Michelle Carter, playwright and creative writer professor at San Francisco State University, is the award-winning author of Hillary and Soon-Yi Shop For Ties. Her most recent work is an evening of drama and original music based on the life of Theodore J. Kaczynski ’62 called Ted Kaczynski Killed People With Bombs. Carter sheds light on her creative process in this e-mail Q and A:
Why a musical?
This isn’t a musical exactly—it’s maybe best described as a play with songs. While writing this play and the last one, some material leapt out in meter, or with a melody, or with a bass-and-percussion rhythm attached. Music and song evoke responses in us that straight text doesn’t, and vice-versa. I keep finding myself wanting to juxtapose text and song, but not in a new-music-opera way. I’m too much of a text-bound creature for that.
What elements of his life at Harvard do you talk about?
Kaczynski came to Harvard as a shy working-class 16-year-old boy from a Chicago suburb. What we most directly portray in the play is Kaczynski’s participation in the Murray experiment, a three-year personality experiment in which he was a paid subject. After writing extensive autobiographies and voluminous ruminations on many topics, subjects in their third year were interrogated, their ideas and beliefs challenged in (by most accounts) combative and hostile sessions called “dyad sessions.” Subjects then watched footage of their responses under pressure, and were asked to comment upon themselves watching themselves be interrogated. Dr. [Henry A.] Murray had worked for the OSS [Office of Strategic Services], and some believed he was developing interrogation techniques for the CIA. Others say this is ridiculous. The play takes no position about that.
Did you talk to former classmates of his?
I’ve spoken to people who were in the math department when he was at Harvard, none of whom remember him. He kept to himself, to put it mildly.
How much of his persona as “tortured genius” comes across in your work? How did you separate or move away from media construction of the Unabomber versus actual psychological exploration?
One of the intentions of the play is to shatter that “tortured genius” sentimentality. Kaczynski was certainly a math prodigy of sorts, skipped two grades and so on. But mathematicians seem to concur that his research topic, boundary functions, was a backwater, a narrow field of limited interest. As for his image as a political visionary, if you spend some time with the manifesto and the works that inspired its writing, you’ll see how unoriginal a document it is. It’s a mix of borrowed ideas and personal pathology (e.g. things he’s mad at his parents about). When Kaczynski was a student at Michigan, he decided that the only thing that would make his life worth living would be to kill people. He planned for himself a life in which he could kill, escape capture and kill again: This was almost 20 years before the manifesto was published. We’re putting twisted-genius political-antihero constructions onto a paranoid schizophrenic who, when an innocent secretary was maimed in one of his explosions, wrote in his journals only: “Frustrated. Can’t seem to make a lethal bomb.”
How did you decide on the title?
I didn’t want the title to suggest a lugubrious biopic (“The Life and Times of the Mysterious Unabomber”). I wanted a title with some point of view to it. The intention of this title is to announce, up front, square one: Hey, Ted Kaczynski Killed People with Bombs. To say: Let’s start there, in that fundamentally unglamorous place.
How long did it take you before you could spell Kaczynski without thinking about it?
Weeks.
Does your spellcheck recognize it as a word now?
The character in the play is called “K.” But I’m sure my spellcheck just knows.
