A: It’s called THE WONDER. It’s a solo piece that follows a New Yorker through the city on an ordinary Tuesday morning: the ordinary people we meet, the ordinary things we see on an extraordinary day.
It’s a story that’s been rattling around in my brain for a while so I’m looking forward to sharing and performing it. I’m extremely lucky to have two amazing directors collaborating with me, Julie Ann Emery and Kevin Earley.
Q: What else are you working on now?
A: I finished THE WONDER rather quickly and am working on a new draft of a play called, THE SILVER KITCHEN PLAY, a conversation with memory that takes place in a run-down Chicago kitchen. Also outlining episodes for a new web series (MEAN SECRETARY) and researching a play about women war reporters called THE FIELD.
Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.
A: Growing up, we had this huge picture window and every summer I’d watch my dad mow the lawn in shower shoes, a speedo and a button-down shirt – opened and tied in a Carmen Miranda-like knot at his waist – while all the kids on the block sat on the curb, watched and laughed. He chain-smoked Camels. Would smoke them until the ash reached the filter, then he’d flip them in the driveway. If he thought something looked good, he did it, wore it, said it – the whole shebang. I grew up watching and listening to him; watching everything. My dad mowing the lawn in a speedo is nothin’. I’d like to say that story is simply his calling card. There are a million stories about my dad problem solving in a way you wouldn’t expect. And I kinda love that.
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: Nothing. Theatre has always been what it is. The reflection changes, the challenges may adjust to the reflection – but that’s theatre. With what we have available to us, we always figure out a way to write, produce and bring to life our stories.
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: Ruth Gordon, Kathryn Hunter. Too many to list. Buzz Goodbody, definitely. And then there are all my friends, my husband; the people I know and love, whose work inspires me daily.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: The kind of theatre that makes me feel like I’m eavesdropping. Or sitting in the audience watching while the entire production is whispering “WATCH THIS”. Anything that makes me feel like I’m nine years old watching the ballet for the first time.
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: Surround yourself with supportive people who challenge you to be the best version of yourself. Live a life. Have a laugh. Be kind.
Q: Tell me about your play you're having read at Terranova.
A: It’s called “Boomer’s Millennial Hero Story.” It will have its reading at The Cherry Lane on June 16th at 3PM as part of TerraNOVA's Groundworks series. Jenna Worsham is directing.
Here’s a blurb! --
A down-home, piano-playing American Storyteller of the Boomer Generation guides us through the "heroic" first twenty-five years of “Millennial” Montgomery Walter’s life. From a childhood full of trophies and medical over-diagnosis and self-esteem building, to 9/11 to the market crash to Occupy Wall Street, this raucous vaudevillian journey takes a dark absurdist look at class, generational cause-and-affect, and American folklore in a world where ideas never truly die.
Q: What else are you working on now?
A: I am currently beginning the process of collaborating with a composer on a folk-blues album/score that will accompany my play, “Under The Water Tower.” Next month I’ll be going to North Carolina to hang out with my old AAU basketball team as research for a new play I’ve been working on about kids from varying socio-economic backgrounds who share a hotel room at a tournament while vying for division-1 college basketball scholarships, with the slimy backdrop of the NCAA recruiting world. I am developing those with The Middle Voice – Rattlestick’s apprentice company – who RULE.
Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.
A: My family was always moving, usually at the end of a semester or school year. I spent a lot of Christmas and/or Summer breaks in a new place, daydreaming about what my new school would be like, the kinds of friends I would make, and especially the kinds of girls there’d be. And I’d spend time missing all the people I had just left behind, wondering what they were doing. I didn’t discover my love for writing until I was about 19 or 20, but by then I’d had years of practice conjuring characters and places and events and seeing how close the reality was to my imagination… as well as filling in my own blanks of what the people I left behind had become by now. And then Facebook ruined all that, but luckily I had fallen in love with writing by then. I still find myself dreaming of the new and aching for the old, in my work and in my life.
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: Tickets cost too much and nobody gets paid enough and I wish more people saw plays who weren’t in the theater. That’s a three-for-one!
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: The not boring kind. That’s cheeky but I mean it! I like plays that must be plays, made specifically for the stage. Plays that ask big questions and challenge an audience to think, but don’t push an agenda. I like characters who are trying hard to be good people. Anything that makes me glad I went to the theater instead of laying in bed watching Netflix. I love poetry and the inherently American. Gross, funny, vulgar, ballsy, weird, sexy, dangerous…
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: I should really be asking this question, and not answering it. From what I hear, and what I tell myself -- keep submitting work, don’t compare or compete with other writer’s journeys, find a way to make your own theater, and most of all, surround yourself with amazing people – people who are smart and kind and talented and who genuinely like your work and you likes theirs too. Patience. And, much like the rest of life, never become an asshole because things are going great or because things are going not so great. Work your ass off and don’t take advantage of your gift. We’re lucky to have found this.
Q: Plugs, please:
A: Check out TerraNova’s “Groundworks” Series. TerraNova is an AWESOME place. The people there are tops. And if you don’t know these writers, get to know them and see their work. They’re great and I couldn’t be prouder to have been a part of it.
Q: Tell me about your upcoming show at the The Kitchen Theater.
A: It's called Slashes of Light and it is the coming of age story of a young girl in the 1960's in an all-black private school on the South Side of Chicago and her relationship with her friend, a budding radical; her smoldering crush; and the new white history teacher who comes to town to teach them.
Q: What else are you working on now?
A: I have several projects going. Some are writing projects and others are education projects. I am the producing artistic director of The American Slavery Project, and the co-artistic director of a theatre company for kids at risk, sponsored by Manhattan Theatre Club's education program called Stargate. You can look at the video here:http://www.manhattantheatreclub.com/education/stargate/
Q: Tell me about the American Slavery Project.
A: The American Slavery Project is a "theatrical response" to revisionism in this country's discourse around slavery, the Civil War and Jim Crow. We support work about the era by African descended writers. We were founded in 2011 in recognition of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War and the dearth of work on NY Stages about the era from our own perspective and in our own voice. ASP has produced staged readings by several award-winning writers and created an original piece called "Unheard Voices" which brings life to the African descended men, women and children slaves, free people and indentured servants who lived their lives on the streets of New York during colonial times.
Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.
A: When I was 8 years old my parents bought me a "Showboat". It was a replica of the steam paddle boats that would go up and down the Mississippi doing plays. It had scenery you could change, characters on little pedestals and a book of scripts. It fascinated me and I played with it for hours-- directing my play characters, reading all the parts. Then, after looking at those scripts, I decided I was going to write my own and adapted a story to be performed. It was Rumplestilskin. I dressed my sister up in green leotards and tights and put pointy ears on her. Then I hired all the other characters from kids on our block. The king, the towns-people, et al. I played the princess, of course, and I gave myself a song. "I can't spin this straw, straw, straw, straw into gold"! We toured backyards throughout the block!
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: It would be cheaper and more inclusive.
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: I don't have heroes. Especially not in theatre. I don't like the idea of icons and pedestals. In my mind people who live ordinary lives in what we look back on as extraordinary times - like during enslavement in this country - those people might qualify as heroes. People who made it out of concentration camps, or walked their families out of war torn countries like Rwanda, got out of the south alive during Jim Crow - they're maybe heroes. But not theatrical people. That being said, I have a lot of respect for many theatrical people for various reasons. Among them, Lee K. Richardson & Ricardo Khan along with Louise Gorham, who founded Crossroads theatre, Eugene Lee who founded the Black and Latino Playwrights Festival, Woodie King, who founded The New Federal Theatre, Stella Adler who taught acting and respect for the playwright, Keith Josef Adkins, playwright and founder of The New Black Fest and many, many writers of plays and fiction. Among them: Toni Morrison, José Rivera, Lorraine Hansberry, Ntozake Shangé, August Wilson. Harvey Fierstein, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins, Cassandra Medley, Cori Thomas, Alexander Thomas, Harrison Rivers, `all of the writers of the American Slavery Project's "Unheard Voices".
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: Work that pinpoints and then illuminates a specific feeling, attitude, time or cultural phenomenon. Theatre that awakens understanding in me. Theatre in which I can get lost. I like theatre with complex characters. But I also like many different forms. I work in realism with a little magic thrown in, but I like other styles, as well.
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: Write a lot. Re-write a lot. Tuck a play away and visit it a long time later. You'll see new things.
A: “LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION!!!!” is a story about a 9yr old physics prodigy, Asali, who doesn’t want her mom, Gladys, to die. To save her mother, Asali builds a time machine, but she breaks it, and in the end learns that schematics and equations don’t always add up to the solution to a problem. Because time breaks everything. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever written. It’s my first straight play. And it hits way too close to home. I don’t know if it’s any good, but I know it was good for me to get it out of my bloodstream. I’m very scared that people are going to actually see it. Very terrified. And very relieved.
Q: What else are you working on now?
A: Only musicals, and both with composer Ben Krauss: #1 is a trio of 20min pieces about people in motion, traveling from uncertainty and, unbeknownst to themselves, into danger; #2 is a Motown-sound adaptation of Othello where the protagonist is the leader of a dysfunctional 4-man band, trying to “crossover” as a successful Black soul artist in the 1960s.
Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person:
A: I will cut and paste a lyric I wrote with Eric Day that accurately describes my life. The song is called “It’s All About Me”
I am seven
And today, Mom is taking me to Oxon Hill farm
Today is the day I almost die
But don't worry
I don't die
I am smiling
Cause today, mom will buy me lemonade in a red cup
Today is the day I will dance with a llama
Don't be jealous
Llama llama llama
It's all about me
La la la la la la
It's all about me--yeah yeah
We're gonna feed the ducks today
Ducks are my favorite
It's all about ducks
And it's all about me
I am holding
Out my hand
Full of twelve day old bread
But this duck is trying to eat me instead
Maybe I'm too delicious
Maybe the bread's too stale
Stop it duck! Don't eat me! This girl is not for sale!
Mom!
Help!
I'm dying and ripping my dress!-No!
Mom!
Save me!
S-o-s-o-s-o-s-o-s-Oh!
I think of my tombstone--Of all the luck
Here lies Sukari: Eaten by a duck
Mom is laughing cause she doesn't care
That I could have died today
I hate my Mom. I hate all Mamas
I even hate the llamas
Yes I am cool. Yes I am free
But mom didn't help
My life's up to me
It's all about me— La la la la la la
It's all about me—yeah yeah
From now on I know
From now on I see
Wow…It's all about me
La la la la la la...la!
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: That I wasn’t the sole person of color in the audience and/or cast 99% of the time I go out to see a show.
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: Henry Krieger, Bill Finn, Michael John LaChiusa, Jeanine Tesori, Jerome Kern, August Wilson, Lynn Nottage.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: Theater that uses the stage as a lab to do an experiment. To investigate something. To test out something wacky. Theater that makes everybody uncomfortable, and then you ask yourself why? And you learn something about yourself you didn’t know. Theater dabbling in sci-fi, that tackles race, class, gender at all. Everything Exit Pursued By a Bear does. Theater where I can afford a ticket to the show.
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A: runboyrun, is the 3rd play in the Ufot Family Cycle. This play follows an older married couple who, for the past 30 years, have been living the same day over and over again. After a sudden burst of frustration, time finally starts moving ...but in both directions. The couple has to navigate through illness and memory in order to discover if they can learn to love each other.
I wrote this play because I wondered at the nature of unconditional love and the circumstances/fears that prohibit us from expressing it. To me this play is a bit of a haunt. With a lot of a terror. It's a vat of loneliness. With the tiniest pinprick of hope.
Q: What else are you working on now?
A: I'm travelling to Space on Ryder Farm as part of their Writers Group, and will be working on the 1st installation of the Ufot Family Cycle, The Grove. This play was the first play I'd ever written and follows a young first-generation woman who is torn between her traditional family and her own burgeoning identity. I am also working on the 4th installation of the Ufot Family Cycle which is currently untitled. This play was commissioned by the National Black Theatre as part of their "I Am Soul Residency."
Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.
A: My mother and my father are instrumental to who I am as a writer. He is a brilliant literary-research-academic savant who uses language to carve himself into new spaces. She is a scientific genius whose love and patience know no bounds. I have too many specific stories about why they are the reason I write in the fashion I write. It feels wrong to pick one over the other...so the explanation of how/why I write is simply: my mommy and my daddy. They armed me with the stories, the skill, the dedication and the sheer tenacity.
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: More plays from more voices. More international theater.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: I like a dense, epic play. I don't mind sitting for 3 hours in the theater if that 3 hours takes me on the journey of a life time. Also, I love an honest and unapologetic voice. I'm more enamored by a possessed play that harbors slight structural imbalance than I am with a well-made play with no heat.
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Violent Bones By Adam Szymkowicz Directed by Jen Wineman
With lots of amazing actors too numerous to enumerate.
Fri June 13 at 4:30 pm
Violent Bones is about being young, successful and broken. Kidnappings, stabbings, novel writing, a SWAT team and lots of interns.
RSVP to readings (at) primarystages.org
Primary Stages 307 West 38th Street, Suite 1510 | New York, NY 10018
Also come see my play Clown Bar at the super fancy new space, The Box Starting mid June and running for 2 months on Saturdays. Tickets at www.pipelinetheatre.org
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A: It’s a comedy that takes place in the internet.
I was thinking of the internet as a sort of magical Shakespearean forest. The kind you see in As You Like It and Midsummer. In THE CLOUD characters use their smartphones and computers (and knowledge of each other’s passwords) to masquerade as one another.
Director Wes Grantom, the design team and a great group of actors have done a fantastic job of bringing it to life. It’s running at HERE until June 1st.
Q: What else are you working on now?
A: The main things right now are rewriting a new play called Index Crimes. It’s about a NYC police officer who takes on his superiors after witnessing injustices within the department. I’m also working on a new play about a girl who comes to believe that she’s the love child of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinksy.
Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.
A: My dad’s a journalist. When I was about 7 I visited him when he was working at the Federal Courthouse in Manhattan during the trial of the Westies, a notorious Hell’s Kitchen based crime family. It was scary seeing the accused murderers and their family members in the courtroom. My father told me that if you look into a mobster’s eyes you can see that they’re dead inside.
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: Would be great if there were more venues in the US that did large cast plays by American writers.
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: Pinter, Richard Nelson, Paula Vogel, Ken Prestininzi, Michael Frayn, Maria Irene Fornes, John Guare.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: All sorts really. I love great acting. I love when it’s funny. A good story is nice. Dense language skillfully navigated can be thrilling.
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: It's about a Southern guy moving in with his son in Manhattan. I had the idea after seeing a dad doing laundry in my apartment's basement and his son was showing him how to use the machines, how to get a laundry card. The whole scene really stuck with me.
In my play the dad used to be a touring musician but stopped playing in his 20s, and he comes to New York City with only a vague job lead and the desire to spent time with his kid. Instead, everyone ends up falling down far stranger rabbit holes.
It's also about sex.
Q: What else are you working on now?
A: I have a Sloan commission through E.S.T that I'm working on through the summer about the invention of chewing gum in Staten Island. A bunch of TV/Film things are in various stages of development, some of which I'm working on with my friend Nick Jones, another writer who has appeared on this very site.
Acting-wise I'm probably heading back on tour with this Stephen King/John Mellencamp musical I've been working on for about 3 years. This'll be the fourth iteration of it that I've been a part of.
Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.
A: In 8th grade I moved to Plano, Texas from Los Angeles, California and struggled to make friends. I was angry and weird and said "dope" a lot, because everyone in California said "dope" at the time.
About halfway through the year our Texas History class was assigned a video project about the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791 and I took it very seriously. I found costumes, wrote a detailed script, really tried to make the production values stand out. Our group got close during the filming and they became some of my first friends in Texas.
When we screened the finished video for the class, it got an amazing response. Kids laughed! I felt great. But our teacher gave us a B-minus because we took "too many liberties with the history" and the group with the boring PowerPoint video got an A. After class I flipped out at the teacher and got sent to the principal.
In retrospect, I really have no idea what this says about me. Maybe I was far too passionate about the Whiskey Rebellion.
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: We all say it, but affordability is just The Biggest Thing. If the people who actually LOVE theater, who are active members of the community, can't afford to see it, that's such a profound problem.
The affordability thing ends up playing into so many other things, too. Because when only old, rich white people can afford to see new plays then the plays have to cater to the old, rich white people. And that often leads to very boring plays.
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: McDonagh's The Pillowman had a major impact on me early on. I had a rather life-altering experience working with Amy Herzog and Tamara Fisch on 'After the Revolution' at Williamstown. I love Kenneth Lonergan and Kneehigh and the Mad Ones. Sarah Burgess is a playwright I hope we'll be seeing a lot in the coming years. Also that Arthur Miller guy is cool.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: Shows about real characters, rather than ones with Overarching Macro Messages in neon letters. Genuinely funny plays excite me, as do things I would never think to write myself -- L'Effet De Serge at Under the Radar from a few years ago always comes to mind. It was so simple: just a guy bringing some friends over to test out his weird inventions. But it was so endearingly honest and fun. When it comes down to it, I just really want to be entertained.
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: Put up your own stuff. There are so many opportunities to do it -- apply to the Fringe, to Ars Nova's ANT Fest, for a slot at a comedy theatre. There's really no excuse for not putting your work up in NYC, if that's what you want to do.
See/do improv. There's a weird disconnect between the improv and theatre communities here, which I think should be bridged. Improv is often meant for comedy and comedy alone, but the best improv is also weirdly moving. Some of the best scenes I've ever seen onstage have been on improv stages, and I think it can really inform one's writing.
Q: Plugs, please:
A: Carnival Kids runs June 5-28 at TBG Theatre. The wonderful Stephen Brackett directs. I also have a play for teens running this weekend at 52nd Street Project. They're the best.
And I perform made-up musicals with Hello every Friday night at 9:30 at the Peoples Improv Theater.
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First is a reading of my brand new play I'm still revising. Come see it with me in front of an audience for the first time. Cast of thousands! Under 90 minutes!
Violent Bones
directed by Jen Wineman
June 13 at 4:30 pm at Primary Stages
307 W 38th St, NYC
You probably want to watch a video about my reading and the other readings by my incredibly talented writing group:
Current City: Chicago, Illinois Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m about to launch myself into a playwright’s initiative with Sideshow Theatre Company (Chicago.) They’re being gracious enough to provide me with a year of resources to write …whatever it is I want to write.
I just opened my adaptation of A Doll’s House (IBSEN IS DEAD) last week, so I haven’t had the luxury to dissect what this particular project is going to look like exactly…but I know it has something to do with America in the 1960’s…I know it’s going to explore fame, I know it’s going to explore personal exploitation, and I know it’s going to have something to do with addiction…
…beyond that…? I’m not quite sure (giggling while typing).
Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.
A: Umm…there were woods in my backyard growing up.
My brother and I would play there a lot.
We would have to cross a bridge to get into the woods, but the moment we were there...? We could be whatever we wanted.
We created alternate universes in those woods.
We were hunters, gold miners, fur trappers…so yeah, I think it was the nature of that very safe, very small, very sacred wood that made me believe in The Imaginary…or…allowed me to believe that The Imaginary could be a reality.
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: BECAUSE YOU ASKED, ADAM SZYMKOWICZ!
It feels like the fire of our artistic ancestors is systematically being put...the fuck…OUT. And it’s really, really disheartening.
I want us to change that.
We seem more concerned with script accessibility and personal gain than actually saying something worthwhile in our craft. I think about storefront theatre, right? I mean, storefront theatre was created to counteract the despondency attached to commercialized theatre. The hope in the storefront legacy was that it would eventually rub off on commercial theatre. But the opposite seems to have happened. Even critics don’t say anything critical anymore, they’re just writing consumer reports. And just to water this down a bit, if we think about A Doll’s House, or The Crucible, or Dutchman… I mean, those works were made to piss people off. And they did! A lot! And we can franchise those works as much as we want and congratulate ourselves (or maybe DELUDE ourselves) into thinking that things have changed since then, but in a lot of ways things are exactly the same. So let’s talk about that. Let’s CREATE about that. Let’s CHALLENGE AUDIENCES about that.
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: ANNIE BAKER. Harold Pinter. Amiri Baraka. Sophocles. Spalding Gray. Lorraine Hansberry. Eugene O’Neill. Sarah Kane.
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: Most days I feel like I’m just starting out too. So I’ll give the advice I give myself:
#1 you don’t have to be poor to be a playwright
#2 you’ll create your best art when you’re taking care of your body and your relationships.
#3 don’t get a credit card
#4 don’t go to law school
#5 “As an artist, you’re constantly in a state of becoming. If you can remain in that state, then you’ll probably be all right.” – Bob Dylan
#6 if you want to be smarter than Steinbeck, Woolf, Lebowitz, Bukowski and Fitzgerald combined: don’t start smoking cigarettes. No matter how cool you think it will make you look, or how provocative you think it is, or how apropos you think it is for a writer to do, just don’t. You’ll never regret not smoking.
#7 if you have parents, be kind to them. Even when you get upset because they don’t seem to understand what you’re doing with your life…because let’s be honest…YOU don’t really know what you’re doing with your life (and I say that with admiration). Tell them you “love” them. Dedicate all your plays to them (at least the good ones). Because they’ve earned it. And without them, you literally wouldn’t be writing plays at all.
#8 Kick back.
#9 listen to Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech/lecture at least once a month. It will be good for you, I promise.
#10 Be you. No one else is going to do it, so you should.
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A: I’m Pretty Fucked Up, which will premiere at Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks in June, is about three best friends who are ditching school to drive up into the mountains of New Mexico. It’s also about the students and staff back on campus who are dealing with an emergency lockdown. So the play is really about danger and freedom and captivity and responsibility.
The play started for me on a writer’s retreat with some Brooklyn College buds. I knew I wanted to write about this invincible, on-top-of-the-world feeling I recalled from sophomore year of high school when I first got my driver’s license. I remember driving around singing along to songs on a mixed tape and seeing the whole horizon in New Mexico stretch out before me and knowing that once my parents gave me the keys to the car, I could go anywhere and no one could stop me. So there is some of that in the play, kids driving around, feeling really free and in charge of their own lives, for the first time maybe ever. There is also a security guard back at school who is grappling with his role as protector during a big emergency.
The play, I think, also celebrates what can happen when nothing at all is happening, when we’re waiting for something to happen like when we’re driving, or flying, or waiting in elevators, or going out for recess. The play hangs out in those in-between moments, moments when we either choose to or are forced to relinquish control over what we’re doing, where we’re going, and why.
Q: What else are you working on now?
A: I’m writing a monologue-diagram about Crown Heights with Mabou Mines, which I’ll be performing at the end of May. I haven’t appeared in my own stuff before and I never write one-person monologue plays. I read it to a few people last week and realized that reading it aloud helped me to touch base with what a story is, how simple it can be, and what it feels like to tell one. I’m also working on a full-length about seven 24 year-old women living in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: Theater should be more affordable. What can we do? We keep saying this. How do we solve this problem?
I would also like theater to find a way to help audiences approach new work, to help audiences approach plays with non-linear narratives, plays where time and space misbehave and misunderstand one another, plays that depict the shortcomings or the collapse or rebuilding of our communication structures. Plays that put us in precarious positions where we feel something that we are not accustomed to feeling. I don’t want plays to confuse people just for the heck of it. I am interested in theater that does not resolve the quagmire of our existence but rather carves out space to stew in it. I’d like theater to find a way to help cultivate audiences who can feel comfortable walking into these new narrative structures and sensations, and by comfortable I mean that they should feel proud and capable of sitting there and getting a little stirred up. I don’t want audiences to feel completely alienated or locked out of the art form. I don’t mean that we all need to speak like academics. I mean that we need to be able to circulate some tools to help audiences feel empowered to come try out new plays and new forms. I don’t quite know what those tools are. But I want theater to start thinking about it.
I know I know, I gave you two things but they both have to do with making theater more accessible, I think.
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: Let’s see, BECKETT. Chekhov, Buchner, Ibsen, Aeschylus, Pina Bausch.
Living heroes: MAC WELLMAN, WILL ENO, Erin Courtney, Robert Wilson, Richard Maxwell, Julia Jarcho, Edgar Oliver, Clubbed Thumb, Jeff Jones, Joanne Akalaitis, New Georges, the Bushwick Starr, and of course Little Theatre.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: I just saw An Octoroon last night by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. An Octoroon does not resolve anything about racism and/or the history of slavery but rather it situates everyone inside of the building in a space where we must consider, confuse, misunderstand, regret, hate, reject, laugh, accept, weep, get defensive, get repentant, get confused, again, get guilty, laugh more, become ill, become whole, become fractured, and then steep in a disease we either don’t know how to or perhaps refuse to ameliorate or both or something else. The play does not solve any problems for anyone in the house. It immerses us in the mess we are in. And it makes us all feel. And it is completely surprising. It keeps shifting under us.
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: Put up your own work on your fire escape and invite some friends who you trust to come see. And invite friends who you trust to be in it. And be kind to yourself. As Mac Wellman says, when you sit down to write, “put on your genius hat”. Also I think it’s important to start out messy. Make strange shapes.
A: HAPPILY EVER is a dark fairy tale based, in a somewhat tangential way, on Shakespeare's play TWO NOBLE KINSMEN. It's a meditation on romantic love. I think romantic love is something that all of us, particularly women, want, but the play is really about how damaging our ideas about love can be to our self-esteem, and how destructive these idealized notions can sometimes be for real-life relationships.
Q: What else are you working on now?
A: In my Bookshop Workshop writing group, I'm working on a play about a Jamaican dancehall queen competition that takes place in Pittsburgh - there will be a reading in June so I suppose I should finish my first draft. I'm excited about it because it's the first time I've ever included elements of my Jamaican-American identity in my work as a playwright... I'm just about finished with a first draft of a play about a homeless man and the ghost of a murdered prostitute. I began writing it thinking it would be the libretto to an opera, but now I think it may just be a play with a lot of poems. We shall see. The Salt Makers is a fun experiment with Noh drama that I've been working on with several very talented folks and we'll present what we've got so far at the Little Theater series at Dixon Place on May 12th. I'm also working on a modern re-telling of Cinderella. Also, I'm researching for projects I have on the back burner. I like to stay busy.
Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.
A: When I was 10 and in the 5th grade I had a best friend who had a huge crush on a boy at our school. This boy had a girlfriend, but I took it upon myself to manufacture a romance between the boy and my friend, writing long letters to my friend presumably from the boy, giving her little presents and telling her that he'd given them to me to give to her, making up lengthy conversations that I had presumably had with the boy about how much he wanted to break up with his girlfriend and be with her. It made her so happy and after a certain point I didn't know how to tell her the truth because this fiction I had created made her so happy! At 10, I felt that telling this lie was for the 'greater good' in some way. Since then I have continued to write fictions that I hope make people happy - or, at the very least, make people feel SOMETHING.
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: More inclusion. A greater diversity of people being a part of the theater experience would be amazing.
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: Eek - this is such a hard question! I'll give you who first pops into mind because there are so many. William Shakespeare. Henrik Ibsen. Frantz Kreutz. Bertolt Brecht. Adrienne Kennedy. Lorraine Hansberry. Edward Albee. Eugene Ionesco. Suzan-Lori Parks. Mac Wellman. MAC WELLMAN. Erin Courtney. Ethan Lipton. Young Jean Lee. Jackie Sibblies Drury. Sibyl Kempson. Marc Bamuthi Joseph. And that's just playwrights. There are many other theater makers - directors, actors, ensemble groups, producers, theater companies - that are creating culturally relevant, lovely work that interests me such as Universes, Rady&Bloom Collective Playmaking, Rehabilitation through the Arts, Marc Bamuthi Joseph and The Living Word Project, The Civilians, Pearl d'Amour, New York City Players, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Morgan Gould and Friends, everything that is Clubbed Thumb...to name a few. I am also very inspired by a lot of visual artists who have a certain amount of theatricality or drama in their work.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: I don't like smug theater, so any theater that isn't SMUG in this pretentious "aren't we so smart, we totally GET it" kind of way is something that excites me. I'm excited by theater that makes me feel included. I'm excited by honesty, earnestness, bravery, experiments with form that are rigorous and mindful - theater that poses challenging questions rather than providing easy answers. I love to laugh, and cry and feel all the feelings, so theater that makes me feel is very exciting also.
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: Read books. Experience culture - literature, art, music, theater, dance, tv. I rather enjoy going to museums. Be aware of what's going on in the world, and not just the theater world. Write as much as you think you can, and then write MORE. Work hard at it. Surround yourself with people who delight you and also challenge you. Also, find a way to make money other than writing plays - playwrights don't make money writing plays.
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