In Wyoming, Brian Watkins' new family drama playing at Theater for the New City, the Tuttle family's long buried past is unearthed during Thanksgiving.  We spoke with the playwright about his fascination with Western America, analog technologies, and unreliable narrators.

I thought the storyline of Wyoming is very straightforward and specific, yet extremely nuanced. How did this particular story come about?

It started in a large place. I’d been interested in the idea of how time is really an antagonistic force against memory. How do time and memory combat each other and particularly in regards to family history? So that was a super large idea that I couldn’t really wrangle into anything coherent until I found the central story of a conflict between a father and son, and the ripple effect that has on an entire family. It poured out from there into being deeply attached to the place where that conflict takes place. I’ve always been interested in characters that are deeply affected by the environments where they grew up. Hence you get a play that’s named after a state.

Why the state of Wyoming?

I’ve always been fascinated in the west. I grew up in Colorado, so I think part of that has to do with a personal interest in where I’m from. I think the west has a very interesting frontier quality that seems to produce people that are both really territorial but also transient, always searching for something that isn’t quite there. I think it’s this odd frontier attitude that leads to narratives that are full of characters that are pretty much all impulse and action. That seems like great stage fodder. There’s something about the imagery of the west too, these great expanses of land contrasted with people trying to conquer that land and use that land. I think that’s kind of where it began.

A big theme of the play seems to be the power of family photos, and how they only seem to capture the good moments, and leave you with this feeling of momentary perfection. How did that idea of the photos get incorporated in the play?

I’ve always been interested in analog technologies and how they tell historical stories that we can immediately place ourselves in a period and time once we see a certain piece of technology. There’s a Walkman in the play, and so we suddenly think, we are not in 2015. A similar force happens when we see that 35mm slide projector. On a story level, there’s something really compelling about it. Family photos are a way of giving us empirical truths about memory. I think when memories exist just in our head it’s hard to grapple with them, but when there are physical photos like that we have some sturdier ground to stand on, and it helps us process the truth of the past rather than projecting that truth through the lens of our own memory. There’s also something really beautiful about that technology, of those analog 35mm slide projectors. I would say to our production team, I don’t know why we ever got rid of these because there’s something so cool and theatrical in the event of everyone sitting down to watch a slide show together. We found that to be a great strength of the show. It’s always great fun to see a new image pop up there and have everyone experience it together.

I particularly liked seeing all those images, especially of the mountains and the countryside, just these wide expanses.  I want to talk about the character of Adam. His muteness and his disappearance from his family are explained as a form of punishment for what he did. Why did you think this particular punishment fit the crime?

It’s interesting you put the word punishment on it, because it is in a way a form of self-punishment that he puts on himself. I just always saw it as a man that was really crippled by one freak event, and it’s not necessarily that he is a murderous person, but that he has that capability in him at some point. I think muteness, somebody who practices silence in a way, it’s been very interesting to see how audiences can both forget that Adam is there or also pick up the fact that he is this looming silent presence. We always talked about the character as being, for the majority of the play, someone you didn’t know if he was deeply dangerous or incredibly gentle. I thought that was an interesting contrast, that he could live in the tension of those two extremes and create a wonder that’s equal parts potentially good and potentially bad. Which really plays into a lot of the ideas in this play, there’s a line of his that says, “We are all a little bit rotten.” I feel that gets to the central experience that Adam deals with, that we all have that great potential of bad and great potential of good in us.

Yeah, that makes sense. And also Adam’s silence is contrasted with the rest of the family’s inability to stop talking about what happened. He’s also described as being a bit different from the rest of the family. I think they even use the word weird at one point. Is this difference between him and his family, the way it’s remembered in the play, was that at all related to why he did what he did, or are the characters describing him that way because of what happened in the aftermath?

There’s a line in the play that April says that memory is a cruel chameleon. I feel like that’s the effect that time has on memory. It’s always antagonistic, it never really gets it right, or at least it warps it, or devolves it or evolves it into something that the actual event was not. I think there’s something about time that warps its way through those memories to produce something other than what actually was. And that’s the difficulty the family is grappling with. Not only is the event confounding but time has made it so much more confounding because it’s been unspoken and because there’s been buried secrets surrounding the whole thing for so many years.

Right, they are unreliable narrators.

Yeah, and I think we all are.

Switching gears now, you’ve worked with the director, Danya Taymor, before on your play My Daughter Keeps Our Hammer. What is it like working with Danya the second time that’s different from the first time?

She’s great, she and I have worked a lot together so we’ve been able to develop this creative shorthand that really helps us get our work done quickly and efficiently. She really has a great emphasis on rhythm, which is a huge focus of my work. It just seemed to be a great pairing. She did such a great job with Hammer that we just continued to work on things together. And this came about and there’s an equal emphasis on rhythm too. It turned out great.

How involved are you in the staging and that process of developing your plays for the stage?

This one I was very heavily involved. I wrote the play faster than I’ve ever written anything before, back this summer. I wrote it in a matter of a few weeks. I typically share it with a few friends or do a living room table read just to hear how it sounds out loud. So I did that with a few of the folks from Lesser America. And the next week they came to me and told me they wanted to option the play and do it in January. So we took a first draft and said, okay we can do that but we have to develop it over the next few months. So we took that first draft and did a few workshops with it and there were a lot of actors, and a lot of people’s time went into improving the thing, which I was so thankful for because it got it into a much better shape and got it to the production on stage that it is now. I was pretty heavily involved and every step of the way we were making new discoveries together.

And that’s significantly different than how you are normally involved in your plays?

It can be, yeah. There are times when I’ve had plays that are more stuck in development stages for years, over several drafts. It just depends on the project I think. There were so many moving parts in this that it was such a new thing for me. I wanted to be at most of the rehearsals and Danya and I had so many hours together discussing different approaches and concepts, what worked and what didn’t work. Luckily we had a team that everyone was all in it for the love of the play. So that made it a very enjoyable but arduous process.

Are you working on anything now?

Wyoming plays until the end of the month. We added a few matinees because the whole run sold out pretty quickly. After that, the play is going to a local theatre in Boulder, Colorado. So I’m doing a reading and workshop out there with it.