Plagiarism and Its Discontents

Steven Drukman on academia, and on his new play at the Geffen

By Deborah Klugman

 

 

Steven Drukman is a prolific playwright whose play, Death of the Author, is currently receiving its world premiere at the Geffen Playhouse, under Bart DeLorenzo’s direction. Set in modern day academia, the play explores what happens when Jeff, a professor at a prestigious university, confronts Bradley, a student whom he suspects of plagiarism. The other characters involved include Trumbull Sykes, chairman of Jeff’s academic department and Sarah, a friend of Bradley’s.

 

 

Drukman’s other plays include Prince of Atlantis (South Coast Rep), The Innocents (Asolo Rep), In This Corner (Old Globe), Going Native (Long Wharf Theatre), Another Fine Mess (Portland Center Stage), The Bullet Round (Arena Stage), Flattery Will Get You (Connecticut Rep) and several others. He is a three- time Edgerton Award recipient and has won the Craig Noel Award, the Paul Green Award, the Critics’ Circle Award, and the Alfred P. Sloan Award, among others. In past years Drukman was a frequent contributor to such periodicals as The New York Times, The Village Voice, the International Herald Tribune, and The Nation. He has served as a senior editor of American Theatre Magazine and is currently an Associate Arts Professor at New York University, where he teaches playwriting. 

 

 

 

STAGE RAW: Can you talk a little bit about what the play is about?

 

 

STEVEN DRUKMAN: Orson Bean called it an academic thriller. And that’s not a bad description of what the play is.

 

 

SR: Was it inspired by an idea or an incident?

 

 

SD: It was inspired by a real life case of plagiarism that occurred to me as a professor at NYU. The wellspring was this feeling of unrepentant glee I had when I got this [plagiarized] paper from a student I didn’t like anyway. So I now had an excuse to not like this student, and perhaps looked forward with a bit too much relish to punishing her.

 

 

What about this student didn’t you like?

 

 

She was a terrible student. At one point she invited her boyfriend into the class and they were on Facebook the entire time. And she was never really present in the room. It was no great surprise that she handed in a paper that was not only cut and pasted from a website but was not even on an approved topic. It had nothing to do with the class I was teaching.

 

 

 What happened?

 

 

We went through the steps of meeting with my [Department] Chair. She kept denying [wrongdoing] so I had no choice but to fail her.   And then I got a call from my Chair over the summer to reconsider. And because I was coming up for review I had to reconsider. That’s not what the play is about but that was my inspiration for it.

 

 

 

An act of plagiarism is at the core of the plot. And the question is brought up: Do you have to know you are plagiarizing to be guilty of it?

 

 

Plagiarism is like pregnancy. Whether you know you’re getting pregnant or not, it doesn’t matter. Once you are pregnant, it is an undeniable state of affairs. Intention has very little to do with it. And that has been ever true. And it particularly has to be true now, with the Internet, when it’s so easy to lift words, sentences and paragraphs wholesale.

 

 

 Jeff, the young professor, is from a working class background while the student he is challenging, Bradley, comes from privilege. Would it be true to say that class resentment is fueling his action?

 

 

That’s part of it. There’s also partly an erotic attraction. And perhaps that feeling of relish that I was talking about: the desire to teach someone a lesson.

 

 

Can you talk about the themes of the play?

 

 

One idea in the play is the notion of academia and how that has changed and become based on the model of a corporation. Students are more like consumers. That’s a good model for some corporations; it’s a terrible one for a university. As a professor I can tell you without reservation that it has infected New York University’s educational mission. I know it has everywhere. If students can rate thumbs up or thumbs down on a professor based on really superficial criteria – it becomes a sort of buyers’ market. And we keep nudging [the university] towards a consumer model, catering to what the consumer wants. “I” can rate “you” and be anonymous, from my little cubby-hole. There’s no accountability. So that’s an important theme in the play.

 

 

 So if the university has changed, have the students changed too?

 

 

As generations are, the two young people in this play probably do not share the same values as I [when I was a student] and my co-students. When I was in school, to me, my values were such [that] I would never take a job that didn’t allow me to wear sneakers.

 

 

 Can you elaborate?

 

 

I was counterculture. We thought the worst thing you could do was sell out and be co-opted into the mainstream. Now [students] are much more ambitious. Sarah – she’s a philosophy and an English major – is extremely ambitious, and probably places more value on the fact that she took this prestigious seminar and can put it on her resume than the more transcendental invaluable prize you get from liberal arts. Which is itself an old-fashioned idea, but some of us still have that.

 

 

 Instead of being resistant to mainstream culture, their attitude is more “come and get me?”

 

 

Yes. You’re buying, I’m selling. And their language is intentionally that way. Sarah talks about her love for Bradley. She says, “I’ve invested 3 years.” She wants it to pay off.

 

 

So has this been your experience as a professor? Of course you can’t say that about everybody but……

 

 

Yes. But I have to say that in a lot of ways, they are a lot smarter than I was. I think in a lot of ways they are getting smarter and smarter and smarter. And that may be the positive side of this computer literacy and information age. They can’t write, but their intelligence seems to be growing.

 

 

 They have access to all this information.

 

 

Right. And it does make them in some specific way, smart and very canny. They don’t read many books anymore. I was one of those who loved reading. It’s still my greatest pleasure. I love writing but I would rather read than write. Most of my friends watched a lot of television. Now with the computers and whatever, they are reading even less.

 

 

 Is the play making a comment about the Internet?

 

 

I think [the play] says the Internet is dangerous. Because the Internet is a screen where we get information, we tend to make our judgments much more quickly and, I have to say, superficially — in an image-based way. A lot of the assumptions that Jeff makes about Bradley are wrong. They are Internet-age inflected. None of us is immune to that.   We’ve become this media saturated culture and it affects everyone, even idealistic young professors at Ivy League schools.

 

 

 

Where do you get the ideas for your plays?

 

 

An idea is never enough for a play. I could have 20 great ideas for a play. The process of writing for me is that I become obsessed with a character of some kind. I generally start with characters that are speaking to me in some way, and need or want something very badly. And you follow their needs and wants. If you are really organically in the skin of the character, often they will tell you what the story is about. You know you have a play if you have enough things to throw in your character’s way to keep him from getting what he wants. And if you have an understanding of the stakes in that loss: In other words, what happens if he doesn’t get it? It’s all about knowing what the character must have. And then some occasion, like this occasion that happens at NYU, sparks a character you already have. Sometimes it’s a headline in the newspaper that sparks it.

 

 

 When you wrote this play, did you apply this criterion of needing or wanting to any particular character?

 

 

To all of them. [If you don’t], the audience will feel the other characters are just a device for the main character. And there is a little bit of that in the greatest of plays. Sometimes characters are just there to maneuver the plot forward. But ideally it never happens. Every moment is accounted for.

 

 

When you create characters, do they develop as you go along?

 

 

Yes, they do, and they will surprise you. It’s better to feel them than it is to know them. I know TV doesn’t work this way, but for me writing a play does work this way. You kind of feel them on a cellular level. A professor told me once: When you make a fully dimensional character, the great ones – George and Martha, Willy Loman or Hamlet or Lear – they will eventually do something that is illogical, that seems to go against their major objective. It makes them more dimensional. When you create that character, you can’t decide what that thing will be, but you have to be alive to it when the character tells you. When that happens, that’s when you know you’re on the right track. Because when it’s schematically mapped out what a character can do, [that] often that leads to a superficial play.

 

 

Death of the Author is being performed at the Geffen Playhouse, 10866 Le Conte Ave., Westwood; Tuesdays through Sundays through June 29, www.geffenplayhouse.com