ALMANAC
Almanac is a literary magazine from Playwrights Horizons. Established in 2020, at a time of pandemic and protest, Almanac is a new kind of publication — one in which a theater and the artists who comprise it come together to take stock of contemporary politics, culture, and playwriting. Through plays, essays, interviews, poems, and visual art, Almanac charts the coordinates of the present day, as measured by thinkers and makers whose work lives both on and beyond the stage.
EDITORIAL BOARD
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Natasha Sinha
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Adam Greenfield
EDITOR
Libby Carr
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Lizzie Stern
DIRECTOR OF MARKETING Teresa Bayer
EDITOR Fiona Selmi
CREATIVE DIRECTOR Jordan Best
DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS Alison Koch
EDITOR May Treuhaft-Ali
ALMANAC PL AYWRIGHTS HORIZONS 416 W 42ND ST, NEW YORK, NY 10036
Copyright © 2023 Playwrights Horizons, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed by Michael Harrison of WestprintNY. Almanac has received generous support from The Liman Foundation.
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Contributors
DAVID ADJMI’s plays have been produced at theaters around the world. He holds commissions from Playwrights Horizons, Yale Rep, Berkeley Rep, and the Royal Court (UK). His critically acclaimed memoir Lot Six was published by HarperCollins in 2020, and his collected plays are published by TCG. Upcoming at Playwrights Horizons: Stereophonic.
CÉSAR ALVAREZ (they/them) is a composer, lyricist, playwright, and performance maker. They create big experimental gatherings disguised as musicals in the key of inter-dimensionality, socio-political transformation, kinship and coexistence. César was a Princeton Arts Fellow, a recipient of The Jonathan Larson Award, The Guggenheim Fellowship and the Kleban Prize. César teaches at Dartmouth College. www.cesaralvarez.net
VIVIAN J.O BARNES is a writer from Virginia. Her short plays have been produced at Ensemble Studio Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre, and Actors Theatre of Louisville. Her play The Sensational Sea Mink-ettes will have its world premiere at Woolly Mammoth Theatre in 2024. She’s a proud member of the Writers Guild of America.
SIVAN BATTAT (she/they) is a theatre director & community organizer, and the Director of New Work Development at Noor Theatre. Sivan seeks to bridge justice work and cultural work, bringing the power of performance to our movements, and the vision of movement work to our theaters. sivanbattat.com
TERESA BAYER is the Director of Marketing at Playwrights Horizons. When she is not selling and celebrating the incredible mission and programming at Playwrights, she is chasing her toddler around Astoria, Queens with her husband and Husky-Akita, arranging flowers as head designer for Raving Flamingo Flowers, and teaching yoga.
JORDAN BEST is the Graphic Design Manager and artwork designer for Playwrights Horizons.
AGNES BORINSKY is a writer, performer, and convener of people. Her most recent play, The Trees, premiered in 2023 at Playwrights Horizons, in a co-production with Page 73. She lives in Los Angeles.
ISAAC BUTLER is the author of The Method: How the 20th Century Learned to Act and the co-author, with Dan Kois, of The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America. He also co-hosts Working, a podcast about the creative process, for Slate.
LIBBY CARR is the Marketing Assistant at Playwrights Horizons. As a playwright, their work as been developed at Playwrights Horizons’ New Works Lab, the Kennedy Center, the Workshop Theater, the University of Texas at Austin, MOtiVE Brooklyn, and Austin’s Ground Floor Theater.
JOHN J. CASWELL, JR. is a playwright originally from Phoenix and the author of Wet Brain (Playwrights Horizons, MCC), Scene Partners (Vineyard Theatre), Man Cave (Page 73), and God Hates This Show (HERE). Education: Juilliard School, Hunter College, Arizona State University.
SHAYOK MISHA CHOWDHURY is a Relentless Award, Mark O’Donnell Prize, Jonathan Larson Grant, and Princess Grace Award-winning writer and director. He recently directed the Soho Rep and NAATCO production of his play Public Obscenities “with a swooning hypnotism reminiscent of the best works of neorealism” (New York Times, Critic’s Pick).
MIA CHUNG received a 2023 Whiting Award for Drama and a 2022 MAP grant for a music-theatre work. Her play Catch As Catch Can premiered at Playwrights Horizons in Fall 2022 (World Premiere, Page 73, 2018). Additional: Ball In The Air, This Exquisite Corpse, You For Me For You.
DEBORAH S. CRAIG (actor, singer, writer) is best known for creating the role of Marcy Park in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Based on her own overachieving childhood, she received a Drama Desk Award and the distinction of creating the first Korean American character on Broadway. She can currently be streamed in these movies: “Meet Cute” on Peacock and “Me Time” on Netflix and in lots of TV shows. Miss Craig was the first writer/actor to be accepted into the Ma-Yi Writers Lab. She is a transracial, transnational adoptee from South Korea and a self-taught Asian. IG: @thedeborahscraig
EISA DAVIS likes to write, make music, and act, in any order, or all at once. She’s from the Bay Area and lives in Brooklyn. Some works: Bulrusher, Angela’s Mixtape, Mushroom, Ramp, The History of Light, The Essentialisn’t, Afrofemononomy, songs for Devil In A Blue Dress, justice, joy.
LARISSA FASTHORSE (Sicangu Lakota) is an award winning writer and 2020-2025 MacArthur Fellow. Her satirical comedy, The Thanksgiving Play, made her the first known female Native American playwright on Broadway under the direction of Rachel Chavkin. She has many new productions coming up including the national tour of Peter Pan.
ADAM GREENFIELD is Artistic Director of Playwrights Horizons. He has a husband called Jordan and a dog called Trapper, and they all live in Brooklyn.
DAVE HARRIS is a poet, playwright, and screenwriter from West Philly. When he isn’t writing or pretending to write, he is cooking for the people he loves and dancing closely with strangers.
Contributors
DOMINIQUE FAWN HILL is a Tony Award-nominated and Obie Award-winning costume designer for Broadway and Film. Broadway: Fat Ham (Tony Award nomination); Off-Broadway: Tambo & Bones (Playwrights Horizons –Lucille Lortel nomination); Fat Ham (Obie Award); Where the Mountain Meets the Sea (Manhattan Theatre Club); The Dark Girl Chronicles (The Shed); 125th & FREEdom (National Black Theatre). Dominique earned her M.F.A., University of California San Diego and you can find her work at www. dominiquefhill.com
SAMUEL D. HUNTER’s plays include The Whale, A Bright New Boise, Pocatello, The Few, The Harvest, Lewiston/Clarkston, Greater Clements, and A Case for the Existence of God, among others. Originally from northern Idaho, he lives in NYC with his husband, daughter, and terrier mutt.
DAVID HENRY HWANG’s works include M. Butterfly, Yellow Face, Soft Power, Aida, Chinglish, and Flower Drum Song (revival), as well as thirteen opera libretti. He has been honored with Tony, Grammy, and three Obie Awards, and is a three-time Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama.
JULIA IZUMI’s (she/her) works include Regretfully, So the Birds Are (Playwrights Horizons/WP Theater), miku, and the gods. (ArtsWest), and others. Her work has been developed at MTC, Clubbed Thumb, New Georges, Berkeley Rep, and more. Honors for her work include the OPC Dr. Kerry English Artist Award, O’Neill Finalist, and KCACTF’s Darrell Ayers Playwriting Award. Current New Dramatists Resident, LMCC Workspace Resident, and Civilians R&D Group Member. Current commissions: True Love Productions, MTC/Sloan, Playwrights Horizons, Seattle Rep 20x30. MFA: Brown University.
ABIGAIL JEAN-BAPTISTE (any/all pronouns) is a theater maker, director, and writer born & based in New York with familial roots in Haiti and the American South. Guided by questions around blackness, femininity and kinship, her work uses fragmented language, repeatable gestures, and tactile objects in search of unconventional and nonsensical ways of being.
EMILY JOHNSON is an artist who makes body-based work. She is of the Yup’ik Nation, is a land and water protector and an organizer for justice, sovereignty and well-being. Emily has lived on the Lower East Side of Mannahatta in Lenapehoking for the last seven years.
JENNY KOONS. The Whitney Album (Soho Rep), Regretfully, So the Birds Are (Playwrights Horizons), Head Over Heels (Pasadena Playhouse w/Sam Pinkleton), Hurricane Diane (Huntington), Men on Boats (Baltimore Center Stage), Speechless (Blue Man Group North American Tour), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (The Public Theater Mobile Unit), Burn All Night (American Repertory Theatre), A Sucker Emcee (National Black Theatre, LAByrinth), The Odyssey Project.
HARUNA LEE is an Obie Award-winning Taiwanese/ Japanese/American theater maker, screenwriter, educator and community steward whose work is rooted in a liberation-based healing practice. For Playwrights Horizons’ Soundstage, they performed in His Chest Is Only Skeleton by Julia Izumi. They are a co-director of the Brooklyn College MFA Playwriting Program. harunalee.com
L MORGAN LEE (she/her) is a Tony Award® nominated actress and storyteller with over twenty years in the business. Her work has included Broadway, Off-Broadway, International/National concerts, tours, and studio recordings. L Morgan is dedicated to championing stories centering women’s voices on both stage and screen. For more: lmorganlee.com
RJ MACCANI is a parent and the Director of Training for Common Justice, the first alternative-to-incarceration and victim-service program in the United States that focuses on violent felonies in the adult courts. RJ is an LMSW and his vocational experience reflects three complementary passions: transformative justice, somatic coaching, and the creative arts.
MONA MANSOUR is thrilled to be part of this year’s Almanac. Her play The Vagrant Trilogy made its NYC debut last year at the Public Theater. She is currently working on a musical about Zelda Fitzgerald with singer-composer Hannah Corneau and director Michael Greif, as well as a joint-stock play exploring quantum entanglement with her theater company SOCIETY. Proud member of WGA, SAG and the Dramatists Guild.
QUI NGUYEN is a Los Angeles-based playwright, filmmaker, and co-founder of Vampire Cowboys Theatre Company. Notable works include Vietgone, She Kills Monsters, and the Disney films Raya and the Last Dragon and Strange World. He’s a proud of member of the WGA.
BRUCE NORRIS is the author of Clybourne Park, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (2011) as well as the Olivier, Evening Standard, and Tony Awards. Other plays include Downstate, The Low Road, The Qualms, Domesticated, A Parallelogram, The Unmentionables, The Pain and the Itch, and Purple Heart
DEIRDRE O’CONNELL has appeared at Playwrights Horizons in Corsicana, Circle Mirror Transformation, Manic Flight Reaction, Spatter Pattern, and Moe’s Lucky Seven. She won a Tony for Best Performance for her appearance in Dana H. in 2022. She has an Obie for Sustained Excellence and a New York Drama Critics Circle Special Citation. She has had four shows of her paintings at Susan Eley Fine Art Galleries. You can find the work at susaneleyfineart.com.
Contributors
SARAH SCHULMAN is a novelist, playwright and AIDS historian and is the author of the plays Carson McCullers (dir Marion McClinton, Playwrights Horizons/The Women’s Project), Manic Flight Reaction (w/ Deirdre O’Connell, dir Trip Cullman, Playwrights Horizons), Enemies, A Love Story (adapted from IB Singer, w/ Morgan Spector, The Wilma Theater), The Burning Deck (w/ Diane Venora, La Jolla Playhouse) and The Lady Hamlet (w/ Jennifer Van Dyck, dir David Drake, Provincetown Theater – BroadwayWorld Boston’s Best New Play). She is a Guggenheim fellow in Playwrighting. Her musical SHIMMER, with composer Anthony Davis and lyricist Michael Korie, will be presented at Yale University’s Innovation Summit on June 1.
FIONA SELMI is a Brooklyn-based dramaturg and writer. She was the Artistic Fellow at Playwrights Horizons for the 2022/23 season, and currently works at United Talent Agency as the assistant to a theatrical literary agent. She holds a BA from Williams College in Theater and Political Science.
JEN SILVERMAN’s plays include Spain, Collective Rage, The Moors, The Roommate, and Highway Patrol. Books include the novel We Play Ourselves, story collection The Island Dwellers, and forthcoming novel There’s Going to be Trouble (Random House, 2024). Jen also writes for TV and film. Honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim.
NATASHA SINHA (she/her) is Associate Artistic Director of Playwrights Horizons, and co-founder of Beehive Dramaturgy Studio and Amplifying Activists Together.
JENANI SRIJEYANTHAN (they/she/them) is an anti-violence advocate residing in Brooklyn, NY. Their abolitionist and transformative work to end gender violence is housed within Just Beginnings Collaborative and the devi co-op. jenani’s work centers young survivors and survivors who experience incarceration and/or system-involvement, namely from queer communities.
VERA STARBARD, T’set Kwei, is a Tlingit and Dena’ina playwright, magazine editor, and Emmy-nominated TV writer. She was Playwright-in-Residence at Perseverance Theatre through the Andrew W. Mellon National Playwright Residency Program, and longtime newspaper and magazine editor for various publications, including First Alaskans Magazine. She is a writer for the PBS Kids children’s program “Molly of Denali,” which won a Peabody Award in 2020 and was nominated for two Children and Family Emmys in 2022. She recently was staffed on the ABC show “Alaska Daily.”
LIZZIE STERN is the Literary Director at Playwrights Horizons. She is also a freelance writer and editor.
MARIA STRIAR is a founder of and the Producing Artistic Director of Clubbed Thumb, which commissions, develops and produces funny, strange and provocative new plays by living American writers. Writers who made their professional debut with them include Will Arbery, Jaclyn Backhaus, Clare Barron, Gina Gionfriddo, Angela Hanks, and many more.
AMITA SWADHIN (they/them) is the Founding Co-Director of Mirror Memoirs, a national organization uplifting the narratives, healing, and leadership of Black, Indigenous and of color LGBTQI+ child sexual abuse survivors. Amita’s life experiences as a queer, nonbinary South Asian, US-born survivor has guided their work as an organizer, storyteller and educator for over two decades.
LAYLA TREUHAFT-ALI has taught middle-school English and History in Chicago Public Schools since 2019. Last year, she and her students won a $1.5 million city grant to build a student-designed playground in West Englewood. She helped craft the Literacy and Justice for All Act (currently headed to the Illinois governor’s desk!).
MAY TREUHAFT-ALI is the Literary and Community Engagement Assistant at Playwrights Horizons. Her past Almanac contributions include “The Center of the World: Playwrights Horizons and 42nd Street” in Issue 1. As a playwright, her work has been developed at Ars Nova, Rattlestick, Clubbed Thumb, The Playwrights Realm, The Movement Theatre Company, and MCC Theater.
JENNY ZHANG is the author of the story collection Sour Heart and the poetry collection My Baby First Birthday. She also writes for TV and film.
Letter from the Editors
Natasha Sinha and Lizzie Stern
DEAR READER,
Welcome to Playwrights Horizons’ third edition of our literary magazine, Almanac, a home for discourse about the theatrical art form and industry during a time of ongoing transformation.
As we are writing this, the 2022/23 season has just ended, with a flurry of think pieces about a bleak future for the American theater, happening in lockstep with late-stage capitalism. And yes, this is a tough time for the kinds of American theater practices and forms to which we’ve become accustomed. But we wonder: if it’s true, as it’s been said, that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism – then maybe it’s also easier to imagine the end of theater than the end of our current model for it. And yet, imagining is what our favorite artists do best.
When we commissioned artists to contribute to this volume, we offered them the loose and optional thematic prompt of “liberated imagining” – i.e., proposals of futures that transcend despair and futility, and articulate new wishes or blueprints for a better world. How can we move past dystopian thoughts and recursive conversations about what’s broken – and move toward constructive visions of the future?
What emerged is a thought-provoking and delightful collection of essays, paintings, interviews, short plays, dialectic explorations, and poetic meditations from some of our favorite artists, including Jen Silverman, Shayok Misha Chowdhury, Vivian J.O. Barnes, Deirdre O’Connell, Vera Starbard, and L Morgan Lee, among others.
Alongside these pieces, you will also find probing and perceptive reflections on our five 2022/23 season productions from extraordinary thinkers in our community, including Jenny Zhang, Sarah Schulman, Haruna Lee, Sam Hunter, and David Adjmi.
…and, we have a special treat for you! Throughout last year’s edition, you could find a series called “Plays as Shapes,” in which playwrights drew the shape of one of their plays. This year, in a similar sweet experiment, we asked playwrights like Eisa Davis, David Henry Hwang, and Qui Nguyen to visually render their “artistic family tree.” This series is a unique look at how each bundle of inspirations nourished these theatermakers’ identities, and it articulates a sense of creative lineage for each of them. (Make sure to check out our very own Adam Greenfield’s tree, at the center of the magazine!)
So, while riding out the ripple effects of the pandemic, and coping with enormous financial hardship industry-wide, it certainly has not been an easy time to work in theater. But it has been – and continues to be – a deeply rewarding one. In our 2023/24 season, we will continue to offer productions and other programming which, we hope, will stick with you long after you’ve left our building on 42nd Street. We’d love for you to join in on this – and stay in the always-expanding conversation with us.
Sincerely,
Natasha and Lizzie
From the Artistic Director
Adam Greenfield
FAMILY: A VORTEX OF CONTRADICTIONS. A source of both security and danger. A safe haven and a war zone. It’s a collective body, but one which perpetually exists at odds with the individuality of its constituents. It’s an abstract idea, but acutely present and inescapable. And even in absentia, family keeps its grip.
Western drama has long fed on the torment of family life, but perhaps never so hungrily as in the theater of twentieth century America. The American family play, as a genre, has been so dominant on our stages that the family home has become a default setting. Lights up on a living room. At center, the sofa. Possibly an armchair. Upstage, a kitchen. Front door on one side, on the other a hallway leading to the rest of the house. Stairs leading to a second floor. A house, with one wall missing downstage: the petri dish of realism, where American life is scrutinized.
When setting out to program a season of plays, I never think of or aim for any unifying theme; I gravitate to each play for its distinct and idiosyncratic merits, and then do my best to fit it on a calendar. Often, though, in hindsight, over the course of producing that season, a common theme starts to emerge and surprise me. And so, sometime in the middle of our 2022/23 season, I came to realize that these five very singular plays work together as a contemplation of the idea of “home.”
At rise in Daniel Aukin’s production of Catch As Catch Can – the delicate, audacious play by Mia Chung which opened our season last October – the lights reveal an ordinary American home which, as the play progresses, deconstructs to become a psychological labyrinth. Tim Phelan has returned home to New England, a tremulous mess, exhausted, and hoping to find his footing. But his arrival only reveals the porous boundary between parent and child, as multiple characters begin to inhabit a single body (in a feat of genius dramaturgy), and as the physical space itself – home, previously a symbol of safety – becomes a crowded, claustrophobic maze of detritus and memory.
In Bruce Norris’s Downstate, a thin-walled halfway house in southern Illinois becomes an inescapable prison for four post-incarceration sex offenders. They live in exile; home is their haven, but a temporary one that allows no privacy and is under constant attack. At the end of the play’s first act, Dee, in a staggering performance from K. Todd Freeman, dances to Diana Ross (“it’s my house, and I live here”), looming behind him a window that’s been
smashed by hostile neighbors. Home promises the safety these men need, but it’s unattainable in a culture which blurs notions of justice and retribution.
In her epic origin story, The Trees, Agnes Borinsky rejects consensus definitions of home and offers a new one. The play opens on siblings David and Sheila, stumbling home from a mediocre party, and deciding – poignantly – not to return to Dad’s house that night, but instead to sleep outside in a public park, where – magically? – they take root. Over the course of the next seven years, home and family are redefined, as a new community forms and begins to promise a kind of utopia. But can a utopia stay both flexible and strong enough to live within hard-line reality?
Meanwhile in a half-scorched house somewhere in New Jersey, Julia Izumi’s Regretfully, So the Birds Are follows three adopted Asian-American siblings whose wacky, sociopathic parents have denied them any knowledge of where they come from. Izumi’s play is an absurd, explosive vision of home through the lens of an identity quest, which launches the siblings on a journey all over the world – to Cambodia, Nebraska, and high into the sky – on their search for home — or at least, for something to fill its absence. Director Jenny Koons’s staging featured
three fractured views of the family home: a physical reflection of their yearning for cohesion and completeness.
Finally, in a dilapidated house in Arizona – in a room saturated with memories and ghosts — John J. Caswell, Jr.’s Wet Brain flutters in the continuum of the American family play. Three siblings are chronically in battle, haunted by their parents’ self-annihilation, trapped in it. But in defiance of traditional, boozy, claustrophobic American realism, the walls of this house become permeable, weak against the family’s need to heal. Caswell’s play draws them up, and farther up, away from the living room, the kitchen, the armchair. It’s breathtaking, this break into freedom. As though the play itself is helping them there, and by extension, us.
I haven’t any brilliant take on what this inadvertent motif means, but it has got me thinking about our relationship with home in the year 2023, in the aftermath of the Covid Era when, for a time, home was our entire world. How are we changed, or changing? What do we need home to be now? What do we want home to be now? And what about its dominating presence on our stages; what does that say about us? I’ve heard it suggested that domestic plays are a tyranny over American theater, and I wonder if
the electricity I felt in this year’s season was that of writers pushing against our theatrical past, straining to break free from – or to find more space within – the domestic drama. Or a deepening of its continued pursuit to understand what makes us.
I think of a note from Arthur Miller, from a 1956 essay published in The Atlantic: “Now I should like to make the bald statement that all plays we call great, let alone those we call serious,” he wrote, “are ultimately involved with some aspect of a single problem. It is this: How may [one] make of the outside world a home? How and in what ways must [one] struggle, what must [one] strive to change and overcome within [oneself] and outside [oneself] if [one] is to find the safety, the surroundings of love, the ease of soul, the sense of identity and honor which, evidently, all [people] have connected in their memories with the idea of family?”
Mostly, though, I look back at the season grateful for the chance to have shared these five plays with our city, and with the extraordinary artists, practitioners, and audiences who came together to participate in these writers’ visions, and to ask the questions. A
CATCH AS CATCH CAN
Written by Mia Chung
Directed by Daniel Aukin
October – November 2022
What do we do when we don’t recognize someone we also know very well? When reality resists easy resolution — or a comfortable one—do we turn away? Find a new narrative? Widen our perceptions? How do we resolve the uncertainty and discomfort of the unresolvable? When grappling with experiences that resist language, how do we express them?
Mia Chung
Playwright’s Perspective: Catch as Catch Can
The Compulsion to Perform: Parents, Children, and Whiteness in Catch as Catch Can May Treuhaft-Ali
LON. The past’s the past, Rob. ROBBIE. Not really, Pop, not really.
It is true, in every play, that the bodies onstage change the story being told. An audience infers power dynamics from the relationships between characters based on their differences in age, race, and gender. The cadence of any playwright’s words changes depending on the voice that delivers them, which might be shaped by the actor’s ethnicity, geographic origins, or socioeconomic background. Even if these layers of meaning aren’t written into the script, they become inseparable from the audience’s perception of the characters.
This is the principle that Mia Chung points to when she writes, in the introductory notes to the script of Catch as Catch Can, “The theatrical doubling of character is core to
the play’s meaning.” Each actor plays two characters of different ages and genders, and so, no matter who is cast in each role, they must inhabit a character whose actual body would look different from their own. By dissociating each character’s gender and age from that of the actor playing them, the play posits that these attributes have little to do with physical appearance, and much more to do with the performance of identity. Through intergenerational theatrical doubling, in which each actor plays both a parent and their grown child, Mia invites us to consider the ways that familial legacy – including inherited values and assumptions around race and gender – dictate what “roles” we feel compelled to play in our everyday lives. This proposition was interrogated with rigorous artistry in the play’s world premiere in 2018 at Page 73, directed by Ken Rus Schmoll and featuring Jeff Biehl, Michael
Esper, and Jeanine Serralles. Our production explores it from a new angle by populating this story with an entirely Asian-American cast. In her script notes, Mia specifies that “the play can be performed by an all-white cast or a cast that is all of East Asian descent,” but that either way, “the actors perform white, working class, Irish-American, and Italian-American characters in New England.” When Asian-American actors embody these characters, they are not just playing across age and gender, but race as well. This casting conceit, therefore, highlights whiteness as an identity that the characters perform – and, ultimately, reveals the toll that this performance takes on them.
The concept that identity is a performance, rather than a fixed or inherent quality rooted in biology, was popularized by Judith Butler in her seminal book, Gender Trouble, published in 1990. Butler, a feminist scholar, theorizes that one’s gender is the cumulative effect of one’s actions, each of which might affirm or defy the gender norms associated with one’s physical features. These actions are sometimes conscious decisions, but more often are unconscious reiterations of culturally ingrained gender roles. Sociologist Nadine Ehlers builds upon Butler’s notions of performativity in her 2012 book Racial Imperatives, arguing that race is not a corporeal fact. Rather, Ehlers asserts that “racial discipline is sustained through the performative compulsions of race, and that all subjects are produced and produce themselves through a kind of labor (discipline) that can be seen as (performative) racial passing.” In other words, racial categories are precarious and mutable, and are only maintained when people’s actions conform to them. Again, those actions are socially learned and are rarely an expression of individual agency.
The Phelans and the Lavecchias, the two families we meet in Catch as Catch Can, are deeply connected to their respective Irish-American and Italian-American heritages. Both demographics have a historically complex relationship to whiteness: they were considered a separate (and inferior) race by white(r) Americans when they first immigrated to the United States, and they “earned” their whiteness through a series of strategic political alignments that can be seen as a collective form of performative racial passing.
When they arrived in the U.S. in the 1820s, Irish immigrants were relegated to ill-paying, dangerous jobs and poor living conditions. They were also subject to vitriolic stereotypes and physical attacks. This dynamic began to change in the 1850s, when Northern white workers became politically advantageous to the pro-slavery Democratic Party. In order to win national elections, they needed more voters in Northern states, and, since most middleand upper-class voters would not vote for a pro-slavery party, Southern plantation-owners made special appeals to Northern immigrant laborers for their support. Since the plantation-owners and immigrant laborers had few political interests in common, they formed a coalition over their shared sense of whiteness. In doing so, the Democratic Party worked to redefine whiteness as a matter of skin color, and not national origin. By relaxing one racial boundary, they were able to reinforce another: as historian Noel Ignatiev wrote in his 1995 book How the Irish Became White, “the assimilation of the Irish into the white race made it possible to maintain slavery.”
If adopting pro-slavery politics was one strategy for gaining acceptance from those in power, another was to
“
When Asian-American actors embody these characters, they are not just playing across age and gender, but race as well.
weave oneself into America’s origin story. The first large wave of Italian immigrants came to the U.S. in 1870, many of whom were from impoverished regions of southern Italy and Sicily. Similarly to the Irish, they were met with racist rhetoric that undermined their safety and barred them from jobs and adequate housing. In 1891, eleven Italian men were murdered by an angry mob in New Orleans, prompting Italy to break off diplomatic relations with the United States. In order to placate the Italian government, President James Harrison introduced Columbus Day as a one-time holiday. Brent Staples explains in his 2019 New York Times op-ed, “How Italians Became ‘White’,” that through the advocacy of Italian-American immigrants, Columbus Day became the annual institution we know today. They positioned Columbus as America’s first immigrant – a narrative that is clearly inaccurate on multiple accounts and obscures the violence he inflicted upon countless Indigenous Americans – in order to secure a higher status in American society and protect themselves from discrimination.
In a play about intergenerational legacies, these histories provide useful context for the Phelans’ and Lavecchias’ worldviews. They are deeply concerned with protecting their whiteness, namely by discouraging interracial marriages that might detract from its purity. Roberta Lavecchia, an Italian-American seamstress in her late 60s, feels a sense of relief that her son’s marriage ended before he could have children with his Korean ex-wife, even though she and her husband are willing to accept their relatives’ white Jewish and Polish-American romantic partners. The parents’ anxiety around accepting Asian-Americans into the family – an anxiety which the children internalize – is emblematic of the precarity of their white identity and their need to continually reify it through racist statements and exclusionary actions. Underlying this need is the inherited fear that, because whiteness is earned through performative racial passing, whiteness can be revoked if one fails to perform. The constant pressure to “produce” oneself “through a kind of labor,” in Ehlers’ words, is exhausting. Catch as Catch Can illuminates the cumulative effect of this exhaustion on parents and children alike.
Examining these characters in relation to the long American histories that have shaped them strengthens the play’s proposition that multiple generations live in each of our bodies, and that we perform race and gender the way we do because of the way our families live in us. With this play, Mia invites us to reflect on the histories we carry, the identities we enact, and the ancestors we bring to life through our actions. A
Caught Isaac Butler
0. Catch as Catch Can is a play in 15 scenes. On the surface, it could not be more simple. There are two families: the Italian-American Lavecchias and the Irish-American Phelans. They are working class and live in New England. The families are deeply intertwined, the children grew up together. Tim Phelan, the prodigal son who has been in California for over a decade, returns for mysterious reasons and announces he has a Korean-American fiancée, Minjung. Three actors play both the aging parents and their adult children. Yet the play is anything but straightforward. The three actors are not Irish-American or Italian-American but rather AsianAmerican. The first half is largely comic, at times quite broad, building to a riotous climax of a holiday dinner in which the three actors switch back and forth between their characters on a dime, sometimes seeming to play both at once. The second half is an increasingly dark and despairing drama in which ties between the characters come undone. The connections between these two halves are mysterious, and difficult to put into language. This is not a play where narrative moves along a line of clearly visible causality. It is hunting after a deeper, more mysterious, game.
1. This semester, I am teaching Shakespeare for the first time in many years. As a way of organizing the class and narrowing down which plays of his we are going to tackle, I decided to focus on Shakespeare and identity. College students love talking about identity, and I figured this would be an easy way into his work. We read some of the cross-dressing ones, and the three plays that significantly feature Moors, and of course The Tempest, because how could you not. Somewhat at the last minute, I decided to toss Hamlet onto the pile. I wanted to ask what does it mean to be a human being? I also wanted to know what does this play, which has been so central to our conception of the human subject, have to tell us about whiteness and maleness? After all, for so much of our history, when we ask what it is to be a human being we really meant what it is to be a white man. Whiteness and maleness were our assumed neutral, the mean from which everything else deviated.
2. ROBBIE: I mean, the goal’s to, like, to change yourself, to be different.
TIM: Right. But then: how will you know it’s the right self?
ROBBIE: …
Getting a little weird for me, Tim. – Catch as Catch Can, Scene 15
3. Being the neutral has all sorts of benefits, but it can leave you rather at sea over what your identity actually is. If you’re told over and over again that you are capable of being anything, it is also the case that you might be, well, nothing. A blank canvas isn’t all that interesting, except in terms of its limitless possibilities.
4. One running motif in Catch as Catch Can is the older generation’s attachment to certain pieces of Asian culture that appear to have washed onto the shore of their consciousness like treasures on a beach. Roberta visits a psychic with the name Glorisha who does the I Ching. Lon venerates Yamaha pianos.
5. Acting holds out the promise of self-transcendence. In the place where the actor and character meet, both are changed, both become more than they were before. This, at least, is what Konstantin Stanislavski taught. He believed that through a combination of rigorous research, physical training, textual analysis, imagination, and their own experiences as human beings, actors could reach beyond themselves and touch the peculiar individuals that they were playing. It was only this meeting of character and actor, which he called perezhivanie or experiencing that would allow for the most truthful, the most powerful, the most alive performances. This was a very different model from the mainstream of his time, which was more focused on types, and in actors working within whatever type suited them for the bulk of their careers.
6. As a Jew, I am both neutral and not. I am both white and not. I have a whiteness that can be revoked if it becomes inconvenient to the project of white supremacy. For some Jews, this creates an endless anxiety, a drive to reinforce their whiteness at the cost of people of color. For others, it fuels a desire to dismantle white supremacy. I like to think of myself as the latter kind of Jew, but I fear at times I may be the former without even realizing it. If whiteness is the neutral, it’s also the default, the reflex. To give one example of this: there are Black Jews—including my nephews— and the above paragraph completely ignores them.
7. We live at a time when identities are in flux. Or, to be more accurate, we live at a time when we have a heightened awareness of how in flux identities can be. Identities are always in flux, their boundaries are always renegotiated, always being policed and resisted and transgressed. Does an identity have intrinsic meaning or value? If so, what is it? What do categories like “Asian–American” or “Jewish” or “Italian-American” contain, exactly?
8. One reason we come to the theater is to see actors transcend themselves. It is a powerful thing to witness. We often feel trapped within the self, and, by transforming into the character, the actor helps us to feel on a deep level that perhaps some transformation of our own self is possible. The odd paradox is that the characters that the actors play are almost always trapped within themselves. So the act of performance gives us hope even as the content of that performance dashes it on the rocks. Thus the comic delights of Catch as Catch Can’s first half and the crushing bleakness of its second.
9. While we’re talking Stanislavski and transcendence and becoming other people and so on, I should probably mention that Stanislavski was a little fixated on Othello. He played Othello (and Shylock!) early in his career, and based his performance on an Arab merchant he met in Paris once. He wrote about Othello often. The prologue of An Actor Prepares is about Othello. In it, the young Stanislavski (who is named Tortsov) is trying to figure out how to play the Moor of Venice. Eventually he smears his face with chocolate frosting so that he can see how the whites of his teeth and eyes catch the light. He feels within this moment that he has discovered something. We have discovered something too, but not the thing that Stanislavski intended.
10. Does neutral exist? And what happens if something other than whiteness — and maleness — is treated as neutral? Catch as Catch Can playfully provokes both of these questions by having actors of East Asian descent portray white people. The opening of the play is a riot of stereotypes. In playing Roberta and Theresa, Jon Norman Schneider and Rob Yang wear whiteness like a mask. We know before the characters say more than a few lines that they are white women, that they are from New England, that they are in late middle age, that they do not come from money. It’s remarkable how much information about Roberta and Theresa can be derived from ten seconds of exposure to their accents, facial expressions, and gestures. But there is a second deployment of stereotypes—the exoticization of Asian women voiced by Roberta as she discusses Tim’s impending marriage to Minjung. It turns out her son Robbie’s ex-wife is also Korean. Asian women, she claims, are tighter than white women. They stay wet longer. Their vaginas are also horizontal instead of vertical. Five feet away, the actor Cindy Cheung, who plays Roberta’s husband Lon and daughter Daniela, sits, silently in place, dimly lit. In a few minutes, the lights will crossfade sharply and she will begin scene two as Lon. Watching her not respond to Roberta’s claims about Asian women — words that are written by an Asian woman to be voiced by a white woman played by an Asian man — we cannot help but have a heightened sense of… well, everything. Who is actually speaking? And who is listening? And who are we, to witness this? Every line begins to exist in multiple realities and contexts at once. The play, as comic as it is at this moment, is also a vertiginous, dizzying experience.
11. When I speak to acting teachers about their lives and jobs, the thing they often say they are worried about is the increasing constraints on who can play what. Yes, yes, they’ll say, practices like blackface are abhorrent. But must gay characters be played by gay actors? What about characters with disabilities? What about Jews? Or fat people? If transcendence is one of the goals of acting, one of its most powerful purposes, are we losing something if we insist too strenuously on a one-to-one correlation between actor and character when it comes to identity? I find these questions provocative and do not know a good answer to them. All I can usually say is that these are norms that are constantly being renegotiated, and that
the ongoing conversation about who can play what is a healthy one for us all to be having, regardless of the results. This is both true and feels like a cop-out, but the honest answer is I don’t know. I was furious when Ruth Bader Ginsberg was played by a British shiksa in On the Basis of Sex, but don’t really care about Louis in the most recent Angels in America revival being played by a straight Scottsman. I have no defined coherent ideology here, and I doubt most other people do either. What we have is deep-rooted, mysterious feelings, responses we cannot really control that we try to rationalize into something coherent. But we are incoherent, on this issue as in so many other things.
12. DANIELA: Sure, it’s easy to say I’ll be different, I see that hole and I’m not fallin’ in.
– Catch as Catch Can, Scene 3
13. The characters in Catch as Catch Can are burdened by whiteness, but they cannot see it. Whiteness is the air they breathe. Instead, they experience deep pain that comes from seemingly nowhere. They walk as if carrying great weight. They look tired all the time. The younger generation all yearn for some kind of escape, but everything feels like a trap, whether it’s a new job, or marriage, or parenthood. Their parents all yearn for the opposite: a stasis that never ends, a way of keeping their children and the world from changing. Neither is a real solution to the problem of being alive.
14. Stella Adler, the only American acting teacher to have studied directly with Stanislavski, often talked about what she called “modern drama.” These are plays, beginning with the naturalists of the late 19th century, where the characters are mysterious to themselves, ones in which unknowing is highlighted, rather than the kind of certainties the enlightenment ushered in. The problems in these plays cannot be solved, even when the plots resolve, because the problem is actually modernity itself. What these plays offer us is not a solution to the problem of living, but rather an experience of the problem of living, a new point of view on that problem. To paraphrase James Baldwin, they expose the questions that the answers have covered up.
15. One answer we cling to often is that identity is coherent, and that it offers us a home that we can carry with us, one that shelters us from the storm of the world. In Catch as Catch Can, Tim refers to Daniela as his home in the pivotal scene in which the play shifts from comedy to drama. The play reveals, first as farce, then as tragedy, that the various homes the characters live in — their physical homes, their families, their identities — don’t shelter them from anything. Instead, they leave the characters more trapped, more unable to navigate the world. In the second half of the play, the borders between characters break down, eventually even language breaks down. Daniela, in trying to express her pain, can only say “Ihh, Ihhca cah qwiy… Ahauhhughuh. Aoww uwwndu-uhuhuh. Mmm.” There is no language that can capture the terra incognita that the play has taken us all into. The answers have all imploded. Now we must find new questions to ask. A
Breaking the Curse Jenny Zhang
THE FIRST TIME someone showed me my astrological birth chart, I burst into tears. I didn’t know what the little symbols meant. (Later, I learned astrologers referred to them as “glyphs.”) It had to be explained to me that the cluster of blue curlicue script, of what looked like a capital M with a little upward arrow at the end, meant I had a “stellium” in the fixed water sign of Scorpio. Scorpio ruled really intense subjects like death and rebirth, as well as really disgusting subjects like bowels and toilets… and it was in my house of family and lineage. Another cluster of little diagonal red arrows with a horizontal line across was for the mutable fire sign of Sagittarius, that optimistic, (over) zealous, wandering centaur. Not knowing any of that at the time—what the glyphs were, or what the planets signified, or the meaning of the twelve houses that ancient astrologers had sectioned off the sky into, each “house” ruling over a variety of topics ranging from the self to others, romantic partners to open enemies, children, creativity, romance, pets, short and long-distance journeys, neighbors, spirituality, siblings, debts, inheritances, hidden sorrows, daily
routines, servitude, career, friendships, associations, insane asylums, prisons, labor, and finances—still, I was convinced what I was looking at was tragic.
The panoply of human experience—not just from life till death, but even events and occurrences that transpired before the moment of my existence and would continue after my death—all of it was contained in this document. Before me was a diagram of a circle with all kinds of lines, squiggles, numbers, colors and symbols that was meant to represent a snapshot of the sky at the moment my body was ejected out of my mother’s womb and into the world. I had no entry into deciphering what I was being shown, but I did know one thing: I was cursed.
Finally, I had what I was looking for. This was visual proof of my rotten fate. It was written in the stars, wasn’t it? That I was destined to be forever lonely. That I would die buried in regret. That love was unachievable for me. That no matter how hard I tried, I would continue to suffer endlessly. That it was too late for forgiveness, sanity, and acceptance… to say absolutely nothing about happiness,
stability, or fulfillment. I had gone looking for proof—it was the not knowing, the bouncing between wild hope and crushing disappointment that was unbearable. I just wanted to know. I just wanted someone to say: It’s not you, it’s your fate. There was something comforting about not being responsible for my own misery. If it had been decided for me by forces unfathomably larger than me, if it had all been determined before I even developed consciousness, then at least I wasn’t completely to blame.
Astrology makes a small but memorable cameo at the end of Mia Chung’s Catch as Catch Can. Two childhood friends Tim Phelan and Robbie Lavecchia study Tim’s birth chart. Robbie knows a little more than Tim about what the symbols and lines and numbers mean, but not much more. Tim finds his birth chart immensely interesting. Robbie thinks Tim is putting too much stock into it. I watched with recognition at how eagerly Tim wants someone to interpret his fate, to tell him exactly what he was working with. After a harrowing series of scenes where we find out that something is very, very wrong with Tim, that, in fact, something is very, very wrong with everyone, this moment stuck out to me. Maybe it meant nothing and maybe it meant absolutely everything, but I remember thinking this about my own birth chart: that analyzing and interpreting the zigzagging aspects between planets and the planetary movements was a fun reprieve from analyzing and interpreting the endless zigzagging that goes on in my own brain.
In Catch as Catch Can, three Asian American actors play Irish and Italian Americans, inhabiting both the role of the parent and the grown-up child. The actor who plays Tim Phelan also plays his mother Theresa. The actor who plays Robbie also plays his mother Roberta. The actor who plays Roberta’s husband Lon also plays his daughter Daniela. We are treated to a kaleidoscope of identities. Children become their parents, and parents become their children, sometimes in the same breath as the actors switch from son to mother, daughter to father, glib to serious, drunk to sober, cheerful to morbid, racist to curious, energetic to muted. What the audience gets is everything. At one point, as the Lavecchia family is getting ready for a major pre-Christmas holiday dinner celebration, things get tense, ancient family conflicts are stirred up, and Theresa Phelan, obliviously, or maybe not so obliviously, cuts through the tension by blithely dropping in a nugget about herself that no one asked for: “I love Swedish fish, but I have to be in the mood.” I laughed in deep recognition. Too often the realest thing anyone is willing to say among people they’ve known for years is a frivolous comment about candy preferences. Another reason why something like astrology can come as such a relief. It provides a structure that permits and even encourages questions like: “Do you struggle with love?” or “As a child, did you have to parent yourself?”
Like Tim, who confesses to Robbie, “Something broke, Rob. A long time ago. And it’s not getting fixed,” I had also confessed to a cherished friend about how broken I was, how there was no hope for me. Was it a confession or a challenge? I’m not sure anymore. My friend responded something to the effect of: If only real life were so simple. It would be nice if that was actually the whole story. Wow, I thought. She was right. It would be so much simpler if I were actually cursed.
There was a version of me that understood that and there was a version of me that refused and clung onto the
All these versions of me also contained echoes of my mother and my father and all the mothers and fathers before them… refracted and reflected and overlapping and subsuming and voided and crowding for space.
belief that I was, in fact, broken, and there was a version of me that stood on the shoulders of my ancestors and the people who raised me, and there was a version of me six feet under the ground, dragged down by everyone who came before me, and there was a version of me that wanted to be part of the world, and there was a version of me that was too weary to try, and there was a version of me that had so much still to live for, and there was a version of me that couldn’t do it again, and there was a version of me that believed in generational curses and who the fuck was I to think, that of all people, I would be the first to do things differently, to finally placate the ghosts and heal what my ancestors could not? There was a version of me that could go on and be a functioning member of society and a version of me that could not, and there was a version of me that clung to my ego and could not admit to what I did not know, good or bad, and there was a version of me that was humbled by the universe and could accept small and large kindnesses, that did not live in fear of the future nor in pain from the past. All these versions of me also contained echoes of my mother and my father and all the mothers and fathers before them… it was all in me, refracted and reflected and overlapping and subsuming and voided and crowding for space. And it’s the same for everyone. Which version will it be at any given moment? It’s hard to predict. But I know I have to be in the mood. A
Behind-the-scenes photos of the cast of Catch as Catch Can by Chelcie Parry. Production photography by Joan Marcus.
On Dystopias Jen Silverman
WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER, my martial arts teacher always told us that the gaze was everything. “Your fist goes where your eyes are looking,” he would say, meaning: don’t look away at the last second. And it was true – if we blinked or glanced away, the strike went off-course.
I think about this often in my adult life. It applies to so much else. Our bodies turn toward where we place our gaze. Even if we tell ourselves we’re thinking about something else, we drift closer. We can’t help it.
I wrote a Dystopian Play once, in grad school. A visiting playwright was in town, and one of their duties was to sit down with all of us one by one and discuss our work. By the time the playwright got to me, they were reasonably exhausted – by us as well as by the burdens of adult life in the theater. “Look,” they said (in my recollection). “I mean, just… Why?? Are you writing a dystopian play? What is the point? Aren’t there enough?” At the time, I was startled by their bluntness. But now, I have a real appreciation – both for their candor but also for the level of cultural exhaustion that makes an artist say, in their real voice and not their interior-monologue-voice: What is the point? Aren’t there enough?
It’s not that I’m against dystopian fictions. There is something to be said for processing our collective fears and traumas in narrative form. Numerous plays and films that I love have come out of these narratives.
But this is my question, for myself as well as you: in funneling our despair and frustration into dystopian world-building, are we also reinforcing our own worst ideas about ourselves and our potential for destruction? Do we create a sense of inevitability to the idea that things can only ever end in catastrophe? As we think about what is ahead, is there not power in placing our eyes on what we want to move toward? I don’t mean an optimistic take on the world we’re in; I mean: imagining a world that’s better than the one we’re in.
What happens if we imagine for ourselves abilities and capacities we don’t currently have? What if we imagine structures and communities our societies don’t yet hold? What if we place our narrative gaze there? Do we start to move toward it?
*
Theater makes alternate approaches to reality tangible and manifest. If theater is a place of concentrated communal witnessing, is that not an especially powerful space into which to place a vision?
We dream ourselves into physical spaces and then invite people to join us there. The experience of witnessing the world presented to us by a play is not wholly intellectual; it’s an embodied reality that lives in our breath, our heartbeat, the blood and meat of our bodies reacting. What feels real is, to our bodies, real. And thus we might physically experience life inside a world that, beforehand, we couldn’t bring ourselves to imagine existing.
Maybe the opposite of dystopia is the process by which we imagine what we most need to thrive, and then invite other people to join us there.
*
When Taylor Mac did A 24-Decade History Of Popular Music at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2016, there was a moment in which I looked around the packed theater and I saw so many kinds of queer bodies. Bodies that had brought themselves into being. I could see the labor on them: a labor of self-dreaming and self-knowing made manifest in scalp and ink, sequin or denim, clothing as armor or bare skin as clothing, gender blurred or brought into striking focus. A language of self-declaration that so many of us first learned to speak at a whisper, or in code. In that vibrating room, every body was out loud. Taylor Mac was singing songs from the past, and we were gathered in the present, but in that moment of gazing around me, I saw the future. A kind of future. One possible future.
*
Something I love: the defiant, expansive, restless imagination that I see in queer artists, in queers who are not artists, in people who have survived and built a means of thriving inside a culture that was not made for their safety or happiness.
There is a thing that happens to you – slowly, grindingly, over time - when you live in a country where your existence is subject to public debate. More than that: where your identity is something so dangerous that it must
be regulated or disbelieved – or regulated by disbelief. We could talk of the most obvious violences, but let me describe a different and subtler one: an exhaustion that always lives under the bones. The tendency to question yourself before someone else even gets around to questioning you: Am I really what I think I am? Am I sure? What are the consequences? Is it worth it? You might argue yourself into nonexistence before someone else can even get there.
But here is something else that happens. You learn – in equally bone-deep ways – that you cannot trust society’s reflection back to you of what you are and what is possible for you. You can’t trust it, nor do you require it. It just doesn’t apply. It’s a story in a language that does not describe you. And when you realize that, a kind of constraint goes away, and suddenly you are in a space in which your imagination is larger than the cultural imagination that surrounds you.
There is a freedom in that, I think. Many of us are destroyed by it, or are destroyed before we get to it. But those who aren’t seem able to access a singular vision and reach. I see how they fling open doors for the rest of us and say: Come see what it looks like over here.
There is a depth of imagination tied to survival: physical, spiritual and cultural. As humans, our imagination becomes more profound and muscular when it is also our means of salvation.
When I first read Andrea Lawlor’s astonishing Paul Takes The Form of A Mortal Girl, I thought: Somebody is speaking to me. I have waited my whole life for somebody to speak to me in this way.
Paul Takes the Form is set in the mid-90s, but it opens up a window on the future. The titular Paul is a shapeshifter, a polymath who radiates curiosity and desire… and who shifts between genders. Paul is also Polly. Polly/Paul is witty and bold and sometimes arrogant and often vulnerable. Paul is not a different person when Polly, Paul just has access to a whole other side of human experience, in large part because he is seen and treated differently by others.
Paul is not a pretender except for the ways in which all humans who want to be loved are pretenders. Paul is not sad except for the ways in which all humans get sad. Paul is not punished for the audacity to be fluid and multiplicitous; though Paul gets a bit heartbroken in the way that all of us do, he also gets wiser, more joyful. Paul is a story about queerness that is also the story of somebody who has a thrilling and truthful future, in part because he wouldn’t settle for anything less.
In a book that combines casual fisting with philosophy, what seems to me most subversive of all is that Lawlor uses the pronoun “he” for Paul/Polly throughout. And what this does, instead of driving home the idea that Paul is “really” a boy, is that it takes the pronoun and renders it meaningless. “He” becomes repurposed and stretched and shifted until all of a sudden it means a million things
and nothing at all. I was talking with someone about this book the other day, and they said: “The thing about Paul is that he… she… they… fuck it! – are so joyful.”
And I thought: that “fuck it” is my utopian future.
I thought: I want to live in a world where I get to be Paul.
Monica Byrne’s 2021 novel, The Actual Star, is set in a future where the population is made up of nomadic climate refugees whose highest religion is one of mutual aid. This is a world that has eradicated power differentials in terms of how different bodies are perceived or acted upon by systems of governance. Though there are many bodies who have inabilities, all have access to supportive technologies that make up for what they lack, creating unfettered and equal access to community. In this way, characters have inability without disability, and this is part of a larger framework in which bodies are not seen as sites of virtue or failure, strength or weakness. They’re just bodies –supplemented as needed, each in a different way.
This vision stayed with me long after I finished the book: a future where there is no loaded meaning afforded to any one kind of body. A future in which all bodies have become sites of transformation, possibility, and play. *
What am I looking for?
Stories that dream. Stories that conjure. Is this what I mean?
Stories in which reality flickers and there is a new thought on the other side, a truly new thought.
*
If you’re driving down a highway and you look to the side, eventually you’ll swerve. You won’t be able to help it. Like my teacher said all those years ago: you can’t move forward if you’re looking somewhere else.
These days, I’m trying to figure out what it means to look straight ahead, at a horizon-line I can’t make out. I’m trying to understand what it takes to get there – what are the vehicles by which one travels? How do we ensure that it’s not all rubble when we get there?
What theater offers us is the act of boundless dreaming made concrete: the door left open, the seats awaiting those who wish to dream with us.
I used to joke with my non-arts friends that they were doctors and teachers and scientists and my calling was “make believe.” That’s still true, but to my own surprise, I’ve come to have an abiding respect for the make believe: the labor in the verb Make, the vital difficulty in the word Believe
How can we move forward without believing that something better is ahead? What better future can we believe in, so that it can be made? A
Revisiting A Memory
L
Morgan Lee
It’s late. The middle of the night. You’re six years old.
Laying in bed, looking up at a somewhat plain, off-white ceiling, In a somewhat plain, tan and brown room. Alone.
A faint glow from the moon peeks through the blinds, casting light on a colorful “He-Man: Masters of the Universe” comforter set and a stream of sparkling tears running down your face and onto the pillow.
“If only I could wake up and be a girl things would all be easier.”
This isn’t the first night you’ve cried. But it IS the first time you’ve said these words out loud. I know…
You’re a good kid.
You’re kind. You smile. You get good grades. People like you.
You don’t want to make a fuss.
“If only I could wake up and be a girl things would all be easier.”
Six years old. First grade. It’s not about your body or that you are miserable in it. You’re not. It’s all you know. But something… Some thing Something is off.
You get lost in fantasies of waking up... Putting on the dress mom bought you at the department store that weekend, Doing your hair – pigtails with bright colored barrettes. (But not too many like cousin Sherri.)
You grab your book bag with the pink Trapper Keeper inside –Or maybe it’s purple, you like purple.
You walk into the classroom. Your teacher smiles.
No one stares or laughs.
No one whispers to their friends about you. No one says your voice is too high or tells you to act like a boy. It’s easy. Finally.
Everything would make sense.
You would make sense. But that’s not possible.
It goes against everything you’ve been taught. When you were born, the doctor told your parents what you are. Doctors are right. They are the smartest. They know everything. Why are you even questioning? It’s not possible. Again, People like you. Don’t make a fuss.
So…
Rather than tell anyone about these feelings, You simply whisper it to your ceiling. Alone. in the middle of the night. Knowing not a soul will hear you.
“If only I could wake up and be a girl things would all be easier.”
Guess what kiddo…
One day you do.
It takes a while A long while (Maybe too long)
But there comes a day when you’ll say it out loud – Where others can hear. Where others also share similar feelings and live out loud and you don’t feel alone. (Well, at least not for that.)
I won’t go into the details of your life and the journey to she Because I believe you need nights like this to get there. But kind and gentle youngster… I will share this with you:
There is joy.
You know those dreams you have where you’re able to fly? There are moments that feel that way in real life. I started this letter sitting in a hotel in London. Yes, that London. England. I’m an actress. Now some people prefer a non-gendered use of the word (actor) but this is MY letter to you, and being called an “actress” makes me feel pretty swell. I live in New York City. I get to do what you see people on the floor model TV doing. Like The Wizard of Oz… or Fame or Meet me in St. Louis or Grease 2 (but mostly like Fame.)
(Yes, it’s an actual job. They got paid.)
Much like that night in bed, The glow from my laptop screen is shining into my face, tears streaming as I type. But I don’t cry because things feel off. I cry because one day you figured it out.
It might seem impossible to believe this… But I’m you.
Many years later.
(Don’t ask how many.)
Yes.
You.
I remember that night. I remember… Wondering. Dreaming. Dozing off. Back to sleep. Thoughts tucked away.
Mom loves you. The family loves you. Some of them will never truly understand. But the things you are afraid of won’t happen. (They don’t abandon you.)
Many girls like us don’t get that. Girls like us.
Us.
“If only I could wake up and be a girl things would all be easier.”
We live in a “man’s world”. So in many ways, they’re more challenging Girls. Women. particularly Black girls. Black women and the things that harm us Things we want to bring up in conversation Seem to (more often than not) fall on deaf ears. People’s eyes glaze over as they don’t hear what they expected to hear (assumed they’d hear) as they realize my thoughts might ask them to stretch to consider things that don’t center what they already know (that don’t center them) or that don’t align with what society has told them my experience is supposed to be. I am inconvenient.
“If only I could wake up and be a girl things would all be easier.”
There are people who will use you. Who will use your identity for checkmarks and trophies Who exploit our pain, our lives, our wins, our voices for points in the campaign for the world to know how great they are. How evolved How they’ve done “the work”. They will never ask. They will never ask… and yet claim they know They will make moves to sweep hurt under the rug
To make questions disappear. Some call themselves “allies”. Look out for them.
There are also people who care. Who will take time to get to know you
To hear you, To love you, To ask you…
For whom that will not be “work”
Look out for them.
Treasure them.
“If only I could wake up and be a girl things would all be easier.”
You will meet an artist.
A Lady.
She is a songwriter. She is a moment.
Her music will crawl into your soul and shine light. It will heal people.
Years later you’ll realize why singing her music touched you so deeply.
She is transgender.
You are transgender.
(It’s a word you don’t know now.)
I wish you did. It’s beautiful.
We are beautiful.
The reason you feel different than everyone else is because the world teaches us about cis people (another word you don’t know yet…)
(People think it’s obnoxious.)
(People are obnoxious.)
Anyway, Cis people.
We are socialized to center them
They are incredible (they’ve had centuries in the light) but there is more… YOU are more.
The world doesn’t celebrate the nuance of being us. (yet.)
That doesn’t mean we can’t.
Six years old.
Your whole life ahead of you…
So many new chapters to come. Stay kind. Keep studying. Keep dreaming. Don’t skip ballet.
Yes, one day you’ll take ballet class.
(Yes, tights and all. I told you…like Fame.)
One day, you’re gonna be tempted to pluck your own eyebrows. Don’t. Surprised is NOT “the look.”
Oh, one last thing Hug Dad extra tight the next time you see him.
Remember his hugs.
He loves you so much. You know that.
But love on him more anyway.
(For me.)
“If only I could wake up and be a girl…”
The day will come when you realize You always were. A
ARTISTIC FAMILY TREES
As a theater fueled by visionary playwrights, we’re constantly curious about how they became the theatermakers we so deeply admire. Who are their heroes, mentors, touchstones - from theater and beyond? What cultural movements or ideologies have impacted their perspectives? A traditional family tree offers a visual sense of familial lineage, which made us wonder about what an “artistic family tree” might look like. So, we asked some of our favorite playwrights... check out their visual responses throughout this volume of Almanac! – Natasha and Lizzie
CÉSAR ALVAREZ
I like that the game Candy Land requires absolutely no skill. Its primary function is to teach toddlers how to take turns, all while hypnotized by psychedelic pictures of candy. At no point in the game do you make any choice or implement any strategy, which ensures that toddlers can beat the big kids. It’s tempting to think of my own artistic journey as a series of colorful and bizarre inevitabilities. Sure, I made decisions, but there is a sublime serendipity to finding this long string of nerdy musical activities. When I line them all up they look like a treasure map to mutant musicals. My artistic family tree is a beanstalk. My leaves are the artists that fed me sunlight. My path was a rainbow road of band geekery. The fruit may be tricky to put on stage, but at least it’s psychedelic.
Eisa Davis
I am born of music and lyric, nature and strong kindness. I have always felt redwood trees to be my relatives, but drawing one is above my pay grade. Instead this is a nice afro oak rooted in nurturing home soil, filled with the people, practices, groups, and sounds that grew me. There isn’t space to put every single teacher, relationship or artwork, so let them be the unseen leaves. The top of the tree is waiting for more branches yet to grow.
DOWNSTATE
Written by Bruce Norris
Directed by Pam MacKinnon
October 2022 – January 2023
“
When we sit in the dark and watch the lives of other people in front of us, things can get complicated. And, if you ask me, the complicated questions – the ones we don’t have easy answers for – are exactly the ones we need to be asking ourselves right now.
Bruce Norris
The playwright on Downstate
American Tragedy Lizzie Stern
THERE ARE SOME PROBLEMS IN LIFE that go unresolved. Far more challenging, though, are the ones that go unrecognized. We suffer and don’t know why; we try to feel better and have hope for the future, but have no idea where to begin. So we reach for greater understanding of ourselves, one another, and the systems in which we operate. This is why we go to the theater.
In the 5th century BCE, Agamemnon by Aeschylus premiered in Athens. It was the first tragedy in a trilogy, the Oresteia, the plot of which is – strap in – as follows: Agamemnon sentences his daughter to death so that the Greeks can win the war. Then, his wife, Clytemnestra, murders him for having murdered their daughter. Next, their son, Orestes – who has grown up tortured by the fact that his mother killed his father – kills his mother. And, finally, the Furies – three goddesses who represent justice – pursue Orestes for killing his mother, but (in a twist of yet more divine intervention) they do not kill him. There is mercy. And this mercy ends the violent cycle of retribution.
The Oresteia is not a soapy revenge drama. It is Tragedy. With a capital T.
Tragedy is an inquiry into the human condition: our blind spots and fatal flaws, our agony, grief, and despair, our struggle to navigate conflicts when life feels incoherent and reconciliation is impossible. It is an examination of the tortured relationship between forgiveness and vengeance, and between mercy and injustice. It is, in other words, a confrontation with the greatest impasses in ourselves and in society.
Downstate by Bruce Norris is Tragedy.
The play unfolds over the course of 24 hours inside a halfway house where four sex offenders live south of Chicago. The story begins when Andy, an adult survivor, confronts his childhood abuser, Fred. Andy tells Fred, haltingly, why he is – or, more importantly, is not – there:
ANDY: [Y]ou will never be deserving of sympathy, or forgiveness . . . That is not something … I can give you. But I must remember to forgive myself, and remember that I was only a child, and to treat myself with the same respect and loving kindness that any child deserves.
For Andy, there is no amount of apology or reformation that could undo the lifetime of, as Andy puts it, “guilt and shame” which directly resulted from Fred’s abuse. The damage is done. Forgiveness is unavailable, irrelevant, neither Andy’s objective nor the play’s action.
And how cruelly true this is about life, that the conditions which make forgiveness most transformative are the very same which make forgiveness impossible. We suffer at the impasse of irresolution, trapped in the prison of the past, desperate for a countervailing force that can compensate for our personal sense of powerlessness in the face of abuse, and interrupt cycles of hurt. What can answer this calling?
The law, at its best, might. Lawyer and social justice activist Bryan Stevenson offers a framework which allows the law to remain separate and apart from the realm of forgiveness, without sacrificing our humanity – even and especially in situations of extraordinary wrong. That framework is what he calls “just mercy.” In his 2014 book of the same title, Stevenson defines the term as a kind of compassionate understanding – which can, sometimes, manifest in policy – which uniquely “belongs to the undeserving.” The purpose
behind it, Stevenson argues, is that when we find mercy for people when it seems least warranted or expected, we have the power to “break the cycle of victimization and victimhood, retribution and suffering” which plague society.
If we follow Stevenson’s argument, then mercy for sex offenders – some of the most “undeserving” – would not preclude reparation for survivors or accountability for perpetrators. It could, in fact, facilitate resolution on the collective level when it is unavailable on the individual level.
But this is not how America operates.
In a 2019 episode of the podcast, “You’re Wrong About,” hosts Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes analyze America’s treatment of sex offenders. The episode builds on an article Hobbes had just written, for The Huffington Post, called “Sex Offender Registries Don’t Keep Kids Safe, But Politicians Keep Expanding Them Anyway,” exposing how the punishment meted out to them is biased, draconian, and ineffectual. I’ll share a few points from Hobbes’s research.
State registries, across the country, restrict sex offenders from living in 99% of homes because they are within 1,000 feet of a school, church, or other place where children spend time. But, of course, this restriction does not actually keep children safe; 1,000 feet is about a five-minute walk, and the law can only regulate where sex offenders live, not where they go. In fact, by increasing the likelihood of homelessness and unemployment, these restrictions make it more probable that sex offenders will end up camping out in restricted areas. And the enforcement of these policies is full of hypocrisy and racism. State registries are disproportionately black and poor, but, when dealing with white billionaire pedophiles like Jeffrey Epstein, local prosecutors and judges tend to impose fewer and less severe restrictions.
In study after study, it is clear that this area of public policy is rippling with weaponized dysfunction. It fails to prevent abuse, and, by financially prioritizing its current tactics over resources for survivors, it fails to repair and restore. As Marshall observes: “This idea that we are going to solve the problem by removing the contagion, this is not a contagion-based problem. This is something in the human that we need to figure out how to manage.”
The system, as it is, may seem to satisfy a basic human need to externalize and extinguish the most irredeemable parts of our society, so as to preserve a sense of order in our world and in ourselves. But this shadow-self projection is a fallacy that only serves to amplify the personal sense of failure we feel in the face of abuse as we try to resolve what is unresolvable, to find somewhere to put it all – and realize there is nowhere.
This is not justice. This is the stuff of Tragedy.
In 2015, when we produced The Christians by Lucas Hnath, Adam Greenfield wrote an essay about Tragedy and helplessness. Here is 2015-Adam: “Tragedy arises when we become aware of a fissure in the world, a crack or conflict that can never be reconciled. . . we witness a character who employs his/her complete self to engage in that conflict, only to recognize that it’s the human condition in a universe which will always be beyond our comprehension.”
Downstate is an appeal not for reconciliation, but recognition. It is an autopsy of our broken shared humanity. A plea to witness problems that cannot be solved and people who cannot be redeemed and yet – still, always – can be more fully understood.
Maybe that is a kind of mercy. A
Bruce Norris May Be Trying to Make Me a Better Person
Maria Striar
IN AN APPLICATION to graduate school for acting, I wrote an essay that “I wanted to be an actor” because it offered a live philosophical exploration — that to step into the skin of a character and their context was to roam around, on a journey of discovery, in another worldview. And that was an internal exercise that I relished. (They let me in anyways.)
Bruce Norris had a robust career as an actor, but I think he came to find it… boring, often. So it is not surprising that he creates both elaborate moral obstacle courses and comparable challenges of craft for his actors. His plays usually inhabit both the architecture of farce and deeply-felt drama, and his collaborators must deftly pivot from one to the other, committing fully. I don’t think I’ve ever seen bad acting in a Bruce Norris play – and that’s a tribute to those individuals and his longtime collaborator, director Pam MacKinnon, as well. Downstate offers some of the finest acting I have seen, from start to finish. I could have sat in its excruciating final scene for hours to experience the mastery of Francis Guinan and K. Todd Freeman. The work is seamlessly executed, and its virtuosity both envelops us in great pain and lifts us out of it.
The excavations Bruce demands of his actors are not just ones he would relish personally, they consist of him personally. I suppose most writers put their own blood into their characters, but it’s an especially powerful current within Bruce. He decants himself into them; everything that is moving, self-loathing, charming, destructive, ragefilled and grasping comes from his marrow. He disperses himself, prismatically, in his ensembles, and pits himself/ them against each other, as they negotiate a morally and psychically complicated battleground. And the closer one resembles Bruce Norris – a straight white man of privilege – the harsher the scrutiny he gives them.
Bruce has a reputation as a provocateur and a gadfly. But he’s not trying to get the skin to itch a little, he is trying to dig under it. He wants us to prove our value system through a more rigorous examination than we are used to, by forcing us to look at things that are very easy to avoid. Bruce might be Shavian in his moralism – and in some ways
the constructedness of his plays – but in Downstate, at least, the arguments are given their depth by their murkiness, by the mitigation of small, human details. Oh damn: these are actual people, not trash.
The animating problem in a Bruce Norris play – certainly this one – is the unwillingness or inability to hear or even countenance the experience and perspective of others. This can manifest on a range from obliviousness, to a deliberate refusal to listen, to caustic and cruel refutation. Regardless of the form it takes, it leads to destruction.
I am writing this during a time of great agitation in this country, in which there is radical disagreement on what would once have been considered facts, and rage-filled rejection of not just “the other side,” but between camps within each side. I have spent the last six years in the miserable knowledge that many people in my country hold beliefs that I find inexplicable and – increasingly –detestable. My imagination doesn’t want to hold these people and for the most part the world doesn’t make me.
While I am revolted by the positions they support, and horrified by the amount of fear and hate and greed that seem to undergird them, I am not helped by considering my fellow citizens monsters. It doesn’t help me strategically, morally, or emotionally. Rather, it hurts me. I’m left feeling confused, alone, disempowered, and disconsolate.
Compassion is often an exercise of imagination, and the danger of its atrophy should be clear to all of us. Seeing and acknowledging complexity does not mean loving, forgiving, or accepting. It might, however, enable us to negotiate a more productive coexistence with others. And it almost certainly brings us closer to being the selves we aspire to be, or tell ourselves that we already are.
I am not yearning for communion with child predators. But I ask myself: Have I been served by refusing to acknowledge humanity and complexity in the lives of others? And my answer is: Nope, not much. Might I – might we – be helped by making room for that, by stretching the muscle of our compassion?
Isn’t that worth trying? A
Discussions on Downstate: Care is the Antidote to Violence
When harm happens, how do we hold it within community? What does a survivor-centered justice process look like, and how might it support healing? What modules exist outside of carceral and punitive systems to address harm and support survivors? This conversation with activists, academics, and abolitionists discusses forgiveness and transformative justice after sexual harm at the personal and collective levels.
– Sivan Battat
On Saturday, November 19, 2022, a panel was held at Playwrights Horizons with Amita Swadhin, Jenani Srijeyanthan, and RJ Maccani, moderated by Sivan Battat. Below are edited excerpts from the full discussion.
SIVAN: Hello everyone. My name is Sivan Battat. And it’s an honor to have a conversation today about the context and history of child sexual assault (CSA), particularly in the United States – Turtle Island. We’ll also speak a little bit about prevention and what it looks like to actually build systems that can prevent harm. We’ll also talk about responses to harm and intervention.
Let’s start talking about context a little bit. So, while child sexual assault are instances of occurrence, there’s also historical context and cultural containers that have created and continue to perpetuate child sexual assault in this country. Can you tell us a little bit about the historical context of CSA and where it sees its roots in American society?
AMITA: The endemic violence of children getting raped and of patriarchy surrounding that violence is literally all over this globe. We’re on a land that was colonized roughly 500 years ago. And in that colonization act, something we don’t acknowledge enough is that children were raped by design. Indigenous children were raped and murdered and hunted. The boarding schools are just one layer of documentation of that. But of course, that violence was happening from the very beginning. Even the girl that we know in pop culture as Pocahontas was a little girl. She was 12 at the time that she was kidnapped and raped by a white settler.
And so you can’t divorce this violence from the history of this country being colonized, that we’re on stolen land. And then of course, in the kidnapping of African people and bringing them here, and the introduction of the system of racial capitalism – which is also, in the U.S., where you can trace the introduction of a gender binary. People being considered property made people be sorted into categories to be force-bred. And what is forced breeding
but enacting sexual violence in a system? And that included the systemic raping of children.
Not to mention the people that were the first presidents of this country were also documented rapists. If you talk about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, these are men who kept women and children enslaved, and sometimes grown men, to be raped at their pleasure. So, we just can’t talk about ending sexual violence in this place that’s now called the United States without acknowledging that history. And I think that’s really important in the context of this show.
SIVAN: How can we create circumstances so that harm doesn’t have to happen in the first place?
JENANI: If you look at what current child sexual abuse prevention is like, it all relies on the fact that a child has been abused. So it’s not really even prevention if it requires harm to already have happened to a child. And I think that also definitely includes public school education, because all we’re really teaching kids are red flags of the “shadow villain” that exists in your community. And then we tell them to call the police or we tell them to go to somebody who more likely than not is a mandated reporter. None of these things are keeping children safe because it requires that somebody has been hurt already.
When you look at root causes of child sexual abuse, more often than not, they are similar root causes to a number of other issues that are happening in our society. Like, people are not able to get good food on their table. People are not able to make a livable wage. People are not able to have housing. But also, there’s this other layer to it, that when you feel powerless, there’s one way that we are taught through history to gain power, and that is to just seek it, dominate it, and grab it. And if we’re not addressing root causes, then we’re not really even taking a preventative approach.
At the end of the day, I really do feel that a preventative approach to CSA involves meeting a community where it’s at and addressing the things that need to be addressed so that people are able to be okay, so that people don’t have a reason to dominate, to take, to grab, to assume power over, in order to be okay. I think that’s hard in this country because it’s not family protection that’s winning elections, it’s really expanding family policing. And I think it’s really special what we do locally in the devi co-op: we’re just trying to get money and give it to people who need it. We’re trying to get resources to the people who
need them, because those are the things that help people escape toxic relationships. These are the things that help people have relationships that are healthy to begin with. We wanna teach kids in school how to have healthy relationships. At the end of the day, these root causes are not special. These are root causes for a number of different ways that people are hurt in this country and in this world. We just have to actually prioritize that.
SIVAN: Downstate presents this model of folks who have been incarcerated, who are living in a halfway house, who are living on the sex registry, which people often turn to as like, “Look, we have a sex registry as a tool that in some cases is claimed to prevent child sexual assault. The registry is a carceral tool to prevent it.” And what Jen is saying here is: that’s not prevention if the harm has already occurred. If we are incarcerating people after the harm, if we’re reporting on harm that has already occurred, that’s not taking a preventative model, it’s taking a reactive model.
AMITA: The play specifically brings up for me the work of one of my comrades and colleagues, Sonya Shah. She founded and co-directs a national organization called The Ahimsa Collective. They’re based in California and they do restorative circles with primarily cisgender men who are incarcerated and then coming out of incarceration into reentry homes similar to the one in Downstate. And all of the men who are in that program elect to be in it.
I had the chance to sit in a circle with those men twice. Once in 2018 and once in 2019. It became really clear to me as one of the storytellers in one of those restorative circles as we passed the talking piece around, after I shared my story, almost all of them were broken down in tears talking about their own survivorship, because almost all of them had been raped as kids.
And they all said: “I never got treatment, I never got support, I never had a safe place I could go to heal.” And we know that most people who are raped or sexually assaulted as children do not go on to rape or sexually assault more children. But again, of the people who are incarcerated for this crime, who we’ve had a chance to study, most of them are themselves survivors who never got therapy, never got support, were never believed. They never got transformative ways of learning, “How do you act in a healthy way? What is healthy intimacy? What is a good boundary?”
When we say “believe survivors” and “support survivors,” do we really mean all survivors? And I do. I don’t think anyone should experience the violence that I lived through, including the men in that prison. And that was the uncomfortable truth in that circle. I was crying while talking to them and saying, “I didn’t expect this. I have more in common with you as men who were raped as little boys than I do with people who were never raped as kids.”
We should be supporting people to heal so that whatever is wounded, whatever needs healing, particularly around shame and self-loathing, that wound gets restored. You’re a human being and things happened to you when you were a kid that shouldn’t have happened. Dehumanizing sex offender registries and policies that go with them are not helping anyone heal their self-loathing.
SIVAN: I’m just thinking now about this moment in the play where Dee and Andy have a conversation and Dee – spoiler alert – discloses that Dee himself is a survivor of child sexual abuse. And I think about what it would’ve looked like for that conversation to be in a different container and what it would’ve looked like to have a different model of what that encounter was, for those two people in that moment. And I’ll bring in the language of abolition, which is a tool of ending something – carceral systems, policing. It’s also a tool of building something. And it’s a tool of building infrastructures for support that meet the root causes of what’s causing what we call crime. Abolition is language that’s helpful in that framework of saying prevention also looks like building something else. What doesn’t exist right now? What creates infrastructures that support people who need that support in order to then in turn prevent harm?
Let’s talk about intervention and responses to harm. When harm happens, where can we go from there? Where does the idea of forgiveness play into this, if at all?
RJ: …What I can say from my years of working at Common Justice, and from my years before that doing community-based responses to sexual violence, and then my own experience as a survivor, is that those of us who experience these things – whether we call ourselves victims or survivors, or we just say, that’s something that happened to me – the things that we tend to want are options. We want some options. We want to have some agency. We want to feel our power to be involved in some way. We want access to some real opportunities to heal. We want answers. Why did this happen to me? And we wanna see some real change, some real accountability from the person that did it. Those tend to be the things, over and over and over. That’s not always true. Some survivors I’ve interacted with are like, “I just wanna get a crew of people together and go and beat that person up.” You know? And in terms of the work that we do, we’d be like, “Oh, that’s not really what we do, but I want you to have options.”
And the same would go for somebody who’s like, “Actually I just wanna call the police right now.” Again, that’s not what we do, but I want you to have options. You know? But all the things I just described, the criminal legal system doesn’t really tend to do any of those things. And I really wanna center us there.
We can say that this isn’t so much about stopping individual monsters. It’s more about addressing a socially entrenched form of violence. But that being said, what do we do when it happens? When someone does something that feels so monstrous to many of us, like sexually abusing a child? All of this political analysis isn’t really that helpful in that moment. It’s like, “Great. Okay, so now I know it’s rooted in colonization and slavery. But still, what the fuck do I do?” We need to be able to move through our first initial responses, which are often horror or terror or disgust or rage. This is what we will feel. But if we want to get to a place where we’re actually gonna effectively address child sexual abuse, we’ve gotta move through that.
And what do we know? We know that some of us as humans, experience the urge to have some sort of sexual experiences with minors, children, babies. It’s not an easy thing to sit with. I’ve worked with people who suffer from this sort of desire and ideation, and those same people
are also deeply committed to never acting on it. So if we’re serious about reducing child sexual abuse, we could provide accessible and anonymous counseling for people who experience this. Germany does this. And I can say that the two people that abused me were not well. And in neither case would I have dreamed of getting the police involved, not because I was an abolitionist, but because even then I had the sense that it wouldn’t be helpful in any way.
So what do we know about guys like the ones depicted in Downstate? We know that they come out of prison often completely isolated, and with extremely limited options for housing, employment, and connection. And we know that isolation and unaddressed shame are core drivers of recidivism. So we want to find ways to build connection and community around these guys. Not because we’re such wonderful enlightened people, but because we know that this is what’s protective of children.
And in many different parts of the States, Canada and other countries, there are programs that do this. They’re typically called Circles of Support and Accountability. And they typically involve people in a returning citizen’s community who are able to move through their initial response to volunteer to be consistently engaged in that person’s life. Those are a couple examples of the kinds of things we can do, what people are already doing.
But to tie back to your question about forgiveness, and this is true at Common Justice as well, forgiveness is a possible ancillary effect of something that might happen. But in none of the work I’ve been involved in have we seen forgiveness as a central component of a pragmatic, grounded response to addressing these forms of violence. It might happen, it might be incredibly healing for the person who was harmed. It might be really meaningful and powerful for the person who harmed. But I think a lot of times, because we are shaped in a predominantly Christian society (and no knock on Christianity), but sometimes these notions of forgiveness get so foregrounded. And it’s not really about that at all. But it is something that could happen and wouldn’t it be nice.
SIVAN: What does it mean to be accountable for harm that one has committed? What might accountability offer to someone who’s seeking it? And what might it look like?
RJ: A lot of times people associate accountability with saying, “I’m sorry.” And again, “sorry” might be a part of it. Sure. But it’s really about acknowledging what happened … then it’s really meaningful to say, “I recognize the impact that that had on you. I acknowledge not just that it happened, but I see how it impacted you.” And then, “I’m going to commit to doing the work I need to do so that I’m never gonna do that to anybody else again.” And “I would really like to know, what can I do now? Short of getting in a time machine and going back and not doing it, what can I do now to make things as right as possible?” And then, doing it. That’s how we think about accountability at Common Justice and one of the most powerful things I get to witness is when survivors and the people who cause them harm come together and have those kinds of conversations. And then I get to accompany people as they go through that process of their own growth and
transformation and fulfilling on those agreements, fulfilling on those commitments.
And this is so far from what a typical criminal legal system response offers. The process is so completely different…
SIVAN: In those moments of “What can I do,” if the answer is, “There’s absolutely nothing,” what then? Like, “Nothing is good enough. Nothing will ever be enough…” Is there anywhere to go from there?
AMITA: I haven’t spoken to my father since I was 16. And that was by my choice. I’m not a believer in forgiveness being necessary for a survivor to feel healing. I don’t think healing is a finish line. Particularly inside of ongoing rape culture. I’m queer, I’m a non-white person. I am genderqueer. My partner is a trans Black man. Rape culture can’t be divested from any of the identities I just talked about for the foundational reasons I said in the beginning. So, I can heal pieces of my childhood experience, but there’s still violence coming at me from the state. It’s coming at the people I love.
…I think for me forgiveness is about relationship. And I think it’s absolutely okay when we support survivors’ autonomy to say “You get to break relationships.” Because just like you can’t un-murder someone, you can’t un-rape someone, right? I think it’s okay for any survivor of any kind of violence to say “I no longer want a relationship with that person who did violence to me.” There’s nothing they could do that would re-earn that right to a relationship. That’s how I feel about my father… There’s just nothing. Now, however, do I think that there are things that survivors usually want? Many of the things that you listed, RJ. In the Mirror Memoirs audio archive, we have 73 stories on record of queer and trans people of color who are survivors, and I asked – “What do we all need?” What do you all need to undo rape culture in your heart and in your head? If we all went through a portal right now into a dimension in which capitalism doesn’t exist, and your only responsibility from the moment you get up till you go to sleep is to heal yourself of rape culture, whether that’s from a place of directly experiencing it, or just living in this violent society, and you have a toolbox that has every material and spiritual resource to support your healing: what’s in the box?
And so we have 73 different answers in our audio archive, and zero of them are police and prisons. And not because I said to people, “You must be an abolitionist to be part of this project.” Many people didn’t even know that word, but people said, “I need stable housing. I want art supplies. I want really good food and lots of friends to enjoy it with. I want a support animal to love me. I wanna be able to swim, I want to be able to dance. I want, for our wheelchair users, I want accessible grounds where I can be with my community and not have to worry that the fact that I’m a wheelchair user will keep me separate all the time.”
These were some of the answers that people said. There’s many, many beautiful things. So I think another way people could be accountable is, “How do I use whatever money I might have access to to pay for your stable housing, your food, your education, your art supplies, your therapy?”
And accountability is not something we do to other people. Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie just wrote a book called No More Police, in which they talk about both being survivors of sexual violence themselves. But Mariame talks a lot in her work about how accountability is not something you can do to another person. We can’t hold people accountable because that’s actually not accountability, that’s punishment. And if we’re all going to undo rape culture from our heads and our hearts, then we have to undo punishment culture in our heads and our hearts, because that’s actually part of rape culture. Accountability, like RJ was talking about, is something someone can choose to do themselves.
JENANI : What I really love about abolition is its creativity. “If we don’t have a government to save us, how do we save one another?” And I think on the individual level, if we’re really holding ourselves accountable, that shouldn’t only happen because someone has told us we have hurt them.… It’s not making an excuse to say why you did something. Part of that is accountability, part of that is acknowledging the hurt that has come to you, and if we’re gonna break down this abuser/survivor dichotomy, we have to make space for people who have caused harm in this type of way, to also have those conversations for themselves. And it’s not a distraction, it’s not an excuse. It’s their life.
SIVAN: Amita and RJ have worked specifically in theater and performance work around some of these topics. How do you see performance work and storytelling playing into the larger project of preventing and/or responding to harm?
AMITA: So a year ago, Mirror Memoirs spent 20 hours in writing workshops with four of our members, including our board co-chair, who are Black trans women. One is an Afro-Latina intersex femme. And all of them were raped as children (to be clear, so was everyone in Mirror Memoirs).
And so we brought them into writing workshops, based on a model I learned with Sara Zatz through Ping Chong and Company. But, we really made it our own with the ways that we incorporated some of the ritual traditions from the diaspora of people who were enslaved and from Africa. There’s been an ongoing genocide very specifically against Black trans people in this country… We are seeing the statistics very clearly mirrored in our membership base: what does it mean that gender nonconformity is a risk factor for being raped as a child? Well, it means that trans people as adults are disproportionately survivors. And when you layer in race and indigeneity, we should see movements led by Black trans women, for example, because they are disproportionately child sexual abuse survivors and survivors of adulthood violence. But that’s not the face of the current movements to end sexual violence nationally right now.
We wanted to course-correct for that through storytelling because data is out there: federal data from the Justice Department on how there’s genocidal levels of sexual violence against trans people, and it’s not actually infusing itself into collective movements. We’re wired as human beings to sit around a fire from prehistoric days and
witness each other. We have mirror neurons in our brain that are literally fired when a listener and a storyteller pair together and one witnesses the other. That’s part of our wiring neurobiologically as humans. It creates empathy when those mirror neurons get fired.
So we’re using very basic human technology through the act of ensemble storytelling to try to get empathetic responses on a broad level. When you hear four Black trans women talk about, “The police raped me when I was a child.” “The police trafficked me when I was a child.” “It was the guard at the juvenile prison that I was put into when I ran away from home at the age of 12 and was doing sex work on the streets to survive.”
When you hear those stories, about who is a perpetrator, they often include people who are paid by the state to do the dirty work of the carceral system – group home employees, psychiatric state institution employees, of course prisons, prison guards, and police – then, it’s no longer a debate, at least for me, on abolition. When the police are literally the ones raping vulnerable people. Raping the people that are victims of our societal genocide. Why would we ask for more police if we really wanna end the rape of all children? And that’s a collective question for our society.
Do we really mean it when we say no child should be raped? Because if we did mean that, then we would all be abolitionists, I think. And that’s why I practice storytelling, just to clear away the academic debates and the jargon and just get right to the heart of witnessing people’s truth.
RJ: There’s so much power in survivors telling our stories together. And the first opportunity I had to do that was as part of a men’s digital storytelling project. A bunch of men from New York City and the Bay Area who were child sexual abuse survivors, we each made our own little three-minute digital story…. That opportunity to actually construct the narrative of something that was so jumbled inside me was really powerful. And to not be alone when it is such an isolating experience.
AMITA: The work of preventing child sexual abuse is a collective responsibility to grieve the reality that kids are being raped at an endemic rate. And that’s not just for survivors to hold. We’ve all been raised to believe through propaganda, like Law and Order and whatnot, that this prison system is gonna somehow save us. But it’s illegal to rape kids. We have the largest prison population in the world here, and kids today, right now, are still being raped at endemic rates.
And part of the work of undoing that desire for fiery punishment in our hearts and heads is to just get in touch with our grief around that reality. It’s devastating. And we all hopefully have a little more practice around that feeling of grief through this ongoing pandemic. That’s part of the work: in order to build a new world, we have to get in touch with our feelings about how fucked up this one is. And then we can build something better. But it’s not just for survivors to do, it’s collective work. A
From the Dark Vivian J.O. Barnes
WHEN I WAS YOUNGER my mom told me that getting my eyebrows and lip waxed would only hurt the first few times. Eventually, I’d get used to it. Maybe for some people that’s the case but not for me. It hurt every single time.
When I was in grad school, a classmate told me that I wouldn’t always feel the urge to violently vomit every time I shared a new draft of a play. Through repetition, I’d get used to it. I won’t get into the specifics of how my gastrointestinal system handles stress these days but let’s just say… I did not get used to it. There are some feelings that can’t ever be dulled, I guess.
One of my favorite June Jordan poems starts “These poems / they are things that I do / in the dark.” That’s how I feel about starting a play. It’s fun to fuck around and play in the dark. Freeing.
When it’s time to show it to people? Even in the warmest, most generous process it feels like suddenly someone turned on a hideous fluorescent light and yelled “HEY WHATCHA UP TO IN HERE? COOKING UP ANYTHING WORTHY OF MY TIME AND ATTENTION?! GOT ANYTHING SMART TO SAY? ANYTHING NEW?!” Cue the nausea.
When I was trying to decide what to write about here, I dug up some old notebooks from college. They’re these perfect time capsules of what I was obsessed with before I really knew anything about writing. I’m not nostalgic for
Younger Me. She had no idea what she was doing, which was its own kind of hell. But in those notebook pages, the freedom Younger Me felt is palpable. The half-ideas scribbled inside are unwieldy but they’re from that deep, dark, primordial place I’m always trying to find my way back to. Is any of the writing good or clever? Absolutely not! Is it self-serious and earnest? Incredibly! But is it deeply unbothered by judgment in a way Present Day Me is jealous of? YES!
These are three unedited pages from those notebooks with ideas I never continued. I chose them for two reasons:
They all have the feeling of Younger Me working through some Big Ideas.
While every single idea in those notebooks is embarrassing, these three don’t make me want to set myself on fire when I think about showing them to you.
I’m going to translate them because my handwriting was and continues to be unforgivable. And then I’m going to write a little. A few stage directions and a line or two. Just to see what comes out. I’m going to try not to think too much, try not to let in the voices, try to stay in the dark.
A Note for My Dignity: I used to write “Idea” before writing out an idea. Was this necessary in a notebook that only held ideas? No. No, it was not.
Idea
Set at a storage unit that only holds a bookcase full of books, a couple meets up to divide between them who’s [sic] was who’s [sic] because they broke up. [scenes] broken up by different people reading out the inscriptions they wrote to them (individually and as a couple)
Outside a five foot by five foot storage unit. The door is closed and covered in bluish-red rust.
A Man walks up to the storage unit door. He stares at it, facing away from us. He bends over and makes a strange noise. Like a moan. He rocks forward and back, hands braced on his knees. He’s sobbing. Loud, ugly sobs. A phone pings! He immediately stands up straight and types into his phone. No tears. It’s like the crying never happened.
A Woman walks up to the storage unit in a rush.
WOMAN: I’m late, I know. Sorry. You don’t need to—
MAN: No, no. You’re fine. I just got here.
WOMAN: You look good.
Beat. They take each other in. He looks away and opens the storage unit like a garage door rolling up. Inside there’s a bookcase filled with hundreds of books. Surrounding the bookcase is The Horde: hundreds of people crammed in the storage unit, surrounding the bookcase, staring at the Man and the Woman. Every age, race, and gender. The Man and the Woman can’t see The Horde. Another beat. Then…
MAN: …should we start? I can’t stay long.
WOMAN: Right. Of course.
She walks into the storage unit. She picks up a book. Opens the cover. Smiles. A Tiny Old Woman rises out of The Horde. She waits, expectantly.
WOMAN (to the Man, showing him the book): Yours or mine?
The Beginning of Everything
• Picks up after the world has ended. No big thing, everything just went away one day
• Set in a void, a barren landscape
• Woman, alone. Thinks she’s the only one left. First scene is just her doing stuff in silence. Scene ends, she goes back to sleep.
• Next day she sees someone far off approaching not sure it’s real, it’s a man.
• She’s so happy he’s real, doesn’t believe it till she touches him
• Learning to talk again
• It’s been hundreds of years of being alone not sure why they haven’t died
• Neither remember their names
A clearing in a barren landscape. Just beige dirt and beige rocks of varying sizes. The sky is a washed-out beige. It’s hard to make out the difference between land and sky.
The Last Woman is curled in a ball next to a big rock, sleeping. She stirs slowly. Yawns. Stands. She cracks her stiff bones and joints. She walks behind the rock until we can’t see her.
A stream of pee trickles out from behind the rock. The Last Woman sighs. Mmmmmm. She walks out from behind the rock. Yawns again. She looks into the distance. She freezes. Her body starts trembling uncontrollably. Vibrating. Her breathing gets faster. She opens her mouth, but no sound comes out even though it looks like she’s trying to speak.
The Last Man crawls into the clearing. He drags his body like he’s being crushed under something we can’t see. The Last Woman watches him, trembling harder. He keeps crawling. Finally, he’s at her feet. He passes out. Or dies. We don’t know yet. She kneels. She holds her hand out towards his face, but she doesn’t touch him. She opens her mouth, trying to speak again, but nothing comes out. She strains against her own throat. Until…
THE LAST WOMAN (almost a whisper): ……you…….you you…….you you you you you you you. She collapses next to him.
Idea
• Lonely, untouched woman who edits really explicit (comedically so) audio books for a company
Quotes: “The sexual tension in her navel made her want to weep.”
* Look up recordings from [REDACTED] for inspo!
Note: this was a real job I had one summer in college. Describing the character based directly on me as “lonely” and “untouched”? The angst! The drama! Lots to unpack there!
An Untouched Woman sits at a desk with her laptop open. A candle burns next to the laptop, the only light in the room. She presses a button. From the laptop speakers we hear:
VOICE: His hand slides up her thigh. Reaching for her molten-hot core. She gasps as he rubs small, achingly slow circles (pause, The Voice clears its throat loudly) into her.
The Untouched Woman stops the recording. She types for a while then presses a button.
VOICE: His hand slides up her thigh. Reaching for her molten-hot core. She gasps as he rubs small, achingly slow circles into her.
The throat clearing noise is gone, edited out. The recording continues uninterrupted.
VOICE: “Please, please…” she begs, bucking her hips up to meet his grip.
The sound of a dry tongue touching the roof of a dry mouth. The Untouched Woman rewinds the recording. She replays the dry mouth sound again. And again. And again. As the sound repeats on a loop, The Untouched Woman sticks her tongue out as far as it will go and licks her desk. She does this a few times. She stops the recording. Types. Presses a button.
VOICE: “Please, please…” she begs, bucking her hips up to meet his grip.
The dry mouth sound is gone, edited out. She reaches for the candle and extinguishes the flame with some spit on her fingers. Darkness. A
David Adjmi
Even though I can’t draw at all, the notion of a family tree comprised of artistic influences feels natural to me, because I am someone who really did find himself in art. My childhood was disorienting and I was never really able to get a grip on how to be, or how to feel. My outer world didn’t bear much relationship to my inner one. Later in life, I made the decision to consciously build myself by emulating writers and artists who touched something in me, and these people really did become like a proxy family to me. Some of us feel deracinated at the outset; we look for roots outside ourselves, and this is how we become ourselves.
Larissa FastHorse
My artistic family tree is in pencil because that’s my favorite way to write. It’s in a circle because that’s how Lakota people define themselves, in concentric circles that start from the center and go out into all of time and space. Each ring defines who I am and how I see my place in the world, always in relationship to others, because that is how we should live.
THE TREES
Written by Agnes Borinsky
Directed by Tina Satter
February – March 2023
What if we admit the catastrophe from the beginning, soften our bodies to admit all that grief, all that worry, all that rage? Soften the very questions we’re asking so that we find ourselves walking barefoot in grass, spidey-senses tingling, instead of trying to ensure a secure future, squinting into the beams of cellphone flashlights?
Agnes Borinsky
Playwright’s Perspective: The Trees
Origin Story Lizzie Stern
WE ARE LIVING in the wake of an event of mass extinction. Deep cynicism strikes us regularly. We say, it feels like end times. And it might be more comforting to assume the worst than to accept uncertainty. But we are not at the end. We are – terrifyingly – at the beginning. And we need a foothold, a place from which we can start over.
We need a new origin story. And Agnes Borinsky has brought us The Trees
The Trees is a creation myth in the style of a midrash. A midrash is a rabbinic form of commentary on the Torah, which treats the Torah as a living document, and often takes the shape of a story. By telling these stories, we make and remake meaning across generations of the Jewish diaspora as if we are all having one long conversation.
In Deuteronomy, there is a stray phrase
which translates, literally, to because the man is a tree
And Agnes responded, what if? What if two people became trees?
That question is the play’s inciting incident: late one night, drunk-stumbling home through a park in Connecticut, two siblings named Sheila and David take root in the earth. Word spreads like wildfire about this extraordinary event – bringing together an otherwise disparate group of strangers, each seeking renewed purpose, belonging, or sense of wonder.
Among their thought-leaders is a Midwestern rabbi named Saul. Saul, lately, has been picking up on a perilous spirit of indifference in our culture: “I’ve felt a great sliding in the world,” he observes. “Like we’re all sliding off this planet into somewhere... dark and ugly and dead. It seems a little bit like it’s all on autopilot. Like God is off... somewhere... else.”
Sheila and David’s metamorphosis is, to Saul, an act of divine intervention: a rupture infusing ordinary life with miraculous possibility that demands our attention and shakes us from our hardened beliefs and routines.
Saul, and the people around him, radically change their lives over the course of the play; they leave their homes and move to Connecticut. They cook for one another, make art together, and fall in love. Organically, they form a kind of new society: a collective of mutual care which strives to resist the more corrosive parts of capitalism.
In our world, billionaires are working to colonize Mars and relocate people’s lives to the Metaverse. We are cursed by a compulsive need to go on to the next, what Karl Marx calls the endless and limitless drive. Escapism is a byproduct of capitalism. It fuels, and is fueled, by constant motion in a destructive cycle. The more that’s demanded, the more that’s created, the more that’s thrown away.
“
The miracle of this midrash is not just the phenomenal human metamorphosis, but the ordinary stillness which follows...
If we look at our conditioning from a rabbinical perspective, we can recognize that it is not just materially destructive – it is existentially fatal. As the eminent 20th century rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel, famously phrased it: “Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation.”
So if the rabbis are right, if it is not a cataclysmic event but our everyday culture which will kill us and our planet – what, then, is our salvation?
It’s tempting to read The Trees as a straightforward allegory, and imagine that it promises a lesson on how to change our habits and perspectives; the more we slow down, the more we appreciate, the more we care, the more we guard our survival. But this is a Jewish story, and a queer one. It resists the finality of binaries, and it answers questions with questions.
“How can we have a more expansive notion of what change is possible?” Agnes asked me recently. “Of change that doesn’t require a rush forward, out of the discomfort of the way things are?”
For us to reckon with the way things are, we have to stop long enough to observe it. And when Agnes imagines change, she wonders, how can we break our limitless drive? “How can we make peace with our uncertainty, rather than scramble for answers that we think will protect us from fear, from death, or from more uncertainty?” she asked. “How can we find the courage to let things die and see our endings as beginnings? How can we soak the soil with the water of the future, while staying in the present?”
The miracle of this midrash is not just the phenomenal human metamorphosis, but the ordinary stillness which follows; the vulnerability of taking root not in the earth, but in each other. This is a new way of being which is evolving in Agnes’s theater, an ancient analog art, a sacred gathering of strangers journeying together through a question.
And what is a question if not a beginning? A
They Paved Paradise Sarah Schulman
IN 1975, I was working at Circle Repertory Company on Sheridan Square running the pre-computerization light board: a huge metal contraption of levers requiring all four limbs and a broomstick to crossfade and then dim to black. The first play of the season was Harry Outside by Corrinne Jacker, directed by Marshall Mason with Keven McCarthy, Lois Smith, and Jonathan Hadary. It was the story of a wealthy architect who could no longer tolerate the confines of a house, and in his search for personal freedom, started living in his garden. Soon, everyone who hated him and loved him had to come Outside, where their conflicts and passions intensified around vodka lemonades.
From Thoreau and Emerson onward, Americans have grappled with the lure of “Outside” as a place of purity, escape, and rejuvenation. These were American expansionist ideas about primitivity and innocence as simultaneous justifications for leisure and land seizure.
Here in New York City we have long histories of battles over the meaning and ownership of Outside. Adam Purple, an urban rebel, collected dung from carriage horses to cultivate a complex, gorgeous, free, and public circular Garden of Eden on Forsythe Street that served the people of the city from 1975-1986. It was 15,000 square feet and produced corn, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, asparagus, black raspberries, strawberries, and 45 trees including eight black walnuts. When the city announced plans to build low-income housing on that site, The Storefront for Art and Architecture devised an alternative by which the housing could be situated within and around the garden, preserving its treasures for the new residents. Instead the city demolished the garden in 75 minutes.
In Agnes Borinsky’s The Trees, the return to the source is not voluntary. Siblings David and Sheila come home drunk one night and discover that rather than make an enlightened decision to leave man-made structures for
nature, the earth itself has reached out to secure their toes and entice these two humans to literally grow roots. David’s ex-lover Jared departs their relationship to work for the Parks Department, and comes up with the idea that these two should be declared to be actual trees to avoid being fined day and night for overstaying in public space. But they soon discover that being Trees doesn’t protect anyone. Just recently the poet Eileen Myles cohered a movement of Lower East Side and East Village residents to oppose the New York Department of Design Construction’s post-Hurricane Sandy plan to create new flood controls at the edge of East River Park by demolishing 991 trees, some 80 years old. Only one lone state assembly member, Yuh-line Niou, stood in objection to the mowing down of a free neighborhood park. Residents fought in the press and on the land, but without any real support from the people who run things around here, the City triumphed and the trees have been destroyed.
In her 1970 song “Big Yellow Taxi,” Joni Mitchell lamented, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot,” but “paradise” has changed quite a bit since then. David and Sheila find their new external imprisonment to be... well, pastoral. What saves our heroes from the fate faced by so many people and trees is that their story takes place in a park in a mythical land called Connecticut. This is a territory that is unknown to most of the world, but New Yorkers think of as wealthy. David and Sheila grow their branches somewhere near Milford, and go through lonely periods, but their condition brings friends, lovers, even childbirth. With money they inherit from Dad, they can have food, cool clothes, and even a film projector to fill their evenings. Today, in 2023, we live in a time when there are more refugees in the world than there have ever been. The official count is that 47,000 asylum seekers came to our city last year. Here in New York, we have unprecedented amounts of empty apartments, hotel rooms and office space, but in 2022 officials counted 68,884 homeless New Yorkers, including 21,805 homeless children, sleeping each night in New York City’s main municipal shelter system. A near-record 22,720 single adults slept in shelters each night in December 2022. So “Outside” is not only a personal transformation destination for people who have an inside option, nor a metaphoric entrapment like Dorothy and the grasping branches of monster trees with faces on the path to Oz. In the brutal period in which we live, more people than ever are denied access to any private space, and so are forced to live in public space. Our mayor, Eric Adams, has made it a priority and obsession to ensure that homeless people do not sleep on subways or in parks. “Outside” is a battleground for survival between devastated abandoned humans, the endless rats, the brutal and clueless police, and the housed-employed going to work, restaurants, events, for exercise, and even – on occasion – to the theater. At the same time, COVID’s medical and social catastrophes revealed how many influential New Yorkers have second homes to retreat to. This profound material and perceptual inequality and its meaning for organized society loom in the subtext of Agnes Borinsky’s play, addressing head-on the aimless leisure class’s continued preoccupation with its own access and myopia. And many other questions of our time are approached in The Trees almost casually with an engaging charm and a lack of subjectivity, as if the characters don’t know that they are in the world. There
is no world. There is only them. They don’t know that they are rich, they don’t know that they are not resisting their entrapment by the earth, nor that they have never considered trying to escape, and none of their friends do either. In a way, these are the new Chekovian bourgeoisie pushed to our most brutal and accurate contemporary representation. They are the end of the empire. Borinsky has given us Adam Purple’s Garden of Eden as the last beautiful and charming circle of hell.
One of the problems with theater criticism is that it rarely addresses the meaning of the work. What a play is saying, what values it upholds or reveals, are rarely included in its evaluation. The content of what the playwright is actually claiming is often not engaged. There is a fashion in terrible times for being elusive, and that can be exciting and revelatory and also engagingly deceptive. Plays may not clarify meaning, but they can make us grapple with their lack of it, and thereby produce our own new knowledge, which we can discuss in our private spaces, since most theater-goers have them. And The Trees addresses the relational as well as the social. Seven years pass in The Trees and people’s circumstances change. Sheila finds love and David understands that he won’t. But that is not a lot of change for people forced to stand erect outside with their feet in the ground for the rest of their lives. It is this normal unexceptional subject in extraordinary circumstances that helps us identify with these helpless sprouting trunks.
One more of the many themes and tropes in The Trees worthy of engagement is the question of the Jews, which is always somehow hovering even when it’s not there, but here it is. What I LOVE about Borinsky’s character of the Jewish grandmother here is that she goes against everything that we are seeing in contemporary Jewish representation. She is not a Fabelman or a Fleishman, she is not a character at the service of nostalgia for Jewish innocence, nor a Woody Allen derivative. “Baba”, the Polish, yet Yiddish speaking Jewish grandmother of The Trees is wonderfully too old for her story to actually exist. She is a fabricated fantasy of the past! I am old enough to be Agnes Borinsky’s grandmother, and it was my grandmother who lived through pogroms. These characters are too young to have a grandmother who lived through pogroms, their grandmother probably lived through the suburbs, Hebrew school and upward mobility, or urban atheism and radical disappointment. Agnes has created a Jewish grandmother who has died sixteen times and was once a bird, and in that way, Jewish innocence is also a fabrication in a play that exposes false innocence over and over again while defying realism until it unveils it.
The Trees takes all the tropes of our utopian legacies and pulls out the mythologies to reveal the predatory nature of the capitulation, the retention of bourgeois wishes, and the passivity despite the actual state of life and the world. While we are going to The Hudson Valley, or Equinox, or the park in Connecticut, we are stepping over the living and dying corpses of our collapsing society, and while we traffic in mythologies of innocent pasts, we abdicate responsibility to the shrinking future. The real park is filled with homeless people and rats, so maybe better to invite them inside the next time we get trapped by the earth rather than try to pitch a tent and fear spiders, as everything becomes a shopping mall, but as David assures us, a nice one, with a Nordstrom. A
1000 Dead Trees (An Excerpt)
Emily Johnson
ON THE ROAD WHERE I GREW UP there were two trees. Well, there were millions of trees. It was rural Alaska and I grew up in a neighborhood in the woods. But there were these two particular trees. About a quarter mile down the dirt road. They became, over our growing up, THE TWO TREES. A place. These two trees. Known. “I’m going to the two trees.” “I saw a moose and its calves, just past the two trees.” A utility truck ran into one. My mom gathered the sawdust after they cut it down, put it into a jar. One tree we still called THE TWO TREES. Then none. Not even the millions. They’ve all been cut, well not all, but most. Every tree I knew. The spruce bark beetle, an effect of climate change in the arctic, moved in, killed the trees. My mom, for years, tried to protect one tree, the one we called the climbing tree. My mom researched and created a homemade concoction with grapefruit rind and other things that mimics the pheromones of beetles after they’ve infected a tree. My mom applied this to the tree, taught me and my little relative how to do the same. My mom, with this continued attention to the tree, confused the would-be-boring-into-the-climbing-tree beetles for a few years until this one came down, too.
Right now the city of New York is killing 1000 trees at East River Park in the environmental justice neighborhood of the Lower East Side. It’s a land grab on stolen land called the East Side Coastal Resiliency (ESCR) project, a real estate driven “resiliency plan” that is anything but. While 700 trees and 25 biodiverse acres have been destroyed since December 2021, 504 trees and 25 acres remain to protect.
Land defenders have gathered at East River Park for years in defense of this land, Lenapehoking. @1000people1000trees recently released a petition addressed to Council Members who serve on the Environment, Resiliency and Waterfronts Committee asking they uphold environmental justice standards, demand proper mitigation and procedural policies regarding resiliency projects and align with the Right to Clean Air and Water and a Healthful Environment for all New Yorkers.
In The Trees by Agnes Borinsky, characters turn tree and, in so turning, are threatened because the ground they turned to tree upon turns out is threatened, too – by real estate. But first, my mom again. This one person! In the midst of a decades-long assault on trees in southcentral Alaska (no fault to the beetles, they are doing what they do). All fault to settler colonial capitalism feeding the need for climate destructive extraction and production causing irreversible climate change and death. This one person, my mom, in THIS assault tried to defend a tree. ONE tree. To keep it living. To protect it from harm. *
I stood with a Saguaro once. A single Saguaro. For a very long time. Their community of relatives with us – thousands, through the hills.
After quite a while of standing, I felt like this Saguaro asked me what it is like to have arms.
I can’t tell you this whole story, but I can tell you that I described my arms as coming from my back, that I feel
as though my shoulder blades are wing joints – that I imagine the joint where the scapular feathers of the wing of a hawk meet the glenoid fossa and triosseal canal is where my scapula is. And I feel as though my arms move forward, from my back, that they hold. And I said that I feel tenderness through my arms. And power through my arms. That it is amazing to hold someone who is dear to you, close to you, in your arms. That holding small, tiny beings and things feels quite similar somehow, to holding larger, weightier, more complicated beings and things. That action comes from these tiny fingertips and that, from them – fingertips, you can begin moving things, like dirt.
I asked,
What is it like to stand in one place for seventy-five years? For seven hundred and fifty? For four thousand eight hundred and fifty five? For seventy thousand, six hundred and forty years?
In The Trees the characters become rooted into the ground. I honestly wish this for all of us.
In The Trees a family community grows and life continues with life things: a burned house, a sick grandmother, love. The misunderstandings and communications prosper alongside shared meals, time outdoors. The outdoors itself a growing monolith. Real? The outdoors?
When I am dancing on a stage that is indoors I am thinking of pulling the ground UP from underneath and I am thinking of tearing the walls DOWN and all the while I am dancing and so it becomes for me like they – the walls, the floor, the impositions – don’t exist.
Unbeknownst to everyone in The Trees save one, a mall is planned at the site the characters became trees. We can’t live in a mall! Some people (and trees) align with this thought.
I want to scream knowing all the plans made. To dump radioactive waste into the Hudson at Indian Point. To mine for copper in salmon estuaries. To drill for oil where caribou and Iñupiat live. To tear down a forest for a COP CITY. For malls. For malls on Governor’s Island. For malls along every interstate. For interstates. For New York City’s trash to be trucked up an interstate, a new dump at Grand Gorge! For luxury towers and a mega-jail coming to the Lower East Side and Chinatown in concert with fake resiliency plans.
There are raised voices. A betrayal in The Trees. But no guttural scream against the impending mall.
The feet of the rooted characters did not move. I loved witnessing the endurance of that act.
Endurance. A
Behind-the-scenes photos of the cast of The Trees by Chelcie Parry.
Watercolor by Agnes Borinsky, based on photo by Sam Breslin Wright, of siblings David and Sheila in The Trees.
Adam Greenfield
I sat down to make an artistic family tree thinking, “this is going to look sooooo cool ,” and it came out a bit dorky. Which is consistent with most of my attempts to be cool. The placement of the people around the page wasn’t pre-planned, but I’m pleased with the accidental pairings, like Jane Jacobs and A Confederacy of Dunces ; Grace Jones and Brazil ; Sullivan’s Travels and Tina Turner. That it’s a mash-up of influences, a haphazard collage, feels right to me.
Raven Walks on the Beach
Vera Starbard
Translations by Lance X’unei Twitchell
A solitary human figure sits on a large piece of cedar driftwood along a rocky Southeast Alaska beach. Suddenly, they see Raven walking down the beach. The human is excited. Raven notices them watching, and is a bit uncomfortable. Raven quickens his pace, but the human leans in. Finally Raven speaks.
RAVEN
You! Why are you watching me like that?
HUMAN
I mean – every other great Tlingit story starts with Raven walking along the beach. And you’re Raven! THE Raven of epic Tlingit legend! Walking on the beach! Right when I’m trying to write a script! I’m geeking out!
Raven gives them a look up and down.
RAVEN
Oh. So you’re the Storyteller.
STORYTELLER
I mean, I’m a storyteller, I don’t know about “the” storyteller...
RAVEN
I mean you’re the Storyteller for this tale. You’re the reason I’m here. It’s been awhile since I’ve been convinced to come out for a new Lingít story. You... ARE Lingít aren’t you?
STORYTELLER
Oh yes - I’m Tlingit. And -
RAVEN
Tlingit? KLINKIT? I said Lingít.
Storyteller is embarrassed.
STORYTELLER
Ah. I’m sorry. It’s just how most of us say it now. Tlingit? Colonization and all? Raven spits.
RAVEN
I’m sick to death of hearing about colonization. It’s Lingít as long as I’m here.
STORYTELLER
Of course, of course!
Beat. Storyteller rearranges their laptop, awaiting Raven.
Longer beat. Storyteller is uncertain what comes next.
RAVEN
So. You imagine you can create stories as well as your ancestors?
STORYTELLER
I never said that! I mean... I’d hope to... you know... I’d like to try...
RAVEN
Good grief. With that kind of spineless uncertainty you’re just begging for failure.
Storyteller isn’t sure what to say.
RAVEN
For starters, if you’re trying to create a story like them you’d be speaking in Lingít.
STORYTELLER
Very few people would understand if we spoke only in Lingít.
RAVEN
Hél ch aʼ góot kaa daa haa tuk watee? Wé g Lingítch áwé has haa x ʼak wa g .áax
STORYTELLER
A toowú x yanéekw yéi yakkwakáayi: «aatlein Lingítch áwé hél has haa x ʼak wa g .aa .x
RAVEN
Tlax kúnáx tlél ushk é. Wáanáx ʼ sáyá?
STORYTELLER
Haa jeetx wuduwas él ʼ ʼ tsú.
RAVEN
Kaa jeet tsu áx !
STORYTELLER
Kawtoo.aakw.
RAVEN
Gwál yáat aa ʼ haa eedé gu dashée x
STORYTELLER
Yáat aa ʼ gé? Wáa sá haa eedé gu dashée x ?
RAVEN
K idéin ʼ yoo dudzinei Lingít yoo x ʼatángi teen. Yá Lingít aaní ʼ káa yaa nas.á . Gwál a tuwáatx x … kei at gu lachéesh x
STORYTELLER
Yoo at koojeek ágé?
RAVEN
Teeshdéin tlax sawdudzit án ʼ
STORYTELLER
Gwál a tuwáatx kwa ch aʼ x óol ʼ ʼ yáx gu watée g
RAVEN
Whatever. I’m just trying to help. Can’t you try anything to get this story a little more old school? A little more... tradish?
STORYTELLER
I do have Raven walking on the beach to begin...
RAVEN
Sure, but who are you telling this to? Where are the dancers? The masks? How will the people see this in the clan house if it’s just a bunch of written words? Where’s the added production value your ancestors would have?
Storyteller looks confused.
As in when your clan performs this in your clan house? Maybe a big threeday-long koo.eex’? Or even nighttime around the fire kinda thing?
STORYTELLER
We don’t really do that anymore.
RAVEN
What! How sad! How do you share stories? How do you share the legends and history and wisdom of the clan?
STORYTELLER
We write it down, like this. And then... share it? If I can get some funding to pay some actors. And a theater to produce. Maybe even a television studio. I mean, that’s a long shot. A book maybe? In any case, I write it down here, and in a few years, who knows? Someday people might hear the story.
Raven takes a long look at the words.
RAVEN
Years? Idontthinkso. Let’s find some kind of quicker, written format, eh? At least until you get a bit more traditional.
STORYTELLER
But wait – who even said I wanted traditional stories like –
RAVEN
But before we go any further, we have to address format. I mean MY GOD.
STORYTELLER
What’s wrong with my format?
And with a dramatic gesture Raven began to explain the role of the Storyteller in historical Lingít legend. This rigid, formatted structure of script was no place to have a Storyteller truly stretch their style and flair. The script erases the Storyteller! The storytellers of old took in their tales through the telling and watching of others – and then put their own spirit into it. Oral storytelling is an art that doesn’t start at the finished piece. At least written in a sort of narrative form the story resembled its oral-history origin.
“But that was industry standard,” said the Storyteller. “It’s both accepted and expected for maximum audience reach.”
Raven laughed and laughed. He laughed so hard he fell from the driftwood and he rolled around the rocky shore. He could barely breathe as he mocked the Storyteller’s suggestion of industry standard. The Storyteller felt embarrassed, but they still wanted to defend their own experience.
“It’s been a long time since you’ve been born in a new story, Raven,” they said. “The world isn’t kind to storytellers who think small.”
But at these words Raven stopped laughing. In a moment he stopped being a jovial bird on the shore and he drew himself up to the stature ten-millennia of stories leant to him. His claws were not claws, but roots of the tallest Sitka spruce clenched to the land. His feathers were not feathers, but the blackest grief pinched into minute tendrils and sewn cruelly to his ageless body. His eyes widened until the Storyteller felt that they would get sucked into the depth of them. The eyes that saw the beginning. The eyes that saw every birth and life and death of every ancestor before them. In that moment Storyteller saw Raven for the Lingít legend he was, and they were frightened. When Raven spoke, fog began to spill from his mouth at every word.
“Are you a Storyteller concerned with how the world affects you, or are you a Storyteller concerned with how your stories affect the world? You think great masked dances are small? You think epic tales sung on a dozen drums are small? You think great amphitheaters filled with stories honed across millennia are small?”
The Storyteller was overwhelmed, frozen in silence against both Raven’s appearance and the questions hurled at them. And Raven, while a Trickster, is not unsympathetic to the human plight. With a much more bird-like warble, his claws became just claws, and his feathers became just feathers, and his eyes, however deep they remained, spoke for only a single soul, and not an eternity laid out in such starkness. He was once again the light Raven of children’s stories, only as literal as the words from the teller’s mouth.
“It’s okay,” said Raven. “I’m sure your ancestors will forgive you for ever thinking their stories were small.”
“I’m sorry. They aren’t small, they were never small,” said Storyteller. “I guess I just mean... am I able to learn from my ancestors and still do... something... new? Is that possible? Is that... respectful?”
“Aha,” said Raven. “Already a smidge more wisdom, eh? There you go – try telling your story now.”
The Storyteller looked around, and thought a moment, and Raven was uncharacteristically patient in his waiting. And then the Storyteller wrote:
One day, Raven was walking on the beach.
The Storyteller looked up at Raven, still a bit uncertain.
“Is that... right? The right medium? The right format? The right words?”
Raven smiled.
“I’m so glad you asked me, child,” said Raven. “But this is your story.”
The Storyteller paused once more, a millennia of stories at their back, and millennia more in their hands.
And then the Storyteller spoke: A
REGRETFULLY, SO THE BIRDS ARE
Written by Julia Izumi
Directed by Jenny Koons
March – April 2023
“I’m not an adoptee. I’m not Cambodian. I don’t have siblings or white parents. As a monoethnic JapaneseAmerican, I have never been uncertain of my cultural heritage. I’m not even tonedeaf. It’s funny that in a play about identities, I don’t share many with the main characters of this play except that we are all racialized as Asian in this country. That one link has made the American Theatre believe it’s okay for me to write this story. But is it? Honestly, I don’t know.
Julia Izumi
Playwright’s Perspective: Regretfully, So the Birds Are
Preposterous Romp
Natasha Sinha
GREAT NEW PLAYS sweep us into other people’s lives before returning us to our own with new articulations or questions about the world around us. The wild circumstances of Julia Izumi’s Regretfully, So the Birds Are spotlight the unknowable world by probing rather than preaching. This “farcical tragedy” eschews realism and didacticism, in favor of an ineffable strangeness. And couldn’t we benefit from a few more ways of taking things in, given the complicated world we’re all uniquely navigating?
Because while trapped within late capitalism and climate catastrophe, in the wake of a pandemic, on the heels of a kakistocracy, amidst multiple wars and the Great Recession – the absurd pile-up of our crisis-ridden lives doesn’t necessarily fit into straightforward storytelling. How would we survive through endless years of adversity if we wrestle with this chaos solely through naturalism and deduction? How would we even find a logic to follow?
In Regretfully, So the Birds Are, the situation surrounding the Whistler siblings is outlandish, but scrupulously constructed. The three siblings – Mora, Neel, and Illy – are unmoored within their family. Their mother is in prison for incinerating their father, who appears to them as a snowman; a sister is in a romantic relationship with her brother; and as transnational adoptees, none of them knows what country they’re from. This dysfunction is the reason why they made pacts with one another when they were younger – their lives didn’t follow normative rules, so they created their own, to establish some shared understanding. The pacts bind them together, but they continue to live in a relentlessly outrageous world, full of contradictions and lies and moral ambiguity – as we all do!
These adopted Asian American adults struggle to find authentic versions of themselves by trying to claim something of their own – a piece of the sky, a spotlight, simply knowing what country they were born in. But what does “authentic” actually mean anyway? An interest in authenticity is popular these days… but to what, and why? Julia sidesteps this question by instead taking us on a delightfully strange set of journeys. It’s thrilling to watch Asian American characters who are not primarily performing their race onstage – they wouldn’t know what to perform! – instead navigate so much else, on top of being in racialized bodies.
The American Theater often turns to weighty and informative plays that candidly foreground race via racism when including artists from a wider range of racial backgrounds than usual. (It’s a long-running joke that The American Theater repeatedly puts forth great plays that feature cogent arguments set on white families’ couches… so these “race plays” definitely add some color!) (Pun intended?)
But the onslaught of the last several years has exhausted us – American Exceptionalism is touted loud ‘n’ proud in a country that refuses to protect basic rights, while other countries are collapsing under dictators because of U.S. interference. So the frankness of many “couch” plays and “race” plays may not always speak to us. How do we logically reflect on what we’re observing, when daily life has felt so perplexing and it can be difficult to bring into focus any version of our future?
Julia’s answer is to let us laugh at America’s preoccupation with identity labels within this confounding world; it’s simultaneously painful and hilarious. Early in the play, Mora tells Neel a trait he has that he never knew about
“
How do we logically reflect on what we’re observing, when daily life has felt so perplexing and it can be difficult to bring into focus any version of our future?
himself, as an insult. Surprisingly and oddly, this becomes a meaningful realization for Neel – one that propels him toward his journey. He wonders, “Isn’t it just insane that I had to learn something crucial about myself from someone else? Like, what else am I wrong about? Am I not 28? Is my favorite food not banana ice cream? Do I even have arms?”
In some ways, the siblings’ own unravelings begin with their quests to pin down their identities and wrest some control over their lives. This proves to be a disorienting and isolating undertaking. But this is a play that insists on characters of the global majority as multifaceted and idiosyncratic and sometimes just plain ol’ messy people. The gift of rich individuality and personality – outside of identity labels – tells us who Mora, Neel, and Illy are as they strike out on their own. And Julia’s impish wordsmithing and poetic non-sequiturs hurtle us forward. Maybe it’s a reminder of how laughter helps us forge ahead.
In this play that focuses on a mix of groundedness and heightenedness throughout, Julia wields her particular sense of humor along with a startling statement on the first page of the script: “These characters have no subtext.” There’s a bracing cleanness to this lack of spin; a deceptively simple use of language stemming from an unusual straightforwardness. And she deploys linguistic tools (semantics, malapropisms, miscommunications, poetic articulations, non-sequiturs that transform into deep narrative threads, inconsistencies that lead to one meaning in a pun making sense while the other doesn’t, and other wordplay) to create psychological distance and revel in a kind of incongruity that feels relatable. As multiple artists have infamously quoted, “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”
There’s a deep benefit to the resulting resiliency that comes with comedy, as we continue to cope with our realities. Biologically, laughter is healing! It’s proven to improve our emotional and physical health by relaxing our muscles, increasing blood flow, and releasing endorphins. Or, as Tom Stoppard said (in a conversation about his farce, Jumpers, which is also full of verbal ingenuity), “I think of laughter as the sound of comprehension.”
If comprehension is one of the first steps to problem-solving, to coping, to grief, to healing – the irreverent Regretfully, So the Birds Are offers a visceral experience with surprising poignancy, as it admits life can be a preposterous romp. Sometimes we can’t wrap things up and tie them in a bow after a heavy conversation on a couch, but we can laugh about them and find enough buoyancy to make it to the next day. A
The Loneliness of Only-ness (In Defense of Mora, Illy, and Neel)
Deborah S. Craig
JULIA IZUMI SAID in her playwright’s statement, “I was feeling like a lot of plays being produced were positing, ‘what if the consequence of being a marginalized voice or body in this country is the worst thing that happens to you?’ I wanted to write characters for whom that’s not the worst thing that happens — what if there are also other things on top of that, as often many people have? I wanted to give my characters room to be messy — which I don’t think is often granted, particularly to Asian American women characters — as well as charismatic, strange, funny.”
Here is the official description from Playwrights Horizons: Arson. Affairs. Incest. Murder... are only the beginning of problems for the Whistler siblings. Mora’s gotta find her birth mother, Neel’s gotta find himself, and Illy’s gotta keep her piece of the sky... but the birds have other plans. Julia Izumi’s Regretfully, So the Birds Are is a mad-cap comedy that gleefully flips the human quest for self-discovery on its head.
And my description:
This play is a mad-cap comedy about three transnational, transracial Asian adoptees raised by clueless white parents that fuck them all up in different ways. And birds.
Illy, the youngest of the Whistler siblings is going to make a home in the sky.
ILLY (sings.)
I, I bought the sky. I bought a part of the sky And now it’s mine. I, I bought the sky
And on my part of the sky I’ll make a home
Illy wants to live in the sky. So she’s literally bought property in the sky. I don’t think that’s so far-fetched. She doesn’t have roots. She doesn’t know where she comes from. So she can’t go back to the past. Her present is confusing. So naturally she gravitates towards something beyond the present and the past. The sky. The future. In the fight-or-flight trauma response, Illy has literally chosen flight.
Neel, the middle Whistler sibling, questions if he has arms.
NEEL
Isn’t it just insane that I had to learn something crucial about myself from someone else? Like, what else am I wrong about? Am I not 28? Is my favorite food not banana ice cream? Do I even have arms? Illy—could you list all my traits for me? Just off the top of your head. What you can think of? Right now. List them, please, Illy, please, please, please, pretty Illy, pretty please, pretty, pretty—
Neel doesn’t know who he is, so he’s developed a codependent pattern of asking others who he is and trying to determine his identity from external markers. He doesn’t have a birth story or a country of origin. If his trauma response is fight or flight, he is frozen and developmentally stuck in the past. He has no history he can attach to, doesn’t have a present he can rely on, so he’s asking who am I? Please tell me who I am. Do you know who I am? Do I know who I am?
Mora, the oldest Whistler sibling, has a great plan to find her birth mother.
MORA
I’ve got this great plan to find my birth mother! I’m gonna walk up to every person in Cambodia. And I’m gonna say, “Hi. I’m sorry to interrupt your day. But I was wondering. Did you give up a baby girl for adoption thirty years ago?”
MORA
I’m kind of loud? And emotional.
And...some people say I’m...and I, too, would, say I’m a— Oh! I’m an older sister. That’s important. I mean I don’t really act like one but I...I am one.
Mora is the classic transracial, transnational AAPI adoptee on a quest to find her birth mother because she thinks that will fix her. This will heal the wound. This will undo the trauma. This is the prototypical abandoned transracial, transnational AAPI adoptee fantasy/delusion.
When tasked with the honor to write a personal reflection on Julia Izumi’s marvelous and hilarious play, I immediately said yes, because a) it was paid b) I would get to see the play! c) I knew the play was about transracial AAPI adoptees and that it was directed by an adopted Korean (like me) and written by an AAPI playwright – so yes, of course I’m the correct artist to write an inspired artistic response to a play about adoptees.
I saw the play twice. I laughed. A lot. I cried. A lot. Twice. It was surprising and empathic and absurd and wonderful and soulful. Of all the twists and turns in the play, the one I didn’t see coming was how the predominantly white audience (on the nights I saw the play) would react. They were aghast and in shock at these characters. “So quirky! So weird!” I overheard them saying after the show. I overheard them saying after the show and continued to remark about how absurd some of the themes were and how bizarre the characters were and I thought, “Hmmm. F**k you! This is all really accurate. Being adopted is strange and messy. Being a transracial Asian adoptee in America is downright bizarre!”
This play is what it feels like to exist in a constant, endless identity crisis. I wanted to hug Illy, Neel and Morra tightly and tell them it’s not their fault. I can’t do that so I wrote a piece inspired by each of their specific adoption trauma responses.
FOR MORA
Picture this. An Asian woman. Who has no idea how to use chopsticks. What does she do? Does she learn from YouTube? Does she study Asian-identifying people around her? Should her hands come downloaded with the ability to use chopsticks from her Asian-identifying DNA? Is she self-loathing if she doesn’t use chopsticks and eats Chinese noodles (I don’t know if she’s Chinese or not, I just know she’s Asian-identifying, which the majority of Americans default to Chinese)? Do chopsticks even matter? Will she cause a scene at said Chinese restaurant if she asks for a fork and eats with her AAPI-identifying and Caucasian-identifying friends at a Chinese banquet where people assume she is in fact Chinese but she’s Korean - ish?
Koreans use chopsticks also. Maybe she’s Korean. But we don’t really picture Koreans when we think “Asian woman.” When we say Korean we imagine Kim Jong Un or the K-pop group BlackPink or the movie Parasite. We think of Koreans as being trendy, or dictators, or trendy dictators like those who have lower-class people working for them, and who maybe also hide people in the basement, because classism in Korea is seemingly insurmountable. When I say Korean American woman, what do you imagine? I hope you think of Margaret Cho or Chloe Kim or fill in the______________________(with your favorite Korean-American woman here). Now imagine Margaret or Chloe or your fave KA woman at a Chinese banquet with a ton of people. Everyone is using chopsticks. E-VE-R-Y-O-N-E! The three year-old niece of the bride (see, banquet) is using chopsticks to eat her noodles. The white colleagues of the banker groom are using chopsticks. The former college roommates of both parties all use chopsticks with their spouses and children. (I’ll leave it to you here to imagine a *diverse group of people eating a large Chinese feast at a round table all eating noodles with chopsticks*†.) Now imagine the ONE Asian woman in whatever table you’ve imagined, with x, y, z people staring at their noodles, staring at the server, who just politely said something in Chinese to the woman. (Was it Mandarin? Was it Cantonese? How the f**k would she know? SHE’S NOT CHINESE!!!!) Or is she? She doesn’t know because she’s adopted and has not done a 23andMe test, but she does, however, “admit” to really loving pandas and that waving good luck cat. (But who the f**k doesn’t love adorable, clumsy, giant fluffy pandas and smiling cats who wave and supposedly give you good f**king luck?)
Do you feel it? The heart pounding. The heat rising. The dan dan noodles calling. (Are they dan dan noodles? She doesn’t know but everyone loves gd dan dan noodles and that must be it because wouldn’t one have the most delicious Chinese noodles at a celebratory Chinese banquet?) You’re not some gd Chinese noodle EXPERT! You just like to eat noodles like everybody else, even if you are mostly gluten-free and these are probably made of white flour but you can’t not eat the noodles that EVERYONE is eating that you are NOT eating because you are wearing your full Asian costume, and by costume I mean you are Asian with a monolid (what is that you say? Ask the Internet! Also, come back to me with which noodles are FUN!) LOL, but seriously. Back to you. You have dark blackish hair, golden poreless skin, the color that white women have spray tanned onto themselves to look “healthier” (pats
oneself on back for having the color of “healthy” spray tanned white woman skin) and you have high cheekbones and a face that looks roughly ten years younger than your Caucasian peers (WHERE IS THE LIE?!) but you CANNOT use chopsticks PROPERLY! The people from Caucasia sitting next to you are using chopsticks EXPERTLY and talking about the ginger they can taste. They LOOOOOOVE ginger. They make fresh ginger tea all of the time and they leave the peel on. Do you? Do you looooooove ginger? They just LOOOOOVE ginger tea. Fuck you white people! Of course I love ginger!
You pick up the chopsticks. The same chopsticks the waiter handed you when he didn’t ask if you wanted a fork like he asked the “others.” (Choose your own “others” in this scenario so I don’t have to describe an entire table of people. Just like when people use the word “diverse” and you fill in the___ .) THE CHOPSTICKS that have haunted you your entire life because you know you don’t use them correctly and you don’t want to draw attention to yourself by using a fork.
You pick up the chopsticks. You start to eat the noodles. The bride’s cousin stops by the table. She is an Asian woman. An Asian American woman. She says, “Oh you hold your chopsticks like a pencil. That’s so much harder.”
You say, “HAHA, my parents are white. I learned from the chopsticks package how to use them.”
You start using a fork because you are hungry. Some people at your table have already moved on to a fork. You think about pandas and good luck cats and wonder if you’re going to have good luck because you can wave your arm and smile at the same time.
She says, “Here, let me show you how to eat with chopsticks so it’s not so hard.” You say, “Thank you, but it’s too late.”
FOR NEEL
A fun game! Let’s play!
What if your life was fill in the ____?
Let’s play a game. Imagine your mother. Think of a few words that describe her.
PART 2 (FUN GAME!)
Now imagine your father.
What are three words that would describe him?
Write them here:
Ok, now if you have a sibling or a cousin describe three things you have in common:
(can include physical traits, beliefs, hobbies, interests, sports teams, food, animals)
People say I get “ ” from my maternal side.
People say I get “ ” from my paternal side.
All of Neel’s answers would be _______________________.
FOR ILLY
PART 3 (FINIS)
What about the sky? Humans need narratives. It’s how we go from point a to point b, or at least the story behind why we go or even want to go or need to go from point a to point b.
But what if there is no point a or point b.
What if they are just points with no narrative, no start, no finish, no objective, no context, no story.
Then what? How do you get point a to point b?
If no thoughts come to mind, here are some adjectives for each category:
Tall, Short, Funny, Kind, Adventurous, Prankster, Team Fan, Harry Potter, Sushi, Fried Chicken, Bowling, Cat Lover, Doctor, Lawyer, Paralegal, Fair, Honest, Gambler, Hunter, Wise, Soothing, Beautiful, Great Cook, Grill Master, Cold...
Now describe your family
My family, the “ ”, are:
You fill in the ________________. The sky’s the limit. A
NOTES
†Diverse - Imagine a diverse table. What does that even mean, you say? Exactly.
Featuring the author’s own family photo — as a mirror, if you will:
The Delusional Quest for Individuality
Haruna Lee
1.
ONE OF MY all-time favorite podcast moments happens during Episode 37 of Seeing White, Part 7 where Scene on Radio host and producer John Biewen, who created the series as a way to excavate his own whiteness, is confronted with a harrowing question by his guest Chenjerai Kumanyika, a professor, author, and journalist. John is white and Chenjerai is Black. Chenjerai asks John: How attached are you to the idea of being white?
To which John responds:
I’m not attached to whiteness. I mean, I’m not like “How do I defend whiteness in light of all of this?” And I, honestly, I feel like detaching from it.
Then Chenjerai asks:
When you graduated from college, did you feel like it was a victory for white people?
John:
(Laughing) Oh god, no.
Chenjerai:
(Laughing) Right, right. But like, when I got my PhD? I was told it was a victory for my people.
And then John has this huge revelation:
Right… So you’re pointing out that it’s a double standard. Because one of the greatest privileges of how whiteness works in a white-dominated society is that I get to be seen as myself, as an individual.
2.
This conversation always reminds me of my first “boyfriend.” This white guy I dated for over a year who refused to admit we were even dating. He was my first consistent sex partner, and like any co-eds we had sex in a dorm. The dorm building was an old converted hotel where they crammed five extralong twin size beds in every corner of this oblong-shaped luxury suite, with no walls separating these living spaces — only dirty laundry and personal objects demarcating where one bedroom ended and the other began. Rumor had it Al Pacino used to stay at this hotel…
On our “dates” we’d pass the time drinking, smoking, or watching movies in this shabby dorm room where we were, more often than not, in the company of his four roommates. But at some point, he’d announce to the other guys that we were going to bed. The four guys would still be hanging out and chatting, doing homework — it was their room too, after all — and the two of us would crawl under the covers and close our eyes. He’d spoon me. I’d feel this guy’s hands all over me. He’d undress me. And we’d quietly have sex right there in front of everyone—
And when you’re secretly
it. My body gave in to all the sticky stereotypes it could possibly hold — the helplessness, subservience, quiet, excellence, resilience, taking it all without objection — it was the ultimate marriage of an Asian femme body with all of its societal, perverse signifiers. At the same time, I had to create some sort of narrative around agency, or else it would have been too humiliating and shameful. I was inviting the white cock inside me. I let it in. I am a hot barely legal 18 y.o. me-so-horny-me-love-you-long-timey Asian femme with desire: desiring this proximity to whiteness, to be seen by these men (the other guys were white too, and I knew they were secretly watching), “getting turned on” as a means of survival and reclamation of trauma, and indulging myself in the illusion of this individuality. An individuality I never had. Perhaps I never had it to begin with.
I’m doing this for myself.
3.
In Julia’s terrorizing and wickedly comic play, three transnationally adopted Asian siblings are on a quest to find meaning in their lives. The ultimate quest for individuality. But Julia doesn’t make it easy for them. Not only have they been denied access to their birth information for their entire lives, they were cursed with a white adoptive mother recently incarcerated for arson and murder, and an adoptive white father killed by said arsonist and who built a life around his fetish of sexualizing Asian women and culture and aggressively preaching his Orientalist musings. The siblings, plagued with this desire to know themselves as individuals but only wielding their wretched proximity to whiteness as tools, each set off on their dangerous delusions. It’s no wonder that two of the siblings end up in an incestual romantic affair (to which the incarcerated white mom doesn’t even blink an eye), one wants to own a piece of the sky, another goes to Nebraska to find himself with a cowman, and the other randomly goes to Cambodia hoping to reunite with her birth mother. All the while, the children speak to a white specter who is constantly taking up the stage— their father dressed up as a snowman lecturing them on his most asinine opinions of Asia.
All I have to say is, don’t let the smart and fast-paced rhythm of laughter and jokes in this play fool you! Julia has created a truly horrifying spectacle, a hyperreal landscape that’s akin to Jordan Peele’s Get Out or maybe even the super trendy zombie apocalypse series based on the game with the same name The Last of Us, but in Julia’s play the evil, the illness, the contagion is—
4.
“For Asian Americans, there is [no] resolution with assimilation— whiteness is never an attainable state… At once a compelling fantasy and a lost ideal.”
– David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia
Getting fucked from behind
In front of all your peers
With the fluorescent overhead lights on… …it makes it hard to say anything, a peep a sigh a vowel, anything at all in the moment. Too despicable. Too embarrassing. But what’s more complicated is that, I didn’t feel like saying anything at all. I was convinced that I was enjoying
Melancholia is mourning without end.
Racial Melancholia is a phrase often associated with the Asian Diasporic experience in the United States.
For me, the absurdity of this play is in how it portrays this ceaseless feeling of Melancholia caused by our intimate relationship to assimilation — a specifically Asian American dilemma where our brave want to be seen and known is
wrapped up in an “at all costs” mentality. To choose assimilation is to be stripped, erased, fractured, and violated from the truth of our souls. But it also means you get to live. A Great Loss such as this is equal parts displacement from: home body community mother culture language land
knowing your routes of migration (how to get to and from home)
As well as the treachery of assimilation into:
Whiteness
Heterosexuality
Capitalism
Mainstream
Middle Class Values
Norms
Dominance
Individuality
Individuality.
What a debilitating and cyclical desire! The desire to know oneself in the context of whiteness. Maybe I am or am not the first to say this, that the delusional desire for individuality (which is a myth of whiteness) is very Asian — which also makes this play very Asian.
5.
The birds. They are terribly endearing in a dopey kind of way, but they are never meant to soothe or provide you with solace. Their cacophony isn’t for that.
The birds are emergent in their strategies and principles. They might be tone-deaf to us, but their survival is defined by: home body community mother culture
language land
knowing your routes of migration (how to get to and from home)
matters are couched within an all-too familiar pace of a living room drama, but this play is far darker and more deliberate. It’s wailing, unrelenting, sharp, insistent. It’s actually really metal.
7.
The character Illy (named after the Italian coffee franchise, I learned) is at a funeral. The last one standing after everything literally and metaphorically burns down. Illy has been a receptacle for all things stereotypically Asian up until now — she’s small and beautiful, she’s exceptional, she’s a world class viola player, she’s type A, she’s a model minority, she’s too content to go and find herself like the others, and she believes in meritocracy — but here, at the end, she’s lost her two siblings who, though deeply troubled and flawed like herself, were the only people in this world anchoring her to a sense of family, of home. Now she is truly alone. At this point she musters all the courage within her to say:
I have this great plan to find mys—
8.
I admit. I am constantly contextualizing myself – trying to find meaning within, and desperately undercover when it comes to the great sea of whiteness. It’s embedded into the constitutions of this land that my family and I have migrated to. My trauma and my pain have become my infatuations. It fuels my desire to become, to be seen as an individual, because individuality in this country is also synonymous with freedom, rights and power. But ultimately, we’re not afforded these same liberties because inside the myth of whiteness we can never detach from our race the way white people can. We can never be free of the very attachments and meanings projected onto our bodies by (white, colonial, imperial) society across time. Assimilation is only a master’s tool to reach some proximity to power. And still, I am in search of myself despite knowing full well I will never attain this dream. Not in this body, in this country, at least.
This American obse– this Asian American obsession to attain individuality despite it being a futile mythos of whiteness… If we were to let it go, what do we do with ourselves in its place?
Maybe the birds might know. But regretfully, they don’t care about us. They roam the freedom of the skies together. A
6.
If you run into Julia before or post-show, in the theater elevator or at a nearby bar, she may offer you a very charming smile and tell you this play is a “farcical tragedy,” but again — don’t be fooled! The play may look like a regular play with digestible inter-genres, as if family manners and
photography of Regretfully, So the Birds Are by Chelcie
Production
Parry.
Jamie Learns Her Lines Deirdre O’Connell
“Jamie Brewer, Will Dagger, Harold Surratt, and I (the world premiere cast of Corsicana) spent some glorious and grueling days studying our lines together on Zoom before in-person rehearsals with director Sam Gold began. A few months later, Amanda Spooner (our singular PSM, who helped facilitate it all) found the recordings! This series of pictures is loosely based on the pleasure of revisiting the process of learning Will Arbery’s new play with Jamie as our fearless leader.” – Deirdre O’Connell
Couldn’t fit: PARKCHANWOOK, AARONMCGRUDER, AMIRIBARAKA, BUSTARHYMES, ROGERREEVES, LUCILLECLIFTON
DAVE HARRIS
I love artistic lineages and tracing the artists that make up another artist. And then I was asked to do mine, and I blacked out. If you ask me to make this list again right now, every name would be different. Oops. I also can’t draw so instead I typed the names into a crossword puzzle generator. You could say this is a metaphor for how every part of us is made of someone else, how we would not even have names unless someone was named before us. But no, I simply can’t draw.
DAVID HENRY HWANG
SELECTED FOOTNOTES
• Novelist John L’Heureux, my writing professor at Stanford, helped me to design a playwriting major.
• Mako, co-founder and Artistic Director of Los Angeles’ East West Players, directed by first play, FOB, at the Public Theater.
• Actor Lilah Kan opened up her UWS apartment to AAPI artists, including me.
• Joe Papp produced my first four plays at the Public.
• Lloyd Richards supported me as Artistic Director of the O’Neill Playwrights Festival and Dean of Yale Scool of Drama.
• Stuart Ostrow mortgaged his house to produce my first Broadway play, M. Butterfly.
• Frank Rich, head theater critic, NY Times, and Edith Oliver, New Yorker critic, championed my work.
• Maxine Hong Kingston, National Medal of the Arts author, and Frank Chin, first AAPI playwright to be produced Off-Broadway: Frank has persistently criticized Maxine and me, so this family is estranged.
• Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornes basically taught me how to write a play at the first Padua Hills Playwrights Festival in 1978.
Toward A New Play Literacy: A Twinterview
May and Layla Treuhaft-Ali
As the Literary and Community Engagement Assistant at Playwrights Horizons, I have two parts to my job, which are connected by my conviction that new plays are uniquely positioned to engage first-time theatergoers. When you sit in the audience for a new play, you are changing and expanding the play’s meaning. How do we reframe the act of watching the play as a participatory process, decouple that process from elitism, and empower people who have been alienated by that elitism to take part?
My twin sister, Layla – or Ms. T. as she’s known to her fifth- and sixth-graders – teaches English at a Chicago public school. The aim of her class is to cultivate in each student an identity as a reader. A reader, by Layla’s definition, reads not for praise or good grades, or because they expect to like every book they read. A reader does not have any tangible reward in mind when they pick up a book; they do it because, as Layla says, “That’s what readers do.”
The question I return to again and again is, how do I encourage people — especially those who have been excluded from the theater for generations because of their race and/or class — to identify as theatergoers? A theatergoer, by my definition, attends each play understanding that, regardless of whether they end up liking this particular one, the overall practice of theatergoing enriches their lives. Beyond reducing ticket prices, how does a theater invite audiences not just to a play, but into a practice?
Layla and I often joke that we have the same job, and so I asked her questions about hers in order to learn about mine. What follows is an interview between us – or, as we call it, our “twinterview.”
MAY: Hi Layla. Thank you so much for letting me interview you.
LAYLA: I cannot believe I’m getting paid to talk on the phone with my sister.
MAY: When you teach literacy, your goal is for every student to identify as a reader. Why is this important? And how do you facilitate this process?
LAYLA: The big thing with forming an identity is that, for those of us who hold the identity of “reader,” we don’t remember the explicit ways that we were taught to hold that identity. If you’re someone who reads all the time, you may think, “Some people are readers and some people aren’t. I’m a reader and I’ve always been this way.” You didn’t notice your teachers’ deliberate moves to make you that way; you just felt it happen.
MAY: When you talk about the deliberate steps that teachers take to bring out the reader in every student, what does that look like for you?
LAYLA: It’s evolving, but the most important thing to me is that kids actually read. There’s a lot of research that the amount of time they spend with their eyes on text predicts all kinds of academic success, and the only way to increase the time they spend reading is for them to like it. I treat it like building a habit, I have them track how much they read every day. But the other piece of teaching literacy is building skills, like vocabulary, grammar, and spelling, and then also higher-level skills like asking questions of the book, or visualizing the text as you read.
MAY: The framework of “literacy” – and who has access to it – is a useful approach to audience development. Like textual literacy, theater literacy is disproportionately confined to affluent communities. People who didn’t grow up with theater literacy might think they don’t like theater, when really they were never equipped with the habits and skills to engage with it, or introduced to content that resonates with them.
LAYLA: I guess a way to put it is apprenticeship into an identity. When my kids start research projects, I show them pictures from when I did my undergraduate thesis research, and I say things to them like, “Researcher to researcher, here’s my advice to you...” I help them build the necessary academic skills to do research, but I frame it as apprenticing them into the identity of being a researcher. So maybe for you, it’s asking first-time newplay-goers things like, “Here’s what I look for when I see a new play, what do you look for?”
The reason we say things like, “That’s what readers do,” is that we want students to believe they already are readers. Because then it becomes true. An apprentice may be less experienced and you need to show them some things, but they are actively doing the thing rather than passively learning it. A controversial opinion of mine is that I love the talkbacks after plays. I have friends who complain that it’s like English class, and I’m like, “Yeah, I’m an English teacher! I love it!”
MAY: … I am that friend who always says that to you.
LAYLA: I know, but I didn’t want to throw you under the bus.
MAY: How do you develop a reading curriculum that caters to kids with different levels of reading proficiency? How do you “program your season”?
LAYLA: One of my beliefs is, “Teach the reader, not the book.” I’m trying to give them transferable strategies. For example, I’ll offer prompts like, “Whenever you read a book, look for the characters’ blind spots and biases” for them to apply to their individual books. It doesn’t actually matter to me that they can repeat the literary analysis of a
specific book that I teach, it matters to me that they start to notice these things themselves in whatever they read.
MAY: How do you help each student select books to read independently?
LAYLA: One guiding principle is the concept of “mirrors and windows.” When kids read books, they need mirrors, meaning they need to see themselves in terms of race, sexual orientation, or gender identity, but they also need to see their own experiences of grief, or a family member being incarcerated, or a serious injury or sickness, reflected in the literature they read. Those are mirrors. Windows are books that expose them to experiences other than their own, and they need a balance of both. All kids need that. White kids also need mirrors and windows, but they’re likely to encounter more mirrors than windows in literature.
MAY: The desire to provide audience members across many different demographics with both mirrors and windows resonates with me. It’s low-hanging fruit to invite people to a play for which they share a surface-level identifier with the playwright, actors, or characters. But then, how do you get them to come to the next play, which might be the window? The one that might relate to their experiences in an indirect but equally meaningful way?
LAYLA: One place where our work is similar is that it’s relational. When I build a relationship with a kid, I know them not just as a reader, but as an individual. I really do believe that the most meaningful activism has to be sustained on relationships. Individual relationships create networks: if you form a relationship with one person, they form a relationship with the theater.
MAY: There’s a wonderful company called CO/LAB that provides theater education for adults with developmental disabilities. When Playwrights started doing relaxed performances, I invited them. In return, they offered me tickets to their upcoming puppetry show. A few months later, they invited us to embark on a formal partnership that includes group theater outings and interactive workshops. That got built over time. It’s actually very similar to how I correspond with playwrights in my literary capacity. Both are about growing and deepening a relationship to the point where you have a shared language, and from there, you can try something new together. There’s a line from The Trees by Agnes Borinsky that I think about all the time: one character says to his sister, “There’s so much we have to do,” and she replies, “We do a lot already….
We sustain an ecosystem.” Sustaining an ecosystem has become the guiding principle of my work.
LAYLA: It’s easy to feel hopeless if you want the world to be really different from how it is now, but people underestimate the power of relationships to achieve systemic solutions. We don’t go the extra mile to keep sustaining the ecosystem unless there is trust, unless we feel seen and heard and understood, and that’s where true radical transformation can take place. That’s the nexus from which we can challenge systemic realities.
MAY: How much of being culturally responsive is about programming (aka the syllabus or the season) versus how we engage with audiences around our programming (e.g. talkbacks, messaging, outreach, affinity nights)? Is it about the content you select or the delivery of said content?
LAYLA: It’s both. If you don’t have something rich to talk about, then the conversation is not going to be engaging and people aren’t going to show up for it. I ask my kids for feedback on my lessons all the time, and sometimes it hurts my feelings, because, you know, they’re kids.
MAY : There’s also the question of then having the nimbleness –
LAYLA: – and the humility –
MAY: – yes, and the humility, to change how you do things based on their feedback. In theater, when there’s always the next play, the next deadline is fast approaching, it can really be hard to take a step back and ask: “Can we change our whole way of doing this?”
LAYLA: Manufactured urgency is an element of white supremacy and capitalism.
MAY: OOF.
LAYLA: It keeps us chained to the status quo, and prevents us from uprooting our practices, and sometimes it’s just fake.
MAY: What is your experience doing culturally responsive work across differences of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and age? How do you earn trust and build longterm relationships across these differences?
LAYLA: Anyone who spends time in a space that is not the space they are used to is going to have to be pretty darn
uncomfortable for a while. I had to sit in that discomfort and listen and be okay with it. But I’ve grown comfortable, and I’ve grown to feel that I belong in my school’s community. For you and other Playwrights staff who do outreach in communities they’re not from, I would urge you to sit through that discomfort. You may feel like a guest for a little longer than you want to. It takes a lot of listening, and you have to understand that you’re going to make mistakes. Don’t be defensive of those mistakes, just apologize and commit to doing better. Over time you can begin to feel at home in a world that is not yours. Of course that’s not to say you take it over and make it your space, it’s to say you can feel a sense of connection and authenticity in a space that was not built for you.
Everyone should experience that feeling. I think people of color experience that all the time in this country, but white people don’t, and there’s so much beauty in it. There’s so much beauty in my school community that I would have never known if I had stuck to communities like the one I grew up in. I’m different and better for having embraced the discomfort and I think most people will be.
MAY: Well Layla, this has been the best conversation of my entire life. Thank you for having it with me.
BOTH (in perfect unison): That’s what sisters do. A
Photographs of May and Layla Treuhaft-Ali.
WET BRAIN
Written by John J. Caswell, Jr.
Directed by Dustin Wills
May – July 2023
Scenic design by Kate Noll; Costume design by Haydee Zelideth Antuñano; Lighting design
by Cha See; Projection design by Nicholas Hussong
ALMANAC
From my own personal experience, addiction shrinks universes and worlds. It makes us very small people living in very small spaces with no way to turn ourselves around. We can’t view ourselves from a perspective that might actually break us free from the cell. I think of this play as an explosive munition, one that might obliterate the rigid and unimaginative thinking which prevents recovery and closure.
John J. Caswell, Jr.
Playwright’s Perspective: Wet Brain
In Another Universe Fiona Selmi
“Earth’s the right place for love: / I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” – Robert Frost
I AM NO STRANGER to an Arizona summer. Dry heat is suffocating. Every movement feels jarring, labored, and daunting. It’s the kind of heat that makes you believe air conditioning is sent from God, and causes you to look at Phoenix and think,“who put so many strip malls in this desert wasteland, and decided to call it a city?” You want a lemonade or a margarita or a cold beer. You need an escape.
In John J. Caswell, Jr.’s play Wet Brain, we meet Ricky, Ron, and Angelina in Scottsdale, Arizona. Ricky, a prodigal son of sorts, has returned home to help his siblings care for their ailing father, Joe, who is deep in late-stage alcoholism. They’ve all come together to figure out how to care for him, and inadvertently, how to care for one another as they try to let go of a family that was more often fucked up than nurturing, but a family nonetheless.
The siblings negotiate what will happen to their father once they cease to be his caretakers, and return to the lives they’ve abandoned for him. They wonder if leaving him to his own devices might be the easiest way out. And yet, they cannot fully let go of Joe for the simple fact that he is their father. Rather, they choose to follow him into his inner universe, one where the honest communication that they crave from him, that we all crave from our parents, can be given without the normal constraints of time, space, and physical embodiment.
Late one night, Ricky, Ron and Angelina, together, conjure and enter a kind of dormant consciousness: the liminal space of their childhood that they’ve long repressed. They move into another mental and emotional dimension in order to transgress the line which Joe’s alcoholism has drawn between him and them. This dimension is what performance theorist José Esteban Muñoz would call the “no longer conscious.”
“The no longer conscious is an essential route for the purpose of arriving at the not yet here,” Muñoz writes in his 2009 book, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, which is part performance theory, part manifesto, and part love letter to both the past and present of queerness. In Wet Brain, the three siblings make a choice to embrace their upbringing, their father, his decline, and all of the skeletons that their parents left behind.
If the siblings need to escape the here and now by embracing the “not yet here” – then they are seeking what Muñoz calls a utopia. They choose to take the skeletons out of their closet and make them dance.
Not a utopia like the Garden of Eden, which Frankfurt School thinker Ernest Bloch describes as an “idealist utopia” – but, rather, a “concrete utopia.” In his 1954 book, The Principle of Hope, Bloch defines “concrete utopias” as utopias that can be achieved in the present through a pragmatic project of hoping for a slightly different world, a slightly better world than the here and now. Bloch believed that concrete utopias were the most genuine of the form, writing “we need the most powerful telescope, that of polished utopian consciousness, in order to penetrate precisely the nearest nearness.” He believed that striving towards an incrementally better future, a possible future, is the most noble and courageous thing one could hope for.
Wet Brain is a play about the corporal, about something that is contained within you, the unavoidable that is pulsing through your bloodstream. The present is cluttered. And the trauma of Ricky, Ron and Angelina’s childhood is made even thornier by the trappings of theatrical realism.
And so when the characters of John’s play enter their own utopia, employing what Muñoz calls the “Utopian Performative,” we are asked to imagine a world: a future that shuns our everyday notions of time, space and embodiment. In the present, there are unmovable physiological boundaries that prevent Joe and his children from ever having the conversations they need to have. Wet Brain, in shaking the mortal coil of realism, dares to make these boundaries movable, to choose alternative definitions of time and space, to transgress universes.
And yet, we recognize that the bodies on stage are present in our reality. The extra-temporal plane on which the play operates is still bound by the very tangible limits of the time it takes an actor to walk back and forth across a stage. And so a kernel of possibility starts to creep in, giving us the smallest glimpse of a future in which we too can experience the understanding that Angelina, Ricky and Ron build a utopia to find. Maybe we can do it without the utopia, maybe the here and now is enough.
In many ways, this is a play about hope. A play about the impossibility of abandoning hope for your parents to be better, and the necessity of doing so. It is the letting go of an idealist utopia for a concrete one: the simple, daily practice of hoping for a better tomorrow.
In Wet Brain, the universe of a failed patriarch asks us to imagine what happens if we exchange one type of hope for another. Joe’s mind and body have failed him as a result of years of abuse; a hope for the person he was must be abandoned. And yet, Joe himself hopes that he can be better for the first 15 minutes of every day. There might be a sense of resolution hidden in this type of quotidian hope, a recognition of the here and now coupled with a belief in potential; of believing in the people your parents could be or once were. Or even who they never were, but a belief in the principle, that people, that our parents, can change. That they can become a version of themselves that they never were and never can be.
We will always fail in reaching that better future. We might even fail after the first 15 minutes of our days. We might not even make it to 15. And yet, the project of trying, of failing towards a better future – a better version of ourselves, a better idea of family – is worthwhile, it will always be worthwhile. We must find the courage to hope, to fail.
And like the temptation of a cold beer in the Arizona summer heat, hope can be intoxicating. It’s been said that one can get drunk on hope, on idealism, on the projection of a future that we will never see. We understand what it feels like to hope, to escape this universe, and yet, we choose to stay here. We choose to build a life, a future with the things we have and with the people we’re here for. We choose to believe in our people – and ourselves – even through the everyday impossibility of becoming who we want to be. A
TOLSTOY FAMOUSLY WROTE that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but I haven’t found that to be true. When I started graduate school I learned that nearly everyone in my playwriting program came from an unhappy family, and that playwrights were people who worked out the unhappiness of their unhappy families on the page, and that the unhappiness seemed to rhyme from one writer to another. There was a general helplessness I sensed from my cohort, a sense that we were impotent to help these broken relationships, a grim awareness that we had to surrender our need to communicate with people in our families and find our way back to them in imaginative conceits of plays.
Wet Brain is, in many ways, a play about impotence. Parents are impotent to help their floundering children; kids are impotent to help their dying father. Joe’s drinking has rendered him (to use Angelina’s phrase) “a bag of meat” — he’s completely incapacitated. Ron is sexually impotent, a problem that leads to the breakup of his relationship. Everything in this play is in some way sick, broken, corroded. (Caswell even compares the hallways of the family home to “fat-clogged arteries.”)
To be sure, Caswell milks jet black comedy from Joe’s condition. Early on in Wet Brain, Joe lumbers across the stage in a terrifying ski mask like Jason from Friday the 13th. The image is both absurd and frightening, and it highlights what we already know: that Joe is no longer human, no longer capable of betraying or helping or loving his kids, for he has made himself a cipher. Addiction hollows out its victims in this way, psychically and spiritually.
But was Joe ever really present for his kids? Is this zombified, wet-brain version of Joe any different from the man who stood by to watch his son’s jaw broken in a homophobic attack years earlier? Alcoholism has made Joe a kind of monster, but I don’t get the sense that there was some prelapsarian period for Ricky and his siblings. For me, Wet Brain is less about alcoholism than emptiness — the emptiness and vacancy at the core of broken families.
Blank Space David Adjmi
When Angelina insists upon the obvious, that Joe is way too sick to be left alone and needs Ricky’s help, Ricky demurs. “I’m gonna watch,” he replies, “we’re gonna see.” The coy reserve of Ricky’s “I’m gonna watch” perversely mirrors – and inverts – the traumatic wound at the center of the play, an event we learn about in exposition: that as a teenager, Ricky was assaulted (or “gay bashed” as Ron puts it) in Joe’s auto-body shop by mechanics, and that Joe and Ron simply stood by and watched it happen — maybe even condoned it.
If Joe looked on passively then, Ricky will now “watch” as his father spasms, collapses, pukes, bleeds — with an ambivalence that sometimes spills into outright hatred. “Should I kick him in the ribs?” he asks when Joe takes a spill on the kitchen floor. To be fair, none of Joe’s kids seem to like him very much. Angelina calls her father a “garbage can” and a “dirty fucking pig.” When a feeble Joe returns from a hospital visit, Ron sets the roughest setting on his massage chair to “crunch all that shit up.”
Flouting the homophobic taunts of his brother, Ricky proudly calls himself a “dirty fucking hole open 24/7”— and of course Ricky, his entire family, and the play itself, are all riddled with holes, emotional and spiritual, memories lost to drunken binges and alien abductions (real or imagined or maybe part of some other theatrical ontology that is neither), gaps in understanding, gaps in communication. “Why did you burn holes through your brain, Mr. Joe?” asks Mona, but anyone raised in an unhappy family knows the answer, knows that these gaps or holes become an organizing principle.
“Don’t talk about mom,” insists Ricky, because the trauma of her suicide must be buried. Trauma is a kind of hole, and people in this play attempt to escape it by burning new holes. Trauma is that which resists articulation, resists coherence and narrative; it lives in voids. If wet brain is Joe’s concrete diagnosis, trauma is the corollary.
Wet Brain is an attempt not to heal a trauma, but to depict it in a series of textures, images, coups de theâtre, and jarring juxtapositions. Caswell doesn’t give us a release or catharsis in his play. The closest we get to real communication between the characters is not on this planet — which in itself is telling. It is equally telling that there may not even be any aliens where they are, just family — which for Caswell, and for many of us, is perhaps the most alien of all. A
That Awful Inheritance: Thoughts on Generational Trauma
Samuel D. Hunter
WE ARE, ALL OF US, unsolvable puzzles made up of chemicals and ghosts. The chemical part is difficult, but easier to wrap our minds around. We can research the medical history of our parents to see what diseases we might be susceptible to. We can cut back on drinking, or adopt a Mediterranean diet. We can get our doctors to prescribe us outside chemicals to change our inside chemicals to unburden us of our depression or panic attacks. We even can mail off a container of our spit to discover if we are at risk for heart disease, or find long lost relatives, or, I assume, learn the exact day and hour of our death.
The ghosts are trickier. They are the people, the memories, the feelings, and — perhaps most notably — the traumas that we carry with us each and every day. They can be our own, but often they are the traumas of our parents, our grandparents. The steady build-up of pain, hidden but always present, like layers upon layers of lead paint in a cheap apartment. We can try to rid ourselves of these ghosts, but often we don’t even know we’re haunted.
Now that I’m a father, I’ve been trying to identify some of my own ghosts. Some of them are close to the surface and fairly easy to identify, like being a socially awkward
big kid in grade school, or a closeted gay teenager in a conservative religious school. Others are harder to locate. I’ve seen in my own family the ways that trauma can trickle down through the generations and make itself known in surprising ways. How does that live in me, in my marriage, in my parenting? Both of my grandfathers saw active combat in World War Two, and they both undoubtedly saw and experienced horrors beyond my understanding. How did that affect the way they raised my mother and father, and how does that shape the way I deal with my kid when she’s having a tantrum? My father was an emergency room physician in Lewiston, Idaho for four decades. He saw thousands of people either in the process of dying or already dead. Did that affect the way he raised me, and in turn affect the way I relate to my own kid? What about even further back, six generations ago, those Swedish homesteaders who left their country for good and brought their young kids to Idaho. Do they subtly shape the way I put my own kid to bed at night?
In that way, trauma is not a punch that produces a bruise which slowly fades with time. It’s a seed planted in a person that sometimes grows and sometimes withers, and is passed down from generation to generation. And this is the kind of messy, often frightening, in its own way beautiful trauma that John J. Caswell, Jr. is wrestling with in Wet Brain. It’s a play that, like life, resists easy answers or neat analysis. The play’s language is the language of pain, of hurtful love, and of complicated but necessary hope.
Writing the word “hope” just now, I stopped typing and stared at it for a while. It doesn’t feel entirely right, but there isn’t a proper synonym. It is hope, yes, but it’s a kind of hope that is equal parts longing and regret. That’s what makes John’s play so rewarding to unpack. The play is like a vast terrain that contains all kinds of geography— focusing on any one landscape feels like I’m not properly describing the whole.
In recent years, there’s been a certain trend—mostly within academia, at least as far as I can tell—of rejecting the so-called “trauma-based” play. After the last several years, it’s not hard to imagine where this is coming from. Our collective national misery has been so overwhelming and unrelenting lately that it’s reasonable to tack in the other direction in our art, to center joy and resist stories that derive drama and stakes from the agony of our characters. We’re all tired, we want relief.
But on the other end of that—what does that mean for our stories? Should they be about rich people becoming richer? Beautiful people becoming more beautiful? Happy people becoming happier? Should Wet Brain be a story about a family who—ugh, the vomit rises—overcomes?
More to the point maybe, who even are we without our trauma? Without these ghosts both experienced and inherited?
John has not given us a play that traffics in easy platitudes and obnoxious thesis statements about What We Ought To Think or What We Ought To Feel. It’s not a play where good triumphs over evil, or suffering leads everso-neatly to redemption. And, thank God, its characters don’t fall victim to those horrifying edicts that rule over so much modern writing which call for characters who do the “right” things and believe the “right” things, characters who we can easily align ourselves with morally, characters who are—here’s that vomit again—“likable.” John’s characters live where we all live every moment of every day,
in the gray. It’s a place where we aren’t always likable, where sometimes our suffering just sits there for a while, existing for its own sake. It’s a place where doing the right thing can be bafflingly complex and often overwhelming.
But in that gray, John offers us moments of love, humor, and hard-won grace. In one ritual of the play, Ron visits his non-verbal, severely alcoholic father in the morning to get him dressed for work, only to reassure him that he can call in sick that day. Ron is clearly doing it both for his father, but also for himself, planting a tent-pole of normalcy amidst daily chaos and agony. And deep into the play, the three siblings begin to actually have fun together for a time, but it’s done so with the help of the family scourge—booze.
Very late in the play, there’s a moment where Ron’s character says that the day before, his father drank onehalf bottle of vodka less than usual. “I think he’s cutting back,” he happily reports. During the performance I attended, the audience member in front of me scoffed at this line in a quiet reprimand of the character on stage. I had an entirely different reaction. I wanted to rush the stage and wrap the character in my arms, for the way that he was finding tiny rays of light in the darkness, small words of encouragement for his father who likely doesn’t understand speech anymore. It was simultaneous care and destruction, and it both broke my heart and put it back together.
These moments, where deep hurt and deep joy live sideby-side, where we help each other by hurting each other, demonstrate what theater can do that so many other forms struggle with: to hold seemingly contradictory thoughts at the same time, and recognize that both can be true. Which is something we all could get better at nowadays. This is the inherent beauty of John’s play. He is showing us real human beings, in all their painful, quotidian glory. And, toward the end, he does offer us an apotheosis of sorts, during which he introduces the thought that maybe— just maybe—we may all have the ability to bottle up some of our ghosts and shove them to the back of a cabinet. Even if—one day—we may open that cabinet back up and return to the drink. A
Production photography of Wet Brain by Joan Marcus.
MONA MANSOUR
In sixth grade, I played an old lady who was loyal to the British in a play about Paul Revere, and the teacher told my mother to put me in classes at San Diego Junior Theatre. I don’t know how my life would’ve gone if my mother hadn’t done this. I got introduced to classic musicals, and Chita Rivera (1), whose voice cut through time and space. The performers I idolize share a theatrical audaciousness: Fairuz (2), the diva of the Middle East; Kate Bush (3), whose sexy art rock videos blew my mind; and PJ Harvey (4), whose Let England Shake melded WWI with alt-rock. In college, I played a prostitute/niece in Good Person of Szechuan, directed by grad student Michael Greif. I didn’t know who Brecht (5) was before that. Caryl Churchill (6) and Chekhov (7) of course; Carolyn Forché (8), whose witness poetry was introduced to me by playwright Ken Prestininzi (9). Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah (10) was a constant resource as I worked on The Vagrant Trilogy. Fellini (11) and Jane Campion (12) were my first favorite filmmakers, and remain so. At the Groundlings (13) I learned how to walk offstage when a scene bombed. In LA, I met a couple of the Five Lesbian Brothers (14), who were doing theater I’d not known was possible. Christopher Durang (15)’s mordant humor made sense to me. The Lark (16)! Those humans! That place! Finally, the tree itself, a eucalyptus, is a nod to my California roots, as is Joan Didion (17). I don’t get sentimental about that part of the world, but the trees are beautiful. They get a new layer of bark every year, and the outermost layer dies.
Qui Nguyen
Since my youthful days of throwing drunken Brooklyn “Saturday Night Saloon” arthouse parties to my current gig of making Disney flicks, I’ve gotten to do a lot of cool shit. Regardless of it being downtown or Hollywood, I’ve had the good fortune to work with an immense posse of brilliant artists, actors, and writers, but none of it would’ve happened, no door would’ve opened, my artistic voice would have never been forged without Abby Marcus, Robert Ross Parker, Nick Francone, and our merry band of Vampire Cowboys riding with me all the way. They promised no matter how weird or ambitious an idea I may have, they would always figure out how to make it happen. So though I’ve been able to branch out in many directions, they are my roots… and my personal superheroes.
Inquiries on Realism Shayok Misha Chowdhury, Jenny Koons, abigail jean-baptiste,
Dominique Fawn Hill, John J. Caswell, Jr.
A SIDE EFFECT of the theater industry’s much-needed racial reckoning is that many artists from historically oppressed communities have less opportunity to talk about the art itself – to share how they wrestle with the nuance and expanse of theatrical form through their individual perspective. And beyond broadening how many stories are told and how many communities of storytellers are represented, what about the range of potential shapes and behaviors and styles of a play’s storytelling? What about aesthetics, personal taste, how a story is told?
With this in mind, I asked a dreamy set of five extraordinary artists to consider realism and the array of what it might mean in theater, prompted by an excerpt from Phillip Howze’s essay “Inquiry” (which appeared in Volume 48 of Theater). In contrast to today’s often-flattened conversations about the craft of theater, its generous, soulful, and generative questions about storytelling and self-expression are striking.
A sort of slow-motion roundtable discussion happened, in writing. The first respondent had a few days to write (as inspired by Phillip’s piece), then the second had a few days to write (as inspired by both Phillip and the first respondent), and so on. What developed is an act of intertextuality by various kinds of theatermakers, built slowly and chronologically, allowing for gray space and contradiction and specificity. At the end of only five thoughtful responses lies a deep well of ideas, reflecting some of the possibilities for how to think about style and form in theater.
– Natasha Sinha
Is making a play equivalent to making your mother and the authorities proud of you? Is this why in the theater at-large, a so-called realism — which is to say art that reaffirms a digestible history and a relatable politics — that art on stage, at-large, is more easily embraced than work that asks troubling, or meandering or unanswerable questions?
Is a play a palliative? Is the theater about feeling safe — is this what realism reminds us of, the womb?
Does the world seem safe to you right now? What do you imagine I, a young Black person, feel about my level of safety in America? How do you think I feel about power and dominance? Is realism a distinction that allows Blackness to fit safely inside of an explicable black box? Is the American theater prepared to express how the plethora of young writers of color see the world today? Or will these writers be forced to retrofit their work into safety mechanisms for the would-be sated?
Which leads me to wonder: is realism an analog for white America? Is that why realism is so dominant in the American theater?
Historically speaking, people who looked like me were forced to serve and service most of our time-honored American institutions (the academy, industry, the domestic household), not the other way around, right?
Exactly, he said, and isn’t therein the argument to be made in favor of realism? Couldn’t it be considered a form of self-preservation, relevant precisely because it provides a kind of reparation to groups of people who for centuries have had to remix, borrow, adapt, and remake culture in order to outrun their bodies and bodies of work being stolen? What in the world is a play to a world of folks who have been disenfranchised, disembodied — whose histories have been forcefully appropriated or stereotyped or parodied for so long? How are we forged under the threat of extinction?
Aren’t you interested in this conversation?
– an excerpt from Phillip Howze’s “Inquiry”
My mother never wears make-up. Rarely, at a wedding, she’ll put on a little lipstick, and folks will gasp, astonished, “
!”: we hardly recognize you! My parents are physicists. Academics. That’s kind of their gender, honestly. Academic. In our home, the ethos was always: why would you spend your precious time talking about “
” — sarees, jewelry — when you could instead be discussing books, movies, the life of the mind?
I grew up watching Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, filmmakers who were “pushing against the like…low-brow, songand-dancey vibes of mainstream Bollywood cinema.” That’s how Choton, the main character in my play Public Obscenities, describes Bengali neorealism. In contrast to pop, campy Bollywood, these Bengali auteurs of the 50s were out to capture an unadorned India. No make-up. No choreographed musical sequences. This was a Marxist cinema, emerging just after Independence: real people, real problems. Ray’s Pather Panchali is my favorite. It doesn’t feel like a film. It feels like the rhythms of real life.
Bengali theater, on the other hand, especially here in the diaspora, was too melodramatic for me. Why are they talking like that? That’s not how people talk. I still feel that way when I watch most theater, tbh. But on rare occasions, when I see someone present on stage, by which I mean in the moment, stripped of artifice, risking something real, I feel like I’m seeing a dragon.
Some who saw Public Obscenities described it as theater vérité. I kind of like that. I wanted to tell a story about my culture with granular, documentary-like precision. By my culture I mean a class of Bengali intelligentsia and their emigrant children. It’s a culture that values education above all else. In the play, Shou, a genderqueer character, tells Choton, “My mother always says to me, ‘Why you are putting such gaudy dress? Instead of calling attention to yourself, why don’t you focus on your studies?’”
In seventh grade, I started parting my hair in the middle and wearing my shirt untucked to school. It felt risqué somehow to look in the mirror and make these small, deliberate choices. To consider myself aesthetically. My academic, gently socialist parents sometimes wondered aloud whether school uniforms weren’t more conducive to learning. I am deeply grateful for the values they instilled in me. And sometimes, in the bathroom mirror, I underline my eyes with kajol like an old-school Bollywood heroine.
– Shayok Misha Chowdhury
Whose imagination is onstage?
The magic of theater is the shared imaginative space. Even verbatim theater, rooted in so-called realism, requires imagination and a leap of faith. A belief that for a moment we collectively release from that which is “real” and share active space with each other’s imaginations.
I don’t believe realism equals accuracy. Anything put on stage has a point of view and interpretation and lens. Anything put in front of another is witnessed through their unique lens and experience.
Is Theater not a form of collage and counterpoint? Is Theater not a collision between disciplines? Is Theater not rooted in interpretation and in-accuracy?
So what then for artists in a moment when our collective imaginations are exhausted? In three years we’ve re-imagined how we live, how we gather, and the futures we dreamt for ourselves before March 2020.
What now is the collective imagining we are doing together?
An exercise in imagining.
What if when we witnessed work in this moment we asked:
What are these artists’ imaginations revealing to me about this moment? What are the limits to my imagination? How is this stretching my imaginative limits?
What if we wondered:
Who inspires bigger dreams? Who invites me into expansion? Who invites me into a new shared imagination?
I don’t care how you define what it IS or what it ISN’T. I care that it IS.
Something WASN’T and then it WAS.
Right in front of me, in shared space, imagination becomes actualized. I am witnessing imagined dreams and sorrows, speculative fictions of what may be, and imagined projections of what once was. And in that collective imagining, we strengthen our imaginative muscles, stretching what we thought was possible.
This moment calls for wise and deep imaginations, ones that will lead us from what has been, to what might be, to what will be.
The theater is a place for this collective practice, invaluable to actualizing the futures we dream of, and the futures we have yet to imagine.
– Jenny Koons
if we are talking in terms of categorizable aesthetics, i guess you could say i’m an absurdist, mulling over questions like, what is “real” anyway?
how do the various ways humans perform (behaviors/opinions/identities/roles) in our daily lives further complicate notions of what performance is?
is play making not real life?
is what happens in theatrical space “imaginary”?
i believe that which occurs in the space of theatrical performance is sacred and embodied. it really happens. the ritual onstage is happening in “real life” whether or not it looks like your life outside of the theatrical space.
making a play is never easy & it’s foolery to think it could make anyone “proud”
in my dreams the collaborative process of creating theater feels as comfortable and nurturing as the womb. but that’s unlikely under this capitalist police state whether you’re dealing with realism or not. plus, the plays i read and watch that remind me of the womb, certainly are not ones of realism.
if realism is theater about real people and real problems, how is it different than the news? when should it just be a documentary film? or (my personal favorite) reality tv?
if realism does not equal accuracy, what is it? or, as Jenny offers, does it even matter? if realism is an analog for white America, how would it possibly preserve and repair anyone else?
i want to know more about Phillip, Misha, and Jenny’s definitions of realism because the very notion of what a play of realism even looks like in a contemporary context is messy to me.
“R E A L I S M,” as coined by Europeans, does not feel like refuge… no verse or poetic stylings no supernatural presences no songs no sense of time other than linear this “realism” has nothing to do with my “day-to-day, ordinary scenarios,” so the entire basis it was defined upon falls apart.
i want the remixings, borrowings, adaptings, and remakings that Phillip posits might be a burden when realism – which receives widespread attention, support, and embrace – seems an easeful counterpoint to occupy.
my life is absurd and nonsensical, but then, the conversation around realism becomes a trap for me. because a play aligned with the “realism” of my life would look like the abstract and expressionist and absurd theater i believe must be energetically and financially supported in the American Theater. so, is therein the argument to be made in favor of realism?
– abigail jean-baptiste
We are going straight for the heart chakra I see!
Indeed, the magic of theater is the shared imagination, a playful space in which past versions of us dress up in the mirror, and those reflective divas just so happen to become full-fledged theatre professionals, with dreams.
Inevitably, recognition – whether it’s from a parent or an institution – is a part of the process.
I like to believe that humans feel more human when met with reflections/affirmations of themselves; not only to solidify an artistic community, but also to navigate the everlasting paradox of love and grief. When my parents passed away at a young age, I found solace within theater, and for that I will be forever thankful.
Live art will always be a nourishing-marvel, simply because it shows us how imperfectly perfect our inner child could be, once grounded with a safe and playful environment to thrive.
Theater is about protecting the right to memory
To wonder
To magic
For all
To recall something in however fashion you want is the luxury, and to make it with people that you admire and adore, is the gift.
There will be an inevitable healing in this. (This I am learning to be true, on my journey.)
Realism makes you aware of the cards that you have been dealt, while ironically the womb protects you from knowing.
When both worlds collide, you tend to find yourself at first preview, trying to refine the age-old recipe by asking yourself, more salt or more sugar?
Safety?
I think the most jarring question we need to ask ourselves is, why are there levels to safety?
Do we not all deserve to be safe just on a Basic Human Package level?
I do know one thing; it is a radical act to be Black in America.
And to be Black and an artist, come on there is no hiding in that, even if you wanted to hide, your void would be heard/felt for eons, because hunty healing has no octave.
Realism allows rules to form, but how can one piece together the rules when they’re always wondering about their safety.
Artistic realism is not a reparation gumball machine prize, it is access to knowing all the shards of the mosaic, before disruption.
I mean it is realer-than-real to know.
Black Artists are still seeking their pieces and what their peace-is. ***
Like Jenny, I ask “what if we wondered?” About a bigger kind of imagination?
I wonder what if Black people rejected the notion of what “Blackness” should look like to others, and reinvented what it should feel like for ourselves?
I mean really paint a narrative that no longer seeks institutional edits, but rather combines radical-unapologetic self-love with first love. Then and only then shall we see new galaxies emerge.
I like to believe.
Art must always have an abundant phoenix energy to it, this is me, this is you, this is the carousel that will only change songs, once we realize that imposter syndrome is a lie, and that the title page has always been intertwined between our fingertips and source.
*Blinking vertical line stares back at you/me/we I type: “Live Wild, Pray Quiet, Dream Fake, and Love Real.“
P.S. and always aim to add more sugar when knowing the options.
*Period
End of Play
– Dominique Fawn Hill
Write a New Realism
I was raised in an unreality, or it felt that way.
Coming of age in Arizona without the internet meant creatively challenging my unrealness. To become real I read gay erotica in the corner of a chain bookstore. I improvised an unreal language with my cousin in an effort to speak real Spanish like our grandparents and become real Mexicans. I recorded on VHS eating disorder episodes of Full House and Beverly Hills 90210 hoping to find a language for the thing I was doing to myself that felt so unreal. I looked for the real me everywhere. No luck so I wrote.
I stumbled early upon the destabilizing work of Richard Foreman and The Wooster Group. The avant-garde makers had a vocabulary most aligned with my own experience of reality, one that is fractured and shifting and unknowable, a reality that overlaps with a liminal place of deep subconscious processing. I learned I could bend time and space on stage to match the way reality felt, which is often more real to me than my memory of actual events.
I gravitated toward a more esoteric writing because it was difficult to feel welcomed by a realism which had evolved into a sort of supremacy machine, elevating most-often white, heteronormative, cisgendered, able-bodied-and-minded perspectives on an American reality. But when some of us tried to pick up their realism and focus our experiences through its narrow aperture, it only obscured the parts of us we thought were beautiful.
Zooming in on reality and staying there doesn’t track with my experience of life. I always depart, not necessarily toward something unrealistic, but toward a state of expression that feels closer to a visceral verisimilitude rather than temporal one. I trust my gut more than my eyes and I’m guided most by not knowing in life, so why would I not do the same with my work?
Artists of color, artists of queerness, we’re starting to stir, boil, awaken in a way that makes me quite excited. And we are trying something in our own key, in our own voice. Inevitably, that will make some folks angry. But no matter what they say, this anger isn’t coming from some profound respect for the movement of realism or the American theater as a whole. No, they’re angry about a disruption to the dominant mode and what that means for future playgoing experiences within the institutions they largely consider their own. It’s an anger driven by prejudices they’d likely deny but are ingrained deeply.
Please. Do not write the kind of plays these people pay $200 to fall asleep to. I’m begging you.
– John J. Caswell, Jr. A
OUR FUTURE STARTS WITH YOU
When I was putting together my plans it was a no-brainer to leave a percentage of my estate to the theater that has defined the American theater landscape for the last 50 years. A gift in my will is an easy, highimpact way to make a commitment to organizations that I am passionate about, and I hope others join me in making sure that Playwrights Horizons is around for the next 50 years and beyond. – Briel Steinberg
If the past few years have taught us anything, it is that the best laid plans can still encounter bumps along the way. However, our commitment to supporting artists who use their unique voices to tell our collective stories has never wavered.
As you look towards the future, we encourage you to contribute to Playwrights Horizons’ future by planning for a special gift, such as a bequest in your will or trust. A charitable bequest made through your will or retirement account is one of the simplest ways you can make a significant contribution to Playwrights Horizons. Your gift will help us maintain and improve our important programs for writers, artists, students, audiences, and the larger theatrical community. Plus, you’ll receive some exclusive benefits and behind-the-scenes access each year.
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Let’s look to the future together! Thank you for your support.
“
Right in front of me, in shared space, imagination becomes actualized. I am witnessing imagined dreams and sorrows, speculative fictions of what may be, and imagined projections of what once was. And in that collective imagining, we strengthen our imaginative muscles, stretching what we thought was possible.
– Jenny Koons
