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IN THIS ISSUE The Messenger:
An Interview with Playwright Jenny Connell Davis
The Cancellation of Lauren Fein: An Interview with Playwright Christopher Demos-Brown
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The Messenger:
AN INTERVIEW WITH PLAYWRIGHT JENNY CONNELL DAVIS by Sheryl Flatow
Left to right: Angela Gulner, Gracie Winchester, Margery Lowe, and Annie Fang SPOILER ALERT: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SOME INFORMATION ABOUT A KEY PLOT POINT. IF YOU WANT TO EXPERIENCE THE PLAY WITHOUT ANY PRIOR KNOWLEDGE, PLEASE READ THIS PIECE AFTER YOU SEE THE PRODUCTION.
What does a statement by a nineteenth century British philosopher have to do with Jenny Connel Davis’ The Messenger? In a way, everything. The world premiere play, a meditation on the connections between past, present, and future, is inspired by the life of Hungarian Holocaust survivor Georgia Gabor (1930-1994) and interweaves her story with that of a John Stuart Mill, 1867 young American woman facing racial discrimination in this country in 2020. For Gabor, a teacher, exposing students to the horrors she experienced during the Holocaust was something of a crusade. By contrast, the fictional characters in the play who come face-to-face with bigotry do not speak up. The overarching theme of the play is the danger, the complicity, of silence. That sentiment is as true today as it was more than 150 years ago and will be 150 years from now. “Let not anyone pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”
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“It’s such an important message from Georgia,” says Davis, who recently became PBD’s first resident playwright. “It’s central to what she was doing, to what she wanted us to know, and it was part of why I could write about this woman. I’m not Jewish, but I have family who is, and I grew up with a circle of close friends who were largely Jewish. It’s that idea of never again, never again. And to achieve ‘never again,’ people have to know what happened.” Several years ago, Roberta Golub, Gabor’s daughter, had a conversation with PBD Producing Artistic Director William Hayes in which she told him about her mother, who lost her entire family during the Holocaust. Georgia survived by her Jenny Connell Davis wits, managing to elude capture and concentration camps. She came to the United States in 1948 and, after raising a family, began teaching in 1969. She taught math for 21 years in the San Marino Unified School District in California, and sometime after the publication of her autobiography in 1981 swastikas and other anti-Semitic obscenities began turning up in her classroom and elsewhere at Huntington Middle School. This campaign of bigotry and harassment continued for years, and though Gabor repeatedly notified school administrators, no one stepped in to try to put an end to it. Things got so bad that she walked away from teaching in 1990. Fascinated by what he heard, Hayes then read Gabor’s autobiography and watched a 1984 interview about her Holocaust experience. He was convinced that her story had the makings of a powerful play, and told that to Golub. He then brought the idea to Davis, who was initially hesitant; she had never considered writing a “Holocaust play.” But she told Hayes, “Let me do some digging.” Hayes immediately sent her a link to the interview (available on YouTube). “I’m always drawn to complicated characters, especially complicated women characters,” says Davis, “and Georgia was just so compelling and fierce. WINTER 2023
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She knew who she was and what story she wanted to tell. There was such fire in her, and I thought, ‘I have to do this. But I have to figure out how to do it.’” Her research led her to riveting, unexpected places and, in the end, she did not write a Holocaust play. “I started Googling, looking for Georgia Gabor, Holocaust survivor,” she says. “I found her obituary, which led me to stories about the awful circumstances under which she had left teaching. That got me really curious about the community in which this had happened, which led to learning more about the history of racism and antiGeorgia Gabor Semitism in that community. I went down a rabbit hole, and when I came up about 45 minutes later, I knew what the play would be. I went back to Bill with something he wasn’t asking for, but he was game. He then went to Roberta with my idea, and asked if she’d commission the piece. And she did. I’m so grateful to her for talking to Bill about her mother; for being open to telling the story of a mom who was a very complicated figure; for her generosity in sharing not just Georgia’s words, but her own. I’ve had a couple of chances to talk to her, and that was seminal.” The Messenger, which runs through December 24, is a four-character play. Georgia is the only one based on an actual person, and the only one with a name; the other three characters, all women, are identified by the years their stories take place. They are 1969, a curator at The Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens in San Marino; 1993, the mother of one of Gabor’s students and a volunteer at The Huntington; and 2020, a recent high
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school graduate and former volunteer at The Huntington. The play moves back and forth in time. “I chose to use years instead of names mostly for anyone reading the play, so that every time you come back to a character you’re grounded, you know what year you’re in,” says Davis. “The characters are specific, but they’re also emblematic of a moment in time: who they are and the story they’re telling is rooted in when they are, and what they experienced then. In other words, we don’t have perspective on what we’re in the midst of until after the fact, and we certainly don’t know what’s coming. In ’69, you don’t know what’s coming in the ’70s. As I wrote the play, it helped me to remember what people knew and what they didn’t know as they tell their stories. I used Georgia’s name because the play is inspired by her experience. But beyond that, when you think of the Holocaust you think of people in concentration camps who were identified by numbers tattooed on their arms. So, let’s give the Holocaust survivor her name, and give everybody else a number.” For the most part, the play’s Georgia speaks the words of the real Georgia. Though the other characters are fictional, each of their stories is rooted in actual events. 2020 was born out of two incidents. “One just happened to take place at The Huntington,” says Davis. “It was the early days of the pandemic, and a guy walked up to a young Asian American woman, ripped off her mask, and got in her face about the ‘China virus.’ It was blatant, it was awful, and the entire community, especially The Huntington, was aghast. At the same time, there was a young Black man who was mowed down at a protest in a nearby community, just like what happened in Virginia when somebody drove a car into a crowd of protesters. “The character came easy, because I’ve spent the last 20 years working with young people,” Davis continues. “I was a high school teacher, and also helped high schoolers with the college process for a long time. I’ve had years of deep one-on-one conversations with lots of teenagers, from across the United States and around the world, about their lives. 2020 is an amalgam of a lot of kids that I've worked with, including suburban Asian American kids in communities with very high expectations.” Davis is also very familiar with people like 1993, the mother of one of Georgia’s WINTER 2023
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students who does not want her daughter exposed to stories about the Holocaust. “I live in a community where my Booster Club is full of 1993s,” she says. “People are very invested in the school system, very invested in what their kids are learning, and very invested in the idea of giving their kids a childhood like the one they had or wish they’d had. They are very protective. There’s a lot about 1993 that’s troubling, but there's part of her that just wants her kids to get three more years of innocence because she was robbed of it.” 1969’s story is inspired by material from The Huntington’s archives. “It’s a phenomenal institution with a great mission that does really good work,” says Davis. “And the documents they have are amazing.” Among the Huntington’s possessions, until they were donated to the National Archives in 2010, were the Nuremberg Laws, the original four-page document stripping German Jews of their citizenship, signed by Hitler in 1935. The papers were given to The Huntington in 1945 by General George Patton – but they were not his to give. President Eisenhower had ordered that official Nazi documents were to be collected to be used as evidence in future trials. But Patton, who grew up next door to The Huntington – which is home to the general’s incendiary papers – had other ideas. As The Washington Post reported in 2000, “the donation [was] never announced and the document [was] not formally made part of the Huntington’s collection.” “Patton gave the Nuremberg Laws to a friend who was on the board of trustees,” says Davis, “and they were put into a private archive where they languished for more than 50 years. Why did they do it, and who was responsible for the decision? Were there always people at The Huntington who knew they were there and why they were there? All of that is still unclear.” It wasn’t until 1999 that The Huntington acknowledged what it had in its possession. For The Messenger, Davis created a Huntington employee who, in 1969, comes across both the Nuremberg Laws and Patton’s correspondence, and is adamant that the public should be made aware of the documents. “In 1969, there were maybe a couple of young women who were working as curators at The Huntington,” says Davis. “Like many women who were in professional and academic positions at the time, they were having to fight tooth and nail and play with the boys in order to do that job.” So, 1969 is faced with a dilemma: go WINTER 2023
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with what her conscience is telling her to do, or “play with the boys” and assure her future at The Huntington. “You can connect the dots between all the stories thematically. They are really all the same story.” Davis, a native of Maine who now lives in Austin, TX, did not set out to be a playwright. She attended the University of Chicago and initially pursued acting, training at the city’s Court and Steppenwolf theatres. She did a lot of storefront theatre – small, non-Equity houses that are experimental and frequently hire new, young talent – but wasn’t earning a living. She stuck with acting for a couple of years, but found herself competing for roles that were not very interesting. “So, at that point I wrote my first play and applied to grad school, and that play got me into UT-Austin,” she says. “Playwriting wasn’t that big a leap. I had written a couple of plays in high school, little ones that had gotten some attention. I still love to act, but I realized that the thing I enjoy most about the rehearsal process is the table work and script analysis. So, it all came together: I was supposed to be in the theatre, but not as an actor.” It was at Chicago’s Gift Theatre that Davis’ first play was produced in 2008. Since then, her work has been seen in theatres around the country, including New York City, Seattle, Berkeley, Anaheim, Waterford CT (the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference), Minneapolis, Sarasota, and Austin, among others. Davis was introduced to PBD during the 2020 New Year/New Plays Festival (now the Perlberg Festival of New Plays) with As I See It, about the relationship between painter Alice Neel and poet Frank O'Hara. Hayes was so impressed by Davis’ writing that he offered her the commission for a play about Georgia Gabor. The Messenger was part of the 2022 festival, and has been developed by The Dramaworkshop. The country was already extremely polarized when Davis began working on The Messenger. Now the chasm has grown wider, the rhetoric has gotten uglier, and people from so many walks of life feel less and less safe. Davis is hoping the play can help bridge the gulf. “My wish for this play is that people who identify on very different parts of the political spectrum can come together in a space and take in each of these women’s stories, how they ping off each other and weave into each other, and listen with an open heart,” says Davis.
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“I don’t want people walking out of the theatre thinking, ‘Well, that proves all my points.’ I hope I’m creating something where you can feel empathy for each character; you might not agree with someone, but you can understand how she got there. You might object that someone remained silent, but realize, ‘Maybe I wouldn’t have said anything either, even though I want to think that I would have.’ The increased polarization around some of the things that come up in the play has made me want to double down on creating a piece that doesn’t divide us, that gives us an opportunity to build some empathy. That’s also my wish for theatre in general.” For the interview with Georgia Gabor, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U25DrP61Pfs
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THE CANCELLATION OF LAUREN FEIN:
AN INTERVIEW WITH PLAYWRIGHT CHRISTOPHER DEMOS-BROWN by Sheryl Flatow
Christopher Demos-Brown has had considerable success as a playwright since 2010, when Florida Stage presented the world premiere of When the Sun Shone Brighter, his first full-length play to receive a professional production. Critics instantly recognized Demos-Brown’s artistry: “A writer of great promise.” “Well on his way to a great new career.” “A first-rate talent.” The plaudits have continued over the years. Demos-Brown has written over a dozen full-length plays, won numerous awards, and made it to Broadway in 2018 with American Son. What makes his achievements all the more impressive is that playwriting is not his primary occupation. Demos-Brown has been practicing law since graduating from the University of Miami School of Law in 1994, and today is a prominent civil trial attorney in Miami. So, it’s not surprising that his day job sometimes generates ideas for his plays. Wrongful Death and Other Circus Acts (2018), for instance, is a wicked satire on the legal profession as a personal injury lawyer, unencumbered by scruples, pursues the survivor of a plane crash in the hope of landing the case of a lifetime.
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The Cancellation of Lauren Fein, his new work for PBD, is informed by DemosBrown’s experiences representing professors who have been caught in the net of cancel culture. In this world premiere play, which runs from February 2-18, Lauren Fein and her wife, Paula Munoz, are professors at a prestigious American university. They live with Dylan, their 16-year-old African American foster son whom they’ve cared for since he was a baby. When Professor Fein’s actions run afoul of the university’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies, her groundbreaking research, her career, and her family are all put in jeopardy. “When I started the play, all I knew was that I wanted it to be about somebody whose life was somehow interrupted or affected in a profoundly bad way by what appeared to be a peccadillo,” says Demos-Brown. “I also knew that I wanted the play to have the basic feel of a courtroom drama, but had a wrinkle or twist on that format.” Cancel culture is an issue on both sides of the political divide, but at colleges and universities the people doing the canceling tend to be on the left. For personal reasons, Demos-Brown chose to hold a mirror up to the cancellations coming from the left side of the aisle. “As a liberal myself, every time I walk into a theatre, every play, even the ones I write, are just preaching to me,” he says. “And I thought, ‘What can I write about that might be challenging for liberals, that might make them go, “In principle I’m on board, but here is where we’ve gone wrong.” In a country where our democracy is in peril, I anticipate people asking, ‘Why did you write this play now?’ It’s because for many liberals, the reaction has been to go so far in the other direction that we make ourselves targets.” Most of the professors who have been canceled have been White men; to underscore the treacherous path of cancellation, Demos-Brown created a female Jewish protagonist married to a Puerto Rican woman and fostering an African-American son; in other words, Christopher Demos-Brown
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they could be the poster family for “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” And yet, when Lauren shares a Darwinian theory in her classroom, it gets misinterpreted by a student who subsequently files a complaint. So, her ordeal begins. (Part of the complaint echoes a statement made by a politician earlier this year. Viewers will undoubtedly recognize it when they hear it. This is not something DemosBrown ripped from the headlines; the line was in the play before it was ever uttered publicly.) “I made the title role a liberal lesbian because I think that will create a presumption in the audience – a correct one, as it turns out – about this woman’s political views,” says Demos-Brown. “They understand which ‘team’ she’s on.” You can draw a direct line from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible to The Cancellation of Lauren Fein. Demos-Brown makes that explicit in the play’s script, quoting the character of Miller’s John Proctor prior to the start of the text: “Now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!” “Early in the process of writing the play, I knew I wanted to incorporate the idea of what happens when a community turns against you, as Miller did in The Crucible,” says Demos-Brown, who pays homage to Miller in various ways during the play. “It’s a very similar dynamic; there’s this strict new code being imposed on people. How do they react to it?” Demos-Brown has represented professors who have been in the same position as Lauren Fein. Their trials play out at the schools, not in a court of law. “I’ve borrowed a lot of what happens in this play from actual cases that I’ve handled,” he says. “They’re almost unwinnable. You don’t know who is making the accusation. You’re not even quite sure who is trying the case against you and what the rules are. There is a making-it-up-as-you-go aspect to the whole WINTER 2023
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proceeding that would be laughable, but there’s nothing funny about it. Most of the research I did for the play was to find out whether this was just my experience or if this is how things generally play out. And it seems that this is generally how it goes. It’s frustrating to tell a client, ‘You’re going to pay me a lot of money and you’re going to prove that every “fact” against you is false or completely unprovable. But you’re going to lose.’ In the cases I’ve handled, there’s been a clause in the professors’ contracts that says regardless of how the process plays out, the university president can ultimately do whatever he or she wants to do. “People talk about due process, but I don’t think they really appreciate what that means,” Demos-Brown continues. “How a decision is arrived at is as important as the decision itself, and you need rules for that. This is a huge problem with these administrative trials, because the consequences for the accused can be worse than in a criminal trial. Also, of course, academia is where we train our best minds. And if our best minds are steeped in a code that we don't believe in, Left to right: Niki Fridh and Diana Garle then our next generation of leaders is going to be steeped in a code that we don't believe in.” Demos-Brown, who was born in Philadelphia and raised mostly in Miami, became interested in theatre while attending Dartmouth. “Other than a dinner theatre play, I had never seen a professional production until I was in college,” he says. “I was very lucky to go to a school where you could participate in plays in every capacity, and I began acting and writing. I just fell in love with theatre. I wrote short pieces for friends, and we would do student productions. After college, I was in a Miami sketch comedy group called Mental Floss. It was kind of like Saturday Night Live, but we performed in a theatre above a tow truck shop.” He went to Los Angeles to pursue writing and acting, and “very quickly learned that I was not a good actor.” He had a talent for writing, but was unable to make it in the industry. “Back then, there was not nearly the market for writing WINTER 2023
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that there is now. You either had to get onto a show, or write a script on spec. I optioned a few things, but never quite broke in.” After a couple of years, he realized he was going to have to find another way to earn a living. He decided to pursue a law career and after receiving his JD, went to work as a prosecutor at the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s office, where he met his wife, Stephanie Demos. They now have their own private practice. But he never lost the theatre bug, and about 15 years ago Demos-Brown decided to again try his hand at playwriting. “I really love writing,” he says. “I had loved writing before, and failed at it.” That changed in 2010, with When the Sun Shone Brighter. That same year, he and Stephanie co-founded Zoetic Stage with Michael McKeever and Stuart Meltzer. He says that all he ever wanted was to have his plays performed “for a wide and sophisticated audience.” Although that would seem to imply he hoped someday for a production in New York, “Broadway was never a goal.” Nonetheless, he got there in 2018 with American Son, in which an estranged biracial couple must confront their feelings about race and bias after their son is detained by the local police following a traffic stop incident. The cast featured Kerry Washington, Steven Pasquale, Jeremy Jordan, and Eugene Lee, and was directed by Kenny Leon. “I think that besides getting married and having children, it was the most wonderful experience of my life.” The piece later became a Netflix movie with the same cast and director. Demos-Brown made it to Broadway before making it to PBD, even though he and Producing Artistic Director William Hayes form something of a mutual admiration society. “I love Dramaworks, and I’ve been coming to see PBD shows since the early days at the little theatre on Banyan,” he says. “Bill and I have talked for a long time about working together, and I’m excited that it’s finally happening. This is an ambitious play in almost every way, and Dramaworks is really the best theatre in the state – if not the entire Southeast – for it to debut. It’s the only theatre that has the perfect combination of elements: vision, a willingness to embrace challenging material, the means to make it happen, and an audience sophisticated enough to be receptive to it. As someone who has co-founded a theatre, I know how hard it is to do what Bill and Sue Ellen [Beryl] have done. To me, Dramaworks is on the brink of being a major player in American theatre.” WINTER 2023
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