Visit Us and Chat!

Chat with us -- tell us, ask us, tell us your thoughts.

We loved Goldie, Max & Milk by Karen Hartman -- the other night at ACT. Was so funny and moving! A truly wonderous night -- even at music stands the play carries you into this crazy real world, the uncontrolable, unschedulable, unpredicatble one that YOU live, for real.
Carrie Paff rocked so bad as Max and the entire cast -- along with Jonathan Moscone directing -- were wonderous! Thank you to Dena Martinez, Carrie Paff, Jeri Lynn Cohen, Ryan Tasker and Kate Jopson for your guts!

If you missed, be aware -- these readings are wonderful magic: see 100 Planes by Lila Rose Kaplan on Dec 15 @ Shotgun!

Interview with BAPF Playwright Lauren Yee

PF: Can you talk a little about the inspiration for Our Peculiar Institution and your process in writing it?

Lauren Yee: I wanted to write a play about minstrelsy, and I spent a month at the American Antiquarian Society in Massachusetts actually researching source material from 19^th century minstrel shows. The play, ultimately, is not a minstrel show, but it springs out of a close investigation of the time period where minstrelsy was an acceptable and, honestly, extremely popular form of entertainment. What I tried to do was mine that mindset in a 21^st century context and in doing so, I began to question the reductionist attitude towards morality that exists nowadays. It’s universally acceptable to say that slavery was bad and people should be free; yet, we continue to see a world where these antiquated, morally objectionable practices live on in subtler forms.

For me, revision is always a significant part of the writing process, since so much of what the play is most centrally “about” usually becomes clear by my second or third crack at the play. When I write, I will typically come up with far more material than I need, and a majority of my time will be spent culling this material, rewriting scenes, and filling in holes.

For Our Peculiar Institution, I basically followed this path, but also started with several elements I knew I wanted to include and then figured out different ways to make these pieces logically fit. Music—one song in particular--was one element that I was hoping to fit in, and a minstrel archetypal character was another.

PF: Some of us saw your play Ching Chong Chinaman at Impact last fall or may be familiar with some of your other work. Where do you feel this play fits with your work. How is it different from other plays you’ve written? What were some of the challenges of this piece?

LY: A sense of heightened realism runs throughout my work and often this translates into something lighter and comedic, as with Ching Chong Chinaman. While significantly more realistic and linear in its structure than some of my other work, Our Peculiar Institution also draws from this vein of lightness, which I like to think of it as “cheerfulness in the face of absurdity.”

Obviously, though, one of the challenges of writing this particular piece is my unfamiliarity with many different aspects of the play—geography, time period. In putting characters into absurd, unlikely situations, you have to grapple with balancing a rather off-kilter tone with chronological and geographic accuracy. Also, in my Asian American-themed work, I have a certain surefootedness that I didn’t have here, delving into issues that were specifically about the relationships between African Americans and whites, then and now. The wisdom is that you write about what you know, and for me, the challenge was finding something I could relate to within the story I wanted to tell.

PF: Given that you’ve grown up in the Bay Area theatre community and have recently begun to experience (and have success!) in other cities and other theatre communities, how would you characterize the Bay Area theatre scene? What do you feel it has done for you as an artist?

LY: The closeness of the Bay Area theater community is something that has always appealed to me. It’s more manageable, and as much as we bemoan the lack of X available to us here, it’s a place that has a little bit of everything.

Still, logistically, just the way that the Bay Area is laid out often makes it difficult to foster the kind of energy that you need for a healthy theater community. You don’t have a single transportation system like New York, where you can get from one side of the Bay to the other for two dollars, and that hinders the actors and the audiences from getting to where they want to be. I also think we in the Bay Area have a slight complex about being so far from New York—note how excited Bay Area folk are when a show transfers to New York.

Also, as someone who frequently writes for actors of color, I get anxious sometimes wondering whether I will be able to get the right people I need for my plays and whether that will ultimately interfere with productions.

PF: You’ve got a lot of new things coming up. What are you excited about and what’s next for you?

LY: In 2010, Ching Chong Chinaman gets two more productions, at New York’s Pan Asian Rep and Seattle’s SIS Productions, so it’ll be fun to see still more interpretations of the play.

And I’ll be heading to San Diego in the fall to start my MFA in playwriting at UCSD. It’s a tiny program (with one or two people in a class every year) with the resources to keep me busy and also help me build the body of work I need to move onto the next step in my career.

But I expect I’ll be in the Bay Area pretty frequently; it’s hard to stay away.

Interview with Martha Jane Kaufman

BAPF Playwright Martha Jane Kaufman was interviewed by Sonia Fernandez, PF Literary and Administrative Director.

Sonia Fernandez: How did you get started on your BASH! Play, House and Junction?

Martha Jane Kaufman: The election of Barack Obama led to a lot of conversations about how we were moving into a post-race world. But I still saw racism built into the worlds around me, particularly working in Oakland Public Schools. As a white person, I wanted some models and approaches for resistance so I started researching the underground railroad. I was interested in the roles and approaches of white people in that struggle. I found a lot of fascinating stories, but, of course, the characters I found were not simply heroes. In many ways they reflected the racism that they were resisting. This is clearer nearly 200 years later and allowed me to see how we are all steeped in the attitudes of our time. When the government and culture says that you can own another human being what does it take to start to see that person as human? I think this is a very important question for our time because slavery is not that far behind us and we are still dealing with that inheritance. Of course, my piece is written from my perspective as a white person and would not be the story everyone would tell. The questions that have come to the surface as I’ve been engaging with these characters and stories have allowed me to look more critically and compassionately at the present.

SF: You’re a recent transplant to the Bay Area. What’s it like to be here at this moment in time, and how has it affected your work?

MJK: Well, I’ve started taking astrology a lot more seriously… (lol) No, but actually, I’ve found the writing/performance/theater scene here in the Bay to be edgy, imaginative and insightful. People working in all media are constantly blending genres, mixing media, and eroding the boundaries between disciplines, which is how I feel most comfortable as an artist since I am also a dancer. I’m inspired by how people here manage to do a lot with very little in terms of financial support, space, materials, and time. I’ve found myself surrounded by articulate, creative, and socially conscious artists making street theater, puppets, spoken-word performances, and all of it feeds my work and ideas. Plus, friends invite me to tackle hard questions in my work, hold me accountable and push my boundaries. And, everyone wants to collaborate! Since I got here less than a year ago, I’ve worked on a puppet show for a community garden, a performance piece in which the costumes were made from newspapers, and two dance/spoken-word pieces that were staged in the corner of a living room. And of course, the amazing weather and freshly grown food only feeds a writers soul …


SF: What about the festival itself?

MJK: I love spending time writing and talking with other writers so I am excited about that aspect. And I’m also excited to work with a dramaturg [Jayne Wenger] and actors on this piece - one that still feels so fresh to me- I’ve never done something like this before. Usually I let ideas incubate a lot longer before bringing a director and actors into the picture. I didn’t know my director, Molly Aaronson Gelb, but as it turns out, she also went to Wesleyan, so we share an artistic vocabulary right from the start. I’m very eager to get started with the process!

SF: What do you have on the horizon?

MJK: After the festival I’m going to return to a full length piece I’ve been working on for a while, called A Live Dress, that focuses on the Yiddish Theater, but from a very contemporary point of view, and plays with gender roles, sexuality and the blending of post post modern and traditional art forms. Like other of my plays, the world of the play crosses the time/space continuum. I’m also thinking about the pros and cons of attending graduate school in playwriting – I’ll let you know what I decide!

Interview with BAPF Playwright Robert Henry Johnson

PF Associate Artistic Director Jonathan Spector: You've been a choreographer for much of your Artistic life. How did you begin writing plays?

Robert Henry Johnson: Actually, I grew up in theater. I started out in the theater as an assistant director at the age of three. No, I’m serious. I was the resident assistant director to the Black Light Explosion Company here in San Francisco. My mother was a star member of the ensemble, and she brought me with her to rehearsals all the time. I was quite a disruptive child I was told--all over the place making trouble for everybody.

One day, Keith – the director - announced to the cast, “Okay, everybody. I have a new assistant director I’d like to introduce to you. Everybody meet Bobby.” My mom said I had the strangest look on my face and it completely transformed my relationship with the theater. So that was my first introduction to plays.

For my seventh birthday my mother bought me a yellow toy typewriter. I wrote my first play about two things: spirituality and dance. It was a play about angels and demons and how dance was looked upon as something demonic and the angels had to try to find their relationship with dance as a form of worship and battle. I’m still passionate about those two things. A year later, I graduated to a black Smith Corona antique. The typewriter became my world. I wrote all the time. Instead of going outside to play with the other children, I stayed in and wrote short plays on my typewriter.

J.S.: How is your work as a playwright informed by your dance training and work as a choreographer?

RHJ: Unfortunately we live in a country where art disciplines are separate. I am not sure when the disciplines became chopped up into itty bitty pieces of sushi-like morsels. In other words, if you are a dancer, you are just that and only that. If you are a choreographer, you are that and only that. In my experience throughout my career, I found that that was never true.

Originally when I started my dance company in 1993, I wanted to make work that featured my writing skills. I wanted the artists I worked with to handle text, to speak aloud on stage while dancing. It was going to be a dance/theater company. But the dancers I procured did not know about handling text, and at the time I did not have the craft to train them. I compromised and we became a mostly-dancing-dance company. However, many of my pieces included text. Every season I would make a solo for myself in which I would recite monologues, poetry, prose. It was an aesthetic that was clearly my signature style, and the audience found it refreshing and entertaining. Dance critic Rita Felciano made a statement about my choreography. She said, “Things really start to cook when Johnson the choreographer meets Johnson the writer.” I think that is true.

Of course words and movement can arguably be exacted as quite different mediums. The wonder of how they can be merged to create a seamlessly and equally valued aesthetic is in how the playwright and/or director crafts these disciplines, using them as tools to communicate something impressionable and evocative to the audience. Of course, who knows how verse or dance or a moment in silence or a vocal lilt or the color of a costume will fall on the human heart? This is the exciting part about merging the disciplines.

The Othello Papers does not involve dance. Language dominates this play, though I think there’s a humorous tango between Caliban and Cleopatra. Hopefully, for the sake of this interview, it’ll make the edits.

Instead, I like to think of The Othello Papers as a kind of opera. Maybe it isn’t. And that’s ok. We’re still in the development stages. That’s why everybody should come out and see it. Before it hits Broadway. Wink, wink.

JS: What was the genesis of the Othello Papers?

RHJ: A costume. Well, originally, I wanted to design a one-man show in which I could wear an interesting costume on stage. In my mind, that looked like something Elizabethan inspired. But, since then, I discovered playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, and it has put me on a mission to create black characters for the theater that are not popularly seen or offered by history or the media. As I came closer to realizing what the project would look like, I began to ask myself, “Why is this black man dressed like a seventeenth century European?” This began my search for the black presence in old time Euroland. That lead me to Othello, and the play.

JS: As a native San Franciscan, and someone who has been making work here
your entire life, does your work have a specifically Bay Area flavor?

RHJ: I’m sure it does but I wouldn’t know what that was or how to explain it.

JS: What's up next for you?

RHJ: I’m committed to further developing The Othello Papers and getting it a world premiere in 2011. And then, there are the fifty-one drafts of unfinished plays stacked neatly in my room. They haunt me when the sun goes down. All the characters of would be plays are standing in a line in full costume waiting their turn to speak to me and tell me who they are and what they want: Josephine Baker, a French student architect without a name, a black transvestite decocooning in a brownstone in New York City, the three headed dog who guards the brownstone, a young man who keeps blowing a trumpet very badly and a woman with a pink parasol who swears it wasn’t the wind that destroyed New Orleans.

Click here to buy a Festival pass!

Interview with Deborah Stein

We caught up with Deborah Stein, whose play Natasha and the Coat was part of this year's in the ROUGH Reading Series and will now be part of the Bay Area Playwrights Festival.

PF: Last time we talked to you was before Natasha and the Coat was in our Rough reading series. What did you learn about the play? How is it changing?

Deborah Stein: The ITR workshop was maybe the most practically useful workshop I've ever had, since it came so early in the play's development - still in the throes of becoming a play - I rewrote almost the entire second half during the three days I spent in the Bay Area, and for the two readings tried out two different endings. Having Corey and Naomi as part of the process was incredibly instructive, as they actually were able to provide information and background on some of the characters and cultures in the play that I hadn't yet researched. I also decided to shift the focus of the play slightly, making a different character the one whose journey we follow. So, my rewrites are focusing on building this character and also fleshing out the research-based aspects of the play. I think it might end up being a two-act play...I've never written anything with an intermission, so that's freaking me out, in a good way.


PF:What’s exciting going on in your life with your shows? How are you feeling coming into the Festival?

It's an exciting time! I'm gearing up to join Pig Iron Theatre Company in the creation of their next piece, Welcome to Yuba City, and I'm casting a workshop of my play Lifeboats which will be the next play of my own that I produce with my company, Workhaus Collective in Minneapolis. We just finished a sold-out run of Tory Stewart's play 800 Words, which was awesome. Also I just received a 2009-2011 Bush Artist Fellowship. So, exciting stuff--and really looking forward to some weeks in the Bay Area, it can't get here soon enough (except for all those rewrites I need to get done...).

From our interview with Deborah for ROUGH last May:

Jonathan Spector: In addition to writing plays as an individual artist, you have also collaborated multiple times with both Pig Iron Theater Company and director Lear DeBessonet on developing work with and for a specific company. How does the process differ when you're developing a piece specifically with a company?

Deborah Stein: Writing with and for specific actors has been one of the great joys of my creative life. When I write for an ensemble, the creation of character, story, rhythm, and playworld is a collective endeavor. There is often a sense that only these actors could play these roles; while I know lots of writers who would find this limiting, I find it incredibly invigorating and inspiring to know who I am writing for, and to collaborate intimately with them on how the character evolves from the clay. Working with a company, there is collective authorship: I work alongside the director, actors, and designers to create the world of the play. There is a sense of baton-passing, where at various points we are each in the lead, creating all together. Writing independently, I strive to create scripts that are whole yet allow enough space for this kind of active participation from future collaborators.


JS: Along with PF alum Dominic Orlando, you run the playwright driven company the Workhaus Collective in Minneapolis. What was the genesis of this company and how has it grown and changed over the course of the three years?

DS: The playwrights of Workhaus are mostly Minneapolis transplants, drawn to the Twin Cities by the resources of the Playwrights’ Center and the city’s awesome live-ability. The idea behind Workhaus was to create a home for our plays in the city after our scripts had moved beyond the development stages supported by the Playwrights’ Center. Inspired by 13P in New York and also our own experiences producing our own work elsewhere, we are also really committed to creating opportunities for unmediated interaction between playwrights and audiences. Each playwright becomes the Artistic Director for the duration of their production, and is involved in conceptualizing everything from set design to marketing as part of the dramaturgy, part of the audience’s experience of the play. We have produced seven plays in three years. Right now we’re finishing our second season as company in residence at the Playwrights’ Center and gearing up for a third, which will include new plays by me, Dominic, and Alan Berks.


JS: What as the genesis of Natasha and the Coat?

DS: My first job after graduate school was very similar to Natasha’s—I was hired by a vintage clothing wholesaler to design a marketing campaign for her local Hasidic-run dry cleaner. I got the job over Craigslist and lasted about eight days at the job. The parting was amicable—the clash of cultures was too intense; the cauldron of tradition, commerce, and gender dynamics was impossible for any of us to navigate. I grew up in a pretty secular Jewish household in New York, during the years that the Lower East Side and Williamsburg were gentrified. The swiftness with which this process happened was pretty surreal—to find myself bar-hopping on the same street where my grandfather, a Polish immigrant, worked sewing buttonholes forced me to reckon with how quickly the city, and my family, had changed. This reckoning was kind of so overwhelming that I decided to avoid it. This play, which is the most personal piece I have written—and which I began five years ago and then literally stuffed in a drawer, unfinished—is my belated attempt to wrestle with this legacy and these stories.


JS: What's up next for you?

DS: This summer, I’ll be back in the Bay Area to continue working on Natasha and the Coat; then I’ll be in Philadelphia working with Pig Iron on a new piece called Welcome to Yuba City. This fall, my play God Save Gertrude will be at the Theatre @ Boston Court in Pasadena.