We’re so thrilled that we got a chance to work with Alexandra Petri on on Paperless Pulp! In addition to writing Ep. 3 “Equinox”, Alexandra is a renowned Washington Post columnist, playwright, comic book author, and Twitter personality. She’s built a reputation as one of the most interesting and unique writers in the area, and so, we HAD to ask her a few questions about her time-bending, experimental script for Equinox!
What is your experience with audio plays? How was writing for audio as opposed to for the stage or for readers?
I think my experience with audio plays is… zero? This was a first! It was different because — no stage directions! You had to get everything across using only the dialogue. Which can be hard to do while still sounding natural, without people saying things like, “Now I have entered the room to see you, my sister, standing on a five-by-four foot square of pure titanium!”
What drew you to voicemails as a medium?
Voicemails absolutely terrify me. Leaving them, I become an incoherent, rambling mess. Listening to them, if possible, I become even more so. But also there’s something so weirdly intimate about this medium that requires you to deliver a brief monologue to an audience who isn’t present.
One of the things I love about this play is how distinct the voices of the characters are. What do you think you can tell about people by how they leave voicemails? How does that intersect with how people deal with panic and/or loss?
I think some people are frazzled tumbleweeds in day-to-day life, and then moments of crisis or loss arise, and they suddenly are beacons of order and calm. And vice versa. I also love how people of different ages intersect with technology. My parents for the longest time would sign their texts: Love, Mom. Yours, Dad. So I tried to capture all the various textures of that. There’s also this profound solitude in grief, where you’re lonely but you’re lonely for something that you can only imperfectly describe to someone with no memory of it, so you’re kind of trapped in this glass bottle of memory. So you wind up talking to yourself a lot, both inside and outside your head.
What interests you the most about time travel? What was it like to write the timelines in the play, with their variations and consistencies?
I love time travel. One of my favorite ever stories about it is Wikihistory: I just love the idea of a bunch of Redditor types with access to time travel technology doing this as a hobby, instead of, say, an elite squadron. I love the idea of having something that is wrong and keeps nagging at you and you have to tinker with, something that won’t fit quite right. You can only leave it one of two ways, and neither is quite right, and so you have a choice of two unsatisfying outcomes. It was a real challenge to build the fabric whose threads this story was going to tug at and unravel.
I am kind of an optimist/fatalist, where you sort of say, well, if something bad is going to happen that is out of my control, it is, as just described, out of my control, and so I’d better just have the best Tuesday it’s within my power to have. So the idea of having something that is just wrong, that is sticking out, that you will know no rest until you’ve fixed it, that seemed like it could be a powerful motivation that could ultimately be very self-destructive.
If you could go back in time, what would you try to change?
I don’t know that I would try to change anything. I think there might be unintended consequences! I might go back to the Library of Alexandria and try to sneak out with a book. Or go, like, say hi to Marcel Proust and tell him how great his books were. I feel like as an author that would be the actual dream and ultimate compliment, to have a time traveler from the future come and say how your work lived on and people think it’s terrific. But my fear is that any author I would pick would take one look at me and exclaim, “THIS IS NOT MY IDEAL READER! WHO IS THIS CLOWN?” and destroy their best works, and then I would be responsible for plunging a minor literary corner of the world into darkness. Maybe I should just go sneak into the back of the Gettysburg Address, or something. Or maybe I would just go and be more present in my time with people with whom I knew my time was going to be limited. Come to think of it, maybe I should be doing that now!
Interview by Susanna Pretzer
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