Interview with a Playwright: Sarah Sander

Our next interview is with playwright Sarah Sander. We caught up with her to ask some questions about her poignant, sexy, and darkly funny play Sycamore:

BAPF: Why did the title "Sycamore" resonate with you? 

SS: For a handful of reasons. Sycamores are commonly found in the Midwest and the word, sycamore, is often employed in naming suburban streets or parks. For me, the title evokes tree-lined cul-de-sacs. There’s also this: the branches of sycamores are particularly twisted, as the trees age, the trunks hollow out to provide homes for various animals and the sycamore has bark that peels off and sheds (for a play dealing with a lot of physical transformation, it’s an easy metaphor). There’s this too: I like how the word sounds.

BAPF: The play includes a lot of "..." dialogue. How do you imagine the center action of the play with the silences? 

SS: The silences are integral. A lot of these characters have been brought up in a community that’s caring, but repressive. They don’t have the words to express all that they’re feeling. So, hopefully, when it comes to the play’s central action, a great deal of tension will be wrought from watching these individuals struggle to articulate all that they’ve been unwilling or unable to acknowledge.

BAPF: What drew you to the theme of people taking things? (i.e.: Celia taking boys, John taking pictures, Henry taking clothes?) 

SS: The motivation behind taking things is so layered. It can be an attempt to combat sadness (hoping that the prize will bring happiness), a means of releasing pent up anger and aggression, a cry for attention, etc. With Henry and Celia, it’s also a sly and subtle way to “wage war.” As for John, his “taking” pictures functions differently. It’s his means of disappearing. It’s a defensive technique.

BAPF: Thank you, Sarah! We look forward to seeing Sycamore on Sunday, July 17 at 6PM and Saturday, July 23 at 12PM.

Interview With A Playwright: Jonathan Spector

Preparations for the 2016 Bay Area Playwrights Festival continue with a fresh set of new plays still in development. Our next interview is with playwright Jonathan Spector. We were fortunate enough to be able to ask him some questions about his hilarious (and at times disturbing) play Good, Better, Best, Bested about war, intimacy, and cultural consumption:

BAPF:  You mentioned in a previous interview that the setting of Las Vegas appealed to you because it was an entire city built to encourage people to only care about their own pleasure in the present moment. What drew you to exploring individualized experience in contrast tocollective experience?  

JS: I'm interested in how we as individuals respond to large scale events that don't affect our lives directly. How much time do we or should we take out of our day to think about, or take some action towards, a tragedy involving people we don't know? The machinery of Vegas, built to part people from their money, works particularly hard to get you to privilege what is happening right now for you over anything else. 

BAPF: Additionally, the characters featured in this play are extremely
characteristic of what one assumes they will find in Las Vegas.
Theatrically, why might it be important for us to hear their opinions
about issues like foreign policy or global tragedy? 

JS: It's not. What's important, at least for the play, is less about
people expressing an opinion and more about them navigating an
experience.  

BAPF: Do you believe the responses in this play demonstrate a genuine
representation of our modern-day society when it comes to tragic
events?  

JS: I hope so. 

BAPF:  Thanks so much for talking to us! We look forward to seeing your play brought to life!

Interview with a Playwright: Walt McGough

Welcome to the 39th Annual Bay Area Playwrights Festival!  It's an exciting time: the plays and artistic teams are confirmed.  Auditions have begun. Event planning is underway.  We hope you will check our website and blog for updates, latest backstage news and added special events throughout the festival. 

We will be posting a series of interviews in the weeks leading up to the festival from this year's talented playwrights. Walt McGough, whose timely Non-Player Character lays bare the darker side of gaming, was the first to sit down with us.

BAPF: What drew you to explore the world of gaming and its culture? 

Walt McGough: I've been a pretty avid gamer for just about my whole life; I'm pretty sure that I can still play Mega Man 2 just by sense memory alone. Games have always been one of the major ways that I unwind in what little down-time I have. I'm a particular fan of open world role-playing and strategy games, which is a problem because I tend to have a pretty addictive personality and so when I start a game with too many things to explore, I'm in constant danger of just disappearing down the rabbit hole completely and never resurfacing. (The closest I've come so far was the year that I spent living by myself in Chicago, with an original Xbox, a copy of the Elder Scrolls game Morrowind, and a cheap Chinese restaurant right across the alleyway from my apartment. It...wasn't pretty.)

As far as gaming culture is concerned, I've always followed it avidly, but from a bit of a tangential position. A combination of personal finance limitations and parents who actually wanted me to see the sun occasionally when I was growing up meant that I never had the most up-to-date gaming consoles or computers, and so I had to spend a lot of time playing games that were a couple years out-of-date. When new ones that I was excited about would come out, I would play them at my friends' houses, or (and I actually did do this) force my friends to describe them to me, at length, with much detail. My inability to play most games when they came out didn't stop me from staying up-to-the-minute on all of the various news and developments and new releases, and that's continued into my adult life even though I still have to be very choosy about the games that I spend my time with. I've spent a lot of time learning and reading about games that I'll never actually get to play, covetously. It's my own special brand of masochism, I guess.

As far as what made me want to address gaming and games culture in a play...I tend to play around a fair amount with genres of all kinds in my plays. I have a comic book-style play, and a spy play, and a post-apocalypse play, etc. It's never a really conscious decision to write things that way, but given my interest base and my desire to play around with what's possible theatrically, it just kind of pans out.

So I'd been thinking for a while about what a play about video games could look like on stage, and then gaming had a sort of cultural flashpoint moment a few years back, with the #gamergate "movement" flaring up and exposing a lot of the massive obstacles that women in the games industry and gaming culture face on a daily basis. It's really not much different at its core than the issues women and minorities face all over in society, but when it happens in the sphere of gaming culture it tends to mostly happen online, which means there's no real filter and there's a lot more...I guess "passion," would be the word? No, wait. Not passion. "Awfulness." That's a better word.

Anyway, when GamerGate was really heating up, I just remember being riveted to my computer, following the whole horrific mess of it all, and feeling like it was finally time to write a play about video games, because I finally knew what the conversation I wanted to have about them was. I wanted to talk to audiences about the very real and pertinent cultural issues that are present in the world of video games, but also show them why so many people from all different walks of life love games to start with, and want to fix them.

BAPF: In gamer parlance, non-player characters can be unknown or an "agent" in the game. Did this "otherness" 

​ resonate for you?​

WM: Hoo boy, did it ever. The fascinating thing about games culture is that it's always been viewed (and continues to be viewed, by many) as a sort of monolithic thing: awkward white guys between the ages of 12 and 30, sitting in their mothers' basements and doing nothing but play the newest games.

But that mental picture ignores the fact that, especially in recent years, the field of gaming has become filled with an almost infinite diversity of narrative approaches, styles, and agendas, and there are just as many different people playing video games now as there are games for them to play. That's just about always been true, of course, but the more stereotypical, Platonic ideal of the "gamer" is the demographic that most mainstream games have been pitched to for decades. So for a lot of people who don't fit that mold, whether due to their gender, or their race, or any other number of reasons, there's a sense that you're being forced to look at this thing that you love through a glass window: you're not actually allowed to consider yourself a part of it.

I can't imagine how dispiriting that experience must get sometimes, for someone who loves games but finds themselves not allowed to claim it as a part of their identity. (I mean that literally: I can't imagine it. I'm a straight white guy. Every mainstream thing has been made for me pretty much my whole life, and I can identify with it as I see fit. I'm very much ready for that to stop, because it's boring as hell.)

The trouble really arises when you factor in that gaming is pretty much the only art form that actually started off as a competitive medium. The only reason that Jumpman is rescuing a princess from a gorilla in Donkey Kong is because the programmers needed a thing for players to look at while they scored points. The stories serve the competition, and the medium is the message, and so for a lot of people who play games, there is no "gaming culture" without a competitive drive. That can translate into a constant need to be THE BEST at everything about a game, from the playing of the game to the consumption of the game ("I'm gonna get the best version of this game and the best system to play it on and I'm gonna buy them all on the day they come out before anybody else and that means that I'm winning!!!!!"). For people with that mindset, the inclusion of more and different types of players and stories can be perceived as an honest-to-God threat, and that can cause some really ugly pushback. That fact was very much on my mind as I started in on writing the play, and it found its way into the title.

BAPF: NPCs are often defined as characters controlled by the game for players to interact with, as opposed to player characters which are controlled by whomever is playing the game.  From a theatrical perspective, 

​how did this inform your approach?

WM: It really shaped the central conflict, I think: Katja (the main character) is an aspiring game designer, and has been deeply in love with gaming her whole life. During the course of the play, however, she finds herself pushed out to the periphery, and continually victimized by others simply for trying to claim an agency and control over her own story. She finds out that a lot of the people she interacts with don't actually view her as anything but a part of their own personal stories, and her struggle to fight back against that and claim her own, central role in her own life is the driving action of the play. Plus, a bunch of it is set inside of a video game, and so we get to see her cast spells and do badass spin-move attacks on fantasy monsters. So that's cool, too!

BAPF: You were quoted as saying "Realism, by and large, doesn’t exist. Nobody actually thinks they’re looking through the invisible wall of a house. This is a good thing, because it means you get to decide how the rules of your world work."

​ What did this mean for NPC specifically, and your work in general?

WM: I personally don't like writing plays that attempt to emulate or be super-true to reality in their style, because I just know that it's never going to work. Nobody thinks it's real, or that the events of a play are actually happening. You're not fooling anyone. The audience has already consciously decided to pretend that they're invisible while they watch your play. They're on board. So, to my mind, if they've already come that far, why not bring them a little bit farther, as well.

I'm a big fan of plays that invite the production team, directors, designers, and everybody else in on the world-building, and provide a lot of opportunities to create something new and fun and exciting that nobody's seen before. The specific style is always going to change to fit the story, because at the end of the day, that's all you're doing: you're telling a story with everybody involved all at once. It was easy to get that kind of imagination and sense of play into NPC, because video games inherently have that to start with, so it was really just a matter of figuring out what's possible and what isn't in a real, physical space. I'm sure that there's plenty of calibration left to do in rehearsal, so that I can really make sure I got the math right.

            BAPF: Walt, thank you so much!  This was fascinating.

Interview with a Playwright: Rob Melrose

Our final playwright to be interviewed is the fabulous Rob Melrose, artistic director of The Cutting Ball Theater -- and not really the 'playwright' but rather adaptor, book writer, librettist, as if that's not enough!  He makes his writing debut at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival with his truly hilarious, trip-hop musical, Ozma of Oz.

Rob Melrose

Natasha Brown: Thanks for letting me interview you! First question, is your style distinct or does is change depending on the play?

Rob Melrose:  I always gravitate towards projects with lots of imagination so in that way I’m consistent. However, the ways in which I’m creative are very different depending on whether I’m directing, translating or adapting a text. Each project has its own place and style.

NB: That makes sense. How did this piece came into being?

RM: The idea of doing something with Z.O.N.K. and the book Ozma of Oz came to me when I was directing Happy Days at the Guthrie Theater.  Downstairs they were presenting a new musical version of Little House on the Prairie.  People from all over the state of Minnesota came to see this book brought to life on stage.  And, I asked myself, if this is the Minnesotan Regional Theater way of reaching new audiences, what is the San Francisco Experimental Theater version? At the same time, I was reading all of the Wizard of Oz books to my daughter.  Ozma of Oz plays on identity and I thought about  San Francisco, I found my version.   

San Franciscans

NB: Yep, San Francisco is a pretty great place. I am interested in how the play explores themes of gender and sexuality through the structure of a children’s story. Can you tell me more about why you chose to take that route?

RM: Ozma was born a woman but grew up thinking she was a boy called Tip. Only later does Tip realize that he’s really a girl; Princess Langwidere has 30 different heads that she switches between, and it is clear that there is a sense of attraction between Dorothy and Ozma.  As a musical, we have found ways to highlight those already existing themes in this new context.

NB: Why do you think trip-hop as a musical style was best for this other than typical show tunes?

RM: I grew up really liking West Side Story, Grease and A Chorus Line, but the music of contemporary musicals generally isn’t a sound that I enjoy, so I stopped liking musicals all that much. However,  I loved the idea of U2 writing music for Spiderman the musical and a collaboration between popular music and the musical genre was exciting. My good friend Dave L has a band called Z.O.N.K. that produces trip-hop music, and I just knew that I had to get them to write the music to Ozma.

Z.O.N.K.

NB: Do you think audiences outside of the Bay Area will be as receptive as San Francisco to this musical?

RM: I was a little worried that maybe we’ve gone too far, but at a reading of the play last December these two guys from the International Oz Society came and they loved it. Then there's Lady Gaga and Kesha. Both artists are very open about their sexuality so, while a lot of the themes are very “San Francisco”, they’re actually national and international issues in pop culture that speaks to the evolving identity of a new generation. 

NB: Yeah, I've definitely noticed that a lot more in the last few years. Okay, last question; whose work would you recommend for emerging writers to study?

RM:  Well, I’ve got to say Shakespeare for sure.
People would say of Joseph Papp, founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival, that one of the reasons he was so good at working on new plays is because he had Shakespeare’s plays at the back of his mind all the time. I also love Suzan-Lori Parks and I’ve done a lot of her plays. She just has it all – a great sense of language that is risky and daring, an incredible sense of character. She’s a big hero of mine. I love Beckett but he can be incredibly daunting and sort of unapproachable. A person we don’t give a lot of credit or time to is Ionesco. He was such a playful writer and starts every play with a big imaginative leap and goes from there. I wish more people today were influenced by him because I think he’s wonderful.

NB: Thanks, Rob!

Ozma of Oz is showing on July 19th at 12pm and July 25th at 8pm. Get your tickets here!

The Bay Area Playwrights Festival gives voice to emerging and established playwrights who are pushing boundaries and have the potential to shape the future of American theater and culture. The festival runs from July 18-27. Click here for the calendar and special event details for the whole festival. 

*Edited for content on July 18th 2014.

 

Interview with a Playwright: TD Mitchell

Next up in our interview series is TD Mitchell. You can catch a reading of her play, Queens for a Year, at this year's festival.

TD Mitchell

Natasha Brown: Thanks for taking the time to talk with me. First question, is your style distinct or does it change depending on the play?

TD Mitchell: I would say there are definitely repeating themes that I find myself returning to as a dramatist, but this doesn’t necessarily mean the styles are the same. A big difference in this play is the integration of Greek myth. That aspect of the play is highly theatrical – I can see puppetry, bright colours, a sort of sensory overload. The style of the primary narrative, however, is structured fairly traditionally. There is also a vast difference in the way I write for TV compared to theatre.

NB: Are there any interesting stories about how this play came into being?

TDM: I had written a play called Beyond the 17^th Parallel which required a lot of research and conducting interviews with Vietnam veterans. As a result of this, I met a lot of women who had also served and realized that they needed their own play. Their experiences were different and needed to be represented. As I was writing the play, Maria Lauterbach was murdered.  By this time, I’d heard so much about the predominance of sexual assault and physical violence against women in the military, I felt as though I was the only person who wasn’t shocked by her murder. Everything I had researched and been told by these veterans was horrifically confirmed. 

Maria Lauterbach

NB: That is very saddening. This play is layered with many urgent topics such as the position of women, sexual assault, and homosexuality, in and around military culture. Could you expand some more on how you became involved in writing about the military?

TDM: I never planned to be an expert in that area. This play chose me. As a storyteller it’s my job to listen and observe and bear witness to what is going on. If you were to say to me when I was younger that I would end up writing so much about military culture, I would have said “no way!” We’ve been at war for the majority of my adulthood which is ridiculous. It’s so difficult to wrap my head around it. We, as a country, have such an abstract idea about war and its impact. We walk around as if it’s not happening. This play, for me, was exploring that disconnection.

NB: Yes, and although I feel that the play deals with a victim of sexual assault, it does not necessarily feel like a play about victims. Would you say that I am on the right track or is there something I am missing?

TDM: Yes, definitely! Ideally, I want the audience to feel as conflicted and uncomfortable as I did during the process of discovering these women. I was really torn by this kick-ass feminism “let’s blow shit up” discourse versus just how stupid it is to drop women into this anti-female culture (the military). Everything about the culture is anti-female. The language used in the military is incredibly gendered and sexist.

The question wasn’t about how should we handle our victimhood, it was how do we respond? If we teach women that the ways in which they must respond is with this masculine idea of violence, of course she’s going to take matters into her own hands because the system has let her down. By the end of the play, I want us to feel uncomfortably torn between wanting the women to get revenge and then to realize our horror of that being our primary instinct. 

NB: That’s a very interesting perspective. I love how you interwove the myth of Caenis/Caeneus into the story. I found it to be a really powerful device which illustrated the plot in a fascinating way. Could you tell me more about how that idea developed?

TDM: I wish I knew exactly how that developed. I don’t know exactly. I guess because historically I was looking at women warriors. I didn’t know we had such an extensive history of women warriors in the US, in both WWI and WWII. During the war, they enlisted women but, once it was over, the women’s ranks were disbanded. Women were not given the veteran status for their contributions. I was looking at it from a historic perspective and I was looking at it compared to other cultures. I was not aware of the myth before I wrote the play; I don’t know how I got there. It was one of those happy accidents.

The use of myth in that very physicalized, theatrical way of story-telling allows your audience, safe distance from the subject. So you’re not going into a theatre documentary about rape. Hopefully you’re forced to look at larger themes and questions but from a distance where it does not just hit you on the head. It’s something more gradual. I think that little bit of separation allows us to get more emotionally invested. We can get closer to the subject.

NB: Last question, whose work would you recommend for emerging writers to study?

TDM: You’ve got to pay due attention to Chekhov, Ibsen and Shakespeare – the great storytellers. They’re still very relevant in terms of exploring the human condition, societal relationships, familial relationships etc. There’s still so much value in the greats.

Contemporary writers like Howard Barker. He is brave, frustrating and scary. I’m always watching whatever Caryl Churchill is up to.  I do appreciate writers who continue to play with form and format. Churchill tries different styles.

NB: Thanks, TD!



Queens for a Year is showing on July 19th at 8pm and July 26th at 4pm. Get your tickets here!

The Bay Area Playwrights Festival gives voice to emerging and established playwrights who are pushing boundaries and have the potential to shape the future of American theater and culture. The festival runs from July 18-27. Click here for the calendar and special event details for the whole festival. 

Interview with a Playwright: Don Nguyen

It's Natasha again! I'm back with our interview series, this week with playwright Don Nguyen whose play Sound explores identity and Deaf culture.

Don Nguyen

Natasha Brown: Thank you for letting me interview you! First question, is your style distinct or does it change depending on the play?

Don Nguyen: I think my style does change depending on the play I’m writing. With most of my really serious plays I inject as much humor in it as possible, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to watch it myself. I guess, in that respect, all of my plays have a certain layer of humor. However, I think the type of play does demand a certain level of difference in writing style. 
  
NB: Yeah, I agree. Are there any interesting stories about how your new play, Sound, came into being?

DN: I spent some time at Martha’s Vineyard (where the play is set) for a writer’s retreat. I did some research about the island and found out that, at one point, the island had the highest concentration of deaf people in the country. What I found interesting was that there were so many deaf people on the island, all of the hearing people had to learn their sign language in order to communicate with them. Back then it was about hearing people integrating into their society as opposed to the other way around. It made me want to write about identity.

Martha's Vineyard

NB: Wow, I bet that's something a lot of our audiences won't know. That's really fascinating. For you personally, how did Deaf culture become a necessary topic for you to write about?

DN: Before I wrote the play, I actually never had any personal experience with or attachment to Deaf culture. My father is getting older and is slowly losing his hearing. It’s been on my mind. When I’m at a loud party and I can’t hear a single word anyone is saying I think “Is it just me or is it really loud in here?” Those experiences provoked my naïve fears about losing my hearing. Since writing this play, doing research and working with Deaf artists, I’ve learned that deafness is not a handicap or a disability.  A deaf person can do everything a hearing person can do, except hear.  But also, there are many things deaf people can do that hearing people can’t do, one of which is being able to sign at loud parties! I realized what a great experience it is to have relationships with people I felt completely unattached to before.

NB: That's really great. What makes this play different from other plays written by hearing people about deaf people/culture?

DN: One of the challenges for the festival is how we make sure both deaf and hearing audiences can understand. I think that my play is bilingual – half of it is written in Sign and the other half is written for hearing audiences. My play is definitely trying to do a lot more than a lot of other plays about or including deaf people are designed or willing to do. What we did in a New York reading is to use supertitles that told the audience the general idea of the scene, and then the entire scene would be signed onstage and our hearing audiences would watch the scene unfold. They were forced to get out of their comfort zone, which I think is important. I’m not trying to “represent” Deaf culture because I’m not deaf myself. I’m trying to represent the universal theme shared by deaf and hearing people alike, which is identity and how it shapes us based on our unique circumstances.

NB: Yes, and we know that you have worked extensively with deaf people to make this play inclusive and accurate. What has the process been like? Have you experienced any pushbacks?

DN: Thankfully, I’ve not experienced any pushbacks from the Deaf community, which is one thing I was very sensitive about. The response has been really positive. There is a sense of happiness that someone is writing about their culture and that they get to tell their stories onstage. I’ve had positive feedback about accurately depicting the experiences of many deaf people.

NB: Last question, whose work would you recommend for emerging writers to study?

DN: I would say definitely there are a lot of great new playwrights that writers should read: Everyone in the Ma-Yi Writers lab including past festival participants Kimber Lee, Jiehae Park, Lauren Yee, Mia Chung, and Clarence Coo.  Also Lucas Hnath, Annie Baker, Sarah Ruhl, Rajiv Joseph, Brandon Jacobs Jenkins, Laura Marks, Bekah Brunstetter, Kate Gersten, Yussef El Guindi, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Sam Hunter, Jessica Dickey, and Marcus Gardley just to name a very few.  

NB: Thanks, Don!

Check out Don's hilarious blog, Sad Playwright, for a tongue-in-cheek look at the world of playwriting.

Sound is showing on July 20th at 12pm and July 27th at 4pm. Get your tickets here!

The Bay Area Playwrights Festival gives voice to emerging and established playwrights who are pushing boundaries and have the potential to shape the future of American theater and culture. The festival runs from July 18-27. Click here for the calendar and special event details for the whole festival.