John Jahnke, Writer and Director

Surprisingly difficult to paraphrase, the three parts of Men Go Down follows the adventures of a not-necessarily-good Greek king and the gods, nymphs and ghosts who love him. So naturally in the third part you can count on everything from nymphs who have been with child for millennia, ghosts of slain Argonauts, heaps of cocaine and naked maids in blindfolds. Also? While the show itself is lush with details, the dialogue is not. For reasons we'll let Jahnke explain, the characters have real difficulty getting their words out.

A scene from Jahnke's Men Go Down (Dixie Sheridan).

In your work you've shown a knack for theatrical tableaus and this production has more than its fair share (the final one in particular is a doozy). When writing a script like Men Go Down how much are you writing with those moments preconceived? I don't think consciously in terms of creating tableaus at all when I am writing. I let the situation inform the gesture, though I'm certain somewhere in the back of my brain a picture may be informing the text. When I go into rehearsal I identify the tableaus that seem to stand out on their own within the narrative structure, and create them onstage from there.

What attracted you to telling this particular story? I'm been moderately engaged in recent years by people who seem to succeed with no effort, with no ethics and with no focus, who then become terrified of their success, as if finally conscious that they have done little to deserve it, and then try to sabotage it to little or no effect. What also intrigued me is the way that the people around them, if they are not careful, are drawn down by this guilt, more so than the guilty party themselves. Of course the end of the Bush era was a huge influence on the story.

Why mount the third part in a not uncomplicated trilogy first? The program argues that Men Go Down "relies less on temporal order than on thematic impressions and explorations," but that almost makes the plot sound trivial, which it certainly wasn't. Pity the audience member who doesn't read the synopsis of the first two parts! I suppose it really is a rather bratty gesture, and one I didn't think would trivialize the text, at least at the time. After we workshopped the entire work at Abrons Art Center, I became overwhelmed by its sheer scope and size. I knew I had to limit it to one section first, and after an intellectual debate with the designers, decided on the third part, which seemed to pack a certain odd punch out of context. I'm really not afraid of approaching the creation of a work from an unusual perspective, though I know it throws others off.

There is something lovely about a man sleeping for more than a thousand years and then abusing cocaine to make up for lost time. How did that idea arise? It seemed logical, given his use of opium in Part Two, that he would resort to cocaine, as he has an addict's personality, in order to escape reality once again. As Diana keeps him a prisoner in his own home, what worse fate than to be trapped in ones ancestral home, in an era one doesn't understand, alone most of the time, without the balm of stimulants?

In Part 3: Black Recollections your characters speak purposely stilted and elliptical blank verse dialogue (the script even has a glossary of pauses!)—why are these characters, including gods and ghosts, unable to finish their sentences? They've lived so long that language has become an oddity, a toy, an ever-changing panoply of sound. Certain words no longer serve their purpose. I'm been rather obsessed with the destruction of modern language through texting and Twittering, and decided to attack a classic form of verse itself, and see what happened.

Men Go Down has a lot of nudity in it—much more than written into the script provided to the press. What does having additional ghost debaucheries, naked video portraits and Hylas' striptease add to the production? Do you worry about the audience being distracted? I'm schooled in the visual arts first and foremost, and I view the body as a painter might, and rarely think in terms of shock or distraction. I find the body in painting, sculpture, photography, etc., beautiful, and I don't know why it can't be presented in a serious setting onstage. I think people's issues with it stem more from our Puritan history in America than anything else.

Another scene from Men Go Down (Dixie Sheridan).

You and your collaborators are remarkably adept at creating lavish-seeming productions on what I'm guessing is a budget much smaller than it looks. How much time goes into an hourlong show with this much going on in it? Endless amounts of time and planning. Countless debates about what it will cost. Sacrifices on expensive materials when a cheaper one may look all right under the lights. Much more time than anyone expects. And weeks and weeks and weeks of rehearsal. There were two full workshops before we even began the production process on this one. Every prop, costume, lighting instrument counted. Every actor's day in rehearsal counted.

Speaking of lavish theater budgets—seen Spider-Man? Any thoughts you would like to share on the era of the $65-million-dollar musical? I've had no time to see it, and am not really interested, comic books and commercial pandering don't appeal to me, but I find its cost rather shameful and embarrassing when so many artists are suffering to create work on a smaller scale. That said, the smaller artists may exceed beyond measure, and such oversized Broadway works may not.

What's your next project once this finishes its run? Are there any plans to mount parts one and two? We begin development work on Part One (Alas, The Nymphs) in September with a 2012 opening. I am also interested in creating a dance piece, but this is very much on the drawing board.

And finally, just for my own curiosity, was there a reason why Endymion enters initially through the sideboard? Beyond being a lovely and surprising visual? The initial pre-show tableau had him praying in whispers watching the trio in the bathtub sleep. This became dreary and no longer made sense to me. I figured that if he stored his cocaine in the sideboard, and never slept, that this is where he'd spend the night (after a night of debauchery), secluding himself, as in Part Two. He barely fits through but we made it work!