When Alexis Soloski was in high school, she fell in love with the theater. She’d seen musicals at the Pantages with her parents and some Shakespeare and then started going to the Mark Taper Forum. Then her teacher at Harvard Westlake School gave her a copy of Anton Chekhov’s “Four Major Plays” and said, “Get started.”
She did, and she never stopped.
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At Yale, she plunged into sketch comedy while also pursuing a theater major. When she discovered the Jacobean revenge tragedy, “Tis Pity She’s a Whore,” where a brother kills his sister and walks into a banquet with her heart pulsing, she felt “I have to do that – I have to see what that feels like on stage.” So she and some classmates did just that for a senior project. It felt “incredible,” Soloski says.
Soloski also chased theater further. “I’d get in the back of someone’s van – God knows if there were seat belts – and get driven to New York to plays by Richard Forman or the Wooster Group,” she recalls. “My eyes were opened to that kind of collective creation.”
After college, she crammed her stuff into a station wagon and headed to New York, where she quickly established herself as a theater critic. These days, Soloski writes about theater and the arts for the New York Times, and she has just completed her second theater-related novel.
The first, “Here in the Dark,” was a suspense thriller about a theater critic. Her new one, “Flashout,” involves a young woman, Allison, who comes to New York and falls in with an experimental communal theater group, first finding herself in the thrill of communal creation and then losing herself in the group’s cult-like dynamics.
Soloski met recently near her Brooklyn home to discuss her love of theater and the novel. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. You use the word “ensorcelled” at one point. Is that just a word you love and wanted to use?
It means to encounter or be in a work of art that goes beyond ordinary attention or absorption. The sense of being lifted out of the mundane world into something else by an incredible work of art or performance is all I want. All I want is to be put under a spell. All I want is to be enchanted.
Q. But this is a dark book for a theater lover.
I realize that the theater company at the center does not come off well, nor should they. But I also wanted to convey how good it feels when you are making work collectively, when you are a part of something bigger than yourself. For some people, that’s religion, but for me, it was theater. I loved performance, and I love attention and adulation. I love making people laugh. I love that energy. Nothing is ever as good as discovery and a self-forgetfulness, where you feel something else taking over, and that you’re contributing towards a larger goal. For someone who overthinks, you can just be.
Q. Allison makes plenty of terrible decisions, but she’s also surrounded by plenty of unlikeable characters.
I did have a moment where I said to myself, “There are no likable men in this whole book.” But then I thought, “How likable are the women?” So it was equal opportunity. People cling to the power that they have, and historically, the people with power have been men.
Being likable is something that I aspire to – I would love to make everyone happy. And I would love to write sweet, nice characters people can root for, but good people don’t make interesting choices. I mostly make extremely good choices – I don’t smoke, I barely drink, I don’t sleep around, I am ethical in the practice of my work – and it is so boring to hear about the choices that I make.
But in my twenties, I definitely made messier choices. You have to experiment. You don’t know the kind of choices that feel good until you’ve worked them out.
Q. Allison feels she is making choices when she starts sleeping with Peter, the dynamic leader of the theater group. And later, Peter’s wife tells Allison she was acting of her own accord. How do you want the reader to feel about their choices and those power dynamics?
I hope they have some understanding and some sympathy. I don’t think Allison is exemplary, and she doesn’t make great choices because of things that have happened to her, so she chooses out of fear and hunger.
Looking back, you think, how much were those choices? Peter is the person with power in this situation. But you still have to live with the consequences.
I am certainly someone who had experiences where I’d have said, “I am choosing this freely,” or “I want this,” or, more darkly, “This is my fault. I made this happen.” I finally got to a point in my late 30s, where I thought, “Yes, but also no.” I was not as free as I believed, and some things that happened were not my fault. No matter how mixed those signals were, I didn’t deserve what happened.
I don’t know that I was thinking about this deliberately as I was writing, but that ambiguity is something a lot of young women feel. So is the tension between doing what you were taught to want and figuring out what you actually want.
Q. The 1972 sections, when Allison is 19, are written in the first person, but the 1997 sections where she’s living under a new name as a high school teacher, are third person. It feels like the first person provides the intimacy of Allison discovering herself, and the third person is a traumatized person keeping her past and her wounds at a remove.
That instinct is totally right. But it happened because my first novel had been first person, and the character is a theater critic, so I’d go on a date with someone and have to say, “I’m not her. Those are her sexual practices, not mine.” Even my mother would refer to the character and say “You,” and I would have to say, “No, I do not have a drug problem, and I’ve never slept with a cop.”
So when I started this one, it was third person. I’m a Jane Austen girl from way back and love limited omniscience. But my agent said it needed first-person to make it feel visceral. When you’re that age, everything feels like the biggest deal in the world.
Q. Did you know where Allison’s story was going when you started?
I don’t outline. I’m a single mom with two kids and an extremely full-time job. I don’t have the time. If I have three hours I can string together where no one else needs me, I’ll write a thousand words, and that’s how the books get written. So I didn’t exactly know how it was going to end. Everyone told me the ending was fine, but I felt I wanted something that was a fuller reckoning, that it wouldn’t be satisfying if Allison doesn’t fully understand what she’s done and try to contemplate what life might look like going forward. When I made a few changes, everything fell into place.
I think we can change, but I don’t think we change a lot. And if we don’t recognize those people we were and love them and forgive them, I don’t think you can have a full life. I don’t think that you can pretend away whatever past you had, whatever choices you made.
Alexis Soloski in conversation with Ivy Pochoda
When: 7 p.m., Aug. 13
Where: Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Boulevard, West Hollywood
Information: https://www.booksoup.com/event/alexis-soloski-conversation-ivy-pochoda-discusses-signs-flashout