A wealthy white Manhattan couple, Brooke and Jay, sit opposite their taciturn Barbadian nanny, Brittany. They are trying to sack her but it isn’t easy – in fact, Brooke is so racked with anxiety that she has to bolt from the room at one point to vomit. Brittany looks on, implacable and unimpressed. So begins Emma and Max, an agonisingly funny and abrasive study in race, white guilt and the ownership of suffering.
It marks the stage debut of Todd Solondz, the 59-year-old film-maker who has for more than 20 years been the barbed laureate of US indie cinema. Most notorious is his 1998 black comedy Happiness, populated by characters including a phone-sex pest, a lovelorn murderer and a paedophile father, but none of his subsequent work has indicated any sort of mellowing. Palindromes featured eight actors of assorted ages, races and genders playing the same 13-year-old girl who is forced to have an abortion, while Wiener-Dog starred Greta Gerwig and Danny DeVito as well as a dachshund deployed as a canine suicide bomber.
When we meet in a cafe near his home in Manhattan, Solondz is quick to point out that Emma and Max is not his first play. “I wrote plays when I was in college,” he says in between mouthfuls of chia pudding. “All of them remarkably terrible. Each one uniquely inept and mercifully unproduced.” He has heavy eyelids, plump lips and sprigs of grey hair; his New Jersey cadences are tinged with the comic exasperation of a boy who’s just been told to tidy his room.
Though he has never been one to romanticise life on set (“It’s torture!”), a certain acclimatisation process was necessary in switching disciplines. “With film, you can get an actor to an emotional place very quickly and then you’ve got it. But in theatre you need to have conversations and explanations and it takes a long time until they get there, and even longer until they remember it. Actors expect a lot of what they call ‘table work’ and that doesn’t interest me.” So a compromise was reached. “They bent to my will,” he smiles.
He claims not to have any particular affection for theatre. “I don’t even see much,” he shrugs. “But when the idea for Emma and Max came to me, I thought, ‘Well, this’ll never get made as a film.’” Partly it was the subject matter. “Right now everybody is afraid of stepping on a trip wire and being accused of racism, sexism or homophobia. There’s a fear of somehow not turning the phrase properly or of morally trespassing.” I wonder how his 2001 film Storytelling would be received today, with its scenes of a white woman using racist language during sex with her African American teacher. “I have no idea what people would say about that movie now,” he exclaims, with a let’s-not-go-there grimace. “But I want to play with things that are charged. You have to take those leaps otherwise you get work that isn’t interesting.”
He admits he was scared about staging the play. “At first I thought I should hire a black director because of the material. Then I realised that this decision was motivated by fear, and from wanting some sort of insulation, so I said, ‘I’ll direct it instead.’ There’s a risk everyone will come down on me, but you just have to take responsibility for whatever you’re writing. Look, I am afraid. I have this weak moral fibre: if people like it, I feel happy, and if they tell me what a horrible person I am, I feel sad. I wish I were stronger!”
It was the form of the material, as well as its content, that convinced Solondz it was meant for the stage. “You saw it,” he says. “It’s not a movie.” Indeed not. The play is punctuated with unsparing monologues which explore, among other things, Brooke’s yearning to be black so that her pain will be validated, and the role played by Jay (who uses the Trumpian catchphrase: “You’re fired!”) in a string of racially motivated humiliations. Arguably the smartest staging decision is to have Brittany completing most of the scene changes alone and in character, hauling beds and chairs around while everyone else leaves the stage. “Those scene changes become a whole other kind of meta-story,” Solondz explains.
He and his wife have two children, aged nine and seven, so I can’t help enquiring, in the light of the play, about their own childcare arrangements. “We have a ‘manny,’ which people find a little odd. Everyone immediately assumes he’s a child molester. And then we have a Trinidadian woman who helps us on the weekends.” Is it fair to assume the play is dramatising Solondz’s own anxieties about the power dynamic between white and black, rich and poor, employer and employee? For the first time, he comes over a tad coy. “Look, everything’s fine,” he says. “Although I’m not gonna recommend the play to the nanny.”
Emma and Max is at the Flea, New York, until 4 November
