"Muskrat Love," American History Style :: John Kuntz on His New Theatrical Epic

"Starf*cker." "After School Special." "Freaks." "Jasper Lake." "The Salt Girl." "Hotel Nepenthe." Boston actor and playwright John Kuntz has authored his share of distinctive, sometimes disturbing, theatrical fare.

He's also taken starring roles not only in his own plays, but also in striking stage works like "Copenhagen" (in the A.R.T. production), Taylor Mac's sprawling "The Lily's Revenge" (at Club Oberon), the Actors' Shakespeare Project's production of "Two Gentlemen of Verona," and last spring's "The Whale" (which won accolades for SpeakEasy Stage Company).

It was as the main character of "The Whale" that Kuntz may have had his finest role to date: Portraying a 600-pound man hell-bent on self-destruction, Kuntz not only assumed a radically different look from his svelte usual self (thanks to prosthetics and padding), but also adopted a manner of movement and posture that reflected the crushing burden merely living had become for the character.

Let me revise that last: "The Whale" gave Kuntz his finest role in plays written by people other than himself. His performance in "The Salt Girl" was as raw as any wound you might pour salt into; his depiction in "The Hotel Nepenthe" fit the play's intelligent, feverish style. In a sense, Kuntz is the actor best suited to his own work.

Kuntz coming together with The Circuit Theatre Company for the production of his new play, "An Annotated History of the American Muskrat," is doubly exciting, given the daring with which Circuit has plunged headlong into its new season. "American Muskrat" follows hard on the heels of two plays Circuit presented in repertory, Taylor Mac's brand-new "The Walk Across America for Mother Earth," and Kristoffer Diaz's "Welcome to Arroyo's." It's the third prong in a triple-flash campaign to amaze and dazzle: Boston's theatergoing crowd won't know what hit them once this ambitious troupe is done.

With no little excitement, EDGE chatted with Kuntz recently about the new play, an upcoming production of still another of his creations, "Necessary Monsters," and the particular joys that come with sharing the stage with his husband, Thomas Derrah, who was long a member of the A.R.T.'s core cast and remains practically a legend on the Boston theater scene in his own right.

EDGE: I'm very curious about your new play, "An Annotated History of the American Muskrat," which Circuit Theater is going to be producing.

John Kuntz: I know! I'm quite excited about it.

EDGE: So, did they commission this play from you?

John Kuntz: They did. I was amazed. I've known the Artistic Director of Circuit, Skylar Fox, for quite a while now. I met him when he was a high school student in Newton, where I was a playwrighting mentor. We worked together in the playwrighting program there for two years in a row. Then he graduated and went off to Brown University. He was a freshman at Brown when [The Actors' Shakespeare Project] put on my play 'The Hotel Nepenthe,' and he came and saw that; he really liked it, and he asked if he could direct it at Brown. I said, 'Sure!' So, he directed it at Brown, and I went to see it, and it was excellent! He's a really talented, smart director. He started Circuit Theatre Company with a bunch of friends from Brown and elsewhere, and they are all in their 20s - I'm always the oldest person in the room - and they're all really bright and talented and savvy, and Skylar has an amazing vision as a director.

I saw "Passion Play" - which is a gigantic play by Sarah Ruhl - that the Circuit did a couple of years ago. It was epic. I couldn't believe that they fearlessly tackled such a gigantic, complicated play, and they did it so incredibly well! So when Skylar approached me about writing a play for them, I said, 'Yes! Of course!' We chatted about it earlier in the year, but until maybe two months ago, 'American Muskrat' didn't exist in any form at all.

Skylar said, "We like epic plays." But I hadn't really written any epic plays. I typically write 90-minute one-acts. I didn't know if I could write a play that would be that big. Also, he wanted me to write a play that would be about American history in some way. That was a challenge for me, too, because when I write plays I usually write about whatever I want; I don't really think about what the plays are until I'm writing them, and then in the writing process the play usually tells me what it wants to be. So, I began writing, and many things began to happen. I honestly didn't know I had this play inside me: Characters and dialogue just began tumbling out. I hadn't planned on anything, I had no idea what it was going to be, and, in a way, that was a wonderful, scary thing.

The initial spark for the play emerged around May. Tommy and I were driving around in the car and the song "Muskrat Love" by The Captain and Tennille came on the radio and I said to myself: "What the hell is this song? Where did it come from?" So I googled it, and found out that the song has all this history to it; The Captain and Tennille didn't actually write "Muskrat Love." Their version was a cover. And the band America did a version of it before them. And before America did it, the song was recorded by the original songwriter, a Texan songwriter whose name is Willis Alan Ramsey, and it was called "Muskrat Candlelight." The versions just got progressively worse and worse, until we ended up with that famous synthesized sound of muskrats having sex on the Captain and Tennille version.

What was interesting, to me, about all this was that around the time The Captain and Tennille's version of "Muskrat Love" came out, in 1976, it was very popular. The White House was giving a big party to celebrate the Bicentennial, and the Queen of England was coming, with Prince Philip, and they invited The Captain and Tennille to perform "Muskrat Love" in the East Room for the Queen of England.

EDGE: Oh my god!

John Kuntz: Yeah. So you had Gerald and Betty Ford, the Queen of England, and Henry Kissinger [listening to "Muskrat Love" in the East Room of the White House] and I thought: "Oh my god, you can't make this up!" I read more about that bicentennial dinner... and that got me interested in the Ford administration, and that got me interested in Watergate and how Ford became President in the first place. And the play really took off from there. The play is about how these seemingly random and obscure moments in our pop cultural history can whack up against really gigantic, important historical moments.

Then, of course, I started researching the muskrat, which is an indigenous North American rodent. It turns out there's a beautiful Native American myth about how the muskrat created the world. Everything was only water and sky, until the muskrat dove down into the water and found the earth and brought it up, and put it on the back of a turtle, and that bit of earth grew into North America. So, really, we are all here because of the muskrat! Once I discovered those two bits of information, I was very inspired. It's a crazy play, and I'm excited about it because I've never written anything like it.

EDGE: So, what happens in the play?

John Kuntz: Well, the play is for eight actors, who form a sort of Chorus at times. They're in a strange laboratory with eight beds, and it looks like they're all participating in some sort of sleep experiment. They wake up and take pills, and then they tell this story to the audience about muskrats and the Ford administration. But then the fourth wall slaps up and it becomes a story about these eight different people who are working in the office that is monitoring the sleep experiment. But you're not sure whether the people monitoring the experiment or also actually part of the experiment, and if they are aware of that or not. That's part of the experiment: Not knowing about the experiment. So there's paranoia in the way the two groups overlap.

EDGE: So does the NSA or Facebook figure into all of this?

John Kuntz: I did think a lot about that. There are a lot of current events in the world, because I was writing it in real time, so a lot of things that were going on in the news were affecting me. There's a lot of random gun violence in this play, a lot of surveillance and NSA-type stuff. It's a wildly theatrical environment. Actors play multiple characters. The fourth wall goes up and down. There's this dreamlike, hallucinatory quality to the world.

EDGE: That dreamlike quality was also part of "The Hotel Nepenthe."

John Kuntz: Yes, it is; I guess the plays I write tend to have non-linear, fluid, surrealistic structures. People can morph into other characters or animals or objects. Time can go backwards or forwards or sideways. Dance numbers will ensue abruptly. There's a lot of death in this play, because I'm always thinking about death. (I guess I'm a little morbid) And like "The Hotel Nepenthe," there's a dark humor to it all. But I feel "Muskrat" is also wildly different from anything else I've done. It's a huge play, for one thing - there are three acts, and two intermissions. The fourth wall between the performers and the audience disappears frequently. And I've never played with real people from history before: The Fords, Kissinger, Little Debbie, The BTK Killer, and The Captain and Tennille are all characters in the play.

We delve into the canon of The Captain and Tennille quite a bit. Gerald and Betty Ford are also major characters. It's interesting that Ford wasn't elected President or Vice President by anyone; he was the minority speaker when Spiro Agnew resigned, and so he became Vice President because of that. Then Nixon resigned, so he became President. So he wasn't really seeking greatness, and yet he became this huge figure in history. Sort of like "Muskrat Love."

EDGE: So this is a bit of a trawl of Great American Power Couples.

John Kuntz: A little bit, yeah - Nixon and Pat Nixon are also in the play, and there's a tiny glimpse into Watergate, pre-Ford. The main characters also form these powerful duos during the play.

Eventually, what we discover is that the sleep experiment is something that might have started around the time of the Ford administration, covertly. The experiment is attempting to create Americans who are innocent, and the only way for anyone to be truly innocent is for them to be asleep; and the only other way to be truly innocent is to be a muskrat. So, obviously, when you fall asleep, you turn into a muskrat! It's a search for innocence in a world where there's not a lot of innocence - a world full of random violence and misunderstandings, and people wanting things and not getting what they feel they deserve.

All the main characters have these complicated, intertwined relationships. They work together in this sinister office, and they all have these strange wants and desires and obstacles in their lives. They all seem to want a certain amount of control in their lives, but this world is a random place where anything can happen.

EDGE: You wrote a three-hour play in just a few months?

John Kuntz: I was writing and writing and writing! Once I had the idea, the play just sort of popped out. And in a way, it was good because I didn't have time to second-guess myself: I had some pretty crucial deadlines. I mean, I didn't finish the third act until a week ago. They were rehearsing Acts I and II while I was writing Act III. I'd come in and look at their rehearsals and they would inform me as to the writing of Act III. In a sense, the actors and Skylar know the play better than I do, because they've been inside it so much. So they've come up with all this interesting mythology about these characters, as actors do, coming up with a backstory, based on clues from the text. So I would watch the stuff they were coming up with in rehearsal, and use that to inspire that outcome of the play. It was so wonderful to have access to these actors and to the director, to Skylar.

EDGE: That sounds like an amazing collaborative process.

John Kuntz: I never want to write a play any other way! It's similar to how I work at Boston Conservatory, where I write a play every year - but in this case, I wasn't also directing. Having Skylar there is like having another creative eye on the play, and I don't typically have someone like that who is outside of the play and can really see it in a different, objective, creative way.

EDGE: You have another play coming up, "Necessary Monsters."

John Kuntz: Yes, "Necessary Monsters" is a play I wrote a while ago, actually, for my BoCo students, which is where "The Hotel Nepenthe" came from... it's been kicking around for about three years now. When I first started writing it, it was based on Jorge Luis Borges' "Book of Imaginary Beings." We were using that as a starting point, reading the book together, doing improvs, and then I'd go home and write and come up with characters that were sort of based on monsters. The play that resulted didn't use any of Borges' text at all. If I didn't tell you that, say, one character was based on a Harpy, you'd never know it. The characters don't necessarily resemble the monsters that spawned them, but they have this soupcon of the monsters inside them, that informs what they do and how they behave.

The structure is sort of like a Russian doll: Every story lives inside another story. Last summer the Huntington did a reading of it as part of their summer series. It was a really fun reading, my good friend David Gammons directed it, and Paul Daigneault of Speakeasy Stage Company really liked the reading and wanted to do it, which is a dream come true! It goes up in December. David is directing, and I am also in it - and my husband, Tommy Derrah is in it too. It's a wonderful cast - there are eight people in this as well, so it's another large play for me. I usually have three or four characters in my plays. Then again, "Necessary Monsters" is shorter than "Muskrat," it's about an hour and forty minutes, with no intermission.

EDGE: Last winter you were in "The Whale," which got quite a lot of critical acclaim and love from audiences. Do you find it necessary to step back from acting and write a play between acting jobs to recharge your batteries?

John Kuntz: I loved doing the "The Whale!" It was a beautiful, heart-breaking play, and I got to work with an amazing cast and director and designers. But, wow, it was difficult.

EDGE: There was hours and hours of makeup work for you every night, wasn't there?

John KuntzYes, I had to be there an hour and a half early so they could glue the prosthetics onto my face, and then it took an hour to take it all off. I was there all day and night! And the suit was wildly hot and uncomfortable. That was the only play I did all year, but I frankly couldn't imagine doing another one after that, I was so exhausted. I hadn't done a play since that, but it's not really a choice, so much: I auditioned for things for the fall, but I didn't get cast, there was just nothing out there for me. That happens. So the next play I'll do will be "Necessary Monsters." Luckily, I write these plays and then cast myself.

EDGE: If that's what it takes!

John Kuntz: It's really self-preservation. That's how it all began - when I was young I was never getting cast because people would look at me in a certain way or didn't know what I could do. So I wrote a one-person play to show that I could play different roles, and suddenly that became my job.

EDGE: You mentioned that your husband, Thomas Derrah, will be onstage with you in "Necessary Monsters." You've had the opportunity several times in recent years to be in plays together, with "The Lily's Revenge" at the A.R.T. and "Two Gentleman of Verona," which The Actors' Shakespeare Project produced at the Davis Square Theater. How do you enjoy working together, as well as being married?

John Kuntz: Oh, my god, we love it! It's strange, too, because up until "Two Gentleman of Verona" we hadn't worked together on a play since the last time the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company did "Twelfth Night" on the Common. I was Andrew Aguecheek, and he was Malvolio. [Speaking to Derrah] How long ago was that? It was, like, fifteen years ago?

We finally did "The Lily's Revenge," and even then I never saw Tommy. He was "The Great Longing," and I was a Poppy, and we weren't in the same Act. We would see each other in the dressing room, but not on stage. Then we were two clowns in "Two Gentlemen of Verona," and all our scenes were together. That was really fun. And now "Necessary Monsters." At the center of the play, there's this five-page monologue by this Gorgon-like woman. She's kind of like the tiniest doll at the center of the Russian doll. Tommy read it and said, "I want to play that woman!" Tommy just loves that character. I said, "You got it!" I can't wait for him to play her - he's going to be just wonderful.

What's really exciting too is that in the spring Tommy is going to direct a marvelous play that I have loved for a long time, called "God's Ear," by Jenny Schwartz, for Actors Shakespeare Project, and I'm going to be in that one. I've never worked with Tommy as a director before.

EDGE: Just be sure you have some pillows and blankets for the couch. Just in case.

John Kuntz: Yeah. Hopefully, it won't come to that!