The Brooklyn Rail

In early December, my friend Joey Merlo and I sat down for coffee to discuss the upcoming remount of his acclaimed play, On Set with Theda Bara, directed by Jack Serio. Originally premiering at the Brick Theater’s Exponential Theater Festival in 2023, it’s the story of a middle-aged detective trying to solve an especially harrowing case: the disappearance of his own kid. The suspect: a silent movie star and her henchman. (They may or may not be dead.) It’s noir-shaped, but like all good noirs, there is more here than meets the eye—or ear. In Joey’s floridly contempo-queeny stylings, cliches meet cliches with cannibalistic ferocity, as the play’s quartet of queers—all played by the virtuosic actor-playwright David Greenspan—become exponentially queerer in their pursuits for one another.

This play, produced by Transport Group and Lucille Lortel Theatre, will return to The Brick starting February 6, running through March 9. The below interview was condensed and edited for clarity.

Jess Barbagallo (Rail): Describe writing On Set With Theda Bara.

Joey Merlo: It was a very fast timeline, faster than maybe any play I've written. I was at Brooklyn College and you have to write four plays a semester and this was my final play in my final semester [in December 2022]. I was sick and had been kind of bedridden for months, and it was awful. That semester we had Dennis Allen II [as a workshop leader] and he said something that is so simple, but so easy to forget which is: make sure you’re having fun—this is play. I’ve translated that many ways to myself and think of this advice whenever I get into that space of wringing my hands and getting really tense and in my head. Then I’m like, No, you can return to a sense of ease, a sense of play, remembering what it was like to be a little kid in your room playing with your toys, you know? I think I decided that I was going to make this play something that was really fun and enjoyable for myself and it would be a world I could enter into and escape my room and my bed and I would be able to play and live in it and have a lot of fun with these characters.

Rail: So you were writing this play in bed?

Merlo: Yeah! This is also something that broke up my process because for a long time I would write for three or four hours a day, usually in the morning and with this—first of all grad school is so much work and reading and general writing. I didn’t have time to keep that kind of schedule, but also I was sick. So sometimes I’d get up in the middle of the night to write or in bed before going to sleep, in the middle of the afternoon, whenever. I tried to write every day a little bit, and I was averaging about ten pages every two weeks, and then I’d bring those pages to Elana Greenfield, who was my mentor. She’s incredible. I call her the play whisperer because it’s like having a therapist for your play, and she’s so generous. That was invaluable, to work with her on the play every couple of weeks. She just created this mirror for me to see what I was doing as I was working on it. She was seeing and hearing the play and what the play was and wanted to be. It taught me how to be more introspective about my own work, whereas before I was just like, I have to get to the end. Once I have the first draft I can go back and rework it and maybe things will change…, but I think this way of doing things gets to a real core of what the play is, and you stay true to that core so that becomes this backbone, and that’s something that can really get lost if you’re not aware.

Rail: Are you talking about writing more slowly?

Merlo: It’s not slow. I finished it in six weeks. And with the edits, nothing really changed all that much in the play. I remember David saying at one point where I had cut a whole bunch of stuff and then put some more stuff in: “Well that’s really what it is. Editing for me is mostly just cutting stuff out and putting it back in,” and that was really liberating for me to hear. That’s another writerly myth: having to torture yourself through constant edits and how long it takes to get something right, and I think that’s also a form of surrender—to say it might never be, I can’t make this more than what it is. It doesn’t mean you can’t make big changes or do big rewrites, but you have to give it a chance first.

A mentor of mine recently has been the filmmaker James Ivory. He does a lot of adaptations and this was something that was a lesson for me too. We’d talk about his film scripts, many of which were adaptations of E.M. Forster or other novels and how he and his writing partner Ruth Prawer Jhabvala would adapt them into scripts. They would write out so much more than what would end up being cut for the film. Basically, you get left with these kinds of ghost limbs. James talked about how the audience feels that in a film. If you film a sequence that doesn’t end up making it into the film, but everyone and the actors are taking the time to fully realize this moment, even if it's not there, it’s felt and it has a presence. Even if half your play ends up cut out of the final version, nothing has gone to waste, and if anything those ghost limbs will be there and will hopefully be felt, and I think it's especially great when you can work with an actor through that.

Rail: This is a play about a father who’s lost his child. How do you make that construction if you don’t have the lived experience of having your own child?

Merlo: I’m looking back on the play now, you know, just thinking back on the play over the past almost year since it happened at the Exponential Festival, and that was right after I lost my father. I didn’t know what it was like to lose a child, but I knew what it was like to lose a father and I think there was an inversion there. I also think losing my father [was like] losing a part of myself, so maybe there was an inner child that was lost as well, and there was a reckoning that had to happen because I had to take care of myself in a different way. It kind of creates a sense of having to step up into a kind of adulthood that maybe at any age you don’t have to step up into if your parents are alive, because in the back of your mind they’re there. and then it’s like this cord is cut.

We don’t have to get into the spirituality of it all because I don’t feel like my father is lost forever. I think he’s very much a part of me, but in a weird way in the play, all of these characters are very much part of each other, so in that way none of them are lost to the other. That’s what’s great about playwriting. The play can constantly reveal itself to you, even if you’re the one who wrote it. I think if it’s being written from a deeper place and not a heady idea place, but a gut place. I think it communicates things that you might not understand right away. That’s why it’s so important to give yourself time and have patience with your own work, and let it develop and not fuck with it too much. To listen to it.