Doran’s newest piece for the stage, The Mystery of Love and Sex has opened at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center, drawing critical praise in the process. Richard Bordelon/The Fordham Ram
By Richard Bordelon
Writer Bathsheba Doran, who has written for TV, radio and the stage, admits that if someone were to “put a gun to [her] head” and force her to choose only one of the art forms to write for, “it would be for the stage.”
“The connection between the work and the audience is so incredibly, relentlessly pure,” Doran explained, “it’s very special.”
Her newest piece for the stage, The Mystery of Love and Sex has opened at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center, drawing critical praise in the process.
From her youth, Doran knew that she enjoyed the theatre. “I naturally wrote plays,” she admitted. “It was something I just did at a very young age.” But these plays, some of which were for Hebrew school, have grown more complicated and more “proper” over time, starting in university.
Although it does not have a theatre program, Cambridge has a reputation for theatre among British universities, and Doran went there to pursue her art. For two years, she acted on stage before she pursued the craft of writing. “I didn’t really like acting, but it seemed like the only way to do it,” she said. “But then, through acting, I met people my own age writing plays and that’s when I started to get serious about it.”
Her first “proper” play, as she labels it, was Odes and Gameshows, which was performed at the London Fringe Festival. “I’m sure if I looked back on it now, I would be mortified,” Doran laughingly admitted, “although I do like the title.”
“Fresh out of Cambridge,” Doran’s first paid writing job was sketch comedy for British television. Although it was a shorter form than her plays, Doran took the job. “I was part of that Cambridge comedy community,” she explained, “and that’s sort of where the opportunities were.”
After handing in a sketch that was 12 pages, Doran was encouraged to move on to a different form. “A producer said to me that my sketches were getting longer and longer and longer,” Doran said, “[and that] I should go see about working in a longer form.”
After discovering the opportunities for her writing abroad, Doran decided to move to the United States in 2000 and settled in New York City. “I just always loved American culture,” she explained. “Things were happening in the United States that were just unbelievably exciting.”
Now that she has lived in the city for 15 years, Doran knows she made the correct decision. “I love New York City,” she said, “I don’t want to live anywhere else.” Even though she is British by national origin, she still feels like a New Yorker, which she believes is special. “You’re allowed to be a New Yorker wherever you come from and that’s not true in England.”
Ethnically Jewish, Doran — though not religious — felt disconnected from English identity. “That was a strange barrier to Englishness,” she explained. This barrier was part of the motive for her moving to New York. “I wanted to be in a home where I felt like I was part of the architecture,” she said.
Lately, her writing has centered on human relationships, particularly marriage. In general, however, Doran likes her work to examine the human experience and “human beings’ attempts to connect with each other when there are obstacles.” “They may succeed or they may fail,” she explained, “but I am very interested and moved by the impulse of people to try to stay in each other’s lives, to try and help each other.”
The Mystery of Love and Sex, which opened on March 2 and plays until April 26, draws on Doran’s interest in marriage and the “complications and compromises and sacrifices” that come with it. As a gay woman, Doran was inspired by her own experience and she wrote the play shortly after her child was born. “I felt unexpectedly sad about being gay,” she said “because it suddenly came crashing down to me that ‘Oh, I’m a lesbian, and my kid has two mommies, and I was unable to make him with my wife; we had to get help.’” This feeling caused Doran to think more about her identity.
Now, as a parent, Doran explained that she was also able to “look back on my early 20s with a degree of clarity I had never had before,” she said. “I was able to objectify the experience of being young in a completely different way and feel a huge amount of compassion for a generation that felt different to me.”
The play, which has drawn critical praise, exhibits the relationships between a father, mother, daughter and her childhood friend and views these relationships through the lenses of sex, religion and identity.
At the end of the night, however, Doran explained that she wants the audience to hold these characters close to their hearts. “I hope they remember the journey everybody went on with a feeling of compassion and astonishment for how far life can take us and how much we can forgive and how hard we all love each other.”
