STUDY GUIDE SUPPLEMENT Today Is My Birthday By Susan Soon He Stanton Directed by Mina Morita YALE REPERTORY THEATRE James Bundy Artistic Director
Florie Seery Managing Director
Kelvin Dinkins, Jr. General Manager
STUDY GUIDE WRITERS Asa Benally David Geffen School of Drama, MFA ’16
Kamilah Bush
EDITORS Taylor Barfield
Lead Editor David Geffen School of Drama, MFA ’16; DFA Candidate
Amy Boratko Literary Manager, Yale Repertory Theatre
Molly FitzMaurice
Artistic Office Fellow David Geffen School of Drama, MFA ’19; DFA Candidate
GRAPHIC DESIGNER Marguerite Elliott
Publications Manager, Yale Repertory Theatre | David Geffen School of Drama
Literary Manager, Portland Center Stage
Madeline Charne
David Geffen School of Drama, MFA ’20 DFA Candidate
Eric M. Glover
Production Dramaturg for Choir Boy; Assistant Professor Adjunct of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism, David Geffen School of Drama
Jisun Kim
Production Dramaturg for Today is My Birthday David Geffen School of Drama, MFA ’22
Sophie Siegel-Warren
David Geffen School of Drama, MFA ’19 DFA Candidate
Ashley M. Thomas David Geffen School of Drama, MFA ’23
Sebastián Eddowes Vargas
Assistant Dramaturg for Between Two Knees David Geffen School of Drama, MFA ’24
Faith-Marie Zamblé
Assistant Director for Choir Boy David Geffen School of Drama, MFA ’23
SUPPORTERS Cockrum Foundation New Alliance Esme Usdan SPECIAL THANKS Christopher D. Betts, The Cumberland County Historical Society, Julie Felise Dubiner, Jennifer Kiger, Amanda Luke, Kay Perdue Meadows, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Catherine Sheehy, Susan Soon He Stanton, The 1491s, Eric Ting.
TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY Welcome BY
SUSAN SOON HE STANTON DIRECTED BY MINA MORITA
Home, Emily!
What does home mean to you? Does it give you comfort, or make you nervous, or both? What do we do when we love our home but are tired of it at the same time? One’s relationship to their home can be complicated. Emily’s (the lead character of Today is My Birthday) certainly is. She calls Hawai‘i her
Susan Soon He Stanton is a playwright, television writer, and screenwriter based between New York and London, from ‘Aiea, Hawai‘i. Susan is a producer/writer for HBO’s Succession, for which she received Writers Guild of America and Peabody Awards. Upcoming television work includes HBO/Sister Pictures’ The Baby; Amazon’s Modern Love; Amazon/Annapurna’s Dead Ringers; Hulu/ Element Pictures/BBC’s Conversations with Friends, adapted from the novel by Sally Rooney, as well as several projects in development. She is a co-writer for the award-winning feature film, Brooklyn Love Stories. Her film Dress, directed and starring Henry Ian Cusick, won the Audience Award at the Hawai‘i International Film Festival. Her plays, which have been produced internationally and regionally across the United States, include we, the invisibles, Today Is My Birthday, Both Your Houses, Takarazuka!!!, Cygnus, Solstice Party!, The Things Are Against Us, The Underneath, Navigator, and more. Susan is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch Dramatic Writing Program and Yale School of Drama. She holds commissions for new work from Yale Repertory Theatre, American Conservatory Theater/Crowded Fire, South Coast Rep, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and others. About Today Is My Birthday: Emily Chang’s life is falling apart. A nasty breakup and a stalled writing career send her packing from Manhattan back to O’ahu. But her fantasy of a picture-perfect homecoming collides with reality as she begins to discover how little she really knows about those she loves most—and how difficult it is to let her true self be known to others. Susan Soon He Stanton’s critically-acclaimed play, Today Is My Birthday, is a wise and witty comedy about loneliness in the age of connectivity.
home, both one of the most beautiful islands on Earth and one of the most popular tourist sites. But when you live on an island that strangers claim as their paradise, it’s only natural to become a little bit cynical because you know enough of its history and everyday life. Emily left home for New York to get a fancy master’s degree in journalism. It seems she had a great time there, but she’s now back home in Hawai‘i, complaining that “Nobody gets what I’m trying to do.” Emily’s high school friend Landon asks her, “And now we’re supposed to be grateful that you’re back slumming it island-style?” In the meantime, Emily’s parents are going through a divorce, and her best friend Halima is having a marriage crisis in New York. They all try to make themselves at home no matter where they live. What home means to us is always evolving. For some, it simply means where you grew up or where your family is. For others, it means where you feel most loved and welcomed by a community of your own. It can be a place you miss all the time but are not able to return to, or it can be somewhere you’ve always wanted to leave because you feel trapped. Today is My Birthday tells us that home is not just a physical location but a place where you actively cultivate love and community. —Jisun Kim
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REFLECTING THE PRESENT MOMENT An Interview with Susan Soon He St anto In a school that has built a tradition and history out of masculinity, this play explores when a student is amazing and feminine in a space that is hyper-masculine. TB: I’ve read that both plays were inspired by moments in your own lives. How does that affect your creative processes? How do you take these moments from your lives and create fictional stories?
Playwrights Tarell Alvin McCraney and Susan Soon He Stanton return to Yale with their plays Choir Boy and Today is My Birthday. Last fall they sat down with Study Guide Editor Taylor Barfield to discuss writing and why you shouldn’t call their plays “coming-of-age.” Taylor Barfield: Could you tell us a bit about your plays Choir Boy and Today is My Birthday? What should people know before going to see these shows? Susan Soon He Stanton: Today is My Birthday is a deceptive comedy. It talks a lot about homecoming. It talks about communication during our modern age. I wrote it before COVID, but it still talks about people trying to reach each other. It also plays with the idea of what it means to be in space together. None of the characters in this play are ever in the same room. They’re talking together on live radio, through intercom, by phone, or by FaceTime. It plays with how and why we communicate with each other. Tarell Alvin McCraney: Have you ever gone to a school that had a really great football or basketball team; or a chess team; or gone to a Gifted-in-Science School? Similarly, for fifty years Charles R. Drew Prep has had its choir. And its choir has dedicated fifty years to making music and keeping the tradition of Negro spirituals alive. The school is known throughout the country for that choir and for educating strong, ethical Black men. And the year Choir Boy takes place, there’s one talented student who has been placed as the leader of that legendary choir. His name is Pharus Young, and he is gifted, wildly talented, and smart; and also, effeminate.
TAM: There are no new stories. We tell the same stories over and over again because they exist in the world, in our minds, and in the ways we are trying to understand the world. We pull together the stories we understand as best we can and point them at questions we do not. For me plays are about questions. They’re about big things that I don’t have answers for. In the case of Choir Boy, the question is, how does one belong to a community and hold up a tradition while also being oneself? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I have a whole bunch of instances in my life where it has been tried and tested. I think the more playwrights engage story as history unfolding, it becomes easier to separate this idea of something coming directly from your life. I never have a problem with people saying that the play came from my life, but I didn’t go to an all-boys prep school. I was never going to be anybody’s lead of anybody’s choir. But, did I have best friends? Absolutely. Did I fall in love with people in school? Absolutely. But, that’s true of almost everybody reading this interview. SSHS: That’s so beautiful. I would say that in terms of writing about yourself, it’s very important to put yourself in there to be vulnerable on the page. I feel like if I’m not scared in an exposed way, then I’m not doing my job. I like that with a lot of things I write, I’m drawing from the resource of myself. For Today is My Birthday in particular, people think that Emily Chang is exactly me. People would tell me, “I’m so sorry about your parent’s divorce or about your health issues,” to the point where I thought it was almost strange. People were so literal that the character of Emily was me. It’s a funny balance, but I do think it’s important to make a distinction. It’s not an autobiography. There is that process of lifting, changing, making it different. Just because a person’s writing a play that has certain characteristics that are similar, give the playwright the credit that it’s not exactly the same thing. There’s a process that happens when you’re putting something into art. It’s not a literal one-to-one transference.
T: on and Tarell Alvin McCraney TB: Susan, could you talk about one of the play’s opening scenes where Emily performs a role in a radio call-in show? I’ve read that something similar happened to you and the experience helped spark Today is My Birthday. What made you think that this experience would be a good starting point for a play? SSHS: Very similar to the scenario in the play, I was back in Hawai’i and a theater company that was doing my play asked me to call in as an actor on the radio. I recorded that original interview, and it was such a strange experience that I had to transcribe it. I was improvising a fake date with somebody, and even in an improv, it was just really nice to hear somebody pretending with me on the radio. And I thought, if I was a crazier person, then maybe I would find out who that voice on the other end of the line was and if there was anything real. Then, like an hour later, I was like “no, nothing real. Don’t be silly!” So, I transcribed that first scene and started writing. And of course, nobody was in the same room together because everyone was on the radio. And the next scene, I had somebody on the phone and then it just started organically. I kept thinking, what are different ways people are not together? It evolved slowly from there. TB: I love that notion of “what if” that you’re describing as a catalyst for imagination. One of the aspects about your play that grips me is that Emily has this moment in adulthood where she finds an artistry for the first time by playing pretend. On the other hand, the protagonist in Choir Boy has been around music since diapers seems like. Tarell, could you talk a little bit about the music in your play and its impact on your young characters like Pharus? TAM: Gospel and Negro spirituals were borne out of mostly Black people working together with work songs and rhythms to find a spiritual language during slavery. A lot of those songs have roots in rhythms, syncopations, and phrasing that is very African. Depending on where folks were in the world and where they were from in Africa, those rhythms and songs could have all kinds of meanings. I go through that long history, that is boring for some, because that is a legacy that Black people often aren’t able to celebrate and aren’t told to celebrate. If you have something that has been forged for over 500 years, then you can’t possibly want that in the hands of someone who is going to be reckless or ignorant of its power or sanctity.
We’re constantly asking ourselves about this current generation, these high schoolers who are in school during COVID, who know how to do lockdowns because they have so many mass shootings, and can tell you more about prescription drugs than their grandparents can. This is a generation of folk wholly different for a number of reasons and excitingly so. I think about the synthesis of that incredible musical tradition in the hands of this generation. How do we make sure that we let go of the legacy enough so that they can actually have it? To me that’s the centrality of the music. And in Choir Boy, Pharus is a student, who some think isn’t worthy to hold that power and legacy. TB: Tarell, you said “legacy” multiple times in regards to this music and its history from Africa to the United States. Susan, how does that word fit into your play? How does Hawai’i and Hawaiian culture fit into Emily’s story? SSHS: Emily’s home is Hawai’i, which doesn’t feel like her home. Hawai’i itself is geographically the most isolated place in the world. It’s not in a lot of ways, but geographically, it is the furthest from anything else. You certainly feel that way when you grow up there, especially before the internet. You know what it feels like where you don’t necessarily have a lifeline out there. On a good traffic day, you can drive across the island in maybe an hour and a half or two hours. There’s something strange about growing up there and knowing that. It’s sort of like, everything’s fine until suddenly you have this fever to get out of this place! Manhattan can feel that way too. New York City can feel immense, but it’s also very small.
An Interview with Susan Soon He Stanton and Tarell Alvin McCraney
TB: In reading both of your plays, I thought immediately of the common term “coming-of-age.” What do you both think about that term as a way of describing Pharus and Emily’s stories? TAM: At this point, it’s really a dumb term because it’s trying to describe something that actually has nothing to do with age. There are people who transition into their lives by refusing whatever society’s trying to give them at 80. There are people at all ages, who just stop caring about what the world thinks of them and begin listening to that inner part of themselves that’s directing them towards peace, happiness, something. In Choir Boy, Pharus steps up and says, “Look, I know how you all see me, but I see myself this other way and I want to be seen in the world like this.” As a society, we need to ask ourselves, why are some of our reactions so violent to people just being themselves? I don’t know that that has anything to do with “coming-of-age.” TB: It almost sounds like a “coming-into-oneself.” Is that a more apt term? TAM: I don’t know that we need a term for what it means to trust your truth. The more we try to coin it, the more I think we get away from what actually happens. Because the story is old. There are stories of Hercules having to stop doing these trials in order to fend for himself. There are stories of Prometheus having to take the fire because he just couldn’t take it anymore. Antigone was out there burying her brother regardless of what the law said. Joan of Arc was seeing the sign of the Messiah and being told to go to war against England. Lots of people did not believe her. There are so many moments in history and storytelling like this, and we say folks came of age? Did they? Does that have anything to do with age? I think people like to do that, so they can diminish. Because if we actually remember what it is to be that age and “coming-of-age,” we know that the intimate of that is way more epic than we’re saying. That moment was cataclysmic for us. The moment we decided to wear those earrings and not care if so-and-so says that they’re stupid. That moment was huge! People try to go, “it’s coming-of-age” to put it in this box so that we can go, “I don’t really like coming-ofage stories.” Don’t let the marketing machine put plays and stories in these kinds of categories. They encompass so much. SSHS: I love that! “Coming-of-age” is a problematic term. Part of what makes it difficult are those markers—when you hit 18, when you hit 21, when you graduate high school, if you go to college. I felt this strongly when I
was younger. “When I hit 16 or 21, it’s going to mean something.” You have these dates looming in your mind. You say, “I’m going to track myself by these markers.” You pass 21 and say, “well at 25, I can rent a car.” And then it’s like, the markers get a lot blurrier. Is it marriage? Is it children? Is it a job? For my character Emily, she’s haunted by these societal markers put on by other people, but also by herself. And these are artificial measuring sticks because you don’t know what other people’s real lives are like. One of her best friends is seemingly happily married and has two kids. She has other friends that seem much more professionally happy. There are all these people that she’s known since childhood and she’s always comparing herself. It can be very cruel what happens in your mind when you feel like you’ve missed the train and you don’t know how to get back on. What are you supposed to do? There are a lot of different ways to live your life and find your way. All of these things are just constructs that can be really toxic. Emily’s trying to make meaning from her life after she was on a track for most of her life and now doesn’t know what to do next. TB: I love this notion that you’re both teasing out that we go through these kinds of moments at all ages. We all get a little lost. We all have these moments of having to listen to ourselves better despite what the world dictates. I want to ask about these moments for you. You’re both artists. Could you describe the moment or series of moments when you heard art calling you? SSHS: It’s a very lofty title, isn’t it? I have thought of myself for a while as a storyteller, and it’s something that’s always interested me. I was always a quiet kid, often listening and writing things down. I think it was a way for me to get through, see the world, and just try to reflect back some of the truths that I have observed as much as possible on the page. Something that I love about this kind of art is that playwriting is deeply collaborative, but also very solitary. I love that toggle so much. I also love that anyone can write. Writing is incredibly hard, but it’s also really simple. There’s a luxury in the simplicity of what we do that’s deceptive. The most difficult thing about the kind of art we do is that it can be done as well or perhaps better by dead people. Most other people’s jobs can’t be done by dead people. That’s the struggle, but I think it’s also the accountability of asking how do we reflect the present moment and prove that what we write today matters. Our livingness— our ability to live in this moment and communicate—is essential.