I Interview Playwrights Part 472: Lonnie Carter

Lonnie Carter

Hometown: Chicago

Current Town: Falls Village, Connecticut

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  Lots of new projects including a Tiger Woods play I wrote with a longtime friend, Mac Davis. If you Google Walter A. Davis, you'll see the kind of cat I hang around with for the last 50 years. It's called TRIM and features Howard Stern, Robin Quivers, Jack Nicklaus, Wendi Deng Murdoch, her hubby Rupie, Oprah, Joel Osteen, Elin Nordegren, Earl Woods to name a few luminaries. Did a staged reading last October at New Dramatists and we believe, as Mac puts it, that we've got lightning in a bottle. It's a What-If play, what if Tiger never went back to golf after Elin konked him with a 9 iron. Each of these folks has his/her reason for manipulating Tiger and he, becoming more and more Hamlettian, will have no part in it. O, did I mention that Marilyn Chambers plays a pivotal role? We've sent it everywhere. Anyone want to read it? Happy to send an ecopy.

But also, everywhere I turn, my play THE ROMANCE OF MAGNO RUBIO reappears. The original production by the Ma-Yi Theater Company directed by Loy Arcenas won eight (8) Obies in 2003 and has been done a lot across the country and abroad at festivals - Manila, Romania and soon Singapore. MAGNO THE MOVIE will soon be in production with me sharing screenwriting credit.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  Not a story, but an abiding memory. I recall collecting Jackie Robinson comic books. He was/is my hero. I wanted to be just like him.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  Fewer plays about dysfunctional families/neighbors shouting at each other. I'm reminded of that routine - Is it Monty Python, or does it go back to Peter Sellers and the Goon Show? Someone asks the man in the street what he thinks of all the violence and rape and incest in the media these days and he says, It's just awful. I get quite enough of that at home.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Graham Greene whom we don't usually think of as a playwright, but his play THE POTTING SHED is terrific. And he's such a terrific writer across the board. Shirley Hazzard wrote a memoir GREEN ON CAPRI. And is she a writer as well! Jean Genet. I saw a production of THE MAIDS played by three men, which is the way Genet wanted it done. Produced by New Stage in Pittsfield Massachusetts. Unbelievably great and directed by my friend Tom Gruenewald. (I had to remind myself that I wasn't in the best theaters in Chicago, New York or London.) James Joyce and his play EXILES. Lorraine Hansberry and A RAISIN IN THE SUN. How about someone living? My Yale pals, David Epstein, Bob Auletta, Bob Montgomery. My Chicago budds, Doug Post, Charles Smith, Steve Carter, Gloria Bond Clunie and the Victory Gardens Ensemble and every New Dramatist and Playwrights' Center writer ever.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Refer to the above. More specifically, theater which I don't leave saying - I AREADY KNEW THAT!

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Go be a Mad Man/Woman.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  The Falls Village Marshmallow Company whose motto is NO ART, JUST FLUFF!  Betsy Howie, owner, operator, CEO, CFO, Chief Cook and Marshmallow Tray Washer.

Self-plugs? My column FIST BUMP, an etymologically-centric rant/riff/rap I'm getting around. THE ODYSSEY CYCLE, a jazz album by Russell Kaplan, about to come out on the theme of Homer's The Odyssey. I have a spoken word TIRESIAS ADVISES CASSIUS CLAY/MOHAMMED ALI over one of the numbers. Nitroglycerine.
 
lonniecarter.com

I Interview Playwrights Part 471: Sarah Schulman

Sarah Schulman

Hometown: New York City

Current Town: New York City

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  A new play about sexual harassment and race.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  Like many of my generation I was handed The Diary of Anne Frank at an early age and it taught me that girls could be writers.

Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  Right now the standard is to reflect back to producers and their identified audiences, their perceptions of themselves. I would change this so that the standard for theater would be to expand what we understand about being alive.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I must admit that Cherry Jones has inspired and frustrated me for many years.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Work that grapples with something that matters while expanding the kinds of experiences, points of view and characters seen on the American stage.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Don't do it.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Most recent book: The Gentrification of the Mind:Witness to a Lost Imagination (U of California Press)

I Interview Playwrights Part 470: Micheline Auger

Micheline Auger

Hometown: Sacramento, CA.

Current Town: NYC

Q:  Tell me about American River:

A:  I wanted to write the Great American Love Story. It's also a grieving. And a comedy. It's a grievedy.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  Right now I'm curating the Write Out Front Playwright Installation happening in the storefront of the Drama Book Shop August 13th - Sept. 4th. Some 70 playwrights will write new work in the storefront while the screen view of their computer will be projected on the wall behind them, visible to the street. People can engage, support and follow the playwrights via twitter, FB and the Write Out Front Website. They can go to their shows, follow their careers and when they win a Tony, Lily or Academy Award they can say I knew them when... Tina Howe called it "Inspired insanity!"

Q:  Tell me about Theaterspeak.

A:  I started Theaterspeak because I come from a small town and even though my family went to the theater and my dad and grandfather were writers, I didn't really view myself as a creative person even though I played the piano, danced and acted. Being a creative person or being in the theater wasn't really viewed as an option. In a way, I think it was viewed as being egotistical. Instead the M.O. was "most people are lucky not to hate their jobs and do what they love to do on the side" so get a job in human resources or something. I had also been told that it takes ten years to make it, so when I was acting or beginning writing, I didn't really put myself out there as much. So Theaterspeak is my attempt to reach out to artists who have beliefs that don't serve them and connect them with artists who are creating their own work, their own lives in inspiring ways. It's a way to build community, to encourage people to do what they want no matter what, to believe in themselves and to spark innovation and new creation. And it's also a big thank you to all the people (like you, Adam) who have shared information, resources and their talent.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  Um, well I talked to myself when I was a child. It was the way I reasoned things out so, in a way, I think that was the beginning of playwriting and finding creative modes to help navigate the world. I'd also stay in the car when my mom would go grocery shopping, and I'd find pieces of paper or loose change in the back seat and make them into characters and do little scenes between them. Then, in high school, my step-brother died, and I wrote a piece about it and performed it for my acting class. I didn't think I was a writer, I didn't think it was a solo show. It was just the human instinct of story telling with people in your community to create connection.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  I'm certainly not the first person to say this but I'd make it more affordable to produce and more affordable to see. I'd also increase the avenues from which we collect our playwrights and theater artists.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  All the theater artists and companies that I saw growing up in Sacramento and LA doing their work despite the challenges internally and externally.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I have pretty eclectic tastes in things but ultimately I'd say theater that is inclusive and is trying to have a conversation with a wide audience.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Keep trying whenever you fail. Embrace others.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Come say hi to me and the Lesser American's who are producing my play American River at Theater for the New City July 12 - 22. You can get info and tix here: http://www.lesseramerica.com/box-office/

If you're a playwright who wants to participate in Write Out Front, you can get info and application here: http://theaterspeak.blogspot.com/p/write-out-front-playwright-happening.html.

I Interview Playwrights Part 469: Greg Pierce

Greg Pierce

Hometown: Shelburne, Vermont

Current Town: NYC

Q:  Tell me about Slowgirl.
 
A:  Hm...it's a two-hander: uncle and niece. What do I say? It takes place in Costa Rica, way out in the jungle. Snakes are mentioned. The niece is trying to escape from something really awful that's just happened. Her loner uncle is doing the best he can to help her out but he's got his own stuff...I always feel like I'm saying too much, Adam. Come see! It's at Lincoln Center's Claire Tow theater until July 15th. Anne Kauffman directed it and she's a wizard. Željko Ivanek and Sarah Steele are killer. Seriously—I'm not just saying that because it's my play. What else...I wrote Slowgirl a while ago, did a reading in my friend's living room, and then put it in a drawer for a long time, thinking it might live there forever. So I'm really happy that it's now living on the Upper West Side, in air-conditioning.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  I'm working on a three-part musical called The Landing with John Kander. We just did a lab production at the Vineyard Theatre, which Walter Bobbie directed masterfully. We're in discussion with the Vineyard about the next step. John and I are hoping to have a first draft of a new musical by the end of summer. I'm also working on a new play, and the libretto for an opera based on Thomas Mallon's novel Fellow Travelers (Gregory Spears is writing the music, Kevin Newbury is directing.) And I write fiction—mostly short stories, so that's ongoing.

Q:  How does your writing process differ when writing theater vs. fiction?

A:  The writing process is different for each project so there's no theater vs. fiction division in my head. Some things happen quickly, some don't. I tend to think about something for a long time, then write a quick first draft, then a slow and painful second draft, and then who knows? But it's always different.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?


A:  I wish it weren't so expensive to produce an Off-Broadway play. I wish all hard-working theater folks could make a living at it, and get insurance. I wish I could see a new Will Eno play every weekend. I wish jangly bracelets were illegal. I wish more people would go to new plays. I wish we could do away with all theater competitions, and just reward each other by showing up.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I'm listing writers only, though I have lots of non-writer theater heroes like the set designer Rachel Hauck. But writers only: Will Eno, Pinter, Tom Donaghy, Annie Baker, Irving Berlin, Chekhov, Slick Rick, Doug Wright, Conor McPherson, Strindberg, Kenneth Lonergan. Lots of folks, but that's who's on my mind right now.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Plays that have excited me this year: Denis O'Hare and Lisa Peterson's An Iliad, David Adjmi's 3C, Will Eno's The Realistic Joneses, Amy Herzog's Belleville. I don't know what these plays have in common, if anything, or why they excited me. They seemed like magic. Cheesy word, but how else do you say it? I left those plays thinking, "Wait, someone wrote that?" which is weird, seeing as I'm a writer. I like plays that remind me that the world is even bigger.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Writing plays is a great thing to do because it's a great thing to do. It's easy to get all freaked out about where you fit in on some dumb spectrum but what's the point, you know? It's great to write something and do a reading in your common room with your friend, or to put up a show in your storage unit, or to just go to other people's plays for a while. Easier said than done, but it's good to be proud of where you are. Starting out is most excellent. If you've written 90 plays: also excellent. There's room for all of it. I'm not qualified to give advice but since I've been asked I'd say: just participate. In whatever way feels right to you. The only comfort in playwrights being wildly underappreciated in this day and age is that none of us is "making it" so we might as well just write what sounds good to us and support each other, right?

In late July in Los Angeles:

I Interview Playwrights Part 468: Susan Mosakowski

Susan Mosakowski

Home and Current Town: New York City

Q: Tell me about Escape.

A: Escape just opened in New York at La MaMa. Escape is about freedom—freedom from self-limitations, freedom from the limitations that come from the outside. It's about the chains that hold us back.

Emblematic of a person in chains was the great Harry Houdini. What kind of person was he? As a playwright, the most interesting thing about Houdini was that he was someone who understood the secrets of his jail. My play became about exploring our limits in all of their manifestations, physical and psychological. I created the character of Harry Houdini the III, but unlike his grandfather, Harry does not understand the secrets of his jail and is not a successful escape artist like the great one. We watch him roll around the floor in a straitjacket, trying to release himself as his wife Bess reads a newspaper and has tea—a normal day in the Houdini household—while next door, Gus, an unemployed elevator repairman, lies in wait with a shotgun. He keeps his neighbors and wife in the cross hairs, protecting his piece of the pie. At the same time, in an adjacent room, lives an agoraphobic actress held captive by Daddy, a terrorist on the run.

Three couples occupy three rooms. Imagining the play is to imagine a triptych. Three stages are going on simultaneously. The verbal text of the play takes place in one of three rooms and rotates from room to room throughout the play. The actors in the two adjacent rooms assume still tableaux or silent actions while the main action takes place. The two silent rooms create an expanded visual field for the play and are intended to contribute to the subtext for the play. The challenge in doing this was that the designers and the director had to create three stages and three spaces that are always present, always active because the characters never exit. The stage is transparent, where people live in rooms without visible walls or doors and windows, and yet they still are trapped. What does the key look like? That's my question.

Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A: If I could change one thing about the theater it would be to change the current system of producing theater in this country and in this city. There is a serious lack of small and mid-level producers. In the 80’s and 90’s there was a theater landscape that included a number of small producers doing off off Broadway shows, as well as independent theater companies doing their own work. Next on the ladder was the tier of producers for off Broadway, and then Broadway. There was an economic tier for many different kinds of work. It was possible to do daring and experimental work in smaller theatres and if the work could reach a wider audience there would be a step up to an off Broadway house. With the downturn in the economy what we have now is poor theater—and even that takes a small fortune to produce—and large theaters that need to have real ticket sales and subscription audiences to survive. Like the middle class that has vanished in this country so have the mid-range theaters. For many off Broadway theaters it’s imperative that they move a play to Broadway so that they have a cash cow to support their operations, their mid-sized ambitions need big money. While some large theatres offer a second stage and workshop productions, the vast majority of playwrights do not see their work produced on a main stage because the larger theaters cannot take risks, and the smaller theaters, in general, are producing less—NYSCA and the NEA has been gutted, foundation and corporate funding is down. Where’s the middle? How are we to sustain a vibrant theatre community when everybody is looking at the bottom line, when theater has been turned into a commodity? There needs to be greater support for those groups and individuals who desire to produce theater. Within reason, the dreams of a playwright or a director should not be tied to economics of a theatre.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: I have many theatrical heroes. Early ones were Robert Wilson, Peter Brook, Pina Bausch, Jerzy Grotowski, Suji Terayama, Richard Foreman, and Meredith Monk. More recent heroes are Ariane Mnouchkine, and Robert LaPage.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: I’m excited by theatre that is total. Total in the sense that the conception of the work is a collaborative effort of text, music, choreography and direction, and design, all in process together from the beginning so that the whole stage is unified and that the theatrical experience is created from a wide artistic palette.

Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A: My advice to young playwrights starting out is that to keep the work front and center. It’s all about the work.

Q: Plugs pleas:

A: ESCAPE plays for one more week at La MaMa. Wednesday June 20 – Sunday June 24th.

Go to http://creationproduction.org/next/index.htm for info or to www.lamama.org

I Interview Playwright Part 467: Chiori Miyagawa

Chiori Miyagawa

Q:  Tell me about DREAM Act Union.

A:  It was a wild ride collectively writing the play, Dream Acts, performing it, and managing the production together. Also trying to collaborate with folks from the advocacy field, who in the end never understood what theater is or what theater artists do, was very challenging. (This is not always my experience collaborating with people outside the theater-I’ve had 3 years of successful collaboration with nuclear disarmament activists and educators. But I found out that the immigration arena is more complicated and territorial.)

There is complete information on dreamactunion.org : about the failed and still failing congressional bill DREAM Act that inspired us, our team, the advisory board members, the production, the panel we put together, press, photos, everything! Also, you can find where to make donations to help undocumented youth continue their education after high school. There may be another production in NYC coming up, which Saviana Stanescu, one of the playwrights is pursuing, and the play should be published online soon at IndieTheaterNow.com – please stay tuned!

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  I’m putting politics and activism aside and going back to art and humanity in a larger picture and longer terms.

I’m working on a play titled This Lingering Life, which is very loosely based on 8 Japanese Noh plays from the fourteenth century. It has 27 characters and spans 10 years or 100 years, depending on the audience’s state of mind. It takes place in this life and Bardo (the place in between life and death), with Nirvana (the indescribable ultimate happiness) just out of reach.

Also working on a play, I came to look for you on Tuesday. that has 19 characters (one of them is Goddess of Light). It follows a woman from ages 6 to 50, tracing her non-existent memories of losing her mother to a tsunami when she was a baby to facing an approaching hurricane as an adult. The play takes place on this planet, but not in any particular geographical locations comparable to the world as we know it.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  I don’t have a story like George Washington’s cherry tree, which I seem to remember being told when I was a child. Also, my father used to repeat some proverb from some European country about how children should live in a house at a distance that does not cool the soup—meaning, a grown child (a female child) should cook soup and bring it over to her parents’ house from her own, and the soup should still be hot when the parents eat it. This story definitely made me put an ocean and a continent between my house and my parents’ house.

Aside from that, it became clear to me when I was about twelve that Japan and I were not a good match. I left when I was fifteen. I think it would have been okay if I was born there as an aristocrat in the sixteenth century or as an intellectual in the early twentieth century. Not as a woman--that would have been awful. I don’t particularly want to be a man, so I guess neither case would actually have worked.

I think I’m the writer and the person I am because I was born in the wrong country at the wrong time, and because I have a deep love-love-hate-hate relationship with my chosen country, the U.S. I appreciate my Japanese ancestry though, and I love love NYC.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  Government subsidy of individual artists. I’m writing to you, Adam, from a huge, nice flat in Berlin that belongs to a Spanish couple who are conceptual choreographers. While my husband and I spend a month in Berlin, our hosts are in their flat in Madrid, working in a performance festival. They don’t live extravagantly, but they are able to make a life for themselves doing theater. There is a certain self-respect and peace of mind that comes with the full-time commitment to one’s art (I only experienced it once when I had a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship—and I knew it would end in a year. I teach for a living, which I consider fortunate given the lack of government funding of artists in the U.S.) But of course, this is not about changing theater. It’s about changing our collective cultural belief and attitude toward artists and attitudes of artists themselves, so I think it’s a little beyond my dreams.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Eugene O’Neill. I can’t say his plays influenced me, but I admire him because he overcame the obstacles in the form of his parents (I know something about this), pulled himself up by the sailor’s boots (I don’t know if those boots even had straps on them) and rose from suicidal darkness to write. And he wrote his best plays at the end of his life, unlike many of his peers whose best work was done in their youth. I find all that hopeful. I wish my hero wasn’t a white male, but he couldn’t help being one. I must mention my major influence and inspiration, even though it’s not theater-- Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theatrical theater. Theater that can happen only in a theatrical space. There is a lot of successful and impressive theater that can be done just as well or better on TV or film. I don’t see the point in that. I prefer theater that doesn’t have a sofa on stage, or at least a sofa that we are supposed to believe is a “real” sofa. I like plays that has very little language AND plays that have a lot of ideas seriously discussed with lengthy text.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  First, I would say don’t follow your heart, but instead look around and make a plan. Second, don’t get distracted by what’s popular or what seems important, but write your own unique plays, and make sure each play is THE play that could be your last. They seem like contradictory advice, but they aren’t. I did it completely differently—I followed my heart only and was blind to everything else and madly kept writing as an experiment. I made my life up as I went, always flying by the seat of my pants. I would take my own advice if I was starting over and not live Helter-Skelter style. Maybe. Oh, and start an IRA early!

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  2 books of my plays are published this year. If you’re curious, please purchase them. I don’t get a cent from it, but I’d love the books to be moving around out there. Thank you!

Thousand Years Waiting and Other Plays
http://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Years-Waiting-Other-Seagull/dp/0857420208

America Dreaming and Other Plays
http://nopassport.org/Press

I Interview Playwrights Part 466: Daniel Akiyama

Daniel Akiyama
 
Hometown: Honolulu, Hawai‘i

Current Town: Honolulu, Hawai‘i

Q:  Tell me about A Cage of Fireflies.

A:  A CAGE OF FIREFLIES is about three sisters of the kibei generation -- sent as children to be raised in Okinawa, then returned to Hawai‘i as young women to live and work. The play is set in the year 2000, when the sisters are quite elderly, in a small Honolulu apartment where two of the sisters live and the third visits. A disagreement over a kimono collection forces them to confront the dreams and regrets they’ve carried with them since childhood, the long-hidden hopes and resentments that unite and divide them.

This is my first full-length play. I started writing it because I wanted to understand certain relationships and incidents from my own family’s history -- I suspect a lot of beginning writers do that. I slogged through a first draft in a playwriting class in 2006. Since then, it’s had so many revisions that it bears almost no resemblance to anything that happened in real life, and I’m fine with that.

A CAGE OF FIREFLIES will be developed in July 2012 at the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab and will have its world premiere at Kumu Kahua Theatre in Honolulu, in January 2013.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  Right now I’m trying to devote most of my time to A CAGE OF FIREFLIES, getting ready for Sundance and Kumu Kahua. I have an idea for a second play, but it’s in such an embryonic stage that I don’t feel like talking about it.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  I love this question, but I just can’t seem to think of a story with that eureka! moment. Instead, here is a family tradition that’s been part of my life for as long as I can recall.

Every Thanksgiving my family and I fly to the town of Hilo, on the Big Island of Hawai‘i, where my grandmother lives. Thanksgiving morning after everyone arrives, we all pile into cars and drive to Saddle Road, a narrow strip of pavement that snakes through miles of uninhabited ‘ōhi‘a forests between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, the largest mountains in the Hawaiian islands. We spend the day picking flowers and plants along the roadside -- ‘ōhi‘a lehua, false staghorn ferns, club moss, pūkiawe -- being careful to only take tiny cuttings from each plant, and only the plants near the path. Then we go back to my grandmother’s house and get ready for Thanksgiving dinner. The adults take the rest of the weekend to make wreaths out of the cuttings, which we bring back with us to Honolulu to give to friends and neighbors as early Christmas gifts.

I’m not sure why I wanted to share that with you. And I’m not sure what, if anything, it says about me as a person or a writer. Something about family, maybe? About continuity? About tradition?

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  A few names come to mind: Stephen Sondheim, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, August Wilson, Bernard-Marie Koltès, Lee Cataluna. Actually, I have a hard time answering this. “Hero” is a strange word, and the writers I really admire are those whose work -- the larger body of work as much as the individual pieces -- I find meaningful, whose career and style continue to fascinate me over time, whose attitude towards writing and the theatre resonates with me. There are a lot of writers whose plays I like or even love, whose careers have heroic episodes or a heroic trajectory, but whom I don’t consider my “heroes.”

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theatre in general excites me. I like plays that have a lot of clarity and thought, plays that are built on a solid foundation and assume their audience is smart and aware. I tune out when there’s a lot of shouting, or when I feel like I’m being talked down to.

Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Well, I’m just starting out myself. As I said, A CAGE OF FIREFLIES is my first big play, and I still have a ways to go before I’m done, so I’m not in a position to offer advice. However, I can tell you what seems to be working for me so far.

Here’s one great thing: I found the right director. Phyllis S.K. Look has been helping me shape and re-shape the play for over a year. She directed the play’s first workshop and public reading in Honolulu in 2011, she’ll be directing the workshop at our 2012 Sundance residency, and she’s going to stage the world premiere in 2013. It’s exciting and stimulating to work with Phyllis, a director whose ideas are rich and vivid and incredibly detailed, but who is always committed to the integrity of the play itself. I know the production will be in good hands.

Q: Plugs, please:

A:  A CAGE OF FIREFLIES was a finalist for the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference and will be workshopped at the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab, under the direction of Phyllis S.K. Look and the dramaturgy of Mame Hunt. It will have its world premiere at Kumu Kahua Theatre in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, on January 24, 2013, again directed by Phyllis S.K. Look.