It’s Not in the P-I

The reporters are getting nervous. “My whole career, I’ve
just expected that people should talk to me so I can write stories
about them,” says Tom Paulson, former science reporter for the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He lost his job this March when
the P-I became one of over 130 American newspapers to cease
printing in 2009. “But being interviewed by playwrights is
nerve-wracking. It’s role reversal.”

Paulson took his turn on the other side of the tape recorder as part
of a theater project called It’s Not in the P-I: A Living
Newspaper about a Dying Newspaper. In the past few months, six
Seattle playwrights—Dawson Nichols, Paul Mullin, Scot Augustson,
Kelleen Conway Blanchard, Bryan Willis, and Pam Carter—banded
together to interview people affiliated with the P-I, from
reporters to janitors, and write short scripts based on what they
heard. Mullin and Nichols, acting as editors, stitched those scripts
together into a full-length “living newspaper,” some of it documentary
and some of it fictionalized, about the 146-year-old daily. The irony
of one mortally wounded industry (theater) reporting on the death of
another (journalism) isn’t lost on anyone.

The project was born in a bar, where Mullin (who won last year’s
Stranger Genius Award for theater) and Paulson were holding a two-man
pity party. “Paul and I were drinking beer one night,” Paulson says.
“And I was complaining about the death of the P-I. And Paul
said: ‘Fuck you, man. You think you’ve got it tough? I’m a
playwright.'” They talked about their dire vocations and the
idea—half comic, half tragic—of people turning to theater
to learn about current events.

The play is a eulogy (one of the deeper, more nuanced eulogies of
the P-I yet), but it doesn’t romanticize the paper or the
journalists who worked there. “As I told Paul, don’t make us look like
heroes,” Paulson says. “We were a goofy bunch and we did some things
wrong, but we were still important to the community.” In one scene,
people who worked around the P-I offices talk about the
reporters they knew. “They were cheap,” a barista says. “They were
principled,” a florist counters. “The third-floor bathroom was a pain,”
a custodian offers. “Someone up there had… issues.”

The scenes range from the crude cacophony of the newsroom to a
reporter interviewing the mothers of victims of the Green River Killer
to the sad absurdity of a resume-building workshop after the
P-I closed. (“I have no clue how I fulfilled the ‘corporate
mission,'” one reporter says to the workshop instructor. “I guess I
sort of hope I didn’t.”) The play is structured like a daily newspaper,
with scenes jumping into one another like stories on a page, and it
maintains a tense, journalistic energy: tragedy running hand in hand
with absurdity; the struggle to hammer chaos into narrative order;
public-interest stories interpolated with intimate, human-interest
anecdotes; and a callous, bittersweet humor that helps the medicine go
down.

One of the funnier recurring bits, written by Nichols, is called
“How to Press a Politician”:

Cheryl: Hi, this is Cheryl Gilcrest from the P-I. I have a
polite request for some information that should be publicly
available.

Tim: Oh, hello, Ms. Gilcrest. Listen, I have an excuse to delay
answering your polite request. I have some evasive answers as well, but
I’d like to hold off on those until later. Can I get back to you?

Cheryl: That’s fine. I’ll continue with the polite line and be
respectful for a little while longer. But Tim, you should know that I
do have a flask of resolve that I’ll be sipping at as I wait.

The conversation intensifies over several phone calls:

Cheryl: Direct question.

Tim: Insincere confusion about the point of the
question.

Cheryl: Restatement of question.

Tim: Off-topic comment.

Cheryl: Same question.

Tim: Deep rumination and troubled contemplation.

Cheryl: Same question.

Tim: Complicated reasons that the question itself can’t be addressed
as posed.

Cheryl: Carefully. Rephrased. Question.

Tim: Counter question about the future of the P-I with the
suggestion that the Pacific Northwest would be better off without so
many questions.

Questions don’t give just politicians hives. In another scene based
on an interview, a reporter named Greg tries to find out the true
mission of Hearst’s corporate emissaries and their plans for the
online-only P-I. Reporters—colleagues—start
telling Greg, “No comment,” and an editor tries to kill the story with
the same clumsy, evasive tactics of the politician. Greg turns to the
audience: “I used to be a journalist. Now I’m in a play. Look at me.
I’m trying to get my story out by being in a play. How desperate is
that?”

The play traces some structural weaknesses of the newspaper
business; putting the play together revealed some weaknesses in the
theater business.

The fateful drinking session between Paulson (the science reporter)
and Mullin (the playwright) happened on March 26, 2009, about a week
after the P-I closed. Mullin and Nichols quickly assembled
their team of playwright-reporters and hoped to cover the story, in
Mullin’s words, “with something approaching the speed of
journalism.”

Five days after having the idea, Mullin began approaching the bigger
theaters
around town, asking if they were interested. “This
project is the best kind of local theater,” he says (in another bar, as
it happens). “Theater for, by, and about the people of Seattle.” But
nobody could commit to turning the production around fast enough, not
even on their smaller secondary or tertiary stages. “The big houses
will never say no,” Mullin says. “They’ll take meetings with everyone
and say yes to everything—they’re fucking Hollywood now—but
then they’ll let a project die the death of a rag doll. I’d love to
premiere this show with the same professional talent the show was
written by. Of course, nobody’s getting paid. But we’re
playwrights—we’re used to working on stupid passion and
alcohol.”

Mullin and Nichols decided to stage It’s Not in the P-I as
a student production at North Seattle Community College (through Nov
22), where Nichols teaches. Mullin wrote an unusually impassioned press
release for the show, accusing Seattle’s bigger theaters of being slow
and inept.

“The big houses were very gracious and unequivocally praised the
piece, but unfortunately as institutions they are piloted like
supertankers,” he wrote. “They can’t make a turn unless they plan to do
so a year ahead. We were determined to treat this project like
journalism, not history. It’s sad that Seattle’s biggest and best-known
theaters cannot respond to what’s happening in the community.”

Friends who work at some of those bigger theaters warned Mullin to
tone down his criticism, saying his stridency was going to “make
enemies in this business.”

“Excuse me—what business?” Mullin scoffs. “The

theater business? What are they gonna do? Send out the
chorus line to kick my ass?”

Mullin is getting angry. He sounds more and more like Greg, the
character trying to report on Hearst’s shuttering of the P-I.
In the scene, Greg’s editor tries to pull him off the story, saying
he’s “just angry.”

“You’re damn right,” Greg shoots back. “What do you think motivates
reporters? What else but anger? We write about people who steal money,
people who commit crimes. Legislators who talk one way and vote
another. Toxic waste, global warming. Workers who get shafted by
management. You’re not mad about these things? Anger is what makes us
reporters. All a reporter is, is someone who’s pissed off enough to dig
into something and try to let other people know.”

Reporters, yes. And playwrights.