Playwright Alex Riad's play The Floor is Lava is currently playing The Downstairs at La MaMa through May 19, 2019. Alex took time out from the production to answer our 6 Questions about the play, millennials and working at La MaMa.
1. What inspired you to write The Floor is Lava?
As I'm sure many New Yorkers can relate, when you’re a transplant in this city there's this pressure to justify the move by being wildly successful. When ever I'm back home drinking with friends or catching up with family, everyone’s always asking me, "How are you doing?", which really means, "Are you successful and happy?" My answer has always seesawed somewhere between yes and I'm fucking drowning. When I wrote The Floor is Lava both happiness and success seemed especially far away. I felt stuck and like giving up, but I still had to go home and answer that damn question: "How are you doing?" It just felt easier to lie and pretend. Hold it all in. Put on a happy face. Friends won't notice as long as there's enough scotch at the bar. I started writing Lava to start trying to be honest. Explore what it's like to come home and hide amongst friends instead of actually connecting to them.
2. What does the voice of a millennial sound like?
I don’t really think of it like that. I never aim to capture a voice. I aim to capture an experience, tell stories unique to our generation, while constantly striving for authenticity. In order to capture that authenticity, I need to fill those plays with three dimensional millennial characters, which gets to the core of why I focus on writing about us. When I made this my mission, I never felt our stories were really being told seriously nor our characters portrayed with any real depth. Their is no unifying millennial voice, we’re all just people just like any other generation, but colored with our individual experiences and shared generational experiences. Maybe we say “like” more than other generations too.
3. Do you think social media is good?
I think like any world changing technology it’s got its positives and negatives. Even if I leaned more negative than positive, I still couldn’t live with out it because it’s so ingrained in our society. Plus my day job is in social media so if it wasn’t around, I wouldn’t have a pay check. The positives are the ways that it connects the world. I never feel too far away from anyone anymore because I can stay updated with all my friends’ lives and they can stay updated on mine. Now, there are obvious truly terrible negatives like social media’s influence in interfering in the last Presidential election and how social media is used around the world to spread some pretty terrible misinformation that can have violet consequences. However putting those two aside, I would say the biggest draw back to social media is the way we can present ourselves on these platforms; it can be pretty superficial. We put a version of ourselves online that may or may not be us, so people “like” us. It’s almost like we each have a brand on social media to maintain. I don’t know if it’s a good thing for people to be brands, makes our newly enhanced communication with one another less honest, which in a sense undermines these connections we’re creating and maintaining with social in the first place.
4. What does real connection look like for the millennial generation?
What I brought up in the previous question, isn’t a specifically millennial problem. Every generation on the internet uses social media as a facade in some degree; it’s not a uniquely millennial experience. What’s unique to millennials is that social media has been a part of our lives since we were teenagers and we’ve never experienced adulthood without it. To answer your question, I’m not going to say, let’s put down our phones and really talk to each other because that’s gonna make me sound like a real asshole and it’s just not practical. However, in the context of the play, I can answer that real connection question for the main character in Lava, Sean. It means stop putting up this fake person to cover up his struggles and actually tell his friends who he is and admit that he needs help. Though Sean may not use social media, he’s a walking selfie or Instagram story, telling the world he’s wildly successful and happy when in actuality his life is falling apart and he has no idea what he’s doing. To admit that and be honest about his problems, is the only way out and the only way his friends can really be there for him. However, that would mean sacrificing an image he’s spent his whole life trying to craft.
5. What has changed for the characters in the ten years preceding this play?
If I answered that I’d be ruining one of the twists in the play. Come see it to find out.
6. What does working at La MaMa mean to you?
It’s a total honor. I’m a huge theatre history enthusiast and LaMama is one of the most important institutions in Indie Theatre history. At LaMama you can feel the history in every room: the textures, the artifacts in the archives, even the smells (which I know sounds weird). I’ve only ever done Indie Theatre in NYC and to be having my work done at one of the theaters that started that movement is unreal. Plus, I heard from my director that this play will now join the LaMama archives along side some really cool playwrights, so it’s almost as if I’m joining Indie Theatre history too.
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THE FLOOR
IS LAVA
written by Alex Riad
directed by Glory Kadigan
May 09 - May 19, 2019
Thursday - Saturday at 8pm; Sunday at 5pm
The Downstairs @ La MaMa
66 East 4th Street
(between Bowery and Second Avenue)
New York, NY 10003
Tickets: $25 Adults; $20 Students/Seniors
For Tickets and Info: CLICK HERE
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