![\"Steven](\"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Drukman-Headshot.jpg\")
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Steven Drukman is a prolific playwright whose play, <\/em>Death of the Author, is currently receiving its world premiere at the Geffen Playhouse, under Bart DeLorenzo\u2019s 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\u2019s academic department and Sarah, a friend of Bradley\u2019s.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Drukman\u2019s other plays include <\/em>Prince of Atlantis (South Coast Rep), <\/em>The Innocents (Asolo Rep), <\/em>In This Corner (Old Globe), <\/em>Going Native (Long Wharf Theatre), <\/em>Another Fine Mess (Portland Center Stage), <\/em>The Bullet Round (Arena Stage), <\/em>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\u2019 Circle Award, and the Alfred P. Sloan Award, among others. In past years Drukman was a frequent contributor to such periodicals as <\/em>The New York Times, <\/em>The Village Voice, the<\/em> International Herald Tribune, and The Nation. He has served as a senior editor of <\/em>American Theatre Magazine and is currently an Associate Arts Professor at New York University, where he teaches playwriting.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n STAGE RAW:<\/em><\/strong> Can you talk a little bit about what the play is about?<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n STEVEN DRUKMAN:<\/strong> Orson Bean called it an academic thriller. And that\u2019s not a bad description of what the play is.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n SR:<\/em><\/strong> Was it inspired by an idea or an incident?<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n SD:<\/strong> 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\u2019t like anyway. So I now had an excuse to not<\/em> like this student, and perhaps looked forward with a bit too much relish to punishing her.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n What about this student didn\u2019t you like?<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0What happened?<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n We went through the steps of meeting with my [Department] Chair. She kept denying [wrongdoing] so I had no choice but to fail her.\u00a0\u00a0 And then I got a call from my Chair over the summer to reconsider. And because I was coming up for review I had<\/em> to reconsider. That\u2019s not what the play is about but that was my inspiration for it.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n 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?<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Plagiarism is like pregnancy. Whether you know you\u2019re getting pregnant or not, it doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s so easy to lift words, sentences and paragraphs wholesale.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0Jeff, 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?<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n That\u2019s part of it. There\u2019s also partly an erotic attraction. And perhaps that feeling of relish that I was talking about: the desire to teach someone a lesson.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Can you talk about the themes of the play?<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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\u2019s a good model for some corporations; it\u2019s a terrible one for a university. As a professor I can tell you without reservation that it has infected New York University\u2019s educational mission. I know it has everywhere. If students can rate thumbs up or thumbs down on a professor based on really superficial criteria \u2013 it becomes a sort of buyers\u2019 market. And we keep nudging [the university] towards a consumer model, catering to what the consumer wants. \u201cI\u201d can rate \u201cyou\u201d and be anonymous, from my little cubby-hole. There\u2019s no accountability. So that\u2019s an important theme in the play.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0So if the university has changed, have the students changed too?<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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\u2019t allow me to wear sneakers.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0Can you elaborate?<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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 \u2013 she\u2019s a philosophy and an English major \u2013 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.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0Instead of being resistant to mainstream culture, their attitude is more \u201ccome and get me?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Yes. You\u2019re buying, I\u2019m selling. And their language is intentionally that way. Sarah talks about her love for Bradley. She says, \u201cI\u2019ve invested<\/em> 3 years.\u201d She wants it to pay off.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n So has this been your experience as a professor? Of course you can\u2019t say that about everybody but\u2026\u2026 <\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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\u2019t write, but their intelligence seems to be growing.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0They have access to all this information.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Right. And it does<\/em> make them in some specific way, smart and very canny. They don\u2019t read many books anymore. I was one of those who loved reading. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0Is the play making a comment about the Internet?<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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.\u00a0\u00a0 We\u2019ve become this media saturated culture and it affects everyone, even idealistic young professors at Ivy League schools.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>