A Q & A with Mac Rogers, Playwright ...
What gave you the idea/inspiration to write Viral?
Believe it or not, VIRAL was originally going to be a lot
grimmer than it is now! My original inspiration came
from the so-called “Rotenburg Cannibal” case involving
a German man who killed and cannibalized a consenting
victim who he met online. But as I continued to develop
the story, I realized it wasn’t the cannibalism angle that
interested me – after all, what kind of demented maniac would write a play with cannibalism in it? – but rather the element of transaction involved: two parties reaching an agreement that involved one party's demise. How would such an agreement be struck? Why would each party agree? Thinking about this led me to devise the idea of the fetish that drives the play, and the type of person who might be inclined to agree to serve as its subject. From there, the idea of all parties spending the week together grew, which proved to be the engine of the drama: if you spend all week in a room with your fantasy, they might stop being your fantasy and start being a human.
Were any of the characters influenced by real-life people?
In the end, no. The original news story subjects faded in the development process, and the new characters didn't have precise real life counterparts. After many years of modeling characters directly on real people, I did a big about-face several years ago and resolved not to do that anymore. Now my characters are composites of qualities from about a dozen real people apiece, plus a healthy lacquer of pure fiction on top.
Viral videos are a motif in the play, as is suicide. What kind of research did you do?
The principal research I did for VIRAL was on suicidal depression, and even that research proved not terribly influential on the play in the end. This is a pretty important point, actually: the play departs strongly from a clinically realistic depiction of suicidal depression, wherein the sufferer is usually highly withdrawn and non-verbal. This was a calculated choice; I wanted Meredith to be able to describe what she's going through. Dialogue is the engine of theater, and I wanted Meredith to have access to it. As far as the fetish itself, and Snow's described method of distribution, I made those up. The fetish may indeed be real, somewhere out there, but the description in the script is not based on research.
You have intimated that Viral might be your most-produced play to date. Why do you think that might be?
I'll just straight-up fall on my sword here - I have no idea. I wrote VIRAL right after writing a play that did well, UNIVERSAL ROBOTS (starring VIRAL director David Ian Lee!), so my thinking was, "I'll write one just for me, I'll write something where it's okay if nobody else likes it." It has since gone on to be arguably my most well-liked play, one I still get emails from strangers about. But that's a different issue from why there's been so much interest in producing it. Because that's really nuts. VIRAL has easily the most off-putting marketing pitch ever: "Suicide fetishists spend a week with the unhappy woman they've convinced to kill herself on camera." Who wants to see that? Many people have liked it quite a lot after seeing it, for sure, but it can't be denied that it's a tough sell for to get them in the room in the first place.
Is this the first collegiate production of the play? Why do you think younger people – students – connect with the play?
This is the first collegiate production, though several other college groups have had or are currently having conversations with me about producing it. I can't lie, my memory's pretty bad, so it's hard for me to remember what my mindset was in college, but one thing I recall is that everything was that back then I had a much easier time questioning fundamental assumptions about life. I'm too invested in those assumptions now, so it's more traumatic to question them.
With VIRAL I was trying to ask one of those fundamental questions: is there a case to be made that life's not worth living? Because if you're going to fight for all of your characters, that means fighting for the ones like Meredith whose philosophies are as alien to you as can be. It's a bit of an irresponsible question as well, if I'm being honest, because the fear is always: what if the play convinces someone? But I think at one level, art has to be irresponsible and ask irresponsible questions. I think at the beginning of adulthood it's easier to face these questions head-on. You're young and strong, ideas are exhilarating instead of burdensome, and you have less accrued structure to defend. It may well be that college students quite simply have an easier time with the material.
Do you think that the meaning of this play will change in 10 years? 20 years? If so, how?
I'm a dreadful futurist, and certainly any play which draws some of its edge from recent technology is going to bleed relevance over time. I do strongly suspect, however, that going forward we're only going to be spending more time in virtual environments, not less. And any prolonged period without proximal exposure to other people and all their imperfections is going to encourage fetishization and the devising of idealized worlds. We're really only going to get better at that sort of thing. So if VIRAL lives on at all, perhaps it might be seen as a bit like THE ADDING MACHINE, where the technology is archaic but the resonance survives, if in diminished form.
As a theatremaker, who are some of your creative influences?
Among playwrights: Churchill, Pinter, Mamet, and Peter Shaffer are clearly the dramatists I crib from the most. Maybe I might wish it was a different list, but anyone can watch the plays and see. I go to the ancient Greeks, particularly Aeschylus, a surprising number of times for structure; I'm not actually sure we've improved on them. From TV: Doctor Who, The West Wing, The Prisoner, The Twilight Zone, new Battlestar, andDeadwood. (I worship The Wire, but I haven't really drawn from it.) From film I'd say Cronenberg, Nicole Holofcener, Neil Jordan, and (as VIRAL clearly demonstrates) Atom Egoyan. More recently Abbas Kiarostami has been a colossal influence.
What are you working on now?
I'm doing final tweaks on my spy thriller ASYMMETRIC, which opens in NYC this month, then I'll be working with the folks doing VIRAL in LA. In December I hope to finally start work on a very unconventional science fiction play that's been brewing in my mind for some time, a bit of a dream project.
If you had to be stuck in a room with Colin, Geena, or Jarvis, who would you choose and why?
For one or two days? Colin. The conversation would be tremendously scintillating.
Any longer than that? Geena. Kindness is what counts in the long run.
