Check out Jolly Abraham’s interview with him below:

Below is more of the interview Dramaturg Kate Farrington conducted with Playwright David Davalos during the first week of rehearsals for WITTENBERG.

KATE FARRINGTON: Each of the characters in this play has a very distinctive sound—how did you hit on that?

DAVID DAVALOS: Early on, I knew. I wanted to give myself the freedom to interpret Faustus according to my needs. He’s an archetype—the historical figure is open to debate as to who he was or if there were more than one of them. And the literary tradition is a tension between his damnation and salvation—two very different fates depending on who’s writing him. He was always going to be the most modern character, and I knew I was going to be pouring a lot of myself into him.

I had other people who were models beyond Marlowe and Goethe—George Carlin in the 70s during his class clown, long hair, cultural wise man phase, Groucho Marx, Timothy Leary, Nietzsche, Interesting blend for Faustus

With Luther, the more I researched him, the more I liked his voice—particularly his description of the Tower experience in which he came to his new understanding of man’s relationship to God, and of his visit to Rome where he first questions the idea of indulgences. The translations I was reading expressed those ideas so beautifully that I wanted to steal them. At the same time he’s very—and I mean this in a complimentary way—coarse and vulgar in the sense of common. He was a German peasant (as was Faustus in Marlowe’s play). I wanted to create a way of expressing Luther that would allow me to slip into his words without anyone being able to see the seams.

With Hamlet, I felt I that if I used Shakespeare’s Hamlet, he should sound like Shakespeare’s Hamlet. So he uses a more archaic, Elizabethan construction. When he’s allowed to talk at length he slips into iambic pentameter. But I also felt that since he’s Danish and they’re German, he’s royalty and they’re commoners—there are a number of reasons to make him sound different. As a playgoer I enjoy plays in which the dialogue is musical. I love trying to write in a way that tries to accommodate these different tones, and rhythms. Hamlet could be high-flown, Luther was a base undercurrent, and Faustus could ping-pong wherever he needed. In his scenes with Helen he’s a little florid and purple—he gets a little Goethe-ian romantic. In other places he sounds like someone who wouldn’t mind you dropping by during office hours today.

During the first week of rehearsals for WITTENBERG, Dramaturg Kate Farrington sat down with Playwright David Davalos to discuss his play. Below is a snippet of the interview. We’ll post more in the coming weeks.

KATE FARRINGTON: The first production of this play was in 2008 at The Arden Theater in Philadelphia and Jim Sullivan directed it. How did you two meet?

DAVID DAVALOS: We met through the good graces of Terry Nolan, the Artistic Director there. He was very invested in my having a good experience with the development and production of this play so I think he was dedicated to finding a director who really got it. I remember that very early on Jim described the play as “intellectual vaudeville” and I thought; I’m in good hands. Because he got it—the intellectual underpinnings, the comedy, the stagecraft—it just felt very comfortable.  The entire time I was redrafting and cutting and moving characters around. That went on all the way through previews, and Jim was a wonderful ally and collaborator.

KF: And now you’re having a busy year with the play.

DD: They’re doing a reading of it at The Globe in London as part of their education programming that, this winter, is exploring “Shakespeare’s German.” I found out that the winter emphasis would be on the importance of Wittenberg as a location in Shakespeare and Marlowe. So I wrote to their director of development saying I’d be interested to know once they’d settled on a schedule, as I had written a play on that very subject. I sent this around 11pm London time assuming I’d never hear back. Two hours later I get an email saying “You must send the script immediately.”

The reading is part of two weeks of lectures and symposiums all about Luther, Shakespeare, and Marlowe. It’s the UK premiere and it’s so gratifying. I’d always wanted to hear the play done with English actors because it derives so much from the English literary tradition and I always kind of hoped that if it got to London it would go the Globe, or the RSC or the National. For one of those things to actually land kind of blew my mind.

Then out of nowhere I got a message on Facebook (of all things) from an American director who works in Berlin. He said he’d heard of the play, read it, loved it, and wanted to know if I was interested in sanctioning a German translation of it to be performed in Berlin at a theatre called the Vagrants’ Stage. Long story short, now I have a German publisher, and the production opens at the end of March.

It’s going to be very exciting to see the English literary tradition and the German cultural tradition each have their whack at it. All I need now is a production at Elsinore and I’m set.