Meet Lisa D’Amour
Interview with the Playwright
CATF: This play is based on something that happened to you…
LDA: Yes, loosely based, of course, like everything is. The actual setting of the play is the building where I lived briefly with a boyfriend. During a design meeting, we could actually see the building on Google Maps.
This boyfriend of mine was trying to cut down on his drinking, so he decided to start smoking, which I thought was ridiculous. But over the next few weeks, I saw it actually reducing his anxiety, at least on the surface. It sparked me to think about coping mechanisms and how we live in a culture in which we’re sometimes required to try and heal one addiction with another, especially the way cigarettes are marketed as things to make us calm down and relax. He really did have a little smoking group outside of the apartment building, but the character of The Smoker and the people in The Smoker’s club are completely different from those folks.
In your play, The Smoker says, “Cigarettes are internal armor. They glue us together. We must create our own little bubble of pleasure and calm.”
For many people, a smoke break is a way to leave a stressful situation. It’s like taking a breath except it just happens to be a breath with nicotine in it. Perhaps their anxiety issues are about not fully feeling their feelings. By the way, I’m not saying that it’s necessarily a good thing to see cigarettes as “internal armor.”
Why does your play have imaginary smoking and imaginary characters?
This play is about the humanity we take for granted and maybe the way capitalism tries to keep us separate and not embrace our shared humanity and tenderness. A lot of things that are invisible in the play, like children and dogs, are very vulnerable creatures. Then there are practical reasons: it’s hard to put a dog on stage or a raccoon or even a human. When the play gets to the funeral scene, one of the characters “sees” these invisible characters and says, “Where did all these people come from? They’ve been here the whole time.” I hope it will get us all to ask, “Why am I not talking to my neighbors?”
What does smoke symbolize in your play?
It’s a stand-in for breath, for pheromones and chemistry and connection. Smokers who have read this play tell me that during smoke breaks you get to talk to people that you would never, ever talk to. That’s a connection that is harder to find in 2026. We could also say that literal smoke is a stand-in for the ineffable, something we should be paying attention to.
Why does The Smoker not have a real name like other characters in this play?
There are two ways of thinking about it. One is that the character of The Smoker is the anchor and creator of this group. Two, although I empathize with The Smoker – and I’m amazed at how many audience members do as well – he represents a certain kind of privileged white man who can sneak his way out of things with family money or a wife who is providing his health insurance. This may be invisible to the man himself so that is part of why I never gave him a name. As a playwright, I also grappled with wanting to kill this character and this trend. It was all related to my frustration with late-stage capitalism, misogyny and the pass that certain white men get in this country.
You have said, “Capitalism keeps us too busy to stop and feel.”
We’re too busy trying to make money, or too busy worrying if we have enough money, or too busy trying to keep up with multiple jobs to pay for our kids’ private school because public schools aren’t good enough, or too busy to create our own backyard garden that our neighbors can help us with, or too busy to even have time to go to the grocery store so we Instacart. Capitalism needs us to be in that kind of constant state of panic so we keep buying things.
You also believe that art can combat the dark side of capitalism. How does it do that?
When you go to the theater with x-number of people for an hour or two, you are taking some time out. If your feelings are shut down, we can feel something through what’s happening on stage. We can experience a kind of catharsis. Late-stage capitalism doesn’t want us to feel or think too much because if we do, we might want to change it.
You are very drawn to mystical and ritual elements…
I grew up in New Orleans from age 10 on and my mom has deep roots there. I was raised very, very, very Catholic so mysticism and ritual are in my DNA and have been a big part of my life in New Orleans, whether you’re grieving a loved one or celebrating a specific holiday. I believe in the power of ritual and also ecstatic dance. There have been times when it’s been so healing for me to dance in the streets. Not many people outside of New Orleans get to experience that healing feeling of ritual and dance and I try to bring it into my plays to give it to other people.
Whenever I write a play, every character is a little bit of me and begins with a deep question I have about myself and the world I live in. For “The Smoker,” the question was “Am I living in a country that is trying to kill me?” Imagine if I wasn’t a white woman. It’s hard to believe that your country is trying to nurture you, and when I say country, I mean the infrastructure, not the individuals. If I am living in a country that’s trying to kill me, I have to think about it, ask myself, “Are my plays helping or healing?”
You have said, “How can I write about big issues like maybe suburban fear, or the American economy, or the economy crashing, but make it look like two couples having a barbeque?”
That is specifically what my play, “Detroit” is about and I cannot take credit for that line. It belongs to my mentor, Sherry Kramer, a beloved playwright teacher who has produced many plays and just retired from Bennington. At some point in the 90s, she told me that audiences will not tolerate didacticism. They will shut down and not listen. Nobody wants to feel like they’re being lectured to in a play. So this is part of the magic trick of writing a play. It’s a little bit of a sleight of hand. You’re trying to hide what you’re talking about in something very casual, and hopefully by the end of the play, the audience realizes what we were talking about the whole time.
I don’t know if the middle class exists anymore, but I grew up in a basic neighborhood around lots of different kinds of people. I did not go to an Ivy League school, so I am not interested in writing a play where someone feels like it’s over their head. I’m more interested in all the ways I can invite an audience into a play.
Yes, you have said, “I love bringing people together and working with them to create seemingly impossible feats of theater . . . I love writing new worlds filled with nuance and idiosyncrasy. I love thinking out loud through my plays about how we humans live in this world, and how we can live better, clearer, louder, deeper.”
I came of age as an artist in the early 90s in Austin. I got an MFA at the university, then a parallel MFA in the streets of Austin doing plays in parks, backyards, parking lots and at one amazing theater called Frontera. One of the artists there was Erik Ehn, a renowned playwright, director and teacher who taught us that if we were going to make theater that is adventurous and not going to make money, we needed to support each other through meals and taking people into our homes. This real spirit of generosity was utopic. Don’t get me wrong, I love making money from my work, but what I really get out of this is being a healer.
How do you balance following established theatrical practices with pushing and/or breaking theatrical boundaries?
First, it’s about the form I’m working in because I work in multidisciplinary areas and in plays. In my multidisciplinary work, I always know that I’m going to be breaking a boundary because I’m trying to invest in new forms. With my plays, I try to start by making the audience think that the play is operating within a traditional Western approach to playwriting, but very soon it goes off the rails. I try to lure people in with the illusion of some kind of normalcy or tradition and then through humor, very generous characters and surprise, turn that on its head. I’m always trying to navigate that world.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
