Interview with a Playwright: Lauren Gunderson

The 2015 Season of Rough Readings has brought us readings of four remarkable new plays in draft form, and is coming to a close this month with The Revolutionists by playwright Lauren Gunderson. 

The Revolutionists has also been selected for the 38th Annual Bay Area Playwrights Festival! You can get a sneak peek of the festival and see this inspiring new work before it comes to the Tides Theatre stage this Summer!

As an additional treat, Lauren was kind enough to share some insight into the play's development -- read on below:

Rachel Finkelstein: Thanks for speaking with me! To start, I'd love to hear how you got interested in this topic and the four women the play is centered on.

Lauren Gunderson

Lauren Gunderson: I was in Paris with my mom and sister 3 years ago and we went to the Pantheon to visit Voltaire and Marie Curie (like ya do) and happened to read a footnote about a feminist playwright who was guillotined during the French Revolution that the people of Paris were considering re-interring there. I did a cartoon-style double take and said "Wait. A feminist playwright? During the French Revolution? Guillotines?!" After that it was a gradual exploration of that time and the striking similarities to our time in America: ridiculous war, drowning national debt, vast divide between rich and poor, institutional racism, and the quest for women's equality. But the play has really turned into a grander story about stories. Why we need to make art, what art does in times of crisis, how stories connect eras and philosophies across time. 

RF: That's as true today as it was then. So, how did you go about getting to know these women so intimately? 

LG: I basically wrote about myself and my cadre of incredible female friends, many of whom are artists. I wrote two of the roles for Kat Zdan* and Jessica Lynn Carroll* (who you'll see in the reading) which is a treat because I had their voices in my head. The fun of writing about historical women is in revealing their humanity, not indulging their mythology. Marie Antoinette was a woman, a mother, a scared mortal person not just a queen. The fun of the play is going into both the grandeur and the grounding of these women. 

RF: There's an incredible mix of history and modern language in the work, which makes it so relatable -- how did you find that balance between past and present?  

LG: I think it's mainly because I was making fun of myself for most of the play. The main character is a feminist playwright who's desperate to think that her work matters and can change the world for the better even though she knows that her work may be an outgrowth of her need to be in charge and speak for others. That's not a far leap from *ahem* someone I know very well. So the tone of the play starts out light, ludicrous, and confessional... until it crashes into the hot threat of violence and censorship of the Reign of Terror. Then it gets dangerous. Then it, ultimately, puts our main character nose to nose with mortality and her own legacy, which is something everyone across time has come to at some point. The play really aims for a timelessness. 

RF: In what ways has this work changed since inception, and in what ways do you hope it will develop moving forwards? 

LG: So many ways. Just last week I cut a whole character. And I'm continuing to rearrange scenes and revelations as I craft the larger story that erupts from the smaller ones. That's kinda vague but it means that this play is still very much in a kind of excavation and discovery. The work we'll do for these readings will have a huge impact on this play. 

RF: Thanks again, Lauren. I'm really looking forward to seeing this play action!

The Rough Reading Series is Pay What You Can, and is wrapping up with "The Revolutionists" by Lauren Gunderson, playing May 18th at 7:30pm at 424 Santa Teresa, Stanford University, and May 19th at 7pm at the Tides Theatre, San Francisco. 

Read more about "The Revolutionists", Lauren Gunderson, and the Rough Reading Series at  Playwrightsfoundation.org.

Save a Seat with an RSVP! Email rsvp@playwrightsfoundation.org or call 415.626.2176.

* Member of Actors' Equity Association

Interview with a Playwright: Lauren Yee

The 2015 Season of Rough Readings is now in full swing, granting audiences the rare chance to see up-close and personal readings of new plays in early draft form. We're continuing with King of the Yees, a brilliant new work by playwright Lauren Yee. We were able to speak with her about her work and process, and she's shared some wonderful insight below:

Rachel Finkelstein: Thanks for your time! King of the Yees touches upon some of the issues you face as a woman of Chinese ancestry, and I know you're a Fellow at the Women’s Project Playwrights Lab and a member of the Ma-Yi Theatre Writers Lab. As a playwright, what do you most hope to communicate about the intersection of culture and gender as it appears in your work?

Lauren Yee: I love it when cultures smash up against one another and I can make connections between seemingly disparate communities. King of the Yees reflects that in spades for me. To me, this play is a parent-child story and all those questions and stories you sometimes forget to ask about. It's also about those contradictory feelings on where we come from--what we love, what we don't, all the strange and wonderful things that reflect who you are.

RF: How did you go about partnering with the Contemporary Drama Working Group at UC Berkeley on this work, and what does that partnership entail?

Lauren Yee

LY: Because King of the Yees  is set in San Francisco Chinatown and is very much a local story, I really wanted to find different ways of introducing King of the Yees  to the Bay Area, and I'd heard great things from other playwrights about working with Berkeley's Contemporary Drama Working Group.

So now I have the really great opportunity to hear the play out loud in the Bay Area two times in April. After the UC Berkeley reading, I'm looking forward to making some changes, and I'm also really looking forward to working with Dennis Yen, one of my lead actors in both readings. We previously worked together on the play at a workshop in North Carolina at UNC Chapel Hill.

RF: This play deals with a lot of surrealism and completely obliterates the fourth wall in the process -- what got you going in this direction?

LY: For me, King of the Yees starts from a very real, grounded place and explodes outwards as we and our protagonist go through the journey of the play. I love asking the question of "how is this theatrical?" It also reflects a general trajectory in my writing thus far--when I first began writing, I started from a place of heightened realism, big farce, and have gradually continued my exploration of what it means to be big and theatrical and formally inventive. I want to write plays that surprise me as I'm writing them, and hopefully that translates to a satisfying experience for an audience, too.

RF: From what I've seen, I'm sure it will! Now, your father plays a huge role in this work - what level of involvement did your father have in the creation of the play?

LY: Absolutely none! Though he definitely did have a lot of ideas about what the play should be about, which was particularly interesting when he suggested things that had actually made their way into the play already. And I think I'm a writer who's deeply invested in strong character voices, so hearing a strong voice for this play really helped me to jumpstart it more quickly than usual.

RF: It really shows in the work. Thank you so much for sharing, Lauren!

The Rough Reading Series is Pay What You Can, and continues with "King of the Yees" by Lauren Yee, playing April 20th at 7:30pm at 424 Santa Teresa, Stanford University, and April 21st at 7pm at the Tides Theatre, San Francisco. 

Read more about "King of the Yees", Lauren Yee, and the Rough Reading Series at  Playwrightsfoundation.org. Save a Seat with an RSVP! Email rsvp@playwrightsfoundation.org or call 415.626.2176.

*Member of Actor's Equity Association

Interview with a Playwright: Erin Bregman

The 2015 Season of Rough Readings is now in full swing for the Winter and Spring seasons! Continuing over the next few months, we will be presenting audiences with up-close and personal readings of new plays in early draft form. Read more about Erin Bregman, The Lady Onstage, and the Rough Reading series at playwrightsfoundation.org

The March Rough Reading features The Lady Onstage, a new work by Erin Bregman. We were able to ask her a few questions about her work  -- read on below!

Rachel Finkelstein: Thank you for speaking with me! To start off, I'd love to hear about what drew you to write about Olga Knipper.

Erin Bregman

Erin Bregman: Actually, it was something that Graham [The Lady Onstage director M. Graham Smith] and Lauren [The Lady Onstage performer Lauren Bloom*] had been working on for a couple of years before they asked me to get involved. I jumped in mostly because I love Graham as a director, and totally trusted anything he would set out to create. But, I had never heard of Olga Knipper before starting this project. This is my first time working with Lauren, and it's been a blast, and have felt very lucky at every step that they asked me to join the team.

Then Graham mailed me a couple of books to read. One was a collection of letters written between Knipper and Checkhov, and the other was a biography about Olga. Her life is a great story in and of itself, and as soon as I started reading about her, I was hooked.

Ironically, it seems fitting that I was drawn to this piece as much for the collaboration as for the content. So much of what made Olga's work great and lasting was that she did it in the context of intense collaboration. So that's a nice accidental parallel!

RF: It is! So, how did you go about understanding Knipper's life and her impact on modern theater?

EB: One thing that Graham said at the beginning of this collaboration that has stuck with me was that there was a point early in Olga's career where she was just at the beginning of something great, and she didn't know it yet. She was working her ass off day in and out (the rehearsal and performance schedule she had definitely wasn't equity approved!), and hadn't yet come into the career she would later have. So that's the part I understand and identify with the most. I am just at the beginning of my own career as a writer, and have no idea where it will go. I'd be thrilled to have 1/1,000th the impact Olga seems to have had!

RF: Let's hope you do! I've noticed that this play is distinctly "you", but I also see some Chekhov seeping in here and there -- is that an intentional callback to Knipper's role as the "originator of the leading female roles in Chekhov's four major plays"?

EB: It's interesting that you say that. I can't say that I know Chekhov's work well enough to be able to distinguish what in this piece is me, and what might be Chekhov seeping in. However, As Knipper is the originator of the leading female roles in Chekhov's plays, [his work] is definitely a big part of her story.

RF: I can certainly see that in the play. Why did you choose to make this work a one-woman play? 

EB:  The last two pieces I've spent a lot of time working on have been 13+ person plays, which are great fun to write, but a one-woman play is a whole lot more manageable. Especially if you're trying to write a good draft in a year. Plus, that was the deal!

RF: I can imagine! As a quick follow-up, I know that in the 2013 BAPF, your play Before & After utilized actors playing multiple roles -- did the BAPF development process help you in writing multiple characters for one actor in The Lady Onstage?

EB: The development process from any play is going to impact how you work on the next one -- it's all just another tool in the toolbox.

RF: Well, I'm excited to see it in action next week -- thank you for sharing with us!

The Rough Reading Series is Pay What You Can, and continues with "The Lady Onstage" by Erin Bregman, playing March 9th at 7:30pm at 424 Santa Teresa, Stanford University, and March 10th at 7pm at the Tides Theatre, San Francisco. 

Read more about "The Lady Onstage", Erin Bregman, and the Rough Reading Series at  Playwrightsfoundation.org. Save a Seat with an RSVP! Email rsvp@playwrightsfoundation.org or call 415.626.2176.

*Member of Actor's Equity Association

Interview with a Playwright: Mike Lew

The 2015 Season of Rough Readings is now in full swing for the Winter and Spring seasons! Continuing over the next few months, we will be presenting audiences with up-close and personal readings of new plays in early draft form. Read more about Mike Lew, Teenage Dick, and the Rough Reading series at playwrightsfoundation.org

The February Rough Reading features Teenage Dick, a new work by the Mike Lew. We had the opportunity to ask him a few quick questions to share  -- keep checking back to find more playwright insight!

Rachel Finkelstein: Thank you for coming in! I know this play is a commission from The Apothetae theater company in New York -- how did you get involved with the group? 

Mike Lew: "Teenage Dick" is the product of an almost decade-long conversation I've been having with Gregg Mozgala, one of my favorite actors. Gregg has cerebral palsy, and he founded The Apothetae out of the desire to mount plays that explore and illuminate "the Disabled Experience."

Mike Lew

I've often felt a kinship with Gregg in terms of our mutual goal of wanting to broaden the range of perspectives being presented onstage. In 2006 I wrote a piece for Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts where I said that as a writer I'm not as interested in exploring diversity as an end in itself (although diversity is often a byproduct), whereas as a director/producer I'm more invested in "nontraditional casting" as a means for balancing the inequity of representation I'd observed in the industry. Since then, my politics on the writing side have shifted. I've come to recognize that I have to build diversity into my storytelling or it might not happen downstream. So my hopes for this play are multiform: to re-examine tired tropes about the disabled, create stories for people we're not otherwise seeing, hire more disabled artists, and carry out a ground-up reconsideration of how theaters embrace the mantle of inclusion (not just in terms of the art but the very physical plant).

RF: So going off of that, how did you go about understanding and researching the "disabled experience" for Teenage Dick?

ML: My understanding is still evolving and I don't presume it will ever be fully complete given that everyone's experiences are different. To be clear, this isn't a research piece exploring the physical reality of a specific affliction (though it is mentioned that Richard's character has CP and that his best friend Buck is a wheelchair user from an unspecified etiology). Instead, this play is more about clocking social dynamics - the way we tend to project assumptions onto people rather than taking them in. Under Elizabethan conventions, Richard is evil because he's disabled. Today, we tend to think of the disabled as sainted just because they're disabled. Both of these constructs are traps.

That said, it's still my responsibility to play-test this work with as wide an audience as possible. I'm writing about an experience that isn't my own, so part of this workshop process is making myself accountable to people whose experiences run deeper than mine.

RF: That's definitely important to keep in mind. When reading the play, I've noticed that it has quite a bit of distinct stage direction, such as the lighting direction and set design. Do you usually have such a clear vision for the look of the performance?

ML: As playwrights we have to think in three dimensions; I'm sick of plays destined for a life on music stands only. And as theater-makers we've GOT to get out of photo-realistic-NYC-loft mode and really transport the audience - put their imaginations to work. My play "Tiger Style!" requires set pieces that can double as locations in both Irvine and Shenzen, so as to portray the locales as two sides of the same coin. "Bike America" requires a set where the actors can go cross-country biking in motion onstage.

In this play specifically, I wanted to create a stark distinction between Richard's mental space and his reality. That distinction manifests itself through set pieces that seemingly coalesce around him, and in stark lighting contrasts, and also in Richard's use of language (which is more elevated and arcane in his head and more pedestrian out in the world). In that way the acting and design are meant to reinforce each other.

I'm a big fan of playing with the actors - of getting in a room and adjusting the script based on the actors' impulses. That sense of play extends to designers as well. I wanted to give the designers a strong starting point in terms of the physical space, if anything just so we can all start riffing. I'm totally fascinated with designers; just like the actors, they've got a skill set I'll never possess.

RF: It's refreshing to see! Finally, I have to ask what drew you to choose which aspects of Shakespeare's Richard III you wanted to stay more faithful to?


ML: I really don't feel a particular reverence for staying true to the source material. If you want to see a faithful production of Richard III it's not going to be too hard to find it elsewhere. But what I did want to do is faithfully recreate Richard's spirit - his silver-tongued eloquence, his ambitions, his sense of injustice - all within a decidedly modern context (and in high school!). And then on top of that I layered in a bunch of cheeky winking references for anyone who cares to go digging.

RF: I'll be sure to keep an eye out. Thank you for your time!  

The Rough Reading Series is Pay What You Can, and continues with "Teenage Dick" by Mike Lew, playing February 9th at 7:30pm at Roble Hall, Stanford University, and February 10th at 7pm at the Tides Theatre, San Francisco. 

Read more about "Teenage Dick", Mike Lew, and the Rough Reading Series at Playwrightsfoundation.org. Save a Seat with an RSVP! Email rsvp@playwrightsfoundation.org or call 415.626.2176.

Inside the Des Voix Mind: Michelle Haner on Léonore Confino and "One Upon Another"

For a translator, taking on the work of a contemporary playwright, especially one as playful and provocative as Léonore Confino, can be a bit like taking a trip down the rabbit-hole.  While hanging out the unknown found there, ideally, that time is spent not just obsessing over the "blades of grass" (the word-to-word stuff), but also discovering a greater landscape, one forged of rhythms, sounds, atmospheres, themes and of course characters. 

Michelle Haner, Translator

In the process of rendering Confino’s world from French to English, questions of translation range from the logistically banal (should I transpose euros, kilos and the names of products and supermarkets?) to the culturally subtle (how to translate that sense of lightness, irony, melancholy or “je ne sais quoi” embedded in a particular turn of phrase?)

In Confino’s portrait of a contemporary French family, three generations “one upon another”, alternately imploding and exploding, the voices of the characters are a particularly rich, vital part of her landscape. Voices come from beyond the grave; voices lose their bodies and resonate through the pre-fabricated house. Seeking to capture their distinct, vital qualities in translation has been both exciting – and particularly challenging.  There is the broken, breathless, sometimes frantic voice of the over-taxed mother; the loving, but ‘oft evasive voice of the scientist –husband; the ironic, bitter, profanity-laced voice of the wheel chair bound grandfather.  Most powerful, poignant and challenging are the voices of the children, smart, savvy, funny, self-aware and heart breaking in their brutality, their nihilism, their despair. Theirs is a language infiltrated with new tech-inspired inventions and pop cultural references, not to mention such French adolescent mainstays as Anglicism’s and “vers-langue” (a popular French slang created by saying words literally backwards).

Léonore Confino, Playwright

It is as much through the specificity of these voices – as through her unique mix of drama and slapstick, tragedy and comedy, real and surreal – that Confino probes the French family of today, offering up a portrait of a society in flux, in tension, in uncertainty and self-reflection. 

Having so enjoyed the opportunity to spend this time exploring Confino’s world, the translator’s humble hope is simply that she has been somewhat successful in rendering up an English-language version, that Confino’s vision may be shared with a wider audience.

-Michelle Haner, Translator of One Upon Another by Léonore Confino.




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Staged Readings of "Les uns sur les autres" or One Upon Another by Léonore Confino will be on Saturday, May 10 @ 2pm and Sunday, May 11 @ 7:30pm at the Tides Theatre, as a part of the Des Voix Festival. 

Des Voix...Biennial 2014: A Festival of New French Plays and Cinema features the American Premiere of Communiqué n˚10, three new French Plays in translation, five french film screenings and a Bal Littéraire, a New Play Night Club.  

Purchase a Full Festival Pass here and gain access to every reading, film, Bal Littéraire and your choice of Communique n˚10 performance during Des Voix!

Check out the Des Voix Festival website for more information, including links to buy tickets, a full festival schedule and directions on how to find where the Left Bank Meets the Left Coast.