Retreating for the Summer, but Not Heading Backward

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/02/theater/summer-residency-playwrights-theater.html

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I went to the O’Neill having had two readings of “it’s not a trip it’s a journey,” but without having had the opportunity to really workshop the play. The process at the O’Neill starts with what they call a dream design — when designers discuss ideas and questions that came up for them as they read the piece. This session was incredibly helpful to me as it unearthed themes that I had not consciously thought through before.

The play is about June, a black woman who convinces three of her friends to embark on a road trip. We see the characters in intimate spaces, in hotel rooms and in a car, and then at real public settings in the wide open United States. Those spaces include Lucy the Elephant, a six-story wood and tin elephant replica, in New Jersey; the largest ball of twine in Kansas; and the Grand Canyon in Arizona.

This dream session put into words and images some of the tensions that exist between the characters. It also delved into the difficulty of creating the real spaces onstage. Lighting and sound cues could signal whether we were inside the car, or outside, but how would we depict Lucy the Elephant? We brainstormed solutions big and small. Lastly, the session gave me and my director, Nicole A. Watson, insight into how the play wants to work.

The next five days were filled with conversations with the cast, director, dramaturge and other supporters and observers we had in the room. I was able to discover which aspects of the play needed more exploration and spent the evenings rewriting. Two public readings were wonderfully executed by the cast and crew, and it was lovely to watch how the audience connected to the characters. The play found firmer ground, coming alive in a way I hadn’t seen.

There is still work to be done, but I now feel that much of that work will need to happen as the play reaches production, and as the possibilities and limitations of fully staging it come to the forefront.

Midway through my residency, there was a Q. and A. with the public, and someone asked me to describe my playwriting process. I answered that my process was to discover a process. I hope it didn’t sound ironic — I was being completely honest. I’d never written a play before.

Cartooning is my profession, and I’d come to the Ground Floor with a plan to adapt my unpublished graphic memoir about suicidal depression, the Great Recession, and millennial malaise into a musical comedy. At this point I should probably mention that I’d never written a song before, either.

But that’s the beauty of the Ground Floor. Its name isn’t a marketing gimmick. The program really did provide me with the space to lay the foundation of a play at its very inception, even though my only prior experience in theater had been selling tickets in the Berkeley Rep box office. (Shout-out to box officers nationwide. Put butts in seats and dream big!) Then all of a sudden, there I was as a resident artist, trying to discover a process for my process.

I was assigned to the Tony Kushner room. No pressure.

Step one: commandeer all of the office supplies I can lay my hands on.

Step two: organize the multicolored index cards into neat little stacks.

Step three: arrange the pens alphabetically by brand.

Step four: write a musical comedy. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that for most of the residency I struggled with impostor syndrome. But if there’s any place on earth to be racked with profound insecurity, it’s the Ground Floor. Everyone was fantastically supportive. There was always hot water for tea, always a moment to chat, always an abundance of office supplies to commandeer and categorize.

My graphic memoir was — and still is — a work in progress, so adapting it into a musical comedy was a bit like trying to walk a tightrope strung between swaying trees. Both projects were in flux. On good days it meant I’d find a new footing on one that also stabilized the other; on bad days it meant I was thrown for a loop. But it’s a testament to the serene atmosphere of the Ground Floor that my faltering never felt like failure. I was allowed to tentatively, haltingly, find my process.

Step five: glom onto brilliant role models.

Cartoons are created in isolation. Theater ain’t. By the end of my two-week stint, I had a rough outline, a song list, a few sketchy scenes, but most importantly a wealth of inspiration from the other resident artists — Alex Borinsky, Dave Harris, Vanessa Garcia & Vicky Collado, Shaun & Abigail Bengson, Sarah Gancher, Emily Feldman, Julia Izumi, Sanaz Toossi, and Itamar Moses.

Step six: let’s all break legs.

Dear M,

O. K. so first: we 16 artists sleep in a row of converted horse stables. It’s strangely cozy, and there’s a thick canvas flap that hangs in the front that you can let down or tie up. Beyond the flap is a looooong wooden table with chairs, candles, wildflowers, and artists. It’s a rustic, intimate, co-working space in rural Pennsylvania where we talk low and feed off the focus and buzz of the art-making right next to us. Nature sounds abound: cicadas, frogs, crickets, rain, thunder, leaves, footfall.

Nature seems to embolden one’s art. Larissa and I walk the grounds and swat away flies and move through space — lush and teeming — and suddenly we’re uninterested in making our EST/Sloan commission (a play about women pilots and space flight and what it takes to get off the ground) small and tidy; we want to explode it with all the dynamic lifefulness it craves.

We dream up cast size and doubling and the movement vocabulary of the playworld. We explore a hundred kinds of human flight in every nonliteral way we can think of. We use our bodies. We chop wood. We wash dishes.

We ask other artists the questions our characters are asking: What have you sacrificed to move through this world with fewer obstacles? How do you know whether or not you deserve something? When you succeed, is it more helpful to be thought of as normal or as exceptional? (Why?) FGP has somehow created a space of collaborative reflection and vulnerability. (How?)

Cross-pollinating with other artists is alchemical. It shakes up one’s process to spend a couple hours each day communally exploring someone else’s project: glam rock, Google privacy conditions, erotica workshop. Could we create our own structure for cross-pollination among our artist friends back home? What form would that take?

When I was in grad school, Paula Vogel once told us: As you write, remember the pleasures of the stage. And I’ve held onto that, but I’ve forgotten about the pleasures of the process — how to invite them, insist upon them. How to do this at home? I don’t know yet.

But I’m leaving with spaciousness in our playworld, and an effervescence I hadn’t realized I’d lost. And I can feel the earth under my feet again — no small thing, given how stressy and ungrounded I was when I arrived.

We culminated in a reading of new pages with all of us sitting in the grass under the night sky with the actors lit by our flashlights. So fitting and luminous for a play about women pilots fighting to go to space. M, it was magical. And moving. Transient, tender, exquisite. How do we get more of this in our lives?

Love,

L

Of the three actors hired to present a reading of my play-in-progress (then titled) “Untitled Adoption Play,” only one — Zarah Shejule — fit her character description: Sharon is described as a 30-something black or Afro-Latina woman married to a 30-something white man named Hairy and living in gentrified East Austin, Texas.

When Hairy and Sharon (also known as Sherri) decide to adopt Ryshi, a 12-year-old black foster care youth with special needs, they are confronted with the ugly realities of their marriage and “good” intentions.

I applied to PlySpace, a new artist residency program in Muncie, Indiana, with only eight introductory pages of what I imagined would be the penultimate scene. Hairy gives his wife an ultimatum: either they abandon their adopted son or get divorced. Little does Hairy know that Sharon has faked her infertility and finds herself now pregnant with Hairy’s biological child.

Tyler Rainer wasn’t 6 feet tall and growing, as Ryshi is described. Unlike Hairy, Jakob Winter wasn’t in his 30s and didn’t sport a full beard and a man-bun. And despite my best outreach efforts, I couldn’t find a 50-year-old Latina to play a fourth character, a case manager named Vera, so I decided I would read her, along with the stage directions.

How did I pitch this project to an arts residency in America’s hometown, the Middletown of Mike Pence’s Indiana? Very carefully. I had no idea how my work would be received or if I would be able to find actors willing to work with an unknown writer.

But such is the scrappy charm of making new theater in a small community: you work really hard with whomever and whatever is available. Zarah, Tyler and Jakob each brought thoughtful questions and feedback to every rehearsal.

In my seven-week residency, I completed a 103-page draft, culminating in a public reading in PlySpace’s gallery. In our post-performance discussion, the audience explored the play’s themes: performative “wokeness,” trauma(s), and the devastatingly underfunded foster care system.

Although my play (now creatively titled) “Hairy and Sherri” is very much set in Austin, I love that it now shares history in Muncie.

What I knew before I boarded the plane at JFK was that the exhaustion of working 362 days in the last year was hitting me, and that upon my return, I would need to be ready to race toward the exciting new challenges of leading the Repertory Theater of St. Louis into the future. I had no way of knowing how powerfully transformative those next 12 days would be, or the sheer number of potential partnerships that would be birthed.

I was one of six international artists invited to the retreat in Arles, France, which unlike most residencies was focused on our artistic lives, and renewal, rather than a specific project. Two of us found each other at a train stop in Lyon. Two more at the next stop in Avignon. The final two fellows met us at the Alyscamps estate that would be our Mecca in this creative pilgrimage.

Each day we found ourselves masters of our destinies. Our evenings, curated by Christopher Hibma, who runs Sundance’s theater programs, had us watching the sunset over rich conversations about artistic practice, inspiration, the heavy lift of innovation, relationships, possibility, futurism, fatigue and friendship. Across the table dreams were born, tears were shed, irreverent talk shows were imagined. A group of artists from the United States and Syria became family.

The retreat coincided with Les Recontres De La Photographie, filling the city with hundreds of photographic exhibitions. I spent hours moving through exhibits, from sculptures of repurposed technologies to the reconstructed ruins of the Syrian war. I sat and studied the work at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, got lost in animated virtual reality worlds, and climbed a giant felted hill to watch dark neo-noir films.

One of the most inspiring mornings was spent touring the incredible Luma Arles Parc des Ateliers complex. Even while under construction, it emanated invention and inspiration. It was a powerful reminder that the time ahead in St. Louis requires an investment in bold, ambitious ideas and a commitment to democratized access. The Great Work Begins …