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Tony Award-nominated playwright and director Robert O’Hara spent some time discussing his work and artistry with TRW. Read the exclusive interview here.  

“The world sees me differently than they see other people, and so therefore, I am required to see the world differently than other people.”

– Robert O’Hara

KATIE STOTTLEMIRE: You grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, where you were heavily involved in your high school theatre program, as well as corralling your many cousins for impromptu performances in the yard during family events. Did these foundational years in theatre impact your approaches in professional rooms today?

ROBERT O’HARA: When I was in high school theater, or when I was making up stuff in the backyard of my grandmother’s house with my cousins, it wasn’t because I thought I was going to have a career in theater. It was just extracurricular. It was just fun. So, it impacted my professional career in that it’s very important to me that we keep the fun in the process. Especially when dealing with difficult themes and characters, a sense of play is always necessary coupled with an investment in craft.

I think many people, because they were in a high school theater program or because they did a lot of singing and dancing and playing around in their backyard or with family members, think that those experiences equate to them doing this for a living professionally: and that is simply not true. Everyone does not have the talent to be a professional artist. Everyone has creativity, but that doesn’t always translate into artistic talent.

Just like if I liked to play sports in school doesn’t mean I can be a professional player. Or your being in the high school band doesn’t mean you’re going to be a concert pianist. Many people see being an Artist as a Hobby and that eventually you’ll get a “real job” … but it’s a Profession and it is a Craft.

KS: In an interview with Playwrights Horizons, you said that part of the magic of being in theatre is that you can go to the extremes, and it’s good to make audiences uncomfortable. Has any theatre made you uncomfortable lately?

ROBERT: I don’t know if I necessarily meant that it’s good to make audiences uncomfortable, rather that I’m not invested in the comfort of the audience. Anyone can make an audience uncomfortable. I could put a baby on the stage and put a razor blade across the stage, and people would squirm and be uncomfortable because this baby is going to go and swallow this razor blade. So that’s easy. But not being invested in the comfort of an audience and demanding to tell stories that are not invested in comfort is another thing.

Stories of violence, stories of trauma, stories of poverty and of a difficult life are not necessarily comfortable, and should not be comfortable for you to do or to write or to witness. We don’t want to normalize trauma or normalize violence or normalize these things that we see all the time on the news. Those things are not made for our comfort.

We have a 24-hour news cycle, and they don’t care whether you just came from hearing bad news at a doctor’s appointment, seeing your child’s first steps, if you’re on your honeymoon or have just returned from a funeral. They’re going to tell you some very uncomfortable things, and they’re not invested in your comfort. And since no one has invested in my comfort, why should I invest in other people’s comfort? I can’t make a room full of 300 people comfortable, so why should I invest in trying to make that happen? Someone will always be uncomfortable. I wake up and walk outside and my very presence as a Black queer man living and breathing on earth is bound to make SOMEONE uncomfortable.

Has theater made me uncomfortable? Every time I go to the theater and I see nothing but white people on the stage, I’m uncomfortable. Or when I see a piece of theater that is invested in a white supremacist point of view, I feel uncomfortable because I feel invisible and I feel this is unnecessary in 2024, that you have a piece set in New York City and everybody is white. And this is on television and film, too. Everyone that’s speaking is white. Everybody eating in the background is a person of color. And I’m just like, how is this possible? EVERYBODY?? In this police department, or neighborhood, or restaurant, that has speaking lines, is white and beautiful? So it just pushes whiteness forward and that is uncomfortable.

When there’s so much diversity and so many other stories to be told, even by white folks. White folks don’t have to invest in their whiteness. They can choose to invest in diversity. I don’t write plays that are nothing but Black people. And when I do, there’s a point in that. But some people are just out here writing people sitting around talking about nothing, and everybody got to be white??? So yes, that makes me uncomfortable.

KS: You’ve also said “I will not be limited by anyone’s imagination. I am a storyteller,” and the premises of your plays certainly are not limited by imagination: in MANKIND, you create a world where men are the ones who birth, in BARBECUE, you showcase the story of a family intervention being turned into a product for Hollywood, in ANTEBELLUM, you interrogate the similarities between Nazi Germany and the American South, and in ZOMBIE: THE AMERICAN, the first openly gay president has been elected in the midst of worldwide crisis. How do you come up with your ideas?

ROBERT: Well, that’s like asking me how do I breathe? The world sees me differently than they see other people, and so therefore, I am required to see the world differently than other people. I cannot walk through the world in a Black queer body and see it in the way that everybody else who walks through the world sees it. I have different thoughts of the stories that should be told.

For instance, I am working on a project now that has to do with the AIDS epidemic. And most of the stories surrounding the AIDS epidemic are about white men dying in either New York or San Francisco in the 80s and 90s. And so we have lots and lots of storytelling around white men dying. But there was another group of people who were dying as well, and they were dealing with TWO epidemics: HIV and Crack. So Black queer people were dealing with both those epidemics and that’s important to add to the conversation about AIDS, especially in a story set in the 1980s and 90s.

But we don’t tell those stories, and we certainly don’t explore those two realities in the same story. I want to see those stories of those lives lost as well. And because I’m invested in those stories, those are the things that live inside my mind. So when other ideas come up, I attach them to that lens, not to: how many white people can I get on this damn stage to tell this story of heartbreak and pain and loss, but whose story is not being told? I guess that’s where my ideas come from, what is not being told.

I don’t usually write a play unless there are several ideas bumping around, because I don’t like to see work that has one idea and they stretch it for an hour and a half. I like to have too many ideas put into an hour and a half or two hours or what have you. I want there to be too much information. I want it to be difficult for you to process it because I want the experience of writing it to be exciting and challenging and therefore, I want that to be the experience of watching it: to be exciting and challenging.

I wouldn’t write a play that dealt with why mama didn’t love me, or why I didn’t get the red bicycle when I wanted it, and what that said about how I treat myself now. I want ideas that clobber each other a bit and demand space. Big ideas inside of a compressed package.

KS: Do you have any advice for others who are experiencing a silencing of their creativity and artistic expression from outside voices? How can theatre artists feel empowered to express themselves as they see fit, and less how the industry sees fit?

ROBERT: Well, first of all, I think you have to acknowledge the truth of white supremacy in the American theater. You have to acknowledge that most American theaters are run by white people. That’s a fact. Most of those are run by white men. That’s a fact. And that most of those are populated by white people in the audiences and in the administration. Those are FACTS. You can’t go into this profession thinking that somehow you’re in a place that you’re not. You’re there to MAKE fiction. You’re not there to LIVE Fiction. So why walk into a place, a real place, and fictionalize yourself inside that space?

When I walk into a place that I know is a white space, I have to acknowledge that. And I have to acknowledge that that is why certain things have been programmed and that is why certain questions are asked of me and that is why I’m having a valid reaction to your white supremacy, and that I’m not crazy. That it is a valid fact that you have a majority of white people in this space and people who do not look or live like me—and that that is a challenge to me. And I am a challenge to that. Today we don’t even want to acknowledge white supremacy, we have people making laws that don’t even teach that there was slavery or that white people OWNED human beings! And NOT teaching that, benefits ONLY White Folks…

So the first step is to acknowledge the profession that you’re in, which is a space of whiteness that you have to produce your work in. And once you acknowledge that, then I think that you can get over this idea that somehow they’re going to see you as the writer that’s standing next to you, who happens to be white. They’re not. Because these spaces were not built for you. It doesn’t mean that you don’t belong there. It means that your name is not on the wall. So you may have to do some carving into stone.

I’m fascinated by the excuses that sometimes you hear from these spaces where you have cultivated a white audience, you have hired only white people, you have done only white playwrights, and then you’re surprised it’s difficult to market my work at your theater, or people walk out. Then the blame falls on me or the play itself but not you and your history of exclusion. Then you come up with sh*t like: “Oh, you know, diversity is very important to me.” No, it’s not. “These are difficult conversations.” No, they’re not. These conversations are not difficult. I’ve been Black all my life. I’ve never had a difficult conversation around race. Now, white people have had difficult conversations around race when it comes to me and other people like me. But I have never had a difficult conversation around race. I have always been Black. And that has been very clear. And there’s nothing difficult about that fact for me.

Once you acknowledge you are different and that people see you as different, then that becomes a wonderful thing. You don’t have to try and be like everybody else. They will never see you as everybody else. So stop trying! I realized that my voice was different and my words were different and my stories were different, and that’s what makes me Necessary. That is what makes me required if you’re going to say that you are doing diverse work. If you get people who are trying to all write like the last person who did a play there, then that wouldn’t be diversity. But you get the person who has acknowledged their difference from everything that you’ve done in your theater, and you want to do their work, then you are diversifying your slate.

I had to spend a lot of time early in my career with people telling me I’m risky, I’m challenging, the work makes them afraid, they don’t know how to explain my work to their audience, they’re not sure the audience is ready for my work, all of those things. And let’s be clear, this comes from people who run theaters, people who read plays, people who review plays and go to plays: all of that has been a criticism of my work. In the face of all that, I STILL choose to get up and create something else, something new, and not have that influence me in a way that reduces the creativity of my work. In the middle of all that, in the middle of white supremacy, in the middle of being labeled “risky” and “different” and “out there” and “provocative” and what have you, in the middle of all that, you have to create.

I think of my plays as rollercoasters. Which rollercoaster do you want to go on? Do you want to go on the rollercoaster that looked like the last rollercoaster that you were on five minutes ago, that has the same incline and slopes and the same curve and the same speed as every other rollercoaster you’ve ever been on? Or do you want to try this other rollercoaster that everyone keeps calling risky and dangerous and too much and provocative and out there? That’s the roller coaster I want to go on. You can’t have an amusement park full of all of the same rollercoasters. Some of it has to be for the adults in the room. Some of it has to scare the f*ck out of you, to make you uncomfortable, to knock you around a bit. Some rollercoasters have to not give a f*ck about your comfort. Your safety, yes, but not your comfort. Because if you want to be comfortable, then don’t step your ass on my rollercoaster.

Read Robert O’Hara’s Bio

ANTEBELLUM

BARBECUE

MANKIND

ZOMBIE: THE AMERICAN

Article by Katie Stottlemire

“We all have stories to share, and the accessibility of creating live art, storytelling, the act of theater lives in all of us.”

-Beaufield Berry

Beaufield Berry is many things: playwright, screenwriter, mom, teacher, and novelist. Above all, Beaufield is a teller of stories and a playwright you should know. Her play IN THE UPPER ROOM follows an intergenerational African American family living under one roof and is based on the true stories of her family. Read on to hear the chilling experience of writing IN THE UPPER ROOM, her experiences in transformational theatre, and the advice Beaufield has for artists who are struggling to feel seen (she’s been there, too.)

KATIE STOTTLEMIRE: IN THE UPPER ROOM is based on your own life. The characters even share your last name, Berry. What was the process like of writing such an emotionally intense play based on your own experiences?

BEAUFIELD BERRY: Technically the play predates me. It involves the lives of my family, though! My mother inspired Josephine, John and Jan are my grandparents, Eddie is my beloved great grandfather who helped raise me, and Rose is the great grandmother who passed before I was born. The original process of writing was lightning quick. It was supernatural for me. I wrote late at night and their voices were so alive in me that I swore they were in the room. They wanted their (our) story shared and told; I wrote 100 pages in three nights. It has been emotional. It’s been emotional to see my mother’s reaction to seeing her younger self alive again. It’s also been affirming as I hear the feedback from the people who LIVED it, who ask me how I got it so accurate. And then I know that the experience of co-writing it with my ancestors was real.

KS: For me, the most fascinating and memorable characters are often complicated women, especially when they are contrasted with other complicated women. This play has a handful of complicated women, from the controlling, unrelenting matriarch of the family to her grandchildren navigating the pressures of being young women while dealing with colorism both inside and outside the home. What did you learn from translating these characters from the page to the stage?

BEAUFIELD: Wow, I love complicated women too. I love watching the generational divide that happens in a family of strong women play out. I learned that these are the women that I’m from and that in sharing our experiences honestly and with raw intention, we can help others do the same. Women are the ones who keep families alive, who sacrifice daily, who rise above everything thrown at them. It made me so proud to be a Berry woman and to remember where I came from.

KS: I read in another interview that after you had written IN THE UPPER ROOM, you were building a website to sell Halloween costumes because you had nearly given up on writing. This might be a feeling that many creatives can relate to. What did you learn about yourself during that time, and what advice would you give others who are experiencing a similar situation?

BEAUFIELD: Hahahahahaha. YES! I was on the phone with someone in China when I got the call from DCPA, which kind of pulled me off the ledge. I was living in the Midwest, so nowhere beneficial to building a writing career, I was a mom of 2 at the time, buried in domestic duties and with no real direction–just my dreams –but those felt on hold indefinitely. And then that call came and changed everything. And I think the biggest lesson is to just keep working, keep writing, keep sending, keep sharing. I had no idea that Heather Helinsky (dramaturg) had submitted my work. I had no idea anyone was reading it. I had no idea my name was in rooms I didn’t know yet. I know it’s a cliche, but you really have to keep pushing yourself forward and getting out of bed and even if I did end up selling Halloween costumes, I would still be writing because, at the end of the day, that is my purpose.

KS: Theatre can be a transformational experience for many people, from an audience submerged in a story, to those who have been working on said story since its first inkling of a concept. What’s your take on the transformational nature of theatre?

BEAUFIELD: When people say “theater saves lives” …I know it can sound so dramatic…but oh man, is it true. It saved mine from the confines of domesticity. Yes, I have to clean and cook and raise children, but I have a place I can go to lay my dreams down, and then other people pick them up so they can leave their confines and live their dreams too. That connects us. And it saves forgotten lives and untold stories from the abyss of obscurity. Theater is an incredibly powerful and needed art form, LIFE form, and anyone can do it. We all have stories to share, and the accessibility of creating live art, storytelling, the act of theater lives in all of us.

Read Beaufield Berry’s Bio

IN THE UPPER ROOM

Article by Katie Stottlemire

After having three of her plays newly published, Abby Rosebrock met up with TRW at Drama Book Shop in New York City. While there, she signed copies of BLUE RIDGE, DIDO OF IDAHO, and SINGLES IN AGRICULTURE, and sat down to unpack the complexities in her work, from how hard women are on each other to navigating the expectations forced onto us, and how it’s important to learn to nurture your intuition instead of focusing too much on what others think your work should be.

Abby Rosebrock’s plays examine relationships from unexpected angles. She writes about damaged characters who may seem broken, but her expertly crafted words peel back the layers to reveal new depths and strengths. Even in the darkly comedic, off-kilter situations in which her characters find themselves, Rosebrock’s plays remain big-hearted and uplifting.

“And I guess that’s kind of what the plays are about: the way women are brutally hard on themselves and each other.”

– Abby Rosebrock

Katie Stottlemire: So, we’re here at Drama Book Shop, and you’re signing copies of three recently published plays. How are you feeling?

Abby Rosebrock: It’s thrilling. I feel so honored to have my work homed here, and to have DIDO OF IDAHO chosen as a monthly feature.

KS: As it should be! DIDO OF IDAHO was the first play of yours I read, and I couldn’t put it down until I finished it. And when I did, I had to take a few moments to digest.

Abby: Wow, thank you.

KS: I read all three of your plays the same way, actually. I would start and not be able to tear myself away until I’d finished. They’re all such visceral reads, and the characters are all so truthful and fully dimensional. I think it really speaks to your abilities as a playwright to be able to write characters I feel like I know after only reading the words they speak on a page.

I want to talk specifically about Nora, from DIDO OF IDAHO. We are introduced to Nora while she is having a drunken rendezvous with her secret lover, who’s married to a woman named Crystal. Then, after Nora passes out, Crystal wakes her up, and the audience goes on a wild journey with Nora throughout the play.

Abby: Nora is like, my shameful id. But so is Crystal. They’re both kind of feral versions of me. When we meet her, Nora feels completely defeated and is convinced she needs someone to save her—that she can’t survive, let alone thrive, on her own. She’s got this primal drive to install herself at the feet of someone else. Crystal’s the opposite; she thinks she needs to barrel through life, bending people and things to her will. Neither woman is really able to sit still with her own immense fear and grief.

KS: As much as we want Nora to get what she wants, this guy is obviously dragging his feet and has no intention of leaving his relationship for her. I want scream at her: this can’t be the way to go about it!

Abby: Yeah, a lot of people react that way to Nora. Women readers, especially, often dislike her or get frustrated with her, at least in moments. It’s always a little funny, but also terrifying, when you unleash these gnarly parts of yourself on the page and people express aversion. Like, “Wow, what a piece of work she is!” I was fascinated to notice that women are often harder on Nora—and on this character Alison in BLUE RIDGE—than men are. And I guess that’s kind of what the plays are about: the way women are brutally hard on themselves and each other. Even though they’re often suffering at the hands of men and institutions. But even people who judge Nora tend to have fun with her.

KS: Yeah, we come around to Nora. We just have to go on her journey first. Well, more accurately, she has to go on her journey first. A line of Nora’s that really resonates with me is when she’s talking with her mom, and her mom tells her she has to love herself, and Nora asks, “What does that feel like?” Which is a question I think almost everyone can relate to.

Abby: Self-love can be monumentally challenging, especially if you were taught a different way of relating to yourself. Nora grew up in a household where the focus was on behaving in ways that appear correct to other people: “Make straight A’s and don’t have sex and go to church.” That’s a terrible way to live, always checking to see whether you’re measuring up and assessing how others perceive you. You tend to berate yourself constantly, often without knowing it. So Nora’s convinced she’s a bad and undeserving person, a failure. And the only antidote she can really believe in is this charismatic lover.

KS: And you played Crystal in the initial production of DIDO OF IDAHO. How do you negotiate these two parts of your creativity as you work on your plays?

Abby: I learn a ton about a play when I’m performing in it. Also, I now realize, performing gives me things to do besides worry about how people will react to my words. For a long time I think it felt less vulnerable to be a character than it did just to be me, the writer.

KS: Let’s talk about your other plays, like SINGLES IN AGRICULTURE, which is about a convention for single farmers looking for love.

Abby: Yes, the whole thing is set in a motel room, where we see these two characters who have yet to find a partner interacting on the last night of the convention.

KS: And you acted in it, too?

Abby: I played Priscilla, a farmer from South Carolina.

KS: Which is where you’re from. And your roots are absolutely a huge part of your work. The premise of SINGLES feels like it could quickly become a caricature of these people who live in ten-person towns and are desperately lonely and looking for love. Instead, you turn it into this really intimate night between two of those individuals, and we learn so much about them. And while they may be wildly different from us and our experiences, we identify with their desire to be loved and to have someone to share their lives with.

Abby: It came from the loneliness of living in New York. I guess externally my life at the time couldn’t have been more different from Priscilla’s. She’s raising goats; I was editing and writing and shuttling between rehearsals. But we were both lonely and scraping by. So that play wrote itself pretty fast and came out more or less all in one piece. It just felt like this primal cry of isolation and longing. So I was focused on what I had in common with the characters, not on the differences.

KS: You do the same thing in BLUE RIDGE, which is about a halfway house in North Carolina, where a slate of different folks are staying for various reasons while they’re getting their lives back together after grappling with addiction and other issues. How did you find this story?

Abby: The main character, Alison, has just vandalized her boss’s car after a thwarted love affair, and she’s in this despairing place where she’s blaming men for all her problems. I guess she’s kind of like Nora in DIDO in that sense; she doesn’t really see herself as capable of transcending the structures and traumas and disappointments that have shaped her life so far. Self-belief hasn’t really paid off in the past; it’s actually gotten her into a lot of trouble—poverty, heartache, certain kinds of danger. So why would it help now? Her views aren’t without logic, and she still has this veneer of charm and wit, but she’s living in hell. I wrote the play to look for a way out of that. Not that I’d ever vandalized a car.

KS: I’m curious about how you got into theatre.

Abby: Well, I was getting a PhD in English, specifically medieval poetry, and then I wound up getting into comedy, and now here we are. It’s kind of a jarring contrast to go from improv comedy to playwriting. Because improv is all about agreement, about the “yes, and,” and dramatic writing is about conflict, conflict, conflict. When you have two scene partners existing in opposition to one another, two characters who see the world in different ways, you’re breaking a basic rule of improv. But I also think that plays should be funny. So while writing scripts, I try to incorporate a certain amount of riffing and play and agreement, where characters match energies and share in the same oddball worldview.

KS: Right, and when you’re writing, you can edit your improvised ideas and pick the best, most truthful, and most fraught outcome, as opposed to being stuck with the original idea.
Before we end here, I’d like to ask you one final question. What has been the best, or most resonant, piece of advice you’ve received from someone about navigating the theatre industry?

Abby: There’s a documentary about Elaine Stritch where she’s getting out of a cab, or into a cab—I don’t know, I barely remember the context—but she says something like, “Everything everyone says in this business is bullsh*t.” I think I’m paraphrasing, but the sentiment has stuck with me for a long time because her delivery was so funny and spontaneous. And kind of serious, but not bitter. I never want to be cynical, but I keep thinking about that line, and how important it can be to shut out the cacophony of other people’s voices. You really have to nurture your own intuition instead.

Read Abby Rosebrock’s Bio

SINGLES IN AGRICULTURE

BLUE RIDGE

DIDO OF IDAHO

Article by Katie Stottlemire

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Lucille Lortel award, recent recipient of the 2023 Obie Award for Playwriting, and now Tony Award-nominated: Martyna Majok’s legacy has only just begun. Her work is urgent, exploring pressing stories of the American experience that demand to be told.

Although she is deep in the throes of writing the musical adaptation of The Great Gatsby (with music by Florence Welch and Thomas Bartlett), Martyna found some time to spend with TRW, discussing her play SANCTUARY CITY and revealing some of her writing process.

KATIE STOTTLEMIRE: SANCTUARY CITY follows two characters, B and G, over the course of their friendship. Together (and sometimes separately), they face the challenges of living as an undocumented person in the United States. In a New York Stage Review by Elyse Gardner, SANCTUARY CITY is said to “transcend politics as only the best and most humane art can.” How did you approach the creation of this story, and what was important to you as you crafted B and G’s narrative?

MARTYNA MAJOK: I tried to approach this story, and most of my plays, from the human and the personal. The characters in my plays are often loose composites of people I know or have been, combinations of aspects of myself and people I grew up with. And the political is an active given in their lives. History and policy dictate certain circumstances and challenges to their lives and futures in this country. As does class and race and limitations of means. And the reasons for and way in which the immigrant characters may have come to America, where and how they’re living, the help of their communities here or lack thereof. The political isn’t really separate from these characters’ lives because they’re dealing with its limitations and dangers on the daily. But the characters are also their very specific selves, with their specific humors and quirks and loves and losses and yearnings and anger and joy. It was important to me that an audience felt invited to come to know these characters — and maybe to recognize bits of themselves — within the circumstance of being undocumented in America and trying to begin an adult life with hope in the face of resistance. At its heart, SANCTUARY CITY is the story of a deep friendship that gets severely tested by the immigration policy of this country. But it’s also about finding and trying to hold onto a home in someone — that sacred relationship with your person who understands you like nobody else. That rare friend or love who you believe when they tell you: “I got you.”

KS: Oftentimes, plays give audiences the opportunity to not only learn of certain political or social issues, but to witness an experience of those who face those issues in their own lives. How do you decide which stories to pursue (and, consequently, spend a long time with)? How much is informed by your own passions and interests, compared to what you (or others) might think the world needs?

MARTYNA: For some people, B and G’s world may be an unfamiliar one — or a world they’re more familiar with from news articles — and for them I hope the play contributes a more intimate and personal picture to those headlines and articles, a picture of a life. And for others, it will be shorthand, an experience they know in their bones. Which I hope will do for them something like what seeing the work of other playwrights writing from similar worlds and experiences does for me — which is to make me feel more connected, less lonely, and more alive. A tall order maybe but that’s always the hope — connection, feeling fuller in one’s life, seeing and being seen. Either way, I hope it’s a night of communing in the theatre — whether it’s your world or very much not. Because ultimately, collectively, it is our world. As for how I choose which stories to pursue, it feels more like listening to which story pursues me. SANCTUARY CITY came to me while I was working on another play. I had been actively writing “Queens” that day. And a DREAMer character had surprised me and walked into the narrative. That night, I couldn’t sleep. Something about the appearance of that character in “Queens” had sparked some memories to start kicking around in my mind. So much so that I couldn’t sleep. So, I got up in the middle of that night — I think it was 3am — and started writing what I thought were notes to myself…that were turning into notes for a play…that were turning out to be the actual scenes of the play, arriving on the page in this sort of fragmented but associative style. I wrote for three days straight until I had the first draft of SANCTUARY CITY because I was so afraid of losing the story, of losing the words to this love letter and apology. At least, I hope that’s how it comes across.

KS: What do you believe are the responsibilities of a playwright?

MARTYNA: To write generously and with complexity about the things and people that they most care about. To invite others into their worlds. To attempt to vanquish the loneliness of being unseen or misunderstood.

KS: What is one of the best pieces of advice you have received?

MARTYNA: Lately, it’s this quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald:“…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” Because I love his call upon our determination — to make it otherwise.

Read Martyna Majok’s bio

SANCTUARY CITY

Article by Katie Stottlemire

Cori Thomas, author of LOCKDOWN, talks about the realities of her volunteer work in prisons and how the vulnerability of the incarcerated people she met inspired her to put her own life story into the play. Read on to learn about Cori’s past, who inspired the characters in LOCKDOWN, and more.

“It was as if everyone that I met at the prison shared their DNA with me which ends up woven throughout the fabric of the play. The men were all so gracious and open, I felt it only right that I put myself in the play also.”

-Cori Thomas

KATIE STOTTLEMIRE: LOCKDOWN centers completely around the experience of an imprisoned Black man, Wise, and the volunteer who works with him, Ernie. Many people may be unaware of the actual lived experience of those who spend most of their lives imprisoned. As a volunteer at San Quentin State Prison, you likely have a greater understanding of the lives of the imprisoned. Did volunteering change your understanding of the lives of the imprisoned?

CORI THOMAS: Absolutely. I don’t have lived experience, but I can say with confidence that, by now, I know more about the day-to-day routines and struggles of the incarcerated than many. I have volunteered for many years now and so I have had the opportunity to observe and get to know not just the people but their details. My initial introduction into the prison was with a podcast producer who had hired me to write narration. (The podcast did not even end up happening.) Walking into the prison for the first time, I had no experience or understanding about anything beyond what I had read and seen in the media.

I had low expectations about the caliber of people I would meet and left that day ashamed of myself. Meeting the men there and seeing how inaccurately they and their lives have been portrayed made me want very much to share what I had learned with those who don’t know. I began volunteering at the prison which has changed my life. The prison, the people housed in prisons in this country, and the unjust system that keeps many of them there their entire lives has become one of the most important causes to me. My initial visit to the prison, happened to also coincide with a commission from Daniella Topol at Rattlestick Theater to write a play about whatever I wanted. I felt this was my opportunity to do what I could to try to change the existing inaccurate image.

KATIE: So, it seems like your volunteer work influenced the writing of LOCKDOWN?

CORI: It is totally responsible for everything about it! It’s a long story, but I’ll try to give the Readers Digest version here: My initial visit exposed to me my own ignorance about prison which continued as I began writing a terrible play for the Rattlestick commission, about a man sentenced to die on death row. One two-hour visit to a prison is not adequate playwriting research, so I was reading everything I could get my hands on and watching films and documentaries but I still wasn’t hearing the voices of the men and understanding their routines in a way that made me feel I could properly write about them.

Then two things happened that feel almost miraculously fated: I won a prize from the Lipman Family Foundation via New Dramatists where I am a resident playwright, which gave me a generous amount of money earmarked for travel expenses connected to research for a play, and I received a call from a supervisor at the prison asking me if I was interested in working with one of the men I had met that first day, Lonnie Morris. I said “YES!” I live in New York, and San Quentin is in California, but I have relatives nearby, so this prize money gave me the luxury of flying back and forth and spending weeks at a time as I was writing.

The prison was not at all aware I was writing a play. I was working with Lonnie on media projects for his violence prevention program, No More Tears SQ. By then, Lonnie had been incarcerated for almost forty years. Because I would be flying from New York for only ten-day to two-week visits every month or so, instead of the usual 2-3 hours a week awarded volunteers, I was given 8-10 hour a day access, 7 days a week in the prison to work side-by-side with Lonnie. I also met many other “lifers” incarcerated alongside him.

As we began to work, Lonnie told me his story and I suddenly realized that while he was not on death row, he and most of the men I was getting to know were just as likely to die in prison as those sentenced to death. I learned that it was almost impossible to be granted parole and that society, and the system, does not seem to want to accept that a person can change. I told Lonnie about my death row play and he politely told me it sounded awful. I knew it, but yikes. So, I asked if instead I could write a play about him. He said that was not allowed without permission. So then, I said, “Suppose I write about you but I don’t tell anyone I am writing about you. I’ll give everyone different names,” etc.…And that’s how it started. That’s LOCKDOWN.

I wanted to absorb and understand the environment and spent so much time at the prison, one of the men began calling me “Cousin Cori.” We both share the same last name; no relation. Soon, everyone was calling me “Cousin Cori.” They still do. Lonnie Morris, who the character Wise is about 90 percent based on, read every draft to make sure I was accurate. Everyone I got to know at the prison was generous answering questions. They all shared their stories when I explained that I wanted to honor them and make sure that every detail was correct. One man began to give me prison slang vocabulary lessons, another gave me a list of rappers to listen to so that I could accurately write the rap, and so forth. I wrote it, but I could not have done so without their help and input.

KATIE: It’s incredible that you were able to take the time to really tell the lived experiences of those men as truthfully as possible, and it paid off: LOCKDOWN is a painfully accurate portrayal of what the life of someone who is imprisoned can be. Most of these characters are dealing with profound loss, whether it be in the form of losing a person or losing one’s freedom. Oftentimes, loss comes from a lack of closure. Both Wise and Ernie seem to not get the closure they deeply desire, yet they seem to have found some healing at the end of the play. What encouraged you to explore loss in such a vulnerable way?

CORI: It was as if everyone that I met at the prison shared their DNA with me, which ends up woven throughout the fabric of the play. The men were all so gracious and open, I felt it only right that I put myself in the play also. As I explored what brought them there, I began to explore where I was too. I realized that I was still mourning the sudden loss of my husband of 19 years, three years before. Like Ernie in the play, after my husband died, I found myself unable to write. It was only after going to the prison and meeting Lonnie and others and hearing their stories and realizing that these amazing human beings might never leave, my need to write was re-ignited. And my enjoyment of writing was awakened again.

It is ironic that being amongst people, some of whom had caused others to experience the same loss I felt, helped me to find the closure I had not up until then found. Being around them helped me heal in so many ways. I think it was because I recognized that that they could never change the consequences of their actions. And they had to live with that and accept it. It was clear that they always carried the burden of their actions while taking accountability for having done whatever it was.

I realized that we can only move forward. These are people to whom hope and the future are paramount. That rubbed off on me somehow. I realized that we were the same in reversed ways. And I learned that until one recognizes the consequence of their actions and humanizes their victim, they cannot truly accept what they have done. Once that happens and I saw it happen and heard about it over and over in Lonnie’s program, that person will never hurt another person ever again. It’s interesting, you must embrace and understand the depth of your pain; only then can you actually live with it in a productive way. Observing them, I learned to do it with my grief.

KATIE: Wow. So, LOCKDOWN focuses not only on the actual lived experiences of imprisoned folks, but your own life as well. It’s a play of undeniable truth. One line in particular that rings true is spoken by Wise: “Intelligence and education are not the same thing.” That stuck with me after reading LOCKDOWN, especially given the context in which it’s said. Why is this important for audience members to hear?

CORI: After volunteering for so long now at the prison and getting to know so many people they are literally like family members, it has become somewhat of a mission for me to do what I can to try to change the narrative of what prison is, and especially who the incarcerated people are. Some of the men I know who are serving long sentences began their time in prison at very young ages. Like Wise. I know a man who was 16 when he went to prison and is now 43. He was given a 54-to-life sentence. He barely went to school before going to prison. He could not even read or write when he entered prison. Yet I believe that he is a genius. He taught himself to do some of the most remarkable things.

While there are many super-intellectual, well-read and educated incarcerated people, there are some who are just street-smart and life-smart. In society we place a lot of importance on Ivy League schools and neighborhoods, brand names, etc.…but I know I have had conversations with some of the wisest, most intelligent people I have ever met, right there in prison. I wanted to point out that being book-smart is not the only kind of smart there is; that everyone has something they are good at and that when you listen to people instead of just hearing them, you can learn so much. I wanted to try to help the audience see that the breadth of intelligence that might reside within a person can be measured in ways other than a traditional education.

KATIE: “Everyone has something they are good at.” That’s hugely impactful. Now, outside of your writing career, you are also the founder of a non-profit organization, The Pa’s Hat Foundation. Can you tell us a bit about your experience creating this foundation?

CORI: I am a first-generation American-born child of two immigrants. My mom was Brazilian, and my dad was from Liberia, West Africa. He was Ambassador to the United Nations in 1980, and there was a coup’d’etat that overthrew the Liberian government and began a terrible long lasting war which didn’t end until 2006. Many people were killed, including an uncle and others I knew, and the new people in power wanted to kill my dad as well. We were living in the United States at the time, and my dad had to apply for political asylum, which was granted. Twenty years later, the year 2000, he was 83, the war was still going and he thought he might not outlive it. He wanted to visit his parents’ graves and decided to go to Liberia.

As the eldest child, I was ordered to go with him. Trust me, I did not want to go, but he was old and my mom said someone had to go with him. It’s a long story that I have written a trilogy of plays about: The Liberian Legacy Trilogy. Briefly, while there on this trip, a child soldier pointed an automatic gun at my head and I thought I was about to die. In fact, I very well could have. When writing the first play in the trilogy, “Pa’s Hat,” which is about this trip with my dad, and my encounter with almost dying, I had to step into the shoes of the child soldier who had pointed a gun at my head. Instead of anger, or bitterness, I felt only sadness and compassion. No child wants to go around killing people. Especially not these who were usually grabbed from home and trained to become killing machines. Eventually, after the war, I got to know a bunch of former child soldiers. Amazingly, all of them said that they wanted to go to school. I started the organization so that I could try to raise funds to send them to school. To date, I have put 6 young men all the way through school.

I am not great at running this organization by myself. In fact, right now, the website is not even working, and I have been trying to fix that. I did not know how to fundraise properly, so I never raised a lot, but I scraped and saved and did the best I could. I have also spearheaded a few other missions in Liberia geared towards helping marginalized citizens with education and help with work. But the 501c3 still exists, and I am hoping to fix the website and you never know. But Covid and just being busy here with writing makes it hard to do a lot with it. Still, the young men I put through school all call me “mom”. I am “Cousin Cori” at the prison and “mom” to the former Liberian child soldiers I put through school. I just realized that both these labels under these contexts make me feel pretty proud.

Read Cori Thomas’s bio

LOCKDOWN

Article by Katie Stottlemire

The trio of writers share their story with TRW Plays.

Jones Hope Wooten, also known as “America’s Playwrights,” is a writing trio you definitely know and love. Their hilarious comedies have had thousands of productions across the world and in all fifty states. Their amazing and popular work doesn’t stop at the theatre—it begins there. As writers of TV shows, sitcoms, and feature films, Jones Hope Wooten has lots of knowledge and excitement to share.

This brilliant trio of writers has three plays, with more to come, available for immediate licensing at TRW: BUDDY BRO BUBBA DUDE: MEN IN TWISTED SHORTS, HONEY SUGAR LADY DOLL: WOMEN IN BODACIOUS SHORTS, and LICKETY SPLIT: WOMEN AND MEN IN OUTRAGEOUS SHORTS.

Here’s a slice of their journey as a writing team and their process of working together.

“Our goal as playwrights has always been to bring joy to others. What has taken us by surprise is how much joy others have brought to us.”

-Jones Hope Wooten

KATIE STOTTLEMIRE: Let’s start with your origin story. How did the three of you meet, and when did you know you would become a writing trio?

JESSIE JONES: Jones Hope Wooten started in Texas… well, at least that’s where the Jones Hope part began. Nick’s first play was awarded a production in Austin and he was searching high and low for his leading lady. So—

NICHOLAS HOPE: I thought it wise to start at the top and got my script to Jessie, who just happened to be the leading actress in Austin. When she finally read it, she was all in and that’s how it all began.

JESSIE: We later actually became part of the staff of a thriving community theatre in Austin, eventually deciding to move to New York to pursue theatre, of course. After that it was onward to Hollywood to try our luck in television.

NICHOLAS: Which is where we crossed paths with Jamie. Evidently, all people in show biz with Southern roots are destined to find each other.

JAMIE WOOTEN: We all had our successes—Jessie was an actress, Nick was a network casting director, and I’d been writing and producing about a kablillion sitcoms.

JESSIE: After my Off-Broadway play was turned into a movie, I decided to write full time. Nick was up for it and together with Jamie we formed a trio and sold many, many television scripts to various networks and production companies. We had a blast.

NICHOLAS: After we hit a wall when no studio would let us write anything with a Southern flavor, we had a “Eureka!” moment. It was time to leave television and return to our roots – the theatre.

JAMIE: We had lots of Southern-flavored stories to tell and we believed theatre would embrace them. And we were right.

KS: It sounds like throughout your creative endeavors, fun has always been part of your journey. Is this true for your writing room as well? Walk us through what a typical writing session looks like for the three of you.

JESSIE: We work almost every day, all in the same room with a blinky computer, massive monitor, and a cat. We write every word together which can result in some rather colorful disagreements. But happily, we share compatible senses of humor. We outline the hell out of every scene of every play before the first line of dialogue is written. Our process is: idea, then story, followed by structure, development of characters and, finally, dialogue. And then comes all that funny stuff.

KS: You’ve got your writing down to a science, which is probably why you all have worked on so much! You each have an impressive list of individual writing credits that range across seemingly all genres, projects, and networks… You name it, and one of the three of you has probably written it! Which project has been the most fun or “out there” for each of you?

NICHOLAS: Yes, we’ve all worked very hard for decades and we’ve been very fortunate. For me, “most fun?” The answer is always our most recent play. Most “out there?” A movie we wrote together titled Meaner Than Hell: A Christmas Story – God and the Devil in Manhattan, fighting for someone’s eternal soul, you get the picture.

JAMIE: “Most fun?” All the seasons I wrote and produced “The Golden Girls.” Those women were so great to laugh with every day. Most “out there?” In Hollywood, the three of us were hired to write an American adaptation of a British mini-series about reluctant women criminals. It was called “Daylight Robbery.” It was one of our favorite projects.

JESSIE: “Most fun?” Writing the short play, “Stairway to Heaven,” which is included in both “Honey Sugar Lady Doll” and “Lickety Split.” Octogenarians Della and Ennis have to be two of the most hilarious characters we’ve ever created. Most “out there?” The surreal experience of seeing my play “Dearly Departed” go almost verbatim from stage to screen as the film “Kingdom Come” starring Whoopi Goldberg.

KS: Wow! It’s amazing to learn that you all wear many different hats, both as individuals and as a team. Earlier you spoke of returning to your roots in theatre after studios weren’t keen on scripts with a Southern flavor. Although you may have focused on film for a while, you three have continued to be true champions of community theatre, and I think many people who have participated in community theatre can have very formative experiences there. I know I certainly have! Did you have a particular impactful experience in community theatre where you felt like you had found a home?

JONES HOPE WOOTEN: Participation in our hometown community theatres had a great influence on each of us and gave us a love for theatre that brought us back later in life. In our playwriting careers as Jones Hope Wooten, we have met some of the most creative, talented people we have ever known who are devoted to keeping the arts alive in their communities. Not only have we made lifelong friendships with many people we’ve met in theatres, large and small, across the country and around the world, we are constantly told about the friendships and bonds forged by cast members who perform together in our comedies. Our goal as playwrights has always been to bring joy to others. What has taken us by surprise is how much joy others have brought to us.

KS: It is a truly special part of theatre, to experience that reciprocal joy. Now, for the final words of wisdom you’ll leave us with: what advice can you offer for young theatre artists today?

JESSIE: Don’t be afraid to go out on a limb. More than likely, it will support you.

NICHOLAS: If you think you’ve got a good idea, somebody else just might agree with you.

JAMIE: Dream big! We did—and we’re having the time of our lives.

Read Jones Hope Wooten’s Bio

HONEY SUGAR LADY DOLL

LICKETY SPLIT

BUDDY BRO BUBBA DUDE

Article by Katie Stottlemire

Author of BLACK SUPER HERO MAGIC MAMA and A HIT DOG WILL HOLLER, Inda’s work is raw, honest, and hilarious. Her plays explore real-world problems wrapped in the dynamic magic of the theatre. She took some time to discuss these two plays in depth and reveals the best advice she’s ever received. Read now to learn more about her process of writing this play and the importance (or necessity) of collaboration within theatre.

“If you are born with powers (or they’re bestowed on you), and you make the choice to use those powers for good when you could literally do anything else, that feels more admirable to me… Also, invisibility. That’s dope.”

– Inda Craig-Galván

KATIE STOTTLEMIRE: Let’s start with your newest play A HIT DOG WILL HOLLER. It follows the relationship between two characters, Dru and Gina, from their first encounter with each other. Their initially different lives become woven together when Dru begins to hear the noise that keeps Gina inside her apartment. What led to the decision to have the two characters share this experience?

INDA CRAIG-GALVÁN: I was excited to put two vastly different characters in the same space and see how they affected each other. A truth that I explore in all my writing is that Black women, Black people, we are not a monolith. Dru and Gina each move through the world so differently. Their core goals might have started out similar – the fight for justice and equity. But what they each value as well as what they each fear has molded them and their approaches to that fight over time. Taking two women from such far poles and inserting one into the other’s life, and then forcing them to stay there, that’s where the great conflict lies. The real examination of those values and choices. And isn’t it like that in life? Economic backgrounds, education, religion, geography, even skin, body, and hair type, all of it can play into the individual experience a Black person has in this country.Yet at the end of the day, the forces outside of ourselves – those who hate us for merely existing –they don’t give a damn if a Black woman went to Harvard or dropped out of high school. They’re still going to be there hollering and cursing, enacting and upholding racist laws, suppressing votes and gerrymandering. Oppressing.It’s the oppression that keeps Gina and Dru in that space. They’ve always been in the same space, even when they didn’t realize it.

KATIE: Right. Our choices and values define who we are, but so do the oppressions we are subjected to. Now, let’s talk BLACK SUPER HERO MAGIC MAMA, which explores what makes a superhero. What’s your personal take on what makes a good superhero? How can superheroes be dangerous?

INDA: There’s this debate in the play between the two boys. They’re arguing over whether it’s better to be a superhero with powers or to be a non-superhero – someone with no powers who decides to step up, out of a heightened sense of responsibility or justice. Or maybe it’s just vigilantism. Maybe it’s borne out of ego. I think I’d have to agree with Flat Joe. If you are born with powers (or they’re bestowed on you), and you make the choice to use those powers for good when you could literally do anything else,that feels more admirable to me. A true superhero could just coast through life. Float above it. Nothing comes hard for them. But when they choose to help others in need, despite having all the resources in the world/multiverse, there’s a fantastic sense of selflessness. Literally, everyone else is beneath them. They’re exalted. To be that powerful and still get down and dirty to help others who can’t help themselves. That’s what makes a good superhero. Also, invisibility. That’s dope. It becomes dangerous when supes/non-supes become complacent. When they phone it in. When they forget their why. And, of course, when they embrace their dark/bizarro side. It’d be so tempting to over-indulge. To take advantage. To believe their own hype. To purchase Twitter. That shit’s dangerous.

KATIE: I agree, it’s very dangerous. Superheroes are not inherently good—they have to make the choice. The superhero in BLACK SUPER HERO MAGIC MAMA is based on Sabrina, Tramarion’s mother. Do you have any personal heroes in your own life?

INDA: I’m cautious of hero worship. People invariably disappoint. Live long enough and you find out things you wish you hadn’t learned. Listen long enough and people will tell on themselves. Instead, I try to recognize the good in every person, keeping in mind that we’re all human.

KATIE: “Keeping in mind at we’re all human.” That’s vital. And yet, sometimes people forget that we’re human, especially when they have expectations of us. BLACK SUPER HERO MAGIC MAMA interrogates the intimacies of how the personal can become political while A HIT DOG WILL HOLLER explores different ways of practicing activism. Both plays highlight the ways in which others prescribe or expect certain actions from people, often in regard to their activism. What is your hope in portraying these expectations and the impact they have on individuals?

INDA: When I wrote Black Super Hero Magic Mama, I was incredibly frustrated with the expectations placed all too often on grieving Black mothers. I continue to feel this. It still resonates. Still pisses me off. The role of the media in propagating this myth of protocol, a burden that’s NEVER placed on other mothers who have lost their children, it’s shameful. With a hit dog, it’s the constant refrain that Black women lead movements. True, and the acknowledgement is appreciated. But why is there an unfair reliance and expectation? My hope is to hold up a mirror and say, “Hey, yo, this isn’t okay. You see what’s happening, right? You see it. Of course you see it. Now maybe stop.” Let Black women live and grieve and fight and breathe and sleep (cousin of death, I know, but sis needs a nap sometimes).

KATIE: Speaking of breathing and sleeping (and overall care for the self), what’s a piece of advice you’ve received recently (writing related or life related) that has had a lasting impact on you and your artistry?

INDA: It wasn’t recent, but it was invaluable and has stuck with me for decades. As an artist starting out with two younger children, I was worried that it was too late to embark on the career I wanted. I couldn’t take all the classes my peers were taking. I couldn’t put in the same hours that would require me to be away from home. At the time, I was studying sketch and improv in Chicago and my instructor was Anne Libera. Also a mother. She told me there’s no right way to do it. You don’t have to take the path others are taking. You have to do what works for you and your family. That advice has helped me on so many occasions. That work led to me acting for years as well as continuing to write sketch. That led me to playwriting and eventually to starting grad school at the same time my daughter was starting undergrad. I held onto Anne’s words as I made my way around campus with 20-somethings whizzing past me on electric scooters. I held onto her words as I made the decision to incorporate several sketch and improv tropes into my playwriting. Black Super Hero Magic Mama’s format and structure stem from that. I experimented and learned to do what worked for me. That advice helped me to find my voice as a writer and still rings in my being as I decide how to take on new challenges. Yay, Anne. Okay, maybe that’s some hero shit. (Anne, please don’t tweet anything horrible and ruin this moment.)

Read Inda Craig-Galván’s Bio

BLACK SUPER HERO MAGIC MAMA

A HIT DOG WILL HOLLER

Article by Katie Stottlemire

Stacie Lents, author of COLLEGE COLORS, spent some time (in the middle of tech week!) with TRW discussing her thought-provoking play about friendship and change, her process of writing this play, and the importance (or necessity) of collaboration within theatre.

“I wanted to explore and question how we as individuals are impacted by this country’s history when it comes to prejudice, racism, homophobia–and what it means to be a friend in the face of that history.”

– Stacie Lents

KATIE STOTTLEMIRE: Your play COLLEGE COLORS is set in the same room for the entire play but highlights two pairs of roommates that lived there seventy years apart from each other. How did you come to create these specific characters and their relationships?

STACIE LENTS: I knew that I wanted to explore the questions of what has changed for us as a society and for young adults over time—and what hasn’t changed. At its heart, this is a play about friendship and about the aspirations and failures of friendship when it comes to addressing our own prejudice. I wanted to explore and question how we as individuals are impacted by this country’s history when it comes to prejudice, racism, homophobia–and what it means to be a friend in the face of that history. It seemed logical to explore two sets of characters at two different points in time because that allowed the two sets of actors/characters to be in dialogue with each other even when they’re not on stage together. But in terms of creating these characters, I had a lot of help; I owe a debt of gratitude to all of the actors who played these roles as they were very honest with me about what felt true to them. I was also very fortunate to develop this play initially at my own home university, Fairleigh Dickinson University, where the first brilliant cast of student actors had many conversations with me as I was writing about what is important to them as college students. Producer Marshall Jones III and actor Jasmine Carmichael were also invaluable advisors during the play’s development. Ms. Carmichael, who played Tanya in an early workshop, read several drafts of the play including the publication draft and took the time to offer feedback about the scenes, the dialogue.

KATIE: COLLEGE COLORS certainly explores how we as individuals are impacted by this country’s history, which is a very important aspect of storytelling. But, individuals are not the only ones impacted by change. In the past several years, we have seen a steep rise in social discourses that have led to the challenging of existing institutions and systems, including universities. Instead of showing what this looks like for a university at large, COLLEGE COLORS happens in the microcosm of a dorm room, keeping the experience of the individuals the center of this play. What led you to decide on a college campus, more specifically a dorm room, as the setting for COLLEGE COLORS?

STACIE: I like to approach playwriting from within specific points of view and circumstances. I hope that in doing so, the production gets to more universal truths, but I am most at home telling specific stories that I hope will resonate rather than putting my plays or my characters forward as representing a whole issue or group of people. I was interested in looking at a college campus in part because I myself have spent so much time on college campuses—as a student, a graduate student, a professor—and because college campuses are often the starting points for important cultural dialogue. For this particular story, I was looking at the history of colleges in this country and of the baggage that many of our oldest universities carry in terms of their relationship to diversity, equity, and inclusion. It was also really important to me as a White writer to put the White characters in the position of facing their own blind spots. I was interested in how larger cultural questions play out in the relationships—and specifically friendships and how we as people are sometimes blinded to our own ignorance. I can’t stress enough how fortunate I was to have the advice and perspective of the actors I worked with. I was also lucky in that Crossroads Theater, who produced the first professional production, helped me schedule interviews with some of the first Black students on some of these campuses.

KATIE: Working with others is vital to the work we do in the theatre industry. Based on this conversation, it seems like you were in constant dialogue with this play before it was finished. One moment that really sticks with the audience is in the final moments of the play when we see both sets of characters on stage together, although they are experiencing different moments in time. It’s a strong choice that results in an impactful image. Did you always know that the characters would all be on stage together at some point, or were they originally fated to exist separately?

STACIE: Yes and yes! The stories certainly started as separate ones, but I realized fairly early on in the writing process that I wanted to give the audience a chance to contend with these four characters at the same time so that as an audience, they could draw their own conclusions about the history of this fictional college and fictional dorm room. It was important to me to have characters on stage alongside their own history or their own future.

KATIE: Speaking of a character’s own history and future: for you, what does it mean to be a playwright? Has the meaning changed over the course of your life?

STACIE: The meaning has certainly changed, mostly because I continue to learn from every production I do and from the artists I work with. For example, playwriting meant something completely different for me before I began working with incarcerated actors through commissions from Prison Performing Arts. These actors taught me a lot about what it means to have a voice in the telling of your own story. I am less interested now in expressing a static story or point of view on stage and much more interested in asking the questions that touch my life and the lives of those around me. I am also much more reliant on other artists, particularly those who work on my plays, to collaborate with me on what is true and on the points of view of the characters. The longer I write, the less I know! I write to grapple with questions I don’t know the answers to and to question and examine my own point of view.

Read Stacie Lents’ Bio

COLLEGE COLORS

Article by Katie Stottlemire

As David Grimm adds three new plays to the TRW Plays collection (TALES FROM RED VIENNA, IBSEN IN CHICAGO, and CYRANO DE BERGERAC), he spends some time with TRW to discuss these titles, the importance of recovery in art, and what his job might be in another life. (Hint: he does it in this life too!)

KATIE STOTTLEMIRE: Let’s start with TALES FROM RED VIENNA. It takes place in the 1920s, and the struggles of that time seem radically different from the world we live in at present. For you, what makes this play vital for today’s audiences?

DAVID GRIMM: Although the play is set in 1920 as Germany tried to recover from WW1, the play was actually inspired by very immediate circumstances (at least at the time I wrote it around 2010). Both the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars were dragging on with no end in sight, with mounting American casualties, and many of those widowed by the war were falling through the cracks. Their lives had been wrapped up in supporting those who served our country, and then, with death – nothing! I was also inspired by German Expressionism – specifically those paintings of WW1 war widows in full mourning, walking the streets as prostitutes to make ends meet. The image catapulted the play into existence, you might say. Additionally, we were approaching the centenary of World War 1 (which, at the time, was called, “The war to end all wars.” Hm.). At any rate, my play is about recovery; about moving on from mourning and loss. It’s about rediscovering life and celebrating it while we have it.

KATIE: Stories of recovery are especially important now. TALES FROM RED VIENNA and IBSEN IN CHICAGO both feature strong and unique female characters, and the tension arises from conflict in their relationships and well as class differences. How did you balance these two tensions in your writing?

DAVID: In a country such as ours, devoted to the making of money (that is, after all, what Capitalism is), it always surprises me when people point out that I write about class. How can one not? Class is ever present in our daily lives and in our politics. Despite the claims of the American Dream, America is not a classless society. Gender and race, two of the most important issues to explore in art today, are inextricably bound up with class. In telling the truth of our characters, it is incumbent on us as artists to explore the truth of their broader circumstances because how they live directly contributes to understanding the actions they take.

KATIE: Exploring the truth is especially interesting in Cyrano’s tale, as it focuses on Cyrano helping Christian by being deceitful. Your adaptation of CYRANO DE BERGERAC is a direct translation of Edmond Rostand’s work. How did you decide on what to keep in your adaptation from the source material?

DAVID: Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac” is a vast canvas. Each of its five acts contains several famous set-pieces, renowned in the dramatic cannon. My primary objective in adapting it was to burnish these set pieces so that they played as immediately as possible to a modern audience, while retaining the lyrical magic of the original text. The play is also a very sentimental piece and I tried, as much as possible, to hew away extraneous sentiment and focus on the dramatically motivated emotions of the characters. The rhyme scheme was a big question: how to handle it? Giving the rhyme dramatic motivation, as a trait of Cyrano’s character, rather than using it indiscriminately, brought a muscularity to the text. It was suddenly more rooted and less Rococo.

KATIE: IBSEN IN CHICAGO is not an adaptation of source material, but it involves source material as the characters put on a production of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts. Did you find that your creative liberties differed between these two plays? Were there any parts of the process that you found surprisingly similar?

DAVID: IBSEN IN CHICAGO is not an adaptation, but the play is based on a real event: the world premiere performance of Ibsen’s “Ghosts” which took place in Chicago, played by Danish and Norwegian immigrants. I researched these characters and location to bring this world to life. The central character, Helga Bluhme-Jensen actually faced the end of her life in an apartment not far from my own in Brooklyn, where she died of cancer. Creating a new play while attempting to maintain the integrity of persons who actually existed is a tricky one. In this case, however, the details of Bluhme-Jensen’s life were ready-made for a play (I won’t give away all the details. Read it for yourself!) I only hope Helga approves, wherever she may be.

KATIE: Wow! That’s amazing that your research revealed such a close connection between you and the history of your play. And I’m sure Helga approves of the great care you took while creating her as a character. Now, for our final question: if you could go back and pick a different profession, what would you choose?

DAVID: Either an actor of a lawyer. Probably actor, as lawyers have to write their own scripts, so that would be a lateral move. I still do act occasionally – I’ve been on stage at Rattlestick and INTAR – and I derive deep satisfaction from exploring and inhabiting characters created by other writers. I love letting go of the critical writer brain. So if anyone’s casting, give me a call! I’m serious!

Read David Grimm’s Bio

TALES FROM RED VIENNA

IBSEN IN CHICAGO

CYRANO DE BERGERAC

Article by Katie Stottlemire

The playwright of HOW TO STEAL A PICASSO & ASKING STRANGERS THE MEANING OF LIFE talks plays, writing and why Death of a Salesman may need a rewrite, in our QnA series, with a focus on the responsibilities of the playwright.

“Theatre is about individual playwrights openly writing about their hopes, griefs, humiliations, defects, complaints, success, and private thoughts in an attempt to… see, if only for a moment, life differently. That’s my hope, to allow the audience and myself to laugh as we see life differently.”

– William Missouri Downs

KATIE STOTTLEMIRE: Two of your plays have found a home at TRW: HOW TO STEAL A PICASSO and the newly released ASKING STRANGERS THE MEANING OF LIFE. Both are hilarious pieces that take very different formats. HOW TO STEAL A PICASSO is set in the tangible household of the family the story centers on and happens in real time, whereas ASKING STRANGERS is fluid with time and takes place in multiple, ambiguous locations. How do you approach writing comedy in such a variety of contexts and settings?

WILLIAM MISSOURI DOWNS: I believe that every context, setting, and story can be a comedy. I read once that the Greeks believed comedy, not tragedy, was the true catharsis. If you think about it, wouldn’t Oedipus make a much better comedy? In the final scene, Oedipus and his mom would file for a no-fault divorce, provide for their hemophilic-Habsburg jaw sons, and learn to laugh about their very human mistake – And then they’d have make up sex. And while I’m at, Death of a Salesman would also make a better comedy. Just before curtain, there’d be a touching scene where Willy apologizes to his sons for giving them such stupid names. Biff and Happy? He must’ve known that such handles would scar them. And then he’d talk about how there’s more to life than trying to live up to the unachievable American dream – Like enjoying the afternoon with his newly named sons, Ethan and Owen.

KATIE: At that point, the play would probably need a new name too! Both of your plays offer catharsis through comedy while interrogating essential questions about humanity. HOW TO STEAL A PICASSO explores what constitutes art and ASKING STRANGERS questions the very meaning of our existence. What are you hoping to inspire by asking these questions through your work?

WILLIAM: Theatre is about individual playwrights openly writing about their hopes, griefs, humiliations, defects, complaints, success, and private thoughts in an attempt to find that cathartic, transformative moment where an audience steps away from algorithm-generated well-charted territory and sees, if only for a moment, life differently. That’s my hope, to allow the audience and myself to laugh as we see life differently.

KATIE: Speaking of seeing life differently, in ASKING STRANGERS, one of the characters makes a claim that is likely to stick with many readers and audience members: that all stories are made for children. Is this a view you share? Who do you think stories are written for?

WILLIAM: I think stories give us structure. Our need for structure is really the need to simplify, to clear away the irrelevant, in order to create or find meaning in our lives. We need simplified structures because the excessive and random complexity of the world exceeds our cognitive capacities. Religion, philosophy, science, art, theatre, and comedy streamline life. And so, in a sense, all plays, novels, short stories, and poems take the complexity of life down to our level.

KATIE: On that note, let’s take the complexities of the craft of writing to your level. Both pieces encourage an examination and questioning of the ownership of art and the responsibility of artists and storytellers. What do you consider to be the responsibilities of a playwright?

WILLIAM: Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said our society suffers from a “philosophical illness.” A diet of only one philosophy, political ideology, or way of seeing the world leads to “dietary insufficiency.” And so, it’s the playwright’s responsibility to defeat sameness, for sameness breeds ignorance.

The writer Nadine Gordimer said, “A writer is committed to trying to make sense of life. It’s a search. So there is that commitment first of all: the commitment to the honesty and determination to go as deeply into things as possible, and to dredge up what little bit of truth you with your talent can then express.” It’s the playwright’s responsibility to find truth.

The philosopher Allan Bloom wrote “Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity, but the one that removes awareness of other possibilities.” It’s the playwright’s responsibility to tear down tyranny.

Maria Tatar wrote in The Heroine with 1001 Faces that need,” to recognize that no single protagonist has a hotline to the truth, and to understand how justice is a hard-won social good that requires us to listen to more than one voice and to be open to listening both to individual testimony and to choruses of lamentation and complaint.” It’s the playwright’s responsibility to give a voice to those who have not been heard.

Pacifist, anarchist, and social critic Paul Goodman wrote that art, “is reacting with one’s ideal to the flaw in oneself and in the world, and somehow making that reaction formation solid enough in the medium so that it indeed becomes an improved bit of real world for others.” It’s the playwright’s responsibility to improve the world.

Writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote, “Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.” It’s the playwright’s responsibility to create dignity.

Playwright John Arden said, “Theater must celebrate noise, disorder, drunkenness, lasciviousness, nudity, generosity, corruption, fertility, and ease.” It’s the playwright’s responsibility to celebrate life.

Playwright Marsh Norman said, “Playwriting is a physical craft, and it’s a thing that requires muscle, intellectual and emotional. People who are afraid of that, people who are afraid of doing damage–those are the people who’ll never make it. You have to be willing to be a killer.” It’s the playwright’s responsibility to not be afraid.

In his play The Real Thing, Tom Stoppard says, “I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little…” It’s the playwright’s responsibility nudge the world.

The novelist, short story writer Robert Coover said, “The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn’t imagine ourselves through a day without it. … We need myths to get by. We need story; otherwise the tremendous randomness of experience overwhelms us. Story is what penetrates.” It’s the playwright’s responsibility to organize the fragile complexity of human affairs.

Critic Robert Brustein said, “The channels that support serious advanced expression are quickly drying up. The big cultural dinosaurs will probably survive… if they fill their schedules with the equivalent of crowd-pleasing holiday shows like A Christmas Carol and Nutcracker, but high art in America is dying and dying along with it are our hopes for a still significant civilization.”

It’s the playwright’s responsibility to save civilization.

Read William Missouri Downs’s Bio

HOW TO STEAL A PICASSO

ASKING STRANGERS THE MEANING OF LIFE

Article by Katie Stottlemire

Tyler Dwiggins writes about his most personal play yet, THE BINDING, in his essay about how he came to write this story and the importance of LGBTQ+ representation in theatre and film. He calls this play “The Gay Pixar Play”.

The Gay Pixar Play

By Tyler Dwiggins

“Do we really need another ‘coming out’ story?” This phrase gets thrown around more often than it should, and I’ve never understood it. We live in an entertainment ecosystem that can support six thousand superhero movies a year. Are there really that many “coming out” stories clogging up our stages and screens?

Still, it was a phrase that bounced around my brain as I began writing my play The Binding. The first scene I wrote was that of Isaac—a closeted religious teen—asking his mother – a youth pastor—about a Bible story in which a father almost sacrifices his own son on an altar to prove his love for God. I saw that Bible story as a metaphor for religious parents who sacrifice their own relationships with their queer children after they come out.

But, I asked myself the familiar question. “Do we really need another ‘coming out’ story?”

And the truth was, I didn’t want to write a basic “coming out” play. I wanted to write something whimsical — with stage magic and literal flights of fancy. I wanted to create a play about queer characters that felt as imaginative and big-hearted as movies like Inside Out or Monsters, Inc. And that is how The Binding became what I lovingly referred to as “the gay Pixar play.”

I decided to pair Isaac’s struggle with his sexual identity and his religious upbringing with the sudden re-appearance of Poppy – Isaac’s childhood Imaginary Friend. Poppy flies into the living room window on the night of Isaac’s sixteenth birthday, and (although Isaac doesn’t know this) she is determined to push Isaac out of the closet one way or another. And Isaac definitely doesn’t know that Poppy has been forbidden to return to her Assigned Child’s home — by her own employers, the Federal Bureau of Imaginary Companionship.

With this, the play found its two worlds: a small Midwestern town and the other magical world, that of the Imaginary Friends. Like Inside Out or Monsters, Inc., we would see how these worlds butt up against each other – and how a sparkling outsider can interrupt the stasis of the ordinary world. And so, the idea of a teenager dealing with the unannounced return of his Imaginary Friend was the getaway car I needed — so that no one would realize I’d really written a “coming out” story!

The core message of The Binding is about the power (and danger) of placing your faith in something you cannot see. The characters in The Binding desperately want something to believe in, so they can survive life’s hardships and the universe’s cruel ambivalence. Whether it’s God or an Imaginary Friend or the cute boy who just moved into the neighborhood, Isaac HAS to find someone—or something– to believe in.

The Binding is my most personal play yet—but not because the characters are necessarily based directly on me. I was not really an Isaac, although he has pieces of my history in his life. And I was not his bold love interest Trevor, even though Trevor has more of my personal philosophies and sense of humor.

The reason The Binding is so personal is not because the plot is autobiographical, but because it represents the core of what I want to put into the world as a writer. I am a playwright who believes that queer characters deserve to inhabit fantastical, romantic, hilarious, heartbreaking, dimensional stories. LGBTQ+ folks have so much more to offer than rote tragedy or bitchy one-liners. We deserve to see ourselves in whimsical fairy tales and religious allegories and teen dramas and any other stories you can imagine… Maybe even one of those six thousand superhero movies!

And we deserve to see “coming out” stories. Especially weird ones like The Binding. Because every one of those stories is as unique and personal as the magical human telling it.

Read Tyler Dwiggins Bio

In this exclusive Q&A with the author of Nomad Motel and The Two Kids That Blow Shit Up, Carla Ching, was kind enough to share some time with TRW’s Katie Stottlemire, and offered a revealing, candid and insightful look into her work.

“…poets, theatermakers, writers and artists aren’t our prophets and seers anymore. Maybe they could and should be.”

– Carla Ching

KATIE: Your plays NOMAD MOTEL and THE TWO KIDS THAT BLOW SHIT UP are different in plot and circumstance but explore similar themes. Both plays present complex family relationships and stories of love. In TWO KIDS, we watch a tumultuous relationship that spans over thirty years and in NOMAD MOTEL, we witness two unique family structures and complex feelings of love. How do you approach writing on family and love?

CARLA: I think F. Scott Fitzgerald said that we return to the same themes again and again because they’re the themes/images/characters that haunt us. That keep us up at night. That move us. So I suppose these are the things I return to. Before I start a play, I may think about a burning question that’s bothering me. I kick around that question for a little while and ask myself if it’s worth spending time for the 2-5 years it’s gonna take to work on the play. Will I get sick of it? Or is there something that I’ve got to answer for myself in the writing of the play and the Rubix Cube of working on that will get me through to production. Then, I’ll sort of put that away and start with the characters I want to work with. And then, I really drop two characters into a room and watch them until they start to talk to one another. And I record what they’re saying. And let them do what they will. Even when I don’t want them to do that. And then the rest of the play starts to reveal itself in unconscious way. I don’t force theme on it or anything, but let the characters lead. I’m coming back around, I promise. For Nomad, I think I was asking what we do when the family we were born into can’t give us what we need — because they simply can’t. How do we find home? How do we continually re-make it as people are torn away from us? How do we find resilience in the face of great adversity? For Two Kids, I think it was almost the opposite question — what do we do when we’re stuck with someone? When the only person in the world that really understands us also makes us so mad? And messes up our lives? Or lets us down? How do you see someone through a whole life? What does it mean to be friends (or more sometimes and less other times) for three decades? Why are there people we just can’t shake, though we try?

KATIE: Right. “How do you see someone through a whole life?” That’s key. NOMAD MOTEL focuses on a facet of that heavy reality for many people: the complete and total uprooting of one’s life. The play explores how that situation manifests differently for each character, and the numbed acceptance and buried pain is palpable. How did you first come to the inspiration to write this story?

CARLA: There is a little bit in this story that comes from a particularly nomadic experience in New York when my marriage broke up. But, I was also commissioned to write this play by South Coast Rep through their Crossroads Commissioning Program. I was supposed to write a story about Orange County in some way. I wanted to touch on corners of the OC that hadn’t been explored as much. And I came across some articles about parachute kids — children who come to the US to live on their own and go to school as their parents stay in their home country. I also watched an HBO documentary called “Homeless: The Motel Kids of Orange County.” I was intrigued about both of these worlds. And saw parallels and contrasts between them. I also started getting some help from Pier Carlo Talenti, as I was starting work with the CTG Writers Group. They have a salon at the beginning of your time there where you could get two specialists to come in and have a conversation for an hour. He found an Asian American filmmaker named Angela Chen who had made a film about parachute kids. And Jennifer Friend, the CEO of Project Hope Alliance, which does work with housing unstable children and families in Orange County. That hour long salon was moving and super informative and influenced the characters that would become Alix and Mason, and their relationship.

KATIE: That connection really shows in the play. I wanted to talk about that in relationship to both pieces featuring racial themes, with a specific focus on Asian Americans. TWO KIDS presents ideas of racial stereotypes in nuanced layers, while NOMAD MOTEL unpacks those nuanced layers in tangible ways. Do you believe one way is more effective at presenting themes of racial stereotypes and oppressions, or is it situational?

CARLA: I write about what I experience moving through the world as an Asian American person. I think what may be different about these two plays is that Diana and Max are both Asian American, so they don’t have to code switch for each other as much. They have an almost insider language they share. Whereas Mason has to translate his experiences (as an undocumented Asian kid trying to pass for Asian American so that he doesn’t get deported) for his father in Hong Kong, and for Alix who has a completely different class experience and racial background. My hope is to put as many varied Asian American characters and stories onstage as I can. And that the characters have a multiplicity of experiences, and many facets. To illuminate for others what it’s like to walk in some of our shoes. And to make us more dimensional and more human in order to make it harder for others to stereotype us, dismiss us, or sideline us. And for the AA community — I think I write these plays because I didn’t see myself on stage or film growing up. It’s painful and hard not to see yourself represented in popular or even fringe culture. Your dreams, your worries, your family, your passions, your gripes with the world. So I write these for us. Stories where we’re at the center. Where we’re not the side character in someone else’s narrative.

KATIE: For you, what does it mean to be a playwright?

CARLA: To me, to be a playwright is to capture some kind of aspect of the human experience and put it onstage. Then to ask people to interrogate what they think they know, feel, understand. To unearth some truths, to dispel some lies. To reckon with the hardest questions we have. There’s nothing like wrestling with a question with a whole room full of other people. To go on a journey in the dark together. I’m sad we’re in a time when our poets, theatermakers, writers and artists aren’t our prophets and seers anymore. Maybe they could and should be. Maybe because more populist forms and platforms are more accessible to people. Maybe if we improve access, theater can once again truly be a place where we dialogue about the world we live in, the families we love in, the existential questions that keep us up at night.

Read Carla Ching’s Bio

NOMAD MOTEL

THE TWO KIDS WHO BLOW SHIT UP

Article by Katie Stottlemire