Lally Katz: 'The Stakes In Art Feel Higher To Me'

Sound familiar? It's the plot line for many women's lives: trying to 'have it all', 'all' being love and a career. It's also the story of Lally Katz' acclaimed stage show Stories I Want To Tell You In Person, which has been adapted for the screen by ABC Arts, and premieres at MIFF in August. The stories Katz tells about her relationships, in particular with a man she calls The Full Jew, are taken directly from her real life. "I think there's still part of me that still has that way of thinking that's like: ' I can only have one or the other.' And my shrink tells me that's not true, but I think it is harder for women."

Katz says she doesn't "feel bad about being exposed": "I connect with people quite easily. I like people. I've always confessed everything to strangers." We too, sitting at a cafe in Sydney's Ultimo, connected easily with Katz, who is refreshingly frank. She speaks quickly, hands always moving, maintaining eye contact and sharing anecdotes as though we're old friends. Katz is a warm person, a curious person, the characters for her next, or last, show always whirring away at the back of her mind. "Often the stakes in art feel higher to me than the stakes in life. I'll do anything to make something work or to connect with an audience, so it never feels that strange."

Her writing technique is to live her work. She says that means sometimes she dwells too long on past relationships, especially in the case of Stories I Want To Tell You In Person, which Katz has been performing across the globe, and for the film, since its premiere in Sydney in 2013. "By the time I was doing the show I had broken up with my boyfriend which the whole thing was kind of about. For about a year after he and I broke up I was still doing the stage show, and writing these scripts, and filming the show, and so I couldn't really get over the relationship because I was sort of living in it all the time. In my mind, when I was playing myself, I had to still be in the moment of being in love with him, and being in this sort of world with him. It made me really sad in a way. And also it would make it not make sense to me: 'Why did we break up? Because everything seems great between us in this. What happened?' And then I'd call him and he wouldn't pick up and I'd be like, 'Right, right, oh right, ok, I remember now.' Also the writing is really particular moments and times, and it's not the whole relationship or whatever, but I sort of believe, even though everything in it is true — everything's versions of everything in life — and I started to believe the version I'd written. I'd be like, 'That was what it was, so how did...'

"For a long time I was always like, 'Everything has to go to writing,' and then the minute that gets threatened, I couldn't live without that. I think what I realised as time goes on that I get along quite well with myself, and living in my world of writing, and it's great to have adventures and meet characters. It would be great if sometimes I could see relationships as not just being a source of that, or they get mixed up in that because I think that's what ruins them sometimes.

"My aunt actually said to me when I was in New Jersey, because I was in New Jersey at the beginning of the year, and I'd been seeing this Mexican guy in Texas and it had busted up really bad, and I was in New Jersey heartbroken, and my aunt said, 'You need to start falling in love with boring people you don’t want to write about because you keep having these disastrous relationships.’ I said the problem is a lot of the time the guys that I get obsessed with, we don’t actually have that much to say to each other, I’m just really interested in them as a character. And often when I have a lot to say to a person I don’t feel the need to write about them because we can talk to each other. And she said, ‘Maybe you should try and be with someone you can actually talk to.’ When I sort of feel like something’s going to make writing not happen or work, that’s a worse feeling I think. Now I feel really loyal to that and I think, ‘Whatever, heartbreaks will come and go and they’re quite useful in some ways,’ but as long as I can write, it’s ok.

“If I had to go through heartbreak or whatever but not use it as writing, what’s the point of it?”

Katz is still open to having it all: “Now my feeling is just follow your life, follow what it is that you love, and then if you can kind of have things work outside of that then great, they will, probably, but not to try and force it to happen, because that doesn’t seem to hold.”