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Losing Louie: Finding Simon Mendes da Costa
This fall, MTC stages Losing Louie at the Biltmore Theatre. The play takes place in one bedroom, as two generations of the same family contend with marriage and parents fifty years apart. This American premiere announces the arrival of a major talent in playwright Simon Mendes da Costa. Dramaturg Aaron Leichter sat down with Simon to find out how he came up with the play’s themes and structure, why he began writing in the first place, and what they think of him in Finland. |
Sibbling rivalry - Matthew Arkin and Mark Linn-Baker (photo by Joan Marcus). |
AL Losing Louie has been an incredible success for you. When did the idea first come to you?
Simon I got the initial idea in 2003, whilst taking a train between London and Edinburgh. I didn’t have anything to read, I just had some paper and a pen. And I drew a family tree. I proceeded to stare at this piece of paper for about four hours. I think that the woman next to me must’ve thought I was mad, because I was literally just staring at the piece of paper. But I was going through ideas and scenarios. I started to think about a family with a secret, what the secret could be, and the idea that secrets in a family, if left undealt with, fester. They cause problems not only for the people with the secret, but also for future generations. And those are the themes which are prevalent in the play.
AL You illustrate this by moving the action between the past and the present. You’ll end a scene with the parents exiting from one side of the stage and their adult children entering on the other side. How did you come up with that back-and-forth structure? |
Simon You know, I can’t even answer that! And I’m as interested to know the answer as anyone else! It scares me that I don’t know how I came up with it. The blank page is scary. And thoughts come quite quietly sometimes. Though I have to say, when I started writing Losing Louie I did have a sense that it was going to work, quite early on. I’d written something just before, a play called Shelf Life, which never saw the light of day. And God hope it never will.
AL It didn’t get produced anywhere?
Simon Oh, I didn’t show it to anyone! I read it and I knew instantly it wasn’t good enough. I remember going to Michael Codron, who’s a big producer in England, someone who really champions new work. I’d finished Shelf Life and I was just starting Losing Louie. I went to him and he said, “Well, why haven’t you asked me to read Shelf Life?” And I said “’Cause it’s not good enough. But there’s a play that I just started, and I’m convinced that it will be the one.” And he said, “Well show me when it comes up.” So I did. I mean, it took me about four months, because the first draft was all over the place. I had different scenarios going on, I had different people in it, I had characters which I have now junked.
AL Do you mean the characters who get talked about but stay offstage in the play?
Simon Yeah, there’s the son and daughter, Steven and Samantha –
AL The third generation.
Simon – the third generation, they appeared. In fact, one time I played around with [having the same actors] play both the grandparents and the children. But that created a very different feel to the play. The play is essentially naturalistic, and if you start playing around with people playing their own grandparents, it stylizes the piece. We’re already playing around with time, and the same bedroom is used in both the past and present. So I didn’t want to introduce any more conceits.
AL So you started writing Losing Louie on a train in the summer of 2003. It was first produced at the Hampstead Theatre in January of 2005. And it moved from there to the West End.
Simon It transferred straight away into the West End, yeah. And it also played in Finland at the same time as Hampstead actually.
AL Really! How did the Finns react to this play?
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| Louie finds love - Scott Cohen and Jama Williamson (photo by Joan Marcus). |
Simon Well, it was astonishing! The Finns are wonderful people, but very dark, because there’s literally so much darkness in Finland. They played the past sort of like Ibsen, and they played the present as a sort of Buster Keaton farce. So you had that slapstick farcical element in it, while the past was really about ripping hair out.
AL Dark psychological drama.
Simon Yeah. It was very interesting seeing those two different styles of theater. And they set it in Finland, whereas we are setting this production in New York. Everybody who’s done this play wants to do it in their own vernacular and their own style. The only people who didn’t are in Australia, they did it as an English piece.
ALYou’re saying that everyone wants the play to be local because they see it as universal.
Simon Hopefully so. You’re dealing with secrets, you’re dealing with sibling rivalry, you’re dealing with people having to let go of their blame and of the past. So these stories fit into any culture. Okay, there may be some cultures where the story wouldn’t be told in this way, in this bedroom. But certainly in England and America and Australia, and apparently Finland as well.
ALYou must be thrilled that it’s been received so well all around the world. Did you ever expect, in your wildest dreams, that this particular play would move to the West End and to Broadway?
Simon No, I mean, I didn’t start writing till 2001!
AL What had you been doing before that?
Simon Well, I started off in life as an estate agent, or “in real estate” as you say. I did some work in insurance, I then became a computer programmer, then gave that up to become an actor. Then that gave me up, I think. I ended up drifting into a writers group that an actor friend had told me about. I went each week and listened to them read their stuff until they said to me, “So Simon, what do you write?” And I said, “Do I have to?” They said, “Well, it is a writers group.” So I went home from the pub, lay on my bed, wrote a line, and wrote another line, and took it in to them. And they didn’t laugh at it. So I carried on writing, and in the end I wrote a play. And they liked it. So I got a director and I produced my first play myself, Table for One, at a small little theater above a pub. It did very well. We got “Critics' Choice” in Time Out which meant we sold out. I got an agent from it and things took off.
AL So you’re really living a playwright’s dream.
Simon Yes! I mean, if someone had told me then what’s happening now, I just never – it’s a dream! Of course at some point you have to come down to earth and do the work. I’m sort of used to it now, but I don’t know when that happened. I’ll have to go back to not being used to it afterwards, I suppose.
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