JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY (JPS): Hey Al, nice to meet you.

AL SIERRA (AS): Hey John, nice to meet you.

JPS: So I’d like to start by telling you I think you’re very talented. Sometimes writers can’t hear anything else until they know how the other person feels about the play. You are very talented. And I wanted to begin by asking you to tell me about the genesis of the play. How’d you come to write it? When did you write it?

AS: Thank you. I officially started writing this play in 2021, and it started with the first scene in the fraternity house. I was writing these characters out, in their voices, with this image of these guys talking over a Kanye West song when they have no connection to Kanye West. By the time I finished it, I realized we were in a fraternity. And then writing it jogged my memory, because I remembered that about 10 years prior, I had read an article in The New York Times about a young man from Brooklyn named George Desdunes who went to the same university as me and [was killed after a hazing incident at a fraternity]. From there the story just came out.

JPS: I often think of plays or screenplays as being a clothesline in that one end is hooked onto this very firm thing and the other end is hooked onto this very firm thing and all the scenes in between are supported. I found the end deeply, deeply moving, and for many, it's really hard to find the clothesline. You have found the clothesline. And I hadn’t heard the specific Kanye West song you were referencing in the beginning, so as I was reading I would stop and play the song [“Gold Digger”].

AS: Oh wow. You know you write things, and you don’t think about the feasibility, or even just the trajectory that these artists are going to have outside of your container. When I started writing this in 2021, Kanye West was a different person.

And with that clothesline idea, that to me is what I’ve been processing personally. Especially within the context of setting and the display, because as a culture we’ve changed. I went to school during the Obama administration and the fifteen years since, it has felt like a warp drive, as far as acceptable behavior and culture norms go, so I wanted to reflect that in the play somehow.

This whole process has been interesting to me. It’s been somewhere in my subconscious for almost five years now. Also because I didn’t write this on commission, or I wasn’t prompted to write this particular play, it all really came out of that one scene, and it’s been coming to me piecemeal since. As I write, or as I’m hanging things on the clothesline, so to speak, I’m thinking about moments that GoldI’ve lived myself when I was in college.

JPS: I want to talk about something that’s hinted at in the play which is the argument in favor of fraternities, because it’s there, with the promise of girls. But also with idea that these men know that they’re not alone.

AS: I’m interested in the idea of the fraternity being a heightened space. And a space where they're not quite themselves, but that the fraternity brings out more of their inner selves than they bring outside. It was like my experience of being the only black kid and the next black person being from the facility staff, and of knowing what little parts of myself I was showing in this university.

JPS: There’s a powerful melodrama at work. I never walk away from this word, melodrama. I love this word and the genre, and what you’re doing in here, is all to that purpose.

AS:  Thank you, that’s really smart. Sometimes writing feels like I’m playing chess and moving pieces.

JPS: I think that second acts usually take care of themselves if the first act is what you ultimately want it to be. And you just take a piece of paper, before you start typing, and name the scenes that you want to do in the first act, just those scenes that have the potency in the storytelling. You name those scenes, and then go back, and write in underneath that one or two things that happen in those scenes, and then you have an outline for what you want to accomplish in the first act. Then you do it again for the second act. It can be intuitive and organic with a sense of “let’s see where it goes.” Which, even though I do it all the time, it still frightens me to death now because I think, “Don't just let it go where it wants to go!” Because sometimes you’re going to end up with something that doesn’t work or something that you can’t get out of the play because you built it in. Also some plays don't want them, and for some plays outlines are really hard to do.

AS: Yeah, I’m an outliner. I generally will go scene-by scene or even beat-by-beat, and kind of sit with the thing. I’ll ask myself, what are we doing here today, which sometimes is the trap, right?

JPS: Oh I do it all the time. I just I put something in, and then I regret it for years.

AS: Oh woah, I’d love to hear about that!

JPS: I wrote this one play, and the play was going along fine. But in one scene, this guy walks in and everything after that sucked. So I decide, that guy can’t walk in, I gotta get that guy out of my play. And for six weeks, I tried to get the guy to leave the play. But he would not leave! And eventually, I had to just yell at myself and say, “Just take him out!” I didn’t care what it meant. I didn’t care if I never got the play right. I had to get that guy out of my play. I got him out finally after six weeks, and things started to fall into place.

AS: How do you spot the guy?

JPS: Because the tone changed in a way that made the whole play dismissible.

It’s a fair question, though, how do you identify whether something should be in a play or not? And the answer is, does it further the story? But of course, somehow those kinds of statements never help.

AS: Yeah, it’s a tricky new thing I’m learning. I really am also a subconscious writer, so I find myself having these discoveries and eureka moments, either during a reading or in conversation with a brilliant playwright like yourself. It even happens with how I see the play. There is a rage in this play. I think this play, in some ways, is me processing my experiences from fifteen years ago. I wasn’t involved with fraternities personally, so it’s not a one-to-one, but when I was reading that Times article, I was struck by so many similarities between us. George was going to graduate a few years after I had, we were three or so years apart. He was from Brooklyn, I’m from Brooklyn. So I’m thinking about this story and writing this play and suddenly I’m wondering if I did have a good college experience. And then the world kind of changed where the weird optimism we were living in during that time changed into whatever bullshit we’re in now. I think I might have bought into that optimism.

JPS: I think part of being young is about buying into many things. So give yourself a break and give the characters that break too. The specifics of your story and of your autobiography is your superpower. Nobody else knows it. We always think everybody else knows. We always think they’ve had a similar experience, and they haven’t. Only you’ve had this experience, so either you share it, or it dies with you. So any little thing that is true for you, and that you’ve experienced? That counts.

Al Sierra is an Afro Puerto Rican-Jamaican, New York City born, and based playwright, writer and actor. He received a BSc. from Cornell University and worked in advertising as a copywriter and creative director before embarking on his journey as a storyteller. His plays include clean, The Peak, and ...when the sea comes home. His work has received developmental support from The National Black Theatre and The National Queer Theater. He is a 2022 Learning to Love Fellow of The Gatekeepers Collective and a member of The Public Theater's 2023–2025 Emerging Writers Group. When he’s not telling stories, Al spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about inequality, identity, NYC, blackholes, The 90s, and Rihanna.

John Patrick Shanley is from The Bronx. His plays include Prodigal Son, Outside Mullingar (Tony nomination), Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Savage in Limbo, Italian-American Reconciliation, Welcome to the Moon, Four Dogs and a Bone, Dirty Story, Defiance, Beggars in the House of Plenty, and Brooklyn Laundry. His theatrical work is performed extensively across the United States and around the world. For his play, Doubt, he received both the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In the arena of screenwriting, he has ten films to his credit, most recently Wild Mountain Thyme, with Emily Blunt, Jamie Dornan, and Christopher Walken. His film of Doubt, with Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis, which he also directed, was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Adapted Screenplay. Other films include Five Corners (Special Jury Prize, Barcelona Film Festival), Alive, Joe Versus the Volcano (which he also directed), and Live From Baghdad for HBO (Emmy nomination). For his script of Moonstruck he received both the Writers Guild of America Award and an Academy Award for best original screenplay. In 2009, The Writers Guild of America awarded Mr. Shanley the Lifetime Achievement in Writing.