Lloyd Suh (Photo: Jackie Abbott https://www.jma-photography.com/)
Imagine what it must have been like to be William Franklin, only son of the greatest scientific mind of his time: to assist in his father’s experiments and try to understand their importance, to travel with him and do experiments aboard ship, to match wits daily with the creator of some of the most famous sayings in American culture. And then to rupture the sacred bond when the time came to choose sides in the great experiment of inventing America.
In his brisk comedy FRANKLINLAND, Pulitzer finalist Lloyd Suh has great fun putting center stage one of the most fractious father-son love-hate relationships in American history – at a time when the country itself was just being born. Lloyd tells more about the genesis of the play below.
The New York premiere of FRANKLINLAND, directed by Chika Ike, is the Fall 2024 EST/Sloan Project Mainstage Production. This year is the 25th anniversary of the partnership between EST and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Previews of FRANKLINLAND start Wednesday, October 9 at the Ensemble Studio Theatre and the show will run through November 3. Reserve your ticket here.
(Interview by Rich Kelley)
Where did the idea of writing a play about Ben and William Franklin come from?
Honestly, it came from EST and the Sloan Foundation. Graeme Gillis had asked me back in 2011 if I had any ideas for a play about science and technology. I had always been fascinated by Benjamin Franklin and had read a couple of biographies about him previously, but I probably wouldn’t have come to the idea of writing a play about him without that prompt from Graeme. But once he asked, I started thinking about an inventor who ultimately invents a nation. It started from that.
When did you know it was going to be a comedy? Was Ben Franklin really as funny as he is in the play?
I knew immediately it wanted to be a comedy, because yes, Benjamin Franklin was very, very funny – albeit in a different way than I’ve depicted him here (what was funny then isn’t necessarily what’s funny now). But humor was a key part of what he valued about life.
What kind of research did you do to prepare to write FRANKLINLAND?
Since the reading I had already done about Benjamin Franklin was casual reading, I went back to various sources, including Ben’s own writing – basically re-reading key sections with more of a researcher’s eye. I gave myself permission pretty early on to deviate in certain ways from the historical record, but I wanted everything to be rooted in the truth – so especially in the few key instances when I’ve invented an idea or encounter, I wanted to make sure there was historical grounding.
Is the term “Franklinland” something you discovered in your research or is it your invention?
That’s one of the things I invented, but it comes from something very real. Ben and William had done a great deal of land speculation in their time together, and in his will Ben left his son almost nothing but for the lands he owned in Nova Scotia. There’s no doubt this conveyed a particular metaphor at the time, as the significance of the land was elusive. But it made me curious about potential complexities – perhaps hidden complexities – in what that land could have represented. Ultimately, the land has a different fate in the play than it did in reality, but trying to load it with as much meaning as possible was a fun and valuable exercise in giving context to that relationship.
There is so much going on in FRANKLINLAND: the tempestuous father-son relationship, the confusion of a young nation in rebellion, Ben’s endless inventiveness. Which aspect attracted you the most?
Well, it started with the inventions, which led to the notion of America itself as a grand scientific experiment. But the father-son relationship, especially as it related to the war in pursuit of that American experiment, was the most essential element in making it an actual play. The other stuff was the impetus – I guess you could say the bones of the play – but the family conflict was the heart.
In your recent conversation on the “EST Re:Members” podcast, you mentioned that you felt that FRANKLINLAND resonates differently now than it did in 2014, when you first wrote it. What in the play resonates differently now?
Okay, this is very nerdy, but if we apply the scientific method to the American experiment, we can just imagine how differently we might interpret the data coming back during the Obama years vs. the data we’re receiving in this very contentious election season, or even just generally in the aftermath of the Trump administration and the ongoing national conversation around our monuments, and what they mean as we reckon with America's racist history. These are new data points, and I suspect we’ll get even more, every day over the coming weeks as the election ramps up. I’m fascinated to see how the news of the day in the run up to Election Day might make its way into the theater during the run.
You are perhaps best known now for your history plays about Asian immigrants coming to America: The Chinese Lady, The Heart Sellers, and The Far Country, for which you were a Pulitzer finalist. How does FRANKLINLAND relate to those plays?
Each of those plays is so distinct, not just in terms of story but also in terms of form, so I never know how to define them collectively. But there was about a 10-year stretch when pretty much everything I did was part of an involuntary impulse to investigate particular moments in history. Many of these plays were full-length plays centered around Asian American history, like The Heart Sellers and Charles Francis Chan, along with the ones you mentioned, but some were not: I would also count Disney & Fujikawa, a shorter play that was another EST commission, as part of that exploration, as well as Bina’s Six Apples, which is not set in the US but in Korea. So I guess you could classify these in many different ways, and sometimes by necessity or convenience I will, but ultimately I think they are all connected. Franklinland was chronologically the first one – both in terms of setting, but also in terms of when I wrote it.
What’s next for Lloyd Suh?
I think I’ve satisfied enough of whatever that involuntary impulse was – that impulse around history. I’m trying not to overthink this, but I’m following a different impulse now, which is that lately I’ve been writing about the future.
