Chicago playwright Laura Jacqmin comes to Milwaukee for Milvotchkee

Chicago playwright (and former A.V. Club Chicago contributor) Laura Jacqmin, coming off the success of her play Ski Dubai at the prestigious Steppenwolf Theater this summer, has been in residence at UW-Milwaukee since August on a grant from the Center On Age And Community for her work-in-progress, Milvotchkee, Visconsin. Inspired by her grandfather, who suffered from dementia before he died, Milvotchkee dramatizes the sensation of experiencing the slow and steady disintegration of the human mind from the inside. Jacqmin's quirky theatricality in Milvotchkee is colored by her ability to observe the minutia of daily life, questioning assumptions and exploring what is unsaid. Milvotchkee, Visconsin will be given a staged reading Thursday and Sunday at Studio 508 inside the UWM Peck School Of The Arts. Both performances are free. Jacqmin recently met with The A.V. Club to talk about TV and why she likes theater more.

The A.V. Club: You have a knack for creating complex dramatic situations similar to episodic TV dramas. Are you influenced by TV?

Laura Jacqmin: I love TV more than I love movies, I have to admit. One of the major differences where I depart from it is language and theatricality. My language tends to be very, very strange, not the way that people would speak. I really don't like those plays that unfold in real time, where people do perfectly logical things. I don't like watching television up on stage. I do, however, really admire TV for making us care about characters, because you live with characters sometimes for years and you end up really invested in their stories. Of course, there are all these things that get our emotional triggers. You don't have those manipulative elements in theater—you can't underscore, you can't do the close up, so you have to find ways through dialogue and action and story. And when it's successful—and it's weird on top of it—that's a different kind of theater.

AVC: Why devote your life to theater when the money is all in TV and film? Theater has been called a dying art form.

LJ: [Laughs.] Well, we don't see it as a dying art form. It's funny people don't say this about music. Live music is where people want to be; recorded music is what we want to download for free. In theater, you can actually fundamentally change the form of it. You can’t be weird with film, because people say, "Why are you being weird with it?" In theater, you can have audience interaction, you can be strange with language, you can do weird things like read all of The Great Gatsby out loud for nine hours, and there's something really cool and strange and powerful about that. The money thing is a good question, and that's why a lot of playwrights are doing both. People who say they can write something and sell it and let shittier writers polish it until by the time it gets to the screen it’s something totally different, but you've made your $100,000 so you're okay with that? I think you're a liar. [Laughs.] I've got a couple of spec screenplays. I wrote an original pilot. It hasn't discouraged me yet. Writers are so used to making nothing that as soon as somebody offers you a big paycheck gig, it’s great. But I think you're going to go back to what makes you happier. For me, so far, theater makes me happier.

AVC: Your play Pluto Was A Planet involves secret societies at an elite college. How close is that to your own experiences at Yale?    

LJ: [Laughs.] Not at all. I had a lot of friends who were in the secret societies. Here are the secrets, basically: There's a lot of drinking involved, and a lot of the societies do this thing where everyone is assigned a night and they have to tell their entire life story. And I don't mean the interesting parts, I mean their entire life story. So mostly I would hear these reports of, "Oh God, we were there for seven hours last night." [Laughs.] But with the weird relationships, and you know, the hooking up thing, what they thought they were supposed to do and what they actually did, that was there. It's like those horror movie prequels, how they spend all this time talking about how Jason got to be Jason. It's too much information. It sort of takes the thrill away. The more you know, the more boring it is.