The Brooklyn Rail

In John Berryman’s seminal poem “Dream Song 14,” our “heavy bored” narrator’s mother berates him for saying so: “Ever to confess you’re bored / means you have no // Inner Resources.” True and deep boredom, in all its wrestling mundanity, feels few and far between in an overstimulated world less and less used to the feeling of nothing to do. Onstage, the challenges of conveying this malaise multiply. How does one externalize a thoroughly internal state? How does one make an event out of its lack? How does an audience learn to sit through it? For Eliya Smith (Grief Camp), the key to success is in embracing the inevitability of failure. In Smith’s latest play, Dad Don’t Read This (running May 4–24 at St. Luke’s Theatre), four Ohio teens plead, act out, and create in glorious (and often futile) attempts to express what they may not fully understand how to say. They also, in what may encapsulate all of the above, play The Sims. Ahead of the upcoming run, I sat down with Smith to talk collaborators, The Sims, and Midwest ennui.

Ethan Karas (Rail): There’s this metatheatricality in Dad Don’t Read This where the characters and the play itself seem to be grappling with how to perform or signal a kind of unsettledness, to make it controllable for themselves or legible to others. How do you represent that ennui on stage when the lived experience can feel, from the outside, blasé?

Eliya Smith: To me, that’s the best thing about dramatic writing. There’s so much room in between the text for the substance to happen. That’s what’s attractive to me about writing for young people; they don’t know how to say what they’re trying to say, and they’re constantly failing. We were talking the other day [in rehearsal] about one of the exchanges where they’re all sort of mean to each other. It’s fun to watch with young people, because if you’re watching older people, you can be like, “Just communicate better!” [Laughs.] But they’re children, they actually can’t, they are doing their best. I don’t really ever know exactly what my plays are saying, but I also think that, because of the form of dramatic writing, the characters also don’t know what they’re saying. To me, whatever the play is saying exists between whatever it is that they’re trying to say and then the way it actually comes out.

Rail: Especially in adolescence, where it feels like the person you want to be is so removed from the person that you are right now.

Smith: Which, to be fair, I don’t know if anyone ever becomes the person they wanna be.

Rail: It feels like adolescence is the first moment that you become aware of that gap. Self-consciousness starts to enter your psyche.

Smith: You’re just enough out of childhood that you have started to realize that something is wrong, but you’re so far from self-actualization that it’s like…maximum gap. [Laughs.]

Rail: Dad Don’t Read This is also the latest in a long series of collaborations with the Goat Exchange, led by Chloe Claudel and Mitchell Polonsky. What drew you to each other and keeps you collaborating on show after show?

Smith: So much. I think you get a lot out of working with people that you love, and I really, truly love working with them.  Chloe said this thing that I think is true, that we make something better together than any one of us could make on our own. It’s so hard to be in a rehearsal room watching something happen to your play that isn’t what you imagined, which is always what’s happening in the best way. In any rehearsal room, there’s a constant push and pull of like, “Do I fight for the thing that I think is right? Or do I choose to let in other people’s visions?” I feel like fifty percent of the time the right thing to do is fight for what you think is right, and fifty percent of the time the thing that will make a play sing is somebody else’s idea. When I work on stuff with them, I have so much respect for them and so much trust that they know what they’re doing, that it’s very easy for me to be like, “Go on, do your thing.” We often disagree about what’s wrong when something’s wrong, but we can all agree when something’s right. I think they’re geniuses and have a singular theatrical sensibility. I often feel like I have no idea what I’m doing, and I really feel like it’s nice to be in a rehearsal room with people that I feel absolutely do know what they’re doing.

Rail: I’d be remiss not also to bring up one of the threads I feel is really tightly woven throughout your plays, which is the glorious state of Ohio.

Smith: Thank you. [Laughs]

Rail: In this writing and rewriting from your own memory or from your own lived experience, has it changed how you view where you’re from over time or your past over time? Does the past change for you each time you arrive?

Smith: I have experienced growing up hating Ohio very much, then moving away, and feeling such a deep pull to return. I tutor in New York, and I’m constantly like, “What is it like to grow up in a place where there’s interesting stuff to do all the time?” The experience of being bored all the time and having nothing to do but hang out with your friends was the central, defining feature of my adolescence.

Rail: The experience of feeling bored with nothing to do feels kind of foreign now.

Smith: Dad Don’t Read This is a period piece, which is a funny thing because when I started writing the earliest drafts of this play [in college], I had just finished being a teenager, and it didn’t feel like a period piece. But when I did the most recent rewrite a couple years ago… I think of it as a distinctly different time.

Rail: What is it about that specific era of The Sims? When you look back on it, what sticks out to you? The games have changed a lot over the years.

Smith: It was pre-social media for me. The idea of being able to press a button and connect with a bunch of other people didn’t really exist, but in Sims, it was like you’re connecting with a bunch of fake other people. I’m not an expert on adolescence, but you cannot understand how lonely it was, trapped in the Midwest without the ability to go on TikTok and see a million different other ways that you could live your life! In the 2010s Sims, you could go on and make a Sim that looked any way, that lived any kind of lifestyle. I’m sure there were plenty of other online arenas where you could do that, but for me, it felt unique. Sims was so vital to my development of personhood, the ability to create a person that’s you, but not you, and then have them go through life was kind of profound. I think we all want to escape ourselves.

Rail: Was theater ever a part of that for you?

Smith: I assume it is this way for everyone, but as a kid, I loved having a place to become someone else. Especially as a teenager, to be given permission to feel the maximum amount of feelings that you as a teenager feel on a daily basis. Theoretically, you have an excuse to feel them at that level, because it’s the worst day or the most important day of your character’s life.

Rail: In Dad Don’t Read This, it’s a certain kind of mundanity, but for them, it does feel like life or death. The social exclusion, it’s their whole world.

Smith: If you interviewed the characters minutes after the action of the play concludes, they would all say it’s the most significant two weeks of their life. But if you interview the characters ten years later, they’d be like, “I don’t remember that.” Everything feels like the end of the world all the time, even though it really never is, and yet it feels like hell every day. So if I can translate that experience of life, that everything feels colossal and maybe isn’t at all…that disparity is kind of heartbreaking.