Moises Kaufman, the Venezuelan-born artistic director and founder of the New York-based Tectonic Theater Project, is the writer and director behind Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Laramie Project, about the killing of Matthew Shepard. He also directed Doug Wright’s Pulitzer- and Tony Award-winning play I Am My Own Wife, which was workshopped by About Face Theatre at the Museum of Contemporary Art before heading for Broadway last year; it comes to the Goodman in January. Now he’s back in town collaborating with About Face artistic director Eric Rosen on One Arm, a new piece based on a short story and unproduced screenplay by Tennessee Williams.
MT: What’s the history of the story?
MK: I have such problems with that classification, a gay play—
MT: Well, there was a wonderful moment: the kiss between Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas started, and all eyes should have been on the kiss, right? All eyes were focused on the mayor. How is he reacting? And he looked completely poker-faced.
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MK: Isn’t that amazing? What year was that? 1998? We’re still concerned about a kiss. And what’s interesting in that play is that you had all of those male prostitutes in their underwear talking about sex that they had had with men and nobody blinked, but the kiss is still such a subversive event.
MK: I think it’s very autobiographical. Tennessee Williams has this story about walking down the street—and he slept with a lot of prostitutes and talked about it very freely—and he met a hustler. They started talking and he asked the hustler, “What’s your name?” The hustler told him, “My name is Tom Williams,” which is Tennessee Williams’s real name, and they started a conversation and then they ended up having sex and whatnot. But it moved him very much, that the hustler shared his name, and I’m sure that that influenced this story.
MK: I would go even further than that. I’m Latino and I’m Jewish and I’m gay and now I live in New York. So when they say, “Are you a gay writer?” I say, “Yes, I’m a gay writer. I’m also a Jewish writer. I’m also a Latino writer and a New York writer. Which one will you choose and how many adjectives do you need to be able to understand what I’m saying?”
