Artistic Director Brian Golden discusses his upcoming play, Cooperstown

Interview by Jonathan Baude

What's your writing process like? On a day-to-day level? Overall?

Oh, it's awful. Writing starts hard, and I think I make it harder with a truly remarkable inability to focus and forget about what other things I have to do. Writers, as a species, are experts at every possible way to put off doing the hard work of filling the blank page with words. Basically, the second I check email on a given day, any hope of writing anything substantive is out the window.

On a big picture scale, I think I'm a pretty good rewriter. My first drafts are awful. They're overwritten, they're simple, they're bad. Once I get to the end of a draft, I feel so relieved because I can step outside the piece a little bit, and hopefully have a pretty good sense of what I need to fix to make it better. But I'm very self-critical, and that means I don't work fast. I will never be one of those writers that can just write and write and write and then redraft and redraft. I'm definitely the tortoise in that race.

Cooperstown deals with some big topics – race relations, sports, history. What does Cooperstown add to the conversation about all those things?

I definitely didn't start the play to talk about any of those things. I started writing the play because I was in a workshop at Chicago Dramatists, where each writer was provided with five actors for whom they had to write a play. Of those actors, I really wanted to write something for Cecil Burroughs. His voice was so strong, and I wanted to write a piece for him. At that time, I had just become very interested and impressed with Jackie Robinson, and became interested in pursuing this idea of exploring why a black man might NOT be a Jackie Robinson fan, or at least want to dodge acknowledging that.

Then the play died on the shelf for about a year and a half, because I was stuck with a first act and didn't know where to go with it. In that mean time, I had read A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn, which is truly a phenomenal book, a new kind of history book I'd never read before – a history book with hardly a mention of who I'd previously thought of as "historical figures" – presidents, politicians, explorers, all that. It was really a people's history – and reframed in my mind that 'ordinary people' were historical figures, too. So that kind of became the piece I wanted to write: a play about the trickle-down effect of 'history' on ordinary people.

One thing that's interesting to me is that I started writing this piece before the age of Obama, before I'd even really heard of Barack Obama – I mean a little, but not much. I'm sure the play would have been different without Obama, although I'm not really sure how. It's a different conversation now than it was in early 2007.

What's the hardest part of writing a play? What's the best part?

The hardest part is…you know, writing it! Thinking about it, talking about it, brainstorming, all that – pretty easy. Actually staring a blank Microsoft Word document in the face with no one there to help you – that's the hardest part. The best part? Being finished. This is my third full-length piece, and my favorite line of each of those plays is the last one.

This is your first full-length play for Theatre Seven. How does it feel?

It's good. I'm glad we're doing this play. The company, from top to bottom, has supported the project and me from beginning to end. I've never pitched either of my first two plays to Theatre Seven, and I'm glad now that I haven't, because I think I'm better now. I think this writing is more mature, I think it's better. I'm excited to have this opportunity because this piece is a new adventure for us in a lot of ways – my first full piece for the company, the first show directed by Brian Stojak, the first time we've really done "history", our first cast with a majority of non-white actors. All those things are really exciting to me. At the same, it's a classic Theatre Seven play that has a lot to do with Chicago, even though it isn't set there – the play's about race, baseball and family for God's sake. That's Chicago.

How historically accurate is the play?

Kind of accurate! Almost all the Jackie Robinson stuff is very, very accurate. All the baseball stuff is highly accurate. The box scores and stats that Dylan and Junior are arguing about at the very beginning of the play is specific down to the actual day. Thanks to an amazing website, www.baseballreference.com, I was able to get box scores and stats from the day before I set the play: July 20, 1962. I made up the names of the players involved in the incident Junior describes in the third act – the players from the Memphis Blues. Actually, the Memphis Blues weren't playing in the International League in 1953. I loved the name Memphis Blues. But really, most of the baseball history is very accurate.

The music in the play is less accurate, and I sure hope no one cares that much! Bob Dylan had released an album in 1962, but it only sold 5,000 copies and no one had really listened to it. He didn't really get big until Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, which was in early 1963, so I've cheated history there by about 8 months. By that time, a ton of people would have known who he was. Dylan was just such a seminal figure, and did exactly what I wanted the music in the play to do. Some of the Dylan songs I've called for in the play didn't emerge until '64 or '65. But, you know, it's not a documentary. I figure if people leave angry that I got Bob Dylan's discography wrong, I've probably failed in multiple other ways.

What made Jackie Robinson so special?

Baseball was the guy's third best sport. He truly could have played professional football, basketball and maybe could have been an Olympian in track. He was All-American at UCLA in four sports. He was an officer in the US Army, and was court-martialed for refusing to move to the back of a bus 9 years before Rosa Parks did the same thing in Alabama. When he made the move to the Dodgers' major league club, he was moved to first base about a month before the season started, and he'd never played there in his life. He learned the position, did great, won the NL Rookie of the Year. On top of all that, he was an incredibly humble, gracious human being. Jackie was fighter, but he fought with stolen bases and decency. He's my hero. This play is really a love poem to him.

How is the play different now than in the early drafts?

Well, it has a plot now. So that's good :)