . . .'"
"That was my pathetic attempt to flirt," Cook laughed. The flirtation went no further at the time, and both went their separate ways for about 10 years until they were brought together in New York, when Cook was directing Weitzman in a play. The couple married in 2000 and today are settled in Bloomington with their two children, Moses and Theo.
Cook said that when she was initially offered a faculty position at IU, the Department of Theatre and Drama was a great choice for her independently -- made even better when she learned the department was also looking for a replacement for Dennis Reardon, who had recently retired from running the playwriting program. (Weitzman was hired and is currently in limbo as a visiting assistant professor, rather than the tenure-track position he had hoped for, as the school hasn't been given the budget for the position.)
"That changes everything," said Cook. "The whole time there's that taking turns: 'I went here for you, now you need to go here for me,' and I didn't know how that was going to work out. Then Ken was able to get a visiting professor position and we could join the department as a team."
Exploring the neuroscience of theater
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
--From Richard III by William Shakespeare
When Cook hears the words of William Shakespeare recited on stage -- such as the powerful opening lines from Richard III -- she's always struck by the enduring impact of the bard's poetry.
Her research focuses on how meaning is created on stage and through performance. In particular, Cook uses cognitive science to understand how people respond to Shakespeare.
"I'm definitely speaking to a lot of different audiences," she said. "My work is not an acting textbook, it's not a directing textbook. It's why and how things work. It's why language moves us on the stage and also why live performance moves us."
"The implication of your research is how we read Shakespeare and how Shakespeare is performed and received," added Weitzman. "Your research would ultimately benefit an actor or director as much as an audience member in understanding their experience."
In the past 30 years, Cook said, research in cognitive science has become more applicable to questions of language and performance in the theater. Theories of embodied cognition, distributed cognition, empathy, emotions and cognitive linguistics all offer exciting new ways of understanding theater and performance.
"There's a way in which we say 'That was good,' and 'That worked' in theater and we have no idea why, cognitively, one way worked and another doesn't," Cook said. "What I want cognitive science to help me understand is: 'Why did that work?'"
Cook said her thoughts often go back to the experience of listening to language as an audience member. "What interested me with Shakespeare is that the language is not obvious. For most contemporary American audiences, it's not like listening to the language of a sitcom, for example," she said. "There is a degree of a barrier with Shakespeare -- and yet generally, even in bad productions of Shakespeare, even in audiences that are not typically theatergoing audiences, there are moments where they just get it. It clicks in."
In the theater, an audience can be moved to understand -- not just metaphorically but, she says, literally moved -- so understanding how the process of that comprehension occurs has profound implications.
Cook's essay "Staging Nothing: Hamlet and Cognitive Science" (previously published in SubStance) will be reprinted in an edited volume called HAMLET as a part of Harold Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations series. Her essay "Wrinkles, Wormholes, and Hamlet: Looking at The Wooster Group Hamlet as a Manifestation of Science and a Challenge to Periodicity" will be published this month (December 2009). She is currently taking part in a workshop on empathy through the IU Institute for Advanced Study and the Poynter Center (http://www.indiana.edu/~ias/empathy.php) in which people from various fields come together to discuss their discipline-specific insights on empathy, adding to the overall body of knowledge on this topic.
At IU, Cook said she has loved teaching her undergraduate theater students. "They're really engaged," she said. "They take charge of their education, they're creative thinkers and they're not afraid to be wrong."
Gradually, her research interests are finding their way into her classes. In a graduate seminar on Performance and Language, she talks about how theories of language, in particular the cognitive linguistic theory of conceptual blending, can inform textual and performance analysis.
Conceptual blending theory argues that we create meaning from a network of ideas prompted by a compressed image.
"One example that's always struck me is at the beginning of Richard III," she said. "This hunchback comes in and says 'Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this sun of York …" she quotes.
"The content of what he's saying is: things are getting better. The bad things are coming to an end. In the first sentence, he encapsulates the entire play. The 'sun' is both the star in the sky and also the son of York, the new king, clouds are being buried in a kind of womb/tomb. All this comes together and provides a kind of scaffolding for the way we understand the rest of the play."
A sports-loving playwright
Weitzman's career has included producing sports documentaries and TV narratives for the National Basketball Association and the ABC network, among others, lending his soothing voice to books on tape (Casino, by Nicholas Pileggi, for example), and seeing his play The As If Body Loop produced as part of the 2007 Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. He returned to Humana in 2008, commissioned to write for the Humana Anthology Project.
His previous plays have been presented and developed at, among others, Atlantic Theater Company, New York Stage and Film, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Playwrights Horizons, Arena Stage, Alliance Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Dad's Garage, The Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Page 73 Productions, The Summer Play Festival, and The New Harmony Project (in New Harmony, Ind.) His play Hominid, in which a utopian community is rocked by bloodshed and greed, was performed at Theatre Emory in Atlanta in November. The play was commissioned as part of a celebration of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species.
Weitzman began the transition from acting to writing as a senior in college, when he became obsessed with Spaulding Gray and Eric Bogosian, both writer-actors who perform their work alone on stage.
"Spaulding Gray was very much into bare-bones storytelling. He would just sit at a desk on stage and tell stories about his life. Eric Bogosian would write these outrageous characters and play them all. I wanted to do something that would combine the styles of both," he said. "It was kind of a thesis project for me. I found I was more interested in the creation of it and the writing of it in the end than I was in the performing of it."
Currently, Weitzman is mentoring doctoral and undergraduate students in playwriting and is in the final stages of revision on his newest play, The Catch, which will be presented in February at the Denver Center Theater as part of the Colorado New Play Summit. The play is based on the real-life event when Barry Bonds broke the single-season home run record in 2001 and two fans laid claim to the ball, sparking a lawsuit. "I started to research these two guys," said Weitzman. "Their stories are really interesting once you start to unravel them. They're classic immigrant stories but very varied. The play is based on true events, but fictionalized."
In addition to the baseball theme is an underlying history of America, from the gold rush to the dot-com era, up to the tipping point before the fall of Enron and the dot-com bubble bursting, Pre-Iraq war.
Weitzman said his creative process varies based on the project. Writing The Catch took him years because he "couldn't get away from the facts. I found the story itself so interesting, but I needed to fictionalize it and make it metaphorical, not literal," he said.
Weitzman said his interest in a given topic is normally sparked when "some issue or obsession of mine collides with a story. Once I have this kind of obsession I'm looking at the world through this obsessive -- some say neurotic -- lens and I'm waiting for some story to collide with it. Mostly what I start doing is reading and researching and just trying to keep it in my consciousness and subconscious until I find something that is the appropriate vehicle through which to explore this idea."
His research process normally takes between six and 12 months. "After that it's really a process of trying not to write for as long as possible, filling myself up with as much information as much knowledge either about character or about the issues so that I feel I'm bursting to write," he said. "I'm not a blank page writer. I need to be filled with ideas first and then after that I try to write quickly."
Weitzman said he can't stay in one place when he's writing; if he has a good writing day at the library, the next day he must return. If he has a subpar writing day at the library, the next day he's at a coffee shop. "I try to let certain impulses take over once I'm letting the characters speak. You only have that impulse once, and once you start intellectualizing it and editing it and critiquing yourself then you're in a different part of the process."
In addition, he always has a "mistress" project -- a play in its early, non-pressurized development -- that he can turn to when he's stuck. "Mostly what I teach my students in terms of process is the idea of structured improvisation so it's not that terror of the blank page."
When Weitzman needs someone to read a first draft, he turns to his closest ally: his wife. "Amy's the first person I show my first draft to, my most trusted dramaturg. I joke that I couldn't possibly write a play anymore without her."
