Current Town: I’ve lived in LA for twenty years but am moving back to New York City in the fall.
Q: Tell me about your play in the EST Marathon.
A: The play follows a temp worker in a large corporation who is charged with the task of reading foreign factory audits. Spoiler: the factories are not great places to work. The play is both funny and disturbing.
Q: What else are you working on now?
A: My latest project attempts to channel my feminist rage. Tall order!
Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.
A: When I was fifteen, I got a job as a lab assistant for my high school Chemistry class—meaning I washed beakers for a few hours a week. The high school sent me paperwork I had to sign to get paid and one document was a declaration that I was not a member of the Communist Party. I showed it to my folks and they told me it was a holdover from the McCarthy era. I didn’t want to sign it, so I looked up the phone number for the ACLU and phoned them to ask them if I had to. The ACLU lady explained that the political climate wasn’t right to challenge this practice in the courts and advised I sign the document. I want to go back and give sixteen-year-old me a high five and a hug for knowing that requiring employees to sign such a document was wrong and calling the ACLU on my own!
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: I would have all companies produce an equal number of plays by women and men and produce playwrights who reflect the demographics of the city where the theaters are located.
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: Tennessee Williams, Sarah Ruhl, The Lilly Awards and everyone who helps run a theater anywhere.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: Anything that makes me feel.
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
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A: Dominick is secretly in love with his best friend. But is the feeling mutual? Fed up with the pain of harboring this secret and plagued by his need to know the truth, Dominick decides it's time for some answers. Lucky for him, there's an app for that. ;) Tempo is a play about love and longing and friendship and lots of candy corn.
Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.
A: When I was a kid, I would recruit my friends to have full out Pokémon battles during recess, ask to be excused from class for a bathroom break that would turn into a Harry Potter-esque exploration of our "ancient" school building to uncover it's magical secrets, and sit for hours on the phone with my best friend reviewing our plans to break into abandoned buildings in Detroit and banish the supernatural spirits inside...
I think I longed for escape and adventure. Longed to access the rainbow-colored truth beyond my black and white reality. As a theatre artist, I'm still searching for that deeper truth. I still believe that there is magic in the world and in humans. And I'm still out here recruiting folks to band together, get into creative spaces, and find ways to tap into it.
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: I'd make theatre more financially accessible.
Theatre should not be an elitist art. Houses should not be filled almost exclusively by upper-class white patrons.
Quality theatre should be available to everyone because theatre serves everyone.
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: Ntozake Shange, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Lynn Nottage, Dominique Morisseau, George C. Wolfe
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: I am passionate about new voices (especially those of marginalized people) being represented on stage.
I am excited by art that takes risks and challenges audiences to re-think what theatre can do and be.
I love seeing elements of fantasy, horror, and sci-fi explored on stage. I geek out.
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: Write. Write write write write write. Carve out time for yourself to sit down and just write. Make that time YOUR time and do not abandon it. You have to take yourself seriously and make writing a priority. Show up for yourself. If you can wake up for work at 5am to clock in as a cog in the machine of someone else's dream, then you can wake up at 5am to make your own dreams come true.
Q: Plugs, please:
A: On June 19th at 7pm, I have a public reading of a new play of mine in Youngblood's Bloodworks series at Ensemble Studio Theatre. Come on out! It's free!
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A: Two things: a play about dildo manufacturing (fun times) and a postpartum play for new parents and their babies.
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 used to spend hours when we would travel to upstate New York in a creek behind a cabin we stayed in. I've always been drawn to water. I would use a stick and "un-clog" the stream- pull leaves and debris from different crooked points along the creek. I loved watching the water run, I loved how powerful it was, and I think I just wanted to help it along.
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: The audiences. Which is to say, the prices. Which is to say, a lack of widespread state/community support for theater.
I wish I saw more people from different backgrounds in the audience. Writing about a middle-class or working-class background can be uncomfortable when the audience feels like it's there to consume the narrative you're sharing for their own relative "goodness" rather than engaging with the story in earnest. In other words- I would love to write more about my family and the people I care about- but not if they can't afford to come see it.
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: I think probably all the other working playwrights who labor in obscurity. Success is a natural food for hope. So those of us working without that, who have to feed our own hope from somewhere, something inside ourselves, I think that's kind of a big deal.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: The kind that breaks my heart, and the kind that makes me giddy, and the kind that makes me feel nourished. Sometimes they overlap, but sometimes not.
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: Always be wary of advice for playwrights just starting out. LOL ok but actually, that, I do kind of mean that. But also: just write. Don't be precious about it. I believe that if you work hard enough, if you write something good enough, eventually, the world will take notice. Screw networking, screw resume padding, screw connections- because all the schmoozing in the world will not make a bad play better. Only work will. Make something genuinely powerful and then find people who understand what you're doing and hold on tight.
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A: Madame Lynch herself was Eliza Lynch, a 19th century woman whose fortunes took her from Irish potato famine refugee, to French courtesan, to becoming the self-proclaimed "Empress of Paraguay” in the 1850s and 60s. In the time that has passed since, she has been both revered in Paraguay for her role as a kind of “cultural founding mother” who introduced customs, music and dances that are still important, and reviled as the femme fatale who urged her lover, the dictator Francisco Solano Lopez, towards waging a war that ended with 90% of the male population of Paraguay killed. I was fascinated by the (probably specious) stories about her that were spread in the Argentine press and figure in to most biographies, that she longed to be powerful and a cultural leader in Paraguay but that she was roundly rejected by the upper class ladies of Asuncion and she exacted her revenge by devising elaborate social humiliations for them. In one case she threw a ball where attendance was compulsory and all attendees had to wear costumes that she chose, with the most humiliating costumes reserved for her chief enemies. Another concerns a pleasure cruise with these same ladies where, where, in response to a slight, she had all of the food thrown off of the boat and anchored the boat in the middle of the river for 10 hours. I was so interested in the extreme cruelty and fragility of this character, and also in the fact that, for someone who seems to have had a rough life in some ways (as a refugee, as a courtesan) she seemed to have no empathy for others.
I wrote the first draft of this play in 2011 I think, and it has been through many iterations. At one point I workshopped it with my old theater company, The National Theater of the United States of America. This final version is a collaboration between myself and my partner Craig Flanagin for our company, The Drunkard’s Wife. It is running at the New Ohio Theatre until June 15, and was developed in the Archive Residency program-- a collaboration between the New Ohio Theatre and IRT. Our show, Madame Lynch, is a spectacle with music. It takes on Lynch’s picaresque story, as well as the larger Paraguayan context. We’ve been developing the show in collaboration with the Paraguayan folkloric dance group Ballet Panambí Vera, to create a multifaceted portrait of Lynch as a way to understand the complex dynamics of cultural imperialism. The show reaches peaks of beauty and horror as it proceeds by way of live music, dance, and real and imagined scenes from her life as an adventuress, cultural doyenne, femme fatale and microfinance pioneer.
Q: What else are you working on now?
A: I am working on show that is 45 minutes of curtains opening onto other curtains.
Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.
A: The first play I remember writing was in the second grade on those sheets of paper that had a space for pictures at the top. It was an illustrated play about marionette puppets of cats that were being operated by mice.
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: I wish that theater was not so obsessed with the idea of newness. The present always flatters itself that it is improving on the past, creating things completely new. I’ve been making experimental theater in NYC for almost two decades. My work has been in fashion and out of fashion. In 2007 I had a reading of my play Certain Words in French (which I shall not name) at The Flea theater. This was a play about 12-year-old girls experimenting with sex and witchcraft at a summer camp, and bringing down a terrible punishment on their parents at the final talent show. At the time I was told by the artistic director of that theater that the play was interesting but unproducible because no one wanted to see adult actors playing 12-year-old girls. We are now in a cultural moment where people do want this. And that will also pass, probably. My point is that we are obsessed with the idea of an aesthetic of innovation as an absolute value, of pushing boundaries as an end in itself. The culture is always changing in ways that are complex, and ideas emerge-- they come to the fore as a result of larger cultural forces, individual obsessions, accidents… I think it’s more like ideas have hold of you than you have ideas. Newness in the theater is a kind of fantasy.
I have been thinking a lot about Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s “Maintenance Art Manifesto.” In it she opposes her concept of “Development Art” ( aligned with “The Death Instinct” and “Avant Garde par excellence” this kind of art is obsessed with the new and with the ways the new lays waste to the old) and “Maintenance Art” ( which is art that, among other things, tries to figure out what to do with the waste, the cultural detritus).
Development art is focused on revolution. “The sourball of every revolution,” Ukeles writes, “after the revolution, who’s going to take out the garbage on Monday morning?” A student of mine who is Chinese observed that Americans are always excited about the possibility of a revolution because they think it will work out in their favor, that they will benefit from the newness and changes. “In China,” he said, “we know that it is more complicated, that revolution can and will turn out very badly for some and in ways that are unpredictable.”
How do we value maintaining something-- a community bond, a space or using what is left over and disused to make something new? This is my interpretation of what Ukeles is asking for in her manifesto. I’m interested in theater that turns towards maintenance rather than rupture. I think this means creating and maintaining communities, the relationship between the performer and the audience. I think it means both valuing and mocking the old. I’m interested in pastiche, camp, homage and parody, as forms of maintenance. You can see it all in Madame Lynch!
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: Two of my great teachers have been Mac Wellman and Erik Ehn.
One great thing Mac once said is that “You have to create the ego that can create.” Which means that sometimes you have to imagine the persona or the entity that can generate, make decisions. Sometimes I imagine specific friends-- my longtime collaborator Jesse Hawley, or my old friend Young Jean Lee.
One great thing Erik once said was “You carry your civilization inside you” -- it’s all in there, in your brain somewhere.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: What I mostly want from the theater is to be surprised. What l love is the feeling of being unable to predict where something is going, the gleeful absurdity of getting lost in a moment.
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: Do it all yourself. Learn as much as you can about how everything works and even try to do it. When you write a lobster hat into your play, someone will have to make it. Try to learn what it will take for them to make it. When I say this, I don’t mean you should temper your expectations, I mean that you should do this so that you have clearer and more nuanced ideas of what could happen on the stage. Think about the materials things are made of.
Show up. Go to people’s shows, especially small scale shows or works in progress. If you see something you like, find the artist and ask how you can help. This is how you find the people you want to make things with. If you are just starting out, and you have the luxury of time to volunteer and help out, give that time to the work you most want to see, or that is dearest to your artistic heart. If you are just starting out and you don’t have a lot of time to give, think about other ways to be generous. Write an email expressing your appreciation. Tell other people about the work.
Q: Plugs, please:
A: Uncanny Valley is our performance parlor in Williamsburg-- it’s been kind of quiet over the last year or so because we’ve been making Madame Lynch, but we’ll be having a salon or two this summer. www.uncannyvalleynyc.com for info! I am in a band with my partner Craig Flanagin-- God Is My Co-Pilot-- and we will probably be playing some shows soon.
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Hometown: Pittsburgh, PA for the first nine years, Durham, NC after that.
Current Town: Pittsburgh, PA
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have a play in development called You Are What You, a comedy about a competitive eater who is trying to win an eating competition in order to afford her sister’s eating disorder rehab tuition. There’s a talking pot roast, farcical door-slamming, real food handed out to the audience, and five meaty (pun intended) roles for women. It’s being produced in Nashville this August, with the Garden Theatre Company.
I’m also writing Seasonal Affective Disorder (The Musical) which is a holiday musical intended for people who think the idea of going to a holiday musical sounds god awful.
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 was a very, very, shy child and had a lot of trouble socializing with other kids and would just sort of cling to the perimeter of the playground during recess. It got to the point where my exhausted teachers stopped attempting to get me to come out of my shell and just shrugged and said, “She’s an observer.”
At the same time, I’d unconsciously memorize sections of movies and recite them to myself when I was bored. So I’ve always been this weird mixture of obsessed with dialogue and talking, and much more comfortable with leaving it to other people to do. While I like to think I’ve metaphorically unclenched my fingers from the playground’s chain link fence as an adult, I’m now kind of proud of the “observer” thing because it’s what makes me a writer and what makes me sensitive to that feeling of being on the outside.
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: Dream of dreams: All tickets would be free, and all artists would be paid fairly for their work.
I know that’s kind of two things. But they’re related because I think the class problem in theatre is pretty major, both in terms of the audiences attending and artists doing the creating.
I teach an arts criticism class to college freshman where I require them to go see a play and write about it, and for many of them it’s their first time in a theatre or seeing a play that’s not their high school’s annual musical. Many of them return saying they felt uncomfortable, that they didn’t wear the right thing, that they didn’t feel like the experience was intended for them. And that’s before we even get into whatever the play was about! Imagine how much those responses might change if theatre was something that had been easily accessed and free to them their whole lives. Imagine how much theatres might change if they provided that access. How might their season programming change?
In this theatrical utopia I’m describing, the plays produced would need to represent the economically diverse audience coming to the shows. This means paying artists enough to support themselves, so that more people can actually do this work. I know of a lot of theatres that work fairly hard towards at least one of these goals (lowering ticket prices or paying artists decently), but I wish more would work towards both.
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: I’m pretty obsessed with Mary Chase who wrote Harvey, which I think is a perfect play, although it may not be super cutting edge of me to say. She really just wrote that play to be a fun evening of theater for people, but did it with such a fantastic love for the characters that it ends up being deeply human and profound years later, after the jokes have become dated and the hairstyles have changed. That’s always a good reminder for me when I catch myself trying to be deeply human and profound on purpose; it’s much better to shoot for writing funny characters that I love and hit the other stuff by accident.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: I have a deep love for my TV and my couch, so I think I’m actually a pretty tough sell when it comes to theatre! I really want to feel like “Yes, I had to get it together and put a bra on and come here and be in this room and experience this.”
So that said, I love plays that have a real beating heart to them, where I feel physically connected to what is happening on stage. I think that’s something that when theatre does it well, it does it really well. I also love a great story, sharply drawn characters, and opportunities for designers to do their thing. And I really love efficiency in story-telling because then I’m that much closer to getting to go eat a snack.
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: Write the plays you want to see and submit them like crazy, before you think they’re ready. Join the Dramatists Guild and Playwrights Center for help with that.
Be nice to actors and stage managers. Learn about what they do. If you think you’d be good at directing and producing, do it yourself.
Cultivate meaningful friendships with other writers and theater-makers, but also with people who participate in the world in other ways. There’s nothing like having to explain some theatre-related anxiety to your social worker friend to really put things in perspective.
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A: The few months leading up to the 2016 presidential election I was teaching a class of college Freshman, about one third of whom happened to be first generation Americans--children of immigrants. One of them, her name is Stephanie, was particularly studious and all around bad ass. She told me the story of a relative that came home from school one day to discover that her parents had been deported. When she told me this story, I imagined Stephanie as this girl, and I wondered, how might a typical white suburban middle-class American male enter into this other American reality that is so different from the America that he's experienced? And what if, what's more, he cared about someone across the breach? How would all of that change him?
Q: What else are you working on now?
A: I just finished the first draft of a play, OKC Bombing, about the trial of Timothy McVeigh. I was a senior in a high school in Oklahoma thirty minutes away from the Federal Murrah Building when McVeigh detonated the bomb that killed 168 people, many of whom where children. Looking back at the event in the present political climate, McVeigh's fear of government over-reach, especially in regard to stricter regulation of guns, resonates in a particular way, and I'm interested in that. I'm also working on a commission from River and Rail Theater, a musical called The Burn Vote, which I'm writing with Don and Lori Chaffer, about the single vote in Nashville, TN, that tipped the scales allowing for the ratification of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote. Also, another play I wrote immediately after the 2016 election, A Woman, about a NYC professor challenging her church denomination's deeply entrenched policy against women elders, will receive two staged readings this summer, one at the Women's Theater Festival and one at Baylor University, both directed by Kel Haney.
Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.
A: Well...I was born in the Philippines and raised in Hong Kong and mainland China until my family came back to the US (Oklahoma) when I was thirteen. Both of my parents were military kids. My sister works in counter-terrorism. I'm a playwright. Somehow all of that adds up to my writing.
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: I love theater. I've been doing it practically full time since high school and it's still magical to me. And I love love love the theater community in NYC. But if I could change one thing, it would be equal opportunity for women and people of color. I don't believe that the decision makers are consciously biased against us. But I do believe that the structures upholding the industry have these biases embedded. I wish I could change that.
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: I love Rajiv Joseph, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Annie Baker, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Caryl Churchill, Helen Edmundson, Martina Majok...there are so many.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: For me, it's the specificity of human interaction that thrills me. Human beings will forever fascinate me. I want to understand these creatures, because they are remarkable in their kindness and cruelty, courage and cowardice. Ultimately, I suppose I want to understand myself. So I like all kinds and genres of theater as long as it gives me that thrill of seeing something that shows me some small truth about who I am.
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: Read lots of plays. Go to all of the rehearsals. Listen to your actors and directors, but also trust your instincts. Don't let go of the impulse.
Q: Plugs, please
A: I have a really fun musical called The Zombie Family Musical, a Jungian comedy, also co-written with Don Chaffer, that is super smart and commercial and it needs a first production, please.
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