With 'Pru Payne,' Playwright Steven Drukman Examines America's Cultural Amnesia

"High Art requires virtuosity," Prudence Payne – Pru for short – declares at the onset of Steven Drukman's play "Pru Payne," named for its titular character. "Proustian prose. Paderewski's piano. The plays of Pinter, the poetry of Pushkin – all of them: The apogee of rigor."

Taking aim at art designed to shock, as well as all the ways in which culture has become a matter of soundbites and political rivalries, Pru adds: "Befouling your naked body with dog doo in some downtown venue, well – not so much. Oh, we may feel your pain; what we fail to see is craft. 'You're here and you're queer?' Catchy – but it ain't Proust."

Drukman – an associate professor at New York University, whose inaugural play, "Going Native," premiered in 2002 and starred Billy Porter – is a former actor himself. His next play, "Another Fine Mess," produced the following year, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A native of New England, he's set "Pru Payne" in the Boston area, and its to that same locale that the play is headed in an East Coast premiere production by the SpeakEasy Stage Company. The play received a workshop at the Merrimack Repertory Theater in 2018. A second reading took place the following year with Boston actress Karen MacDonald in the titular role. She stars in the SpeakEasy production, directed by Paul Daigneault. After several more drafts, the play premiered last year at the Arizona Theatre Company.

Highly educated, highly accomplished, erudite, and a little snappish, Pru was created by Drukman as a response to America's cultural amnesia (if not outright senescence), which hit a tipping point in 2016 (that year's election inspire Drukman to write the play) and has only worsened since.

Pru is a woman who's lived a full and rewarding life, but now – even as she's set to receive a prestigious award – it's all falling away with the onset of dementia. But even as her longtime persona begins to fade, another, more vibrant, version of Pru emerges, just in time for her to meet another older person – Gus, a working guy – and fall in love. They may seem a mismatch, but they invigorate each other so much that their doctor wants to keep them together in a facility for the sheer therapeutic value of their affair.

Pru's gay son, Thomas, once attended the tony prep school where Gus still works as a custodian. Gus' own son, Art, is closeted and was once a classmate of Thomas' – a classmate, and something more. Even as Pru and Gus experience a late-in-life blossoming, their sons rediscover each other, and passion ignites anew between them.

For more about the play, Steven Drukman's cultural observations, and his thoughts on the importance of queer representation, read on.

EDGE: My understanding is you wrote this play after the 2016 elections made you feel that America was slipping into a kind of cultural dementia or senescence. Is that even more the case now in 2024?

Steven Drukman: Did I say senescence or amnesia?

EDGE: I don't recall.

[Laughter]

Steven Drukman: You're right, it was Trump's first victory. And I thought, "Have we just completely forgotten what Matthew Arnold called the definition of culture, which is the best things that have been thought and said in this country?" It seems that we have, and now we're truly in a state of amnesia. We are so forgetful as a nation that we we'll hearken back to the days of "stability," of the "stable genius" of Donald Trump. So, yes, things are absolutely worse.

I used to write for the New York Times, and I interviewed a woman named Diana Trilling, who is a leading female public intellectual. There was something about that interview that made me want to write a play about a Susan Sontag or an Elizabeth Hardwick or a Mary McCarthy, someone like that, and that was in the back of my mind when Trump was elected. I thought, "How would this woman react?" And I thought, "Let's put that sense of cultural amnesia into her head."

EDGE: It's interesting you set the play so far in the past.

Steven Drukman: I put the play in 1988 on purpose, because that was a time when I first experienced this slippage, this moving away from experiencing things in a real sense and favoring a mediated experience. I remember the 1988 election very clearly, [when the candidates for vice president were] Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen. In their debate, Bentsen said, "You're no John Kennedy," and Ted Koppel asked Peter Jennings, who was one of the moderators, "Who do you think won the debate?" Peter Jennings flipped it on him and said, "I'd rather hear who you think won the debate, because you watched it on television" – as if that was more real than being in the same room. I thought, "That's a paradigm shift. We are in a new world now." I wanted to somehow speak to that experience at that time.

EDGE: I love the way that you fold queer representation by making the gay characters, Thomas and Art, literally supporting roles in that they are caring for their aging parents. They've had a prior connection, which is a nice comment on how the past and the present inform and relate to each other.

Steven Drukman: Yes, and how Pru's true legacy is love. That's the lesson she learns: Life is worth living because of love. It is because of her that Thomas is allowed to reactivate the relationship he had long ago with Arthur. There's a nice symbiosis of what Thomas gets, lesson-wise, from his mother, which he had been denied his entire upbringing.

EDGE: In in writing Pru, you show how talented with words she is. That's introduced right away with her avalanches of alliteration. Did that section take you a long time to put together?

Steven Drukman: To my credit, or discredit, that stuff comes very easily to me. I live in the world of academia; I breathe that way of speaking as oxygen, and it doesn't mean people who talk like that are smarter. In fact, usually quite the opposite.

The bigger reach for me was Gus and Art. I think the true poet, the one with the real gift of language, is Gus. I find real beauty in the way Gus speaks, and this is where Pru becomes an extension of the playwright. Pru finds that there is a real wisdom in Gus and Art, but particularly Gus. I think he has a moral intelligence that none of the other characters really have.

EDGE: You're recalling your own fond memories in your writing, aren't you?

Steven Drukman: Oh, absolutely. And this play really draws on the two sides of me, in a way that other plays do not. As you noted, I started this play in 2016; it's been a long fostering, and it's caused me to dig deeper and deeper, in a way that other plays haven't. This play was going to be produced in 2020 and, of course, [due to the pandemic], that wasn't going to happen. It forced me to dig even deeper and refine it. You have no choice but to unearth things in yourself the longer you stay with a written project.

EDGE: Is it important to you to put queer representation into your work?

Steven Drukman: I think in this particular play it was important, in that sort of singular way that I want audiences – general audiences, but particularly gay audiences – now to know what it was like in the 1980s. The shorthand that Thomas and his mother have when she says, "Are you being careful?," you know, she doesn't even have to say what it's about. It was just in the air.

My partner was Scott McPherson, who – I don't know if you know who that was, but he wrote a play called "Marvin's Room," and we were in a play together called "The Normal Heart." That's how we met; I was an actor then. I was 23 years old when I met Scott. He was HIV positive. We didn't think he was going to see 30 – he did; he died at 33, but I didn't think he would. It was just a very different mindset, and it's very important to me that audiences know this. It's something we should not forget. I'm not sure why it's a lesson we have to keep relearning. It's that cultural amnesia thing.

EDGE: It must be exciting for you that this play is being produced in Boston. Are you going to come and see it?

Steven Drukman: I am. I'm going to be there up till the first preview. Usually I disappear after the opening, but Speakeasy does it a little strange: They have their first preview, and then they have the opening later. I'm a full-time professor at NYU, so I won't be there for that, but it is thrilling to me. I mean, and I keep getting emails from family members and old friends from grade school who are all going. I've never been produced in Boston. I was produced in Lowell a few years ago, but that's not quite the same, and this is a more important play than the one that was in Lowell. That's very exciting to me, because I've been produced so much on the West coast, and a lot of my old friends and family don't get to see my plays. So yes, I'm very excited about this.

The SpeakEasy Stage Company's production of Pru Payne" will run from Oct. 18 – Nov. 16. For tickets and more information, follow this link.