The Management is currently in production of Larry Kunofsky’s witty, sweet party play, Your Boyfriend May Be Imaginary. We thought we’d do a little Q&A and I’m glad we did. Here is a profile on a thoughtful, humble, whip smart writer of stage plays as he muses on aging, bad theater and how to be the perfect party guest.

What am I, Adam Szymkowicz?

The Management: What was the seed of Your Boyfriend May Be Imaginary? Where did it come from?

Kunofsky: I started to become a little obsessed by how quickly and how often a person’s Significant Other would be referenced in conversation with people I was starting to get to know. 

It’s still fascinating to me!

I do it, too, when I’m in a relationship, because when you’re in a relationship, that relationship defines you, so how can you NOT bring it up?

It’s a very organic aspect of our lives, being single or coupled or otherwise peopled, but sometimes how we talk about it and why we talk about it with strangers becomes strange.

Some people talk about their girlfriend or boyfriend as a kind of Flirting Deflator.

Some use it as a counterintuitive Flirting Inflator!

Some people bring it up to make clear their sexual orientation.

Regardless of our intentions when we talk about this with strangers, the topic becomes a weird Rorschach test for all involved. He/she has a boyfriend/girlfriend? What does that say about him/her? What does it say about me that I’m visualizing this person’s relationship with some other person whom I haven’t even met yet?

As this obsession grew, I thought of a woman who was looking for her boyfriend at party after party, and at party after party, everyone she encountered refused to believe that this woman actually had a boyfriend.

I was also becoming fascinated by how women express themselves at work and in polite society and how, alarmingly often, women are ignored. I’ve noticed this at different jobs I’ve had, where an intelligent woman with good ideas would go unheeded. It even happened in rehearsals for a play I was working on once. In our culture, even now, we often tend to tune women out.  And women seem to me to be as guilty of tuning out other women as men are. This subject could have been handled in a political way, but I wanted to see it within a social context. The woman looking for her boyfriend. Why don’t people believe her? Why don’t people believe in her? Will she find someone who will truly hear her, who will finally listen to her?

Also, as a lifelong New Yorker, I’m endlessly fascinated by how busy we all are at all times and how, at least in my circles, a person whom you consider among your closest and very best friends is someone you might only get to spend time with three or four times a year. I find this notion absurd. And therefore hilarious! And also deeply sad.

The Management: The play deals with people in their 30s who feel like their lives are missing something: love, power, meaning etc. What do you think makes a person’s 30s special? What are the blessings and/or pitfalls of one’s 30s? 

Kunofsky: This is such a fun and juicy question, and I will take the time herein to luxuriate in its succulent-ness, but first – I must say that people place too much value on how old other people are.

I’ll go so far as to say that ageism is the subtlest and therefore perhaps the most pernicious and insidious frontier of isms.

And this persists because it matters. How old someone is matters, just as a person’s race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and class matter, but what matters most is HOW these things matter, and I feel strongly that we as a society must get better at allowing these things to matter in ways that help us understand and relate to people, rather than to dismiss people through categorization.

Whenever someone asks me “how old are you” it almost feels what it must have felt like in the 1950s when someone asked you “Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?” Basically, when someone asks “How old are you,” what they too often seem to me to be saying is “please explain the ways in which I can judge you so that I don’t have to take the time to actually get to know you.”

Ageism swings both ways. For such an unimaginative, inflexible sensibility, it’s pretty bi-curious.  Just when you seem to take pride in your own maturity, you find yourself looking down on people who are younger than you. Conversely, I heard someone in her mid-20s say that she can’t deal with anyone in their mid-30s or older, because “those people are set in their ways and never change.” And I thought, REALLY?! I mean, Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies brought a political perspective to finding the older (ruling) class dubious, but if your ideas about people are so fixated on their age and what someone as dopey as you once told you about that age group…. well, then… you suck.

What’s so fascinating about people in their twenties is that they’re still in the oven, baking, and sometimes they seem to puff up like a soufflé, and other times they seem to darken and to savor, like a roast.

Supposedly, on a physiological level, a person becomes a whole other person every seven years, since that’s the time it takes for every cell in our bodies to regenerate. But emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually, many people in their 20s seem to be transforming every couple weeks or so. At times the same person seems Adele-like And Scarlet Johansson-ish, but the next minute they can go all Nicki Minaj on you, or even Lindsay Lohan-y, and sometimes that’s terrifying.

But there’s any number of ways that people use that time in their lives to transform in ways that are happy, healthy, and ethical, and when that happens, it’s really exciting. For me, when I look back at my twenties, I think of a guy who did not have his shit together, but even when that embarrasses me, I take heart in how my contemporaries and my older friends (and I always had a lot of older friends) were patient with me as I was learning to handle my shit. Now I’m pretty secure in who I am and the notion that if I treat people fairly and warmly, I’ll either receive the same treatment in return or that I’ll know to look elsewhere.

My twenties were an anxious time for me. I wanted to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and marry Marisa Tomei before I turned thirty, and I kind of felt that the world would end if this didn’t happen. But this didn’t happen, and the world didn’t end, and then I went on with the business of living and enjoying my life. But sometimes I’m still a little bummed about Marisa Tomei.

The characters in Your Boyfriend May Be Imaginary have a hyperactive sense of awkwardness, neuroses, and peer pressure, because they all KNOW that they’re too old to be feeling this way, and yet they do! And sometimes, yeah, this happens in life. Just when you think you’ve escaped high school and all your high school demons, you hear the inner school bell of your mind chiming.

One of my heroes is the phenomenal and much under-appreciated singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman. When he was in his twenties, he started the Modern Lovers, which was kind of riffing on the severity and oh-so-coolness of the Velvet Underground, and he kind of single-handedly invented Punk. But then he had a kid and didn’t want to play electric guitar around the baby’s delicate ears, so he became gentler, kinder, and sweeter in his music and his musical approach, and he kind of became a camp counselor for adults in his music, but in a good way, in a very good way. And that’s my model as I grow as a playwright and as a person. I want to write plays the way Jonathan Richman makes music. And I want my life to be a later, gentler, joyful Jonathan Richman song.

The Management: Follow-up: Did you write plays in your teens or 20’s? If so, how is your writing now as compared to then? What’s changed, artistically or professionally?

Kunofsky: I was precocious and started writing plays in my late teens, and I found my voice pretty early, actually, but had to grow up to relax a little bit about it.

I write comedies. And I had weird ambivalence about this when I was younger.

I wanted to be Ingmar Bergman.

But then I realized that as great as Bergman was, I’m a lot funnier than he was.

And that means something. It means something to me, and it could potentially mean something to others, too.

So I embraced the fact that I write funny plays, and by doing so, I accept that even though I might not win the prestigious awards, I create the potential to illuminate people’s lives for an hour or two, and almost trick them into thinking deeply about things while they’re laughing.

I was skinnier and probably better-looking in my twenties. And other people told me at the time that I had a raw talent that seemed boundless, and if that was ever so, it’s probably less so now. But I know I still get smarter, year by year, and I do get better as a playwright. Also, I never give up on a good idea.

I’m a very rigorous re-writer. I take a play that had some good bits, but never quite worked, and start over. So a lot of the plays I wrote in my twenties became much better as time went on, because I never gave up on them. 

Actually, I wasn’t just Not Giving Up on my plays, I was Not Giving Up on myself.

And like my plays, I’m a work-in-progress. Living one’s life, as with writing a play, is not a race, but a process. The process can sometimes seem vexing, but ultimately, find the pleasure in it, delight in the process, and savor it. Like wine, kid!

(I use the term “kid,” ironically, and can be applied to anyone, of any age.) 

The Management: Talk about your own company, Purple Rep. How did it start and where is it going?

Kunofsky: Purple Rep is still what it started out to be a couple years ago when it was founded – a playwrights’ collective. The legendary 13P (a group of 13 playwrights who started a limited company to produce one play by each writer) was a big inspiration to me. Purple Rep started out with two playwrights, but now I’m the sole playwright/artistic director. Sometimes that makes me feel like I’m raising a baby without my Baby Momma (for a while, I was haunted by the image of Dustin Hoffman playing alone with his kid in Kramer Vs, Kramer, but I’ve since moved on to other movies inside my head), but this past season brought new collaborators on board and showed me that there’s a definite future in store for the company.

As the company grows, I expect to build a floating repertory company of playwrights, and together, we’ll produce our plays in rep. My ideal mini-season for Purple Rep would involve using one space for eight weeks in which four plays by four playwrights would have their plays produced on alternating nights, using the same design team, and having a thematic connective tissue that links all the work. This year I came up with the slogan “Playwrights Control The Means Of Production!” I think that’s pretty nifty.

Beyond the mission of creating playwright-driven work and co-producing playwrights in rep, there is a specific sensibility and aesthetic for what makes a Purple Rep play a Purple Rep play.

Basically, it’s what Purple means to me. Purple is the color of sex. So far, all the plays we’ve produced have really been ABOUT sex, have been sex-positive, and have explored the notion of Queer-ness in some iteration or another.

Not every play I’ve written is necessarily a Purple Rep play, but a lot of ‘em are, since I’m THAT guy, the straight white guy fascinated by Queerness and Otherness.

I feel strongly that we’ll adhere (at least abstractly) to this aesthetic, but I’m also open to and hopeful about how the company shifts and changes and evolves as more and more playwrights and staffers join me on this mission.

I always give my artistic collaborators the Magnificent Seven speech. We’re gunfighters. Some might be in it for glory, some for justice. But if you’re in it for the money, or the long life-expectancy, you’re crazy, because we’re GUNFIGHTERS! So stick to your guns. Let’s stick together. And let’s ride! We might not all come back alive, but if we do our jobs right, people will be singing legends of our adventures.

I do think that any small, independent theatre company has to seriously consider the notion of co-producing with another company, or multiple companies.

So what do you think, Josh? Does The Management want to make out with Purple Rep? 

The Management: Yes, we do. I’ll even put on my Dr. Pepper Lip Smacker. Let’s talk shit. What kind of plays do you absolutely hate?

Kunofsky: Absolutely not! I refuse! I simply am far too enlightened…. Aw, who am I kidding, let’s go!

I’ve seen about seventy bajillion Off-Broadway plays about families dealing with the death of a loved one in exactly the same way, and the sets are always beige.

Why do people in bad plays always live in beige houses?!

The family is just about the most important unit of human interaction, and facing mortality is among the most profound of experiences, and yet Off-Broadway has created a genre that makes this all very bland, anemic, and flat, always concerning people with more money than me, living in much bigger homes, dealing in very boring ways with someone who died before the play began who I don’t care about, and I missed the pamphlet or brochure that explains this White, Western Jihad being waged against decorating one’s living quarters with color.

Also, plays about infidelity and only infidelity are almost always stupid to me. The British are particularly notorious perpetrators of this kind of cavity-producing confection. I just think it’s prurient and petty and suggests to me that people who spend two hours worrying about whether so-and-so slept with whozee-what will be lined up against a wall and shot, come the revolution.

I recently saw a play where the protagonist kills people because of an unhappy romantic life, and then once the unhappy romantic life is resolved, the killing stops and everything is adorable and hilarious. This kind of thing drives me up a tree! I can take the most absurdist notion – like people turning into rhinoceroses – as long as there are real consequences for the characters to face. I love inventiveness, I love stretching the bounds of reality, I love when a play can feel like the dream I had the night before, but if there is no value, or seemingly arbitrary value, placed on basic human concerns and interactions, then the play is fake, phony, and a bunch of hooey.

I need emotional content. I need a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. If I don’t get this, or if I suspect I’m being asked to buy into a cheap and dishonest substitute for this, I’m gonna feel really ripped off.

I really hate smart-alecky plays. I love plays with intellectual rigor, but plays that are glib and flippant, plays that are op-ed pieces rather than drama, plays that tell me that what I already think and feel in general is good and not worth thinking or feeling deeply or differently about (ie, “War Is Bad!”)… all of these kinds of plays massage the egos of the audience and the playwright, and that’s a kind of mental masturbation that I’m sure really does make you go blind.

I hate plays with protagonists who are very much like the playwright and how no other character understands or appreciates how good and just and well-meaning he or she is, even though he or she has all the best lines.

Theatre at its best is like a great rock concert. And when I see a play, I ask myself, how does it rock? Sometimes (and we’re a little spoiled here in New York, because there really is a ton of great theatre here) it just totally ROCKS THE HOUSE! But when it doesn’t, I will have wished I stayed home.

In the words of Jonathan Richman “If the music’s gonna move me / Folks, it’s gotta be Action Packed!”

And as Duke Ellington said, “It don’t mean a thing / If it ain’t got that swing/ Doo Wop Doo Wop Doo Wop Doo Wop Doo Wop!”

But from now on, I will take the high road, and never talk smack… wait, this is not true.

The Management: Stump speech time. Is there a play that operates as a guilty pleasure for you or a play you find yourself constantly defending?

Kunofsky: I spend an awful lot of time defending the plays of David Mamet. It’s extremely convenient to hate him. But I think his plays are marvelous.

His essays are pretty boring, his politics embarrass me, and his public persona seems to me in many ways to be pompous and chauvinistic, but his plays are just so extremely beautiful to me. His play Oleanna gets criticized as a piece of misogyny, but I find that play to be an outcry, a howl, a yawp, at the ways in which we as a species fail to communicate with one another.

Any play that deals in gender politics will divide people, and perhaps Mamet was playing the role of the agent provocateur in writing this play, but it works for me, especially since I sympathize with both characters.

There does seem to be a surprising amount of misogyny in mainstream American theatre, which is not only disgusting in and of itself, but alarming for an art form practiced and attended almost exclusively by supposed liberals. And yet despite what many intelligent people believe about him, I myself just don’t consider Mamet to be in such low company as those who revel in bad plays about bad people behaving badly for its own sake.

I personally suspect that people’s irritation with Mamet’s work speaks to a much larger (and far more relevant) issue: that the work of other writers of other ages, genders, classes, ethnicities have less of a voice in our culture, and so when a fancy big-time dude like Mamet writes about gender or race or religion or class, we feel all too sorely and sorrowfully and agonizingly the lack of alternative voices in the mainstream that would help balance our theatre culture.

This is most certainly and most emphatically a severe problem, but not Mamet’s fault.

I hope that mainstream theatre matures in our nation to the point where a play written by an established white male will never have the last or the definitive say on any point, and neither would anyone else, or any other play or playwright, for that matter.

There are so many strong voices with so much to say writing for the theatre right now, and perhaps it’s too easy to dismiss certain iconoclastic plays and playwrights because there are so many other plays that have yet to find a place in the culture. But I have a lot of hope for theatre as an art form in this country – I think it’s going to be relevant the way indie rock was relevant a couple decades ago. And when that happens, I hope that we develop a more daring appetite for plays that are morally ambiguous, because when a play challenges our personal sensibilities with any degree of moral seriousness, a true catharsis can occur, an ancient, primal, collective form of healing, development, and growth.

Is that stump-speechy enough for you?!

The Management: Yes. Thank you for engaging. Your Boyfriend May Be Imaginary is a party play. Are you a fan of parties? Why or why not?

Kunofsky: Yes, I am a fan of parties. As with a production of a play, a party can be lovely and ecstatic and wonderful, or it can be deadly and make you feel like you’ve grown a long grey beard on your soul in just a couple hours. And even when I see a bad play or go to a bad party, it just makes me hungrier for a better one.

I love being invited to things, by the way. But not in that mass-email or Facebook way, but when someone goes out of their way to personally invite me, as in, we’re having some people over, and we’d love for YOU to join us, I’m putty in their hands – I’ll show up in a toga at a rooftop party in a blizzard, if that’s what’s required.

And again, very much as with theatre, a party has the potential to be a transformative experience. But we also need to relax about transformative experiences.

I notice that every time I buy a new shirt, I think, somewhere in my brain, that wearing this shirt will change my life. But sometimes a shirt will expressly NOT change your life, but it will just make your eyes pop, and that’s pretty great, too.

So as with theatre, every time I go to a party, I expect it to change my life a little. But when I relax and just engage in whatever happens, that’s when the real party begins.

The Management: Last question. What, in your opinion, is the recipe for a perfect party?

Kunofsky: The best way to be at a party is very much like the best way to travel in another country:

Speak to everyone you come across.

Become as intimate with strangers as you can, while placing no expectations or judgments on anyone.

It’s good to have a buddy or two to check in with if needed, but let them do their thing and hopefully they’ll let you do your thing.

Treat everyone you meet as if they are the most intelligent, attractive, and fascinating person you ever met, and really, really believe this. And then it will be so.

And then when you leave the party or the foreign country and you’re back on your own turf, try to make your home country a foreign country, and make your regular life a party. And then it will be so.

Your Boyfriend May Be Imaginary runs at UNDER St. Marks April 4th-28th. 

Buy tickets here.

Donate to the show here.

Follow us on Twitter. @ManagementTheaterCo