Interview: With Nods to Kafka and Churchill, Tim Blake Nelson's New Play Is a Dystopian Thriller

There are many sides to Tim Blake Nelson. There’s the character actor we know from O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs; the auteur director of films like O, starring Mekhi Phifer and Josh Hartnett; and the playwright behind dramas including The Grey Zone, Socrates, and now, And Then We Were No More.

Having its world premiere at La MaMa (through November 2), and featuring by an enviable cast led by Elizabeth Marvel, And Then We Were No More is a dystopian thriller in which a lawyer is forced to represent a prisoner who has been sentenced to die in a machine that can execute you without pain.

Here, Nelson discusses his latest work, naturally inspired by Kafka and Caryl Churchill, with a bit of director Mark Wing-Davey thrown in for good measure.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

The team you’ve assembled for this play — Elizabeth Marvel, Henry Stram, Mark Wing-Davey as director…
I’ve known Mark since 1992 when I was in his production of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest, and I’ve worked with him repeatedly over the years. He changed my life as an actor.

How so?
Well, I’d gone to Juilliard for four years, but it was only when I worked with Mark, two years after graduating, in Mad Forest that I really began to put it all together. It took his joint stock-oriented approach to what it is to play a scene, but also what playwriting could be, to organize the training in a way that was meaningful, specifically to me. It’s a very front-footed, action-oriented approach to playing scenes, but also to writing for actors.

At Juilliard, I was doing both. I was there as an actor, but I was also writing for my classmates. Working with Mark on a Caryl Churchill play, she being one of the great writers in the English language, was incredibly helpful in terms of not sentimentalizing, not getting too caught up in exposing how my character might be feeling, or how, as a writer, I didn’t so much need to expose in the writing how characters were feeling, but rather to keep characters active in pursuing their goals. Of course, it goes back to Aristotle. It’s not what characters say, it’s what they do.

How does And Then We Were No More find its way within that?
Well, my experience working on Caryl Churchill certainly pushed me toward a more terse and laconic style than what had been my writing previously, not to mention my acting. I was never interested in going entirely there. And so particularly in the writing of this play, it’s an odd combination because I certainly don’t want any unnecessary words in the play, and yet at the same time, these characters are very articulate, and they speak a lot, and they share ideas. That’s what I want to see when I go to the theater, and it’s what I want to hear when I go to the theater, inside of a production that’s an event.

I guess I’m more prolix than Caryl Churchill, but at the same time, I’m just as interested in the theatrical event. Hopefully you get a play about ideas with a tremendous amount of action and activity inside of it, that is an unforgettable theatrical event. That’s what I tried to write, and I don’t think I really understood what a theatrical event was until I’d worked with Mark on a Caryl Churchill play.

Where did this play come from?
I have three sons, and part of raising them was doing a lot of reading together. My middle son is an aspiring writer who just graduated from Sarah Lawrence. I read Kafka’s In the Penal Colony with him and we spent a lot of time discussing it. The narrative mechanics have a lot to do with today, and I wondered about it as a play. Reading that story that was the initial inspiration. And then it went into something altogether different.

I do hope that the play causes people to question what they believe and think, but this is, above all, not meant to be a polemical piece. Every character has a legitimate and reasoned point of view, and there’s a lot we need to figure out having to do with where we’re headed technologically.

How do you balance your very prosperous acting career with you equally prolific writing career?
I’m always writing, except when I’m editing a movie, which I’m doing right now. I’m speaking to you from our editing facility. It’s just in the weird confluence that I happen to be editing that and sitting in on rehearsals. But when I’m editing a movie, I’m not writing, and when I’m actively acting, I do far less writing. I used to write when I was on sets, but I don’t do that anymore because I found that it was too much of a distraction.

I guess that, whether it’s a play, a movie script, or a novel depends on what the subject matter is. And Then We Were No More was written as something that could only be performed by live actors in a theater, which the physical manifestation of the stuff that goes on in the story right there in front of you. I wanted the characters to be able to argue with one another and philosophize in sharp language in a way that you can only do in the theater, and that the theater celebrates.