From NYFA Quarterly - The Long Run: A Performer's Life Fall 2004 issue

Eric Bogosian is a playwright, solo performer, actor, and novelist. He is author of the plays Talk Radio, subUrbia, Griller, and Humpty Dumpty, as well as four Obie Award winning solos: Drinking In America; Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll; Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead; and Wake Up and Smell the Coffee. He wrote the screen adaptations of his first two plays, receiving the Berlin Film Festival’s Silver Bear for his work on Talk Radio. Fiction includes a novel, Mall, and a novella, Notes from Underground. As an actor he has starred in Oliver Stone’s film version of his own Talk Radio, Robert Altman’s The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, and Atom Egoyan’s Ararat. Bogosian is a 2004 Guggenheim Fellow in Playwriting.

Bogosian is married to theater director Jo Bonney, whose credits include plays by Bogosian, Jessica Goldberg, Lisa Loomer, John Osborne, Jose Rivera, Diana Son, Lanford Wilson, as well as solo performances by Bogosian and Danny Hoch. Bonney received a 1998 Obie Award for Sustained Excellence of Direction and is the editor of Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century. She is currently directing Anna in the Tropics at Arena Stage in Washington, DC.

Edith Meeks: Does your marriage/partnership play a role in who you are as an artist?

Eric Bogosian: Married life creates a kind of order. I needed that after burning the candle at both ends during my first few years in New York. I have always been busy, and I have floods of ideas. But before living with Jo Bonney, I didn’t know how to fully execute my ideas. It’s hard to put into words, but I wouldn’t have become fully formed as an artist without Jo in my life. I’m not sure if that’s a comment on marriage or simply a function of spending so much time around such an incredible person.

EM: Does your marriage/partnership influence the content of your work?

EB: In many ways, our life as a couple is unremarkable. We eat together, we sleep together, we have two children, we keep a house, we go on vacations. Normal stuff. Perhaps, if I were single, my life would have more radical angles. Certainly the calming effect of a safe, emotionally fulfilling place has allowed me to fling myself out there with more abandon.

EM: Is it a help or a hindrance, or something apart?

EB: We have children, and children create a whole other universe of activity and priority. This puts constraints on time. It fills your life (and soul) with other things. An artist, married with children, can’t help but think, “What if I had more time like single artists do?” Having said that, I honestly don’t think it makes any difference. Jo and I have raised our boys together, and they are the light of our lives. Especially when they were very young, when they were at their most demanding, Jo and I, as tired as we were, were prolific with our respective work. Now that the boys are older and more independent (they are teenagers), I have more time and it doesn’t seem to make any difference at all to my work habits.

EM: Is it easier on your relationship to work together or to maintain distinct careers?

EB: Jo and I worked together intensely for 20 years. We made four solos together, and she has directed two of my plays, including, most recently, the premiere of Humpty Dumpty at the McCarter. It was bracing to work together, because we discovered things together. As we have matured, we have developed an appetite to work with other people. I’m sure we’ll work together again, but this is good, too. Of course, knowing each other so well allows work to go more smoothly, but sometimes we are too familiar with one another and a certain distance is not maintained. That distance can be useful.

EM: How does it affect your work to function together or to function apart?

EB: When we are in the flow of it, we think together. We trust one another’s taste totally. Married or not, we are creative partners, and like any duo of this sort, we’ve developed a shorthand over time. We agree on what we’d like to make and how we’d like to make it.

A regular column in NYFA Quarterly, The Long Run is made possible by the NYFA Source funding consortium. Major support for NYFA Source has been provided by The Ford Foundation and Cordelia Corporation. Additional support has been provided by Basil H. Alkazzi; Artist Legacy; Lily Auchincloss Foundation; The Cowles Charitable Trust; The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts; The Robert and Helen Gould Foundation; Independence Community Foundation; The Liman Foundation; Virginia Manheimer; The Joan Mitchell Foundation, Inc.; New England Foundation for the Arts; a gift in honor of Eva J. Pape; Pew Fellowships in the Arts; The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc.; The Judith Rothschild Foundation; The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation; and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.