Hometown: Bethel, Connecticut after a short stint in Maryland
Current Town: Queens, NY
Q: What are you working on now?
A: This past year I had a playwright residency with fellow writer Eric Holmes and curator (writer) Les Hunter at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center in Long Island City.
I wrote a new full length play entitled Surrender.
Usually you get one reading of a play, but we had three staged readings, one after the other, which gave me time to really hear and experience the play and do a few rewrites in between, especially in regards to the ending.
In November I’ll have a workshop production again at LPAC and so I’m working on more expansive revisions.
Surrender is a dystopic play that I imagine in a future/parallel world after there’s been an information sharing burst/crash and a society that evolves/devolves out of it. The characters and audience exist in a world maintained by The Administration’s Protection Policy. We follow the main character D Thomson who works as a Reporter of Loss and Recovery. She helps to track and share what we hold most dear. But she’s been doing her job too long…
Q: What else are you working on?
A: I’m connecting the dots.
I’ve been exploring intimate theater/immersive interactive experiences/moments of return. My frequent collaborator, Sarah Murphy and I are playing with a Words, Words, Words project that has had many iterations – from an interactive performance in a sculpture park in the Hamptons, to online Literary Valentines – recommending books and arranging bibliophile penpals to sending and receiving postcards to//from friends and strangers on Governors Island. GI is a fascination of mine, even more so when I learned that my great grandparents met there in 1900. I’m going to write something that plays with their story. I have his military and court martial record (he was in jail on the island). She was a servant/cook newly emigrated from Ireland.
I’m also writing 3 short narratives for videos for the new Civil Rights Museum in Atlanta.
I’m posing for a painting inspired by John Alexander White’s The Repose (on view at the MET) for my friend the painter Elizabeth Beard. We talk art, process, life while working – it’s fun to be a muse.
Soon, I’ll be helping re-imagine the Jackson Heights Trilogy with Theatre 167 and director Ari Laura Kreith for a site-specific experience for the Queens Museum of Art’s Queens International.
And there are other things cooking, some with artist Phoebe Joel…some of my own projects that I’ve kept in the crockpot simmering simmering simmering and now need to be served.
Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.
A: Growing up, my family would drive down to Ft. Lauderdale to visit my grandparents. One time, after we arrived at the beach, as I was running into the water, I felt a sharp pain in my foot and leg. I had stepped on a Portuguese man o’war. I hadn’t noticed that the beach, crowded with people was also crowded with all these beautiful, blue and yet dangerous, venomous creatures. A tentacle wrapped itself up and around my leg. I was paralyzed for the rest of the day. And then I ran back out there to look at them again, a bit more cautiously and curiously and then later I researched them. They are not jellyfish even though they are similarly gelatinous. The allure and magic of bioluminescence. You think you can see through them but you can’t see everything. There’s still a mystery to figure out and/or imagine. A metaphor, at times, for the process of creating and experiencing theater.
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: So much about theater is business. And business in the USA…Oh, capitalism. And lots of –isms. Money. Politics. I, like many others, more than long for equality and get angry at the consequences of greed and insecurities and...
In my little utopian mind, I think every artist should have an artistic home that is passionate about committing to artistic growth overtime. Producing at least three works at each venue, understanding some may fail. Some may fail big. And some may totally surprise and surprise in ways that redefine the word success. And the homes should rotate and there should be a transition period where the previous artist(s) and new artist(s) overlap. And for every performance there are paid and free tickets perhaps given out in lotteries. And every artist gets paid a living wage. And artists must also curate – mentor and encourage other artists. I like that Joe Papp at some point gave each space at the Public to a few different artists/directors and said curate. I think curating should be not only of people you know but also go far, outside your known and find someone(s) you are curious about.
I want to curate a space/event(s) someday. And more immediately, I’m going to stop sitting on my plays.
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: I admire the process and the masterpiece. I have a lot of heroes in theater, dance, music, art, literature, science, life…This question makes me think of Adrienne Kennedy’s People Who Led to My Plays. (Perhaps that’s been referenced in other interviews already.) I’m happy that my parents introduced me to theater as a kid, that I started experimenting with it, sometimes using a pool table as a stage at a friend’s house. Oh, the classics from the Greeks to Shakespeare to O’Neill (and more) that were introduced in middle and high school, and finally spending countless hours with everyone in the theater at Drew in undergrad. The people I encountered while working at The Public Theater under George C. Wolfe, Bonnie Metzgar and John Dias to the collaborators, peers and mentors at CalArts, to the people I’ve shared with through travels in the US and abroad and through the Women’s Project, The Playwrights Center, Theatre 167 and LPAC. So many of whom have been interviewed by you, Adam. And I can’t leave this answer without saying Kafka and Beckett.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: I seek out a wide range. I’ve long been engaged by promenade style theater thanks to the Macnas theater company’s production I saw in 1996 in Galway of Rhymes from the Ancient Mariner, and many immersive productions since (I’ve directed a couple too). Theater that surprises me, that makes me react (positively) “Oh, theater can do that” either in the moment or after. It keeps me engaged, makes me gasp, puts me in a fit of laughter or wiping tears. Exposes /exchanges vulnerabilities. And later, later, it’s stuck with me, perhaps haunting and/or giving me hope…
So, I have a list. It grows. To choose two that I’ll never forget: Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Baryshnikov and Merce Cunningham dancing a duet at Lincoln Center.
I love that there’s so many ways to be/create/define theatrical – to transform a space and create an event with or without actual spoken words that’s either very real or imaginative/ parallel/perpendicular/potential to what we know in our every day lives.
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: Advice that I need, too. Here’s ten things, lists can go on forever…and I’m going to send this in, finally.
Ask questions such as “what am I curious about?” I like to write down my initial impulse for a play, story, project on an index card and post it, keep it handy. Another good question is “What is the play/story you are not writing?” And then go and write it. Make it immediate.
Trust your gut. Get underneath/inside it but don’t overthink it.
José Rivera once told me that early on he established a writing schedule that reflects a full-time job. The times I have done this, I have experienced the difference it makes. I haven’t been able to sustain it financially yet consistently. And hence, I have/had varied dayjobs, that at least have been inspirational. But…
Read, write, seek theater anywhere and everywhere.
Feed also on the other art forms. Visuals and music help me find the atmosphere and sensuous layers of a world and help lock me in as I write/create.
Travel. Capture what you experience. Use it. Live in the midst of it.
Find your people. Find a muse(s). Collaborate. Join/start/get into writing/theater groups where people know how to give you notes and deadlines and vice versa that take you to the next level and help bring your ideas onto and off the page in space, with audience.
Find mentors and be a mentor. Maintain your own voice. So you also need to isolate, have alone time and face yourself.
Collide what you think you know with what you think you don’t know. Think chemistry experiments. Discoveries are made by doing the work, opening up, making connections and through these “accidents”.
Stop getting in your own way. Focus. Persist. Make/Do. Fail/Succeed. Share again and again. Survive.
A: I'm working on a lot of different small and large projects. I co-wrote a historical drama titled “Hansberry & Baldwin” with Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj. The play is about a series of meetings Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin had with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in 1963. These meetings were an attempt to address civil rights concerns through Negro leaders and it's quite remarkable that two artists could actually be negotiating policy with an Attorney General to effect history. Rajendra approached me with the idea at the beginning of this year and we began hammering it out. Now we're getting to the final revisions and tweaks.
I've discovered that co-writing a play can be fun. The only experience I've had with that is working on musicals and an opera with composers, but it's not the same as co-writing a play.
After that I'm writing an experimental performing arts piece for a Berlin museum putting on an exhibit by artist/curator Melissa Steckbauer. A few years ago, I snuck on to the set of a “Burger King” commercial and pretended to be an actor so I could get paid as an extra. I placed on set at a table with a bunch of other artists, one of whom was Melissa, who is an erotica photographer and painter. I went to her show Bushwick and she moved away to Berlin and her career has taken off. I'm creating a feminist satirical performing arts piece that's interactive. I love the idea of doing something experimental for a museum crowd. And yes, I got paid for the Burger King commercial and was a featured extra in an ad probably running in some obscure Baltic country.
I'm revising my comedy “Defacing Michael Jackson” for its world premiere this fall at Nuyorican Poets Cafe. “Defacing” was a short play I wrote while in school that got published by Samuel French. Two years ago I decided to change the plot and expand the story into a full plot. The play was a finalist at Princess Grace and was picked up by Redshirt Entertainment, a new commercial production company. I'm the resident playwright at Redshirt this upcoming season so I'll be writing other shows as well for their ensemble of actors.
I'm also adapting the “Bhagavad Gita” to the present-day Bronx. Arjuna is a soldier returning home from Afghanistan and suffering from PTSD. The project is called “Red Mind” and it's a multimedia piece involving electronica and video. I'm working with Matt Vorzimer, an extremely talented composer/music producer.
Q: What else are you working on?
A: In January I wrote a short play called “African Americana” that premiered at Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX). I expanded this into a full-length satire, “Obama-ology” that I'm rewriting this summer.
Also this year I wrote an airplane drama “Freefalling” that premiered at Barrington Stage Company and filmed for Williamstown TV: http://vimeo.com/67827216.
“Freefalling” just won the Fiat Lux (Let There Be Light) from a Catholic Church parish and it's inspired me to expand this into a full-length play this summer as well.
To pay my bills I'm writing/producing web videos, which is actually very interesting. I wrote and produced a slate of funny webisodes last year for MISTER, a gay dating app. I'm doing that again this year but also writing/producing videos for LearnLiberty, a Libertarian media company. I'm a left-wing Libertarian from college day.
Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.
A: My grandmother, Lynn Maddox, taught me how to write the alphabet. I learned in her yard with a broken off limb from a tree and a plot of dirt in front of the aloe plants. I started writing the alphabet, words, and then sentences. When I would finish something and it was satisfactory, I would sweep away the words with my feet and continue writing. She would take me on trips to the store and make me write a story about it afterward. She would tell me to think of details and then piece them together in a pattern. Years later, I discovered a story I wrote about taking the Metro-Dade bus with her over the bridge to go to the K-Mart in Miami Beach. When I read the story again 20 years later I was shocked. There was a sort of narrative I had created by just describing the step by step process of getting on a bus. This was 1983 and I was four years old because I'm describing 'pink islands' in the bay. I was describing Christo's arts project he did for Miami Beach that year where he covered the smaller bay islands in pink cloth. Unfortunately, the cloth wasn't biodegradable and was killing wildlife so they had to take it down. But for a four-year-old child to see these massive pink islands was incredible. And I even drew a picture to go along with the story.
Whenever I'm stuck I go back to those images: me in the front yard writing in the wet dirt with a stick and those pink islands. Writing should be as primitive and connected to the environment as writing in the earth. And it should invoke the wonder of a child staring at magical islands.
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: Obviously making it more affordable and expanding the audience would give our craft a huge boost. But I think it would also enrich the lives of many people in the audience. From elementary school through high school, I saw 2 plays. That's it. “Dreamgirls” at community college and “Midsummer Nights Dream” as a school field trip to an empty theatre. Both plays were incredibly moving spectacles and invoked a sense of wonder, but that was my entire theatre experience until I went to Northwestern University. When I came home from my freshman winter break I was eager to see theatre (capital 'T') and picked up the Miami Herald and saw a play by Lee Blessings. “Black Sheep.” It sounded funny. I called up the theatre and they informed me that tickets started at $40. I couldn't afford that. I was also used to movie prices. I wanted to know if there was a student discount and they said 'no.' Before hanging up, I asked if there were available seats and the operator assured me 'oh yes, there are LOTS of open seats.'
If theatre was more affordable and had a younger audience, that would trigger a lot of changes in content and the direction of American theatre.
Aesthetically I would like to see more challenging plays that break traditional narratives. I remember reading “The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer” and discovering 'theatre of debate' where the argument itself was the focus. Then later on Augusto Boal's 'theatre of the oppressed' in Albuquerque when creating a scenario for underprivileged Mexican families involving domestic violence. These were light bulb moments.
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: Susan Booth got me to write plays at Northwestern so she's my hero. I was taking her class and unknowingly wrote a violent opening scene between a father and son that involved an inflatable red ball and a butcher knife. Professor Booth pulled me aside. She could have crushed me and told me I was 'doing it wrong,' I probably would have never tried to write a play again if discouraged in that moment. Instead the professor quietly asked me 'what writers influenced me?'' I had no idea what she was talking about and said so. She looked at me for a long beat and finally gave her judgment: I should keep writing. And I could see that she wanted to say something else but held back. She allowed me to fill in the silence. I immediately asked if she would produce this play at the Goodman Theatre. She laughed. That was the end of it and the beginning of something else.
August Wilson would be the other hero. That summer after Professor Booth's class I went to LA to be a literary intern for 2 movie companies. I lived in a UCLA frat house and went to the campus bookstore frequently. One Saturday a play jumped out from the others on the shelf: “Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.” I sat down on the ground and read the whole thing right there. I felt so strange afterward, like someone had reached inside my mind and bent a few wires around. I immediately went home and began writing an epic play about Cubans and Blacks in Miami. It was 190 pages, spanned generations, covered the South Florida landscape, and was a mess. I managed to get it down to 130 pages. But I would constantly refer to “Ma Rainey's Black Bottom” to simplify. Think like August.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: Theatre that makes me uncomfortable. Theatre where the writer is trying to figure something out on stage or is fighting for their integrity, sanity, or basic humanity.
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: Hang out around as many different people and listen. Listen, listen, listen. Try to remove judgment or the 'advice voice' of what they should be doing. Listen. My teachers made me listen, transcribe conversation of strangers on the street, and find the rhythms in their voice. In my entire four years at Northwestern, I had the same work-study job: radio news. I interviewed professors over the phone, transcribed their answers, and edited it all together for AP and UPI wire stories on the radio. All I did was listen to voices. People have some pretty funny idiosyncratic quirks and rhythms when they're allowed to speak. And their speech is a window into how they think and see the world.
And read the classics as well as poetry.
Stay at the fringes. Be uncomfortable.
Be the canary in the mine for your family, your friends, or your tribe. Tell the story of their extinction.
Q: Plug?
A: I'll let you know more during the fall. This is writing time.
