Almanac Issue #02

ALMANAC #02

A literary magazine from

2022

Almanac Batch 2 Print & Review Version

ALMANAC Almanac is a literary magazine from Playwrights Horizons. Established in 2020, at a time of pandemic and protest, Almanac is a new kind of publication — one in which a theater and the artists who comprise it come together to take stock of contemporary politics, culture, and playwriting. Through plays, essays, interviews, poems, and visual art, Almanac charts the coordinates of the present day, as measured by thinkers and makers whose work lives both on and beyond the stage.

EDITORIAL BOARD EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Natasha Sinha

Lizzie Stern

Jordan Best

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

DIRECTOR OF MARKETING

DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS

Adam Greenfield

Teresa Bayer

Alison Koch

EDITOR

EDITOR

EDITOR

Billy McEntee

Fiona Selmi

May Treuhaft-Ali

ALMANAC

PLAYWRIGHTS HORIZONS

416 W 42ND ST, NEW YORK, NY 10036

Copyright © 2022 Playwrights Horizons, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed by Michael Harrison of WestprintNY. Almanac has received generous support from The Liman Foundation.

Contents 8

Letter from the Editors

Natasha Sinha and Lizzie Stern

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Welcome Letter Adam Greenfield

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A Note on What to Send Up When It Goes Down Aleshea Harris

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Communal Rituals Aleshea Harris

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“Plays as Shapes” Aleshea Harris

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A Note on Selling Kabul Sylvia Khoury

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The War in Us: A Reflection on Selling Kabul Heather Raffo

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On Silence Deb Margolin

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Are You With Me? Mel Ng

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“Plays as Shapes” Sarah Ruhl

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A Note on Tambo & Bones Dave Harris

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When the Sleepers Awaken Anne Washburn

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The American Voice: Dave Harris Natasha Sinha

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We All Earned Our Freedoms

by Giving Concerts Anaïs Duplan

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“Plays as Shapes” Mia Chung

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“Plays as Shapes” Abe Koogler

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A Step-by-Step Guide for Calling Your ExHusband to Let Him Know That a Notice for Jury Duty Came for Him in the Mail Mara Nelson-Greenberg

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Crossword

Adam Greenfield

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A Note on Wish You Were Here Sanaz Toossi

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A Q&A with Sanaz Toossi Lizzie Stern

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A Letter to Sanaz Toossi Heidi Schreck

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Ghost Ships Martyna Majok

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You have a new memory Deepali Gupta

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Lighting & Men: Sex on the Table?

Mextly Couzin

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“Plays as Shapes” Agnes Borinsky

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blueberry

Agnes Borinsky

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A Note on Corsicana Will Arbery

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Take Care Jia Tolentino

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On Invitations Aydan Shahd

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Full Brothers / Full Sister Ryan J. Haddad

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CRIB$

Adam Coy

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Butterflies from the Bronx David Zheng

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“Plays as Shapes” Christopher Chen

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“Plays as Shapes” Jordan Harrison

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When a Chart Becomes a Knot Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas

Contributors WILL ARBERY is a playwright and screenwriter. Playwrights Horizons: Heroes of the Fourth Turning (Pulitzer finalist, Obie, Lortel, NY Drama Critics Circle Award), Corsicana (NY Times Critic’s Pick). Other plays include Plano (Clubbed Thumb), Evanston Salt Costs Climbing (The New Group), and Wheelchair (3 Hole Press). He’s currently a writer on “Succession” (HBO).

JORDAN BEST is the Graphic Design Manager and artwork designer for Playwrights Horizons.

AGNES BORINSKY is a writer living in Los Angeles.

CHRISTOPHER CHEN is a San Francisco native whose plays include The Headlands (LCT3/Lincoln Center Theater), Passage (The Wilma, Soho Rep), The Late Wedding (Crowded Fire) and Caught (InterAct, The Play Company), which won an OBIE Award for Playwriting. Chris currently has an overall deal at Amazon TV. MIA CHUNG’s Catch as Catch Can premiered at Playwrights Horizons Fall 2022; Page 73 world premiere. Ball in the Air (NAATCO/Public Theater 2022). Double Take (Almanac 2021).

This Exquisite Corpse (multiple awards). You For Me For You (Royal Court, National Theatre Company of Korea, Woolly Mammoth, multiple regionals. Published: Bloomsbury Methuen.)

JORGE IGNACIO CORTIÑAS’s plays include Recent Alien Abductions (Humana Festival, Tripwire Harlot Press), Bird in the Hand (Fulcrum, NY Times Critics Pick) and Blind Mouth Singing (NAATCO, NY Times Critics Pick). His many awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

MEXTLY COUZIN (she/ella) is a Lighting Designer. Credits, Broadway: Roundabout. Off-Broadway: Second Stage, Bushwick Starr, MCC, Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb. Regional: Opera Parallèle, Center Theater Group, The Old Globe, Repertory Theatre St. Louis, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, La Jolla Playhouse, San Diego Symphony, Malashock Dance Company. MFA, University of California, San Diego 2020. mextlycouzin.com ADAM COY is a Tejano director, curator of vibes, and actor. Adam serves on The Fled’s leadership circle and is the Associate Artistic Director of Egg & Spoon Theatre Collective. The Playwrights Horizons Directing Fellow, a TCG Rising Leader of Color, a member of Theater Producers of Color.

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ANAÏS DUPLAN is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of I NEED MUSIC (Action Books, 2021), and a book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020). Duplan is the founding curator of the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color.

ADAM GREENFIELD is Artistic Director of Playwrights Horizons and a dork about crosswords.

DEEPALI GUPTA is a performance artist and theater practitioner. Her work circulates ideas around madness relating to the colonized and feminized body. She works in (dis)order to upheave and unravel. Her work has been supported by the Brooklyn Arts Council, NYSCA, and the NYC Women’s Fund.

RYAN J. HADDAD is an actor and playwright. His play Hi, Are You Single? recently completed a run at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, and his new play Dark Disabled Stories will debut in the 2022-23 season at The Public Theater, produced by The Bushwick Starr. His TV credits include “The Politician” and the upcoming FX miniseries “Retreat.”

ALESHEA HARRIS’s plays include Is God Is, What to Send Up When it Goes Down, and On Sugarland.

DAVE HARRIS is a poet and playwright from West Philly.

Selected plays include Tambo & Bones (Playwrights Horizons, Center Theatre Group, 2022), Exception To The Rule (Roundabout Theatre Company, 2022), and Everybody Black (Humana Festival 2019).

JORDAN HARRISON’s Playwrights Horizons productions include Doris to Darlene, Maple and Vine, Log Cabin, and Marjorie Prime (Pulitzer Prize finalist). TV credits include “Orange is the New Black,” “GLOW,” and “Dispatches from Elsewhere.” In 7th grade, he won a blue ribbon in the drawing competition at the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Fair, and received a check for four dollars and twelve cents.

SYLVIA KHOURY’s plays include Selling Kabul (Playwrights Horizons, Williamstown Theater Festival), Power Strip (LCT3), and Against the Hillside (Ensemble Studio Theater).

Awards include Pulitzer Prize Finalist (Selling Kabul) and Whiting Award for Drama. Education: M.D. (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai), M.F.A. (New School for Drama), B.A. (Columbia University).

ABE KOOGLER’s produced plays include Fulfillment Center (Manhattan Theatre Club), Kill Floor (LCT3), Lisa, My Friend (Kitchen Dog), Blue Skies Process (Goodman Theatre’s New Stages), and Advance Man (UTNT). Awards: Obie Award for Playwriting, Weissberger Award, DG’s Lanford Wilson Award. MFA: UT-Austin, Juilliard. He also works as a political speechwriter.

Contributors MARTYNA MAJOK was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, Cost of Living, which debuted on Broadway fall of 2022. Other plays include Sanctuary City, Queens, and Ironbound. Martyna is currently writing a musical adaptation of The Great Gatsby, with music by Florence Welch and Thomas Bartlett, and developing projects for TV and film.

AYDAN SHAHD (they/he) is a dramaturg of classical and new work, a former Playwrights Horizons Artistic Fellow, and a current PhD student at the University of Chicago.

DEB MARGOLIN is a playwright, actor, and professor of theater. She lives in New Jersey, which she denies.

Obie Award for Sustained Excellence of Performance; Kesselring Prize for her play Three Seconds in the Key.

LIZZIE STERN is the Literary Director at Playwrights Horizons.

MARA NELSON-GREENBERG’s work has been developed at Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb and Ensemble Studio Theatre, among others. Her play Do You Feel Anger? was produced at the Vineyard Theatre in 2019.

MEL NG (she/her) is a queer artist, costume designer and poet who splits her time between New York and Honolulu.

Outside of the theater, you can find her swimming, giving tarot readings, writing poetry and practicing reiki. She believes in the transformative and healing power of ritual, and that sensitivity nourishes her work in creative spaces. melissaavang.com HEATHER RAFFO is a singular and outstanding voice in the American Theater whose work has been championed

by The New Yorker as “an example of how art can remake the world”. An Iraqi with American roots, she is a multiaward-winning playwright and actress whose work has taken her from the Kennedy Center to the U.S. Islamic World Forum, and from London’s House of Lords to stages nationally and internationally. Her newly released anthology, Heather Raffo’s Iraq Plays: The Things That Can’t Be Said, brings together Raffo’s groundbreaking contribution not only to the American Theater but gives voice to nearly two decades of reshaped cultural and national identity for both Americans and Iraqis since the events of 9/11.

SARAH RUHL is a playwright, essayist and poet. She’s written 12 plays that have been done on and off Broadway and internationally. She has been a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and a Tony award nominee. Recently, she published Smile, a memoir, which Time magazine listed as a mustread book of 2021. Her most recent book is Love Poems in Quarantine. Awards: Steinberg award, the Sam French award, the Susan Smith Blackburn award, the Whiting award, the Lilly Award, a PEN award for mid-career playwrights, and the MacArthur award.

NATASHA SINHA is Associate Artistic Director of Playwrights Horizons, and co-founder of Beehive Dramaturgy Studio and Amplifying Activists Together.

ARI TEPLITZ, CFP®, ChFC®Managing Member, Teplitz Financial Group. Ari is an award-winning financial planner who works with artists on becoming better financial consumers. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, Ari is a passionate advocate for personal financial wellness.

Ari takes a two-pronged approach to achieving financial freedom—helping clients eliminate current financial stress while also creating good long-term financial habits.

JIA TOLENTINO is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the essay collection Trick Mirror.

SANAZ TOOSSI is an Iranian-American playwright, whose plays include the award-winning English (co-production Atlantic Theater /Roundabout) and Wish You Were Here (Playwrights Horizons, Williamstown/Audible). TV credits include “A League of Their Own” (Amazon). Sanaz was the 2019 P73 Playwriting Fellow, a recipient of the 2020 Steinberg Playwright Award, and the 2022 recipient of The Horton Foote Award. MFA: NYU Tisch.

ANNE WASHBURN’s plays include 10 out of 12, Antlia Pneumatica, Apparition, The Communist Dracula Pageant, A Devil At Noon, I Have Loved Strangers, The Internationalist, The Ladies, Little Bunny Foo Foo, Mr. Burns, Shipwreck, The Small, and transadaptations of Euripides’ Orestes & Iphigenia in Aulis.

DAVID ZHENG is a playwright and visual artist from The Bronx. His work has been developed at The Public Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, MCC Theater, The Lark, and many others.

He enjoys snowboarding, ordering too much food for the table and, most recently, been obsessed with Pickleball.

David is currently developing an original pilot with Tristar at Sony Pictures.

HEIDI SCHRECK is a writer / performer living in Brooklyn with her partner Kip Fagan and their awesome twin daughters. Her latest play What the Constitution Means to Me was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and played an extended run on Broadway before touring the country.

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Letter from the Editors Natasha Sinha and Lizzie Stern

WELCOME TO THE SECOND EDITION of Playwrights Horizons’ Almanac, a celebration of artistic discourse from our 2021-2022 season. In these pages, you’ll find a trove of artists’ sage articulations and witty insights during this extraordinary era of returning to the theater. We are writing this while in the swing of our second season since the pandemic began, reflecting on how we first pushed open the gates of isolation and lockdown, and forged forward onto a path both gratifyingly familiar and deeply unknown.

Back when we were all still at home, and our building on 42nd Street was dark and vacant, Almanac first emerged as an album of reflections on the profound challenges of that moment – and all that we imagined on the other side. Immersing ourselves in the observations and visions of artists became, for us, the most meaningful way we could keep going while staying off the stage.

Now, we’re back! But, the pandemic changed us, in many ways. Restarting our producing engines called for a recommitment to the art; we experienced a reignition of passion for theater-making, alongside a loss of stamina. A delight in spending our days with artists, alongside frustration at confusing COVID guidance. A relief at planning new gatherings and celebrations, alongside leaner budgets. We weren’t so naive as to expect pure joy upon reopening our doors – but the terrain of the 2021-2022 season was even more full of challenge and mystery than we expected.

This complexity is something we honor in Almanac, which now – finally – can exist in relationship with not only the brilliant thinkers who create our new work, but the new work itself: the plays on our two stages, the developmental workshops in our rehearsal studios, and the engagement with our audiences.

So, in this edition, beautifully designed by Graphic Design Manager Jordan Best, you will again discover a selection of original pieces by great thinkers: personal essays, collages, poems, short plays and – arguably our personal favorite – full-length plays rendered in a way you’ve never seen before. When we commissioned these artists to contribute, we offered them a simple and optional prompt: change. The transformation of the artist. The shift in institutional values and priorities. The regeneration of theater, community, and New York City.

And we wanted to try something new: we invited members of our community to write personal responses to productions in our season. In doing so, we hope to foster a unique form of theatrical journalism: one rooted not in judgment or efficient distillation, but in impressionability and self-expansion. In the pages that follow, you’ll find a letter from Heidi Schreck, a poem by Anaïs Duplan, and an essay by Jia Tolentino, among many others. These writers capture what is infinite and ineffable, from an array of perspectives, about going to the theater: the air that surrounds a play – and all the complex, self-contradicting insights and emotions it elicits. There is rigor and courage in their explorations: it is, we believe, a greater challenge to observe art – as well as life – from a place of vulnerability rather than authority. Altogether, these pieces offer a new critical landscape that is rich with multiplicity, and reflect the scope of our previous season not through a lens but, rather, through a prism.

So much, indeed, has changed in the last few years. Thousands of people have left the theater, and thousands have joined. Institutions have faced the largest deficits since the great recession – forcing all of us to reprioritize and rethink vast and ingrained producing models.

But the theater, even and especially during its most challenging moments, retains its power of collective rejuvenation: we come together, reflect deeply, shift perspective, and release ourselves from routine rhythms – exiting the space not quite the same as when we entered it.

Almanac is a sampling – or, perhaps, a distillation – of the self-reflective and dynamic conversation that can happen around any theater anytime anyone sees a play. An innovative artist imagines infinite possibilities, and then renders a clear vision that inspires and sustains the rest of us. This is the horizon line that gives A us our name. And it is our great hope that, in the pages that follow, we can bring us all a little closer to it.

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Welcome Letter Adam Greenfield

FOR 18 MONTHS, live theater was unthinkable. An art form reliant on the shared experience of a crowd, theater was specifically ill-advised. But it was clear — at least, to me — that what made our work unsafe is precisely what makes it all the more mystifying and awesome: people gathered, breathing the same air. So after a long period of screens and isolation, let my first act as Playwrights Horizons’ new Artistic Director be to say, at long last, Welcome.

Seriously, welcome.

Share this space with me, and with each other.

For these 18 months we also wondered what live theater might look like when it returns. What do we want theater to be? What do we need it to be? What is theater here to do? Each time I wrestled with this question, my thoughts returned to Aleshea Harris’s play, which in her words is “a ritual to celebrate the inherent value of Black people, affirm those navigating anti-blackness and honor those who have lost their lives.” Created with staggering skill and a dagger-sharp pencil, it makes full use of what live theater, our medium of choice, can offer: ceremony, poetry, community, rage, song, laughter, paradox, transformation.

I’m honored to re-open Playwrights with Aleshea’s writing, and with this extraordinary cast and creative team, and by the chance to say, again, Welcome.

Thanks for bringing theater back to New York.

A

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WHAT TO SEND UP WHEN IT GOES DOWN

Written by Aleshea Harris

Directed by Whitney White September – October 2021

Company of What to Send Up When It Goes Down. Photo by Marc J. Franklin.

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Ugo Chukwu and Rachel Christopher. Photo by Marc J. Franklin.

“

A good friend once told me that we each have a different job where challenging racism is concerned. She spoke to the ways she could use her privilege as a white woman to dismantle the white supremacist ideology that contributes to the deaths of so many people.

As a Black woman and writer, I am uniquely positioned to create a piece of theatre focused on making space for Black people. This is one way I can contribute.

This is my offering.

I’d like to end this ritual by challenging you to consider what you are uniquely positioned to offer. As a non-Black person, what is a tangible way you can disrupt the idea responsible for all of these lives needlessly taken?

My hope is that you will consider this deeply.

My further hope is that your consideration will turn to action.

Aleshea Harris

From the script of What to Send Up When it Goes Down 15

Communal Rituals Aleshea Harris Aleshea Harris’ What to Send Up When it Goes Down was written in direct response to anti-Black violence, past and present, and honors loved ones lost. What follows are words that Aleshea wrote to encourage us to continue sending up love, strength, resilience and joy as many times.

Also, please feel free to visit www.bagofbeans.net/wtsu-resources.

This page is a virtual extension of What to Send Up...’s purpose, a space where people can honor those lost to anti-Black violence, send love letters of hope and affirmation to Black people and access additional resources related to communal healing and social justice.

What to Send Up on Your Own The ritual doesn’t have to end just because the performers are gone.

You may find it necessary to carry out your own ritual response when another tragedy occurs.

Here are a few things you/your community can do to send it up, some of which were modeled in the piece: 1. Speak the Names In What to Send Up..., we speak the name of the deceased once for each year that they lived. You can do the same or find your own way of acknowledging the tragedy of their death while keeping their name alive.

2. Group Yell Gather in an appropriate place and yell together. Be sure to support each other’s need for catharsis by way of this expulsing. Make sure the space feels and is safe for this kind of expression.

3. Group Call and Response In a circle, one person can say any number of affirming, lovely things about Black people. Here’s a format: “You ____________people!” and then the others in the circle and respond with, “Yeah!”

Examples from What to Send Up...: LEADER: You beautiful people!

ALL: Yeah!

LEADER: You creative people!

ALL: Yeah!

You could build a list of adjectives beforehand and create a script to do call/response with or encourage participants to call out the adjectives as they think of them in a circle.

4. Break bread Gathering together to eat good food can be a tremendous way of nourishing aching spirits.

5. Love Letters You and your loved ones or community members can write love letters to Black people and share them however you see fit. Perhaps each person reads theirs aloud. Perhaps they’re passed around randomly, tucked into pockets to be enjoyed when needed.

These are just a very few examples you are welcome to use. I encourage you to think about what’s most useful to your community.

Be creative.

Be loving.

Be strong together.

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Javon Q. Minter. Photo by Marc J. Franklin.

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Plays as Shapes

At Playwrights Horizons, we are in awe of the variety of shapes that plays can take. While some works of theater beautifully conform to an Aristotelian structure - rising action that reaches a climax before resolving, like a big arc - others accumulate in different and innovative forms. To get a visual sense of a true range of artistic expression, we asked some of our favorite playwrights to draw the “shape” of one of their plays. Check out the full series throughout this magazine!

Aleshea Harris: (for What to Send Up When It Goes Down)

1. The piece began before them, in fact.

Way, way back. What we see of it gets more and more tightly coiled until…

2. The People must exit the spiral together to medicine themselves by way of turning inward, gathering, honoring, holding each other, speaking the names.

3. The People exit the piece altogether, in a new direction, no longer caught in the shape and structure of the ritual.

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SELLING KABUL

Written by Sylvia Khoury Directed by Tyne Rafaeli November – December 2021

Marjan Neshat. Photo by Joan Marcus.

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“

In times of war, of military campaigns, of unrest — the amorphous state must suddenly become flesh and blood. The arms, legs, and minds of individuals cease to be their own and instead are pieced together to give the state a bodily form.

It requires hands to hold weapons, lungs to breathe gas, and mouths to translate.

And in those moments of peril and patriotism, every part unquestioningly belongs to the state.

But the moment the campaign is ended, the need fulfilled, the body disbanded — what then?

Sylvia Khoury Playwright’s Perspective: Selling Kabul

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Marjan Neshat and Dario Ladani Sanchez. Photo by Chelcie Parry.

The War in Us: A Reflection on Selling Kabul Heather Raffo

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I REMEMBER WATCHING Walter Cronkite announce Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. I was a nine-yearold kid in Michigan, doing the evening dishes. It was my first memory of “war,” and it was indelible. I didn’t know it was possible to take another country, like we did on board games. I naively thought the remaking of borders was, simply put, history.

The following year, the Iran–Iraq war started, and my Iraqi cousins were called to serve. Thus began a daily negotiation between my American privilege and my Iraqi precarity. What followed that war, almost without pause, were nearly three decades of conflict between my two nations. Yet, in the U.S., people just went on with life. Very little stopped. The bars were open, the mall was open, and the theater was open.

After a pandemic year of closed gatherings and collective loss, I wonder — will Americans arrive to Sylvia Khoury’s breathtaking play, Selling Kabul, differently? Will they recognize in themselves the harrowing bargains we make for survival? Have we become more intimate with our own history? Because, in this searing play, we meet people we might know: the mothers, the lovers, those working jobs they don’t believe in, those working jobs they do believe in. Each character suffers a loss: of person, of potential, of pride. We know these people, we could be these people.

Together they’ve lost their belonging — and, as the play’s title suggests, their nation was sold out for individual survival. Afghans have been living with the cost of war for decades. I’d like to remind Americans: so have we.

The brilliant playwright, doctor, and human, Sylvia Khoury, asks us to intimately reflect on how our value-systems cost this one Afghan family so much, and in doing so, how our value-systems have come to define who we are.

As I write, my news feed tells me of a school shooting in Michigan, a supreme court on the verge of overturning Roe vs. Wade, and another coronavirus variant billed as “cause for concern” or “midterm hype” depending on which news you watch. There’s a war here too, and perhaps, like Jawid, we’ve sold off parts of our country for the comfort of our TV.

Mattico David. Photo by Chelcie Parry.

“

A school shooting in Michigan, a supreme court on the verge of overturning Roe vs. Wade, and another coronavirus variant billed as ‘cause for concern’ or ‘midterm hype’ depending on which news you watch.

There’s a war here too.

It is possible that Sylvia’s play comes at a time we are poised to grapple with our place in a shared story.

Multiple homeless and hungry people passed me on my way to the theater. When I sat in my seat, I looked at the masked audience, knowing someone here, too, lost their husband, their child, their potential, their job. I watched four profound actors on stage. I know these precious actors well, I know the stakes in their lives - how they carried this play for 19 months during the pandemic, how they faced industry-wide unemployment. I know that when they fight for family on stage, they’ve had to leave family behind in other states, or fly grandparents in to look after their young children — all just to tell this story for you. While none of that compares to the reality of their Afghan counterparts, I am reminded of the life investment it takes to even tell a story, to make a difference.

I left Sylvia’s play with an overwhelming feeling that I’ve been fundamentally changed over the last decades of war, in ways I can never fully unpack. I saw in her characters ordinary people, in impossible situations, becoming unrecognizable to themselves. When I look deep enough, the nine-year-old me doing dishes in front of the evening news would admit — there are unrecognizable parts of me now too.

What has the last 20 years cost you?

If, like Afiya and Jawid, you could collect what you’ve saved over the last two decades and invest it in someone else’s life…would you?

Sylvia’s play is a battle cry for us to do just that, A to, at all costs, simply invest in each other.

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On Silence Deb Margolin for Agnes Borinsky

All’s Well that Ends Well The woman is in the bathroom with her two children, Matt and Julia. All three in one smelly bathroom, the pink ‘50s tile, the tattered bath mat, the sink splattered with toothpaste droppings, the toilet exhausted from its sad receipts, the towels drooping like eyelids, oblique and damp. Two kids and a Mother in a bathroom. Enough for a painting.

The girl is six, and she’s beautiful in that drowsy, preconscious way. Her lips are puffy, full of deep pink flesh, her eyes tight in her head as if in taut collusion with her mind and thoughts, her little feet exuberant with the floor.

The boy is eight and a half; his beauty is more obvious and easier to ignore, his hair is too long, his eyelashes are endless and curl up towards his forehead like those of a torch singer in an evening gown. He is very much the poet, out of step with the practical universe, richly attuned to invisible things. His sister torments him much of the time with the practicalities which elude him. She understands how to hurt anybody. She understands that people are hurt by different things.

The little girl has just realized that she’s going to die someday. Just realized this fully, for some reason, some unknowable reason. There’s always just a moment in a young life when this dawns fully on a person, a person for whom death is generally very far away, but it dawns fully, like the a soldier waking for his first day, a gun on his back, in a foreign country where he’s been sent to fight a war. She’s just realized she’s going to die someday, here in this bathroom.

Everything is quiet for a few moments. Then she starts crying. She’s yelling; this isn’t a peaceful sorrow, not even a sorrow of any kind, really. It’s an outrage, an insult. Like being called a dirty Jew. She’s outraged. Her brother picks at a piece of soap stuck on the side of the tub. Mother is peeing.

I am not going to! she says.

Mother’s pee sounds musical, jaunty, as it falls. They talk over this tinkling fountain.

I’m sorry, Julia, you are, her brother says. The piece of soap comes off under his fingernail.

He tries to flick it into the sink. His sorrow rises with his eyelashes up over his head.

I’m not! I’m not going to die! And my brother’s not going to die EITHER! she shrieks.

The Mother looks at them. She’s wiping herself, getting ready to stand up and flush. She tries an academic approach: Everything dies, and when things die, they ready the earth for more life. It’s a cycle, like in The Lion King, the great circle of life, remember?

My brother isn’t going to die! I’m not going to do it! There isn’t any circle! I’m not going to die, why do I have to do that! You can’t make me do that, and I’m not going to!

Mother flushes the toilet.

Okay, Mother says, okay, that’s fine. You don’t have to do it.

What happens when you die, Mom, the boy asks, returning to his soap piece on the edge of the tub. Do you just see darkness, and lie there very still?

No, the Mother says. You don’t see darkness.

What then, he asks.

Well, you just don’t see. It’s another way of being.

The girl has stopped crying and her eyes are ablaze. She’s seen a piece of candy on the floor that she dropped there earlier, when she snuck into the bathroom to eat it secretly.

Defiantly, looking her mother directly in the eye, she pops it into her mouth.

Mmmmmmm, she says, This candy is duh-LICIOUS! She swallows the candy, and then her eyes fill with tears again.

I can’t do it, Mom, I won’t.

Fine, the Mother says, don’t ever do it.

There’s a silence.

Mother opens the bathroom door, and sound from the house flows in like dammed water loosed.

Ma! Ma! The little girl says. Can you talk when you’re dead?

No. You can’t talk! says the brother, sadly.

The Mother turns to the little girl, lifts her.

I don’t know, the Mother says.

But can you talk, can you talk? Is there any talking?

We can’t hear the dead people talking, but that doesn’t mean they don’t talk, the Mother says.

The girl struggles down the Mother’s body, stands on her own. Says: Well that means there’s talking, and I’ll just talk. If I can be dead and still talk I don’t care that I’m dead. I’ll talk and talk and talk and be dead and talk.

The girl bursts out of the bathroom, relieved. Goes into her bedroom, pulls the head off one of her Barbie dolls. She throws it up in the air. It hits the ceiling, falls down dully, rolls an instant and stops, nose down. The little girl puts the headless Barbie fully upright and says: I’m dead, and now I’d like to tell you a story! Are you listening, boys and girls? Are you listening?

Listen, you stupid, stupid children! You have to listen!

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I’ll Be Seeing You I’ll be seeing you: “… this colloquial formula does not necessarily imply a future meeting.”

—American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms There were two occasions on which I said goodbye to myself in the mirror.

The first time, I had just taken a shower after learning that I was pregnant with Matt. I came out of the shower, dried my body, stepped out of the bathroom and stood naked before a full-length mirror on the closet door. I saw my shapely body and loved it savagely, tenderly and newly. I wished it bon voyage. I entered into a contract with myself. I had no idea if I would ever see myself in that body again, and I felt an unfettered and joyful fear.

The second time occurred in front of a dressing room mirror in Toronto, Canada. I had just finished performing and come offstage. It is that delirious moment between moments, right after performance; a private moment between public moments; a delicate transition, when one is halfway between a character and a self, like being on a train between towns, having no idea what town is just outside, there are trees and birds, and beautiful as they may be, no train stops near them; they are part of passage, they are like dreams.

I stood in front of the mirror. It was four days before I was due to start a grueling regimen of chemotherapy.

I had been told I would lose most of my hair. I had been told they might have to cut into my neck to put in a system for delivery of these chemicals. I had been told I’d be nauseous, constipated, and pale. I had been told one chemical scars the lungs, the other can damage the heart. I had been told all these things, and I stood in antecedence of them, looking flushed and beautiful, much as I’d looked four weeks into a pregnancy. I stood in joy for a long time. Then, out loud, I said to that beautiful girl: I’ll be seeing you.

Keep Body and Soul Together My beloved friend L and I got sick around the same time. Rather, she started it; standing at the Xerox machine with galleys of a book of my work which she’d edited and muscled into publication, she was told on the phone that she had a small breast tumor, operable, with radiation to follow. She continued xeroxing, and called me while doing so to tell me this news.

L was a brilliant scholar of Theater and Gender Theory, a full professor at an Ivy League university, who spoke softly with a southern drawl, and had luminous ideas which, even when seen in the stillness of print, seemed impulsive and passionate, as if they were physically moving through the mind in a terpsichorean parade. We met when, as a theater scholar, she was writing about my feminist theater company; our friendship branched off from this academic context and into something undefinable and very, very deep. L was a melancholic, a philosopher, a sexual sadomasochist, a poet and a Buddhist. She associated ideas and bodies in ways that were at once wildly radical and profoundly humanist. She described herself as “Southern white trash” and made me laugh unmercifully with her stories about her mother, broke and insane, who made her and her brother participate in “luaus” in their broken-down driveway, where they would feign roasting a pig while loud hula music played and her brother was forced to dress up in a white sheet and pretend he was Moses.

Masses were discovered in my nasopharynx and neck, and my long tangle with lymphoma began.

L, a devout Buddhist, wanted me to go to death and dying workshops (Buddhist thought is about rehearsing various kinds of impermanence, I think), but I demurred, telling her I wanted to go to life and living workshops.

I remember her coming with me to a doctor’s appointment during which I was told about several lesions (the word lesion being a horrifying new term for me, and one which still fills me with terror) and L trying to get me to lift my head, to eat a bowl of soup.

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All our friends were going through midlife crises, but L and I, fighting for our lives, found this funny. Other women, worried about cellulite, made us grateful our cellulitic legs could even get us up the stairs! During this period our friendship deepened even further. We called ourselves The Cancer Girls. We discussed sex and philosophy; we discussed love and money; we discussed mortality and its relationship to language. As both L and I were in love with language, we discussed alternatives to it, should disease or aphasia rob either of us of our ability to use it in service of our great love for each other. I told her that, should she be unable to speak, she should send me an envelope with confetti in it, and when I opened the envelope and the confetti showered down, I would understand, and would come to her and rescue her from solitude with tools of hyperarticulate silence.

Right before her ambulatory breast surgery, I was allowed to sit with L in the holding room, where she, dressed in a blue hospital gown with paper slippers and a blue hair cover, gave me the information that she told me would obviate absolutely and forever my need to go to graduate school in Performance Studies. She told me all I needed to know was that Jacques Lacan, the famous philosopher of language cum psychologist had said two immutable, critically important things: 1) The signifier is always literal in the unconscious (i.e., whatever you say, you really mean, even if you’re using an idiom or a figure of speech); and secondly, and most critical, most ineffable, most profound, most tragic: 2)

To speak is to suffer.

This last, with all its layers of meaning, has informed my entire life and work.

It turned out that my beloved had a rare and deadly new form of breast cancer, which literally spreads the way fire does, grabbing and converting everything it touches into part of itself.

The effortless metastasis of this disease reminded me of the celerity and beauty of L’s mind and intellect. She began coughing uncontrollably as the disease melted through her chest wall and into her lungs. She cried a lot, and during that period, everything I did annoyed her.

I would leave her apartment, sad but undaunted, and try another approach the next day.

She shaved her head. Her baldness clarified both her beauty and her suffering. It was Springtime then, and L told me she couldn’t go out into the lovely afternoon sunlight, because it made her so sad and angry to be enchanted by a beauty she was soon to be torn from.

Once as we were going to her doctor in those late days, we were walking down the street and L was hurrying and hurrying and gasping for breath. I said to her: Sweet one, slow down. We are in no rush. Walk more slowly, dear, please!

And I looked at her, her body, her materiality, how frail and skinny yet tangible and visible she was; when she responded verbally, I suddenly saw clearly that her speech and her body were not of the same mettle; that her voice and ideas came from a place that was different from her material body; that her speech was a cartography of her immortal soul, and her body something of a one night stand God had with the world; she was beautiful; I saw that she was dying, and I saw how ridiculous, how incomprehensible, that was. In that instant.

Friends gathered at the hospital; she’d been admitted, and the doctors finally had a terminal patient on whom they were free to try everything. Many of us gathered in the room at once, and L, high from painkillers, grinned from ear to ear and told us how beautiful we all were.

When I got her alone, I asked her to hold on for a month. I told her I had an important play opening that I needed her to see. I think I deluded myself into thinking that she could be distracted from dying, the way I’d distracted my children from things they wanted in the supermarket, things they had fixated on and might have a tantrum over. She said, in her velvet Southern drawl: Honey, I don’t think I’m gonna make it; honey, bring me the script, I don’t think I’m gonna make it that long.

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The next day, when I came with the script, she told me she couldn’t see. She told me she’d dreamt there were seven things on the floor, and she was to pick them up, and when the last thing was picked up, she would die. I joked: Oh well! Just leave them! Don’t bother cleaning up, just leave everything as it is! No cleaning up in here!

The next day, when I went in to her, she asked me again about language. She said: Honey, if I can’t speak, will you still be with me? Will you still understand me?

And I said, Yes, yes, yes, of course, let it go! You can let speech go! Anytime, you can stop when you’re ready, and I’m still with you, I’m right here.

I brought Matt and Julia to see her. They both loved her very much, sensing since they were babies both the power of her gentleness and the hilarity of her rage. Her process of dying had so many things in common with their processes of learning to live. L had always made them laugh, even when she said very little. They both kissed her face many times. We had a flat tire going home.

On the very last day I heard her speak, she returned her voice to that of the teacher. She told me: Honey, I have just eaten oatmeal. I loved my oatmeal. It tasted so good. They served it just the way I asked. It had in it brown sugar, and butter, and every bite was Heaven to me. Here I am, honey, here, so small on time, and I loved, loved, my oatmeal. You can do that. You can do that too.

The next time I saw her, she did not speak anymore, but lay still, breathing heavily and sporadically. Her partner brought her home.

On New Year’s Day, I was called by phone and told that she had passed away at the stroke of midnight as the year 2000, after anguish in labor, gave birth to 2001.

When I got to her apartment, there were 10 people outside the door. They told me: Go in and see her. She looks so peaceful.

I entered the apartment and approached the bed, and my beautiful friend was laid out there, bereft of her soul, just her body, and her face, which was contorted into a mask of homicidal rage. I have no idea what those people saw when they looked at her.

I told the children that L had died, as gently as I could, as neutrally and tenderly as I could.

Matt cried for a little while, and then moved on, but Julia started laughing, and she lifted one of her dolls and began to fly it around her room.

It’s wonderful, she said. Before, she was just in one place, one single only place, and I had to go far away to see her, but now She’s Just Everywhere!

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Silence I imagine the silence around a just fertilized human ovum. The most obnoxious sperm, the one that swam the fastest and spared no other any mercy, brutalizes his way into the egg, and the egg lets out a little cry; then the doors of the egg slam shut. A boundary forms around this astonishing new consortium of sperm and egg; they know themselves to be up to the most atavistic and sacred devilment. This barrier forms the way an invisible bulwark forms around two people who fell in love while you were watching; you saw it happen. And this barrier – called the zona pellucida – is designed to keep out all other sperm; to keep out any other genetic information; to keep out the sounds such things make, the other percussions of the body; and there’s a holy silence, I just know it; a silence worthy of what it precedes: the perilous trip down Fallopia, the arrival at the pelvic pear, blood-lined and sweating; the violent implantation; the waiting. I know that silence.

The silence of a book. So noisy! Images, people, carriages and cars; sex, murder, text messages and letters; secrets and crimes; loucheness and lyricism! I can hear that silence looking at a book sitting quietly on a table. I have to cover my ears! The din!

The silence of an onion. It’s hard to believe an onion doesn’t cost thousands of dollars: so complete, its brittle skin falling off like a woman’s nightgown, the moist, translucent layers beneath, its pungence, its obliterating sweetness. I do not feel I should be able to afford an onion.

The silence of the drug addict who stole my purse while I was performing onstage. I didn’t know she had stolen my purse; I didn’t know that everything I had brought with me was gone, but I did know. Her silence told me that. In the bathroom, three scenes until my next appearance onstage. Playing a miserable character whom none of the other characters liked. Had to pee desperately: woman in there, young woman, staring at me, silent; a nasty, incalescent panic in her eyes. I knew she had robbed me before I knew I’d been robbed.

Everyone hated my character in that play, and thus though they loved me, they hated me also. People fled when they heard I’d been robbed, as if I could infest them with bad fortune.

I was glad; something about being robbed while working for nothing seemed humiliating.

I smiled when I was finally alone in the theater, with no one near me, no keys, no money, no way to get home, nothing.

Walked out into the rain, so far west in midtown Manhattan that it’s not even Manhattan anymore, it’s an anonymous dark alley near a river, where rats take freedoms they have nowhere else and you could be anywhere, it’s dark there even when it’s light. And there, on the scalloped metalwork around what was trying to be a tree, was a $20 bill, draped like a Dali clock, wet with rain, filthy. I picked it up and took a taxi home. I was laughing because that silent woman in the bathroom with the hot, deliquescent eyes: I know her.

Most sublime is the silent body onstage. This silence is like no other. The still, silent body in the light is an outrage, a radical act, a protest, a come-on, a flirtation, a denial, a consummation. When the lights come up and I’m standing onstage, before you, humbled and emboldened by your presence, I am elevated to an apotropaic level: nothing can hurt me, nothing can hurt you, the zona pellucida is around us, we are beginning! I am unstoppable, I belong to you completely. I’m in love with you. I’m being physical with you, I’m letting you hold me, you’re having your way with me, I could die at any moment, we are laughing A together, you and I; we are ageless, and I am standing there in silence.

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Are You With Me? Mel Ng “Rituals are the doorways of the psyche, between the sacred and the profane, between purity and dirt, beauty and ugliness, and an opening out of the ordinary into the extraordinary.”

– Jay Griffiths I go to the theater to experience the sublime, to have catharsis, to be in community, to learn, to participate, to work things out … these are images I came up with to chase down those feelings.

sacred abandon

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pilgrimage

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are you with me?

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Plays as Shapes

Sarah Ruhl:

This sketch is the structure of my play Late: a cowboy song. It’s the structure of Mary trying to leave a toxic relationship; it describes a parabola that keeps closing in on her as she repeatedly attempts to leave, but comes back. She leaves and comes back, leaves and comes back with a circle tightening around her, until she finally leaps out into the unknown at the end.

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TAMBO & BONES

Written by Dave Harris

Directed by Taylor Reynolds January – February 2022

Tyler Fauntleroy and W. Tré Davis. Photo by Marc J. Franklin 37

Tyler Fauntleroy and W. Tré Davis. Photo by Marc J. Franklin

“

The most fun part about writing is that every writer I know is a fucking liar.

Some think this is radical political work. Some think writing is to channel the ancestors and the woowoos to put voice to page.

But all of this is just tactic.

This was the realization that made me stop doing poetry slams and start to focus on theater. I wasn’t growing as an artist; I was growing as someone who could perform identity. Spoken word capitalizes on an idea of the authentic identity.

The real person. But here, in this theater, all of us know that every second of this experience is fake. And there is infinite possibility in that reality.

And the pleasure is in the possibility.

Dave Harris Playwright’s Perspective: Tambo & Bones

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When the Sleepers Awaken Anne Washburn

“

A play doesn’t have to push any sort of boundary to be very great and very satisfying, but surprise is a fundamental pleasure because on some deep level we’re always tensed for it.

WEREWOLF IS A GAME (you may also know it, if you know it, as Mafia) best played in a roomful of people who don’t know each other well, and are experiencing a social impulse, and it’s after dinner, and dark, and maybe there’s drinks or whatever. It’s endemic to writers’ colonies.

You sit in a circle by the fire, or around a table, and the game is led by The Narrator, who starts by passing out cards at random to establish the identity of every player.

You cup the card in your palm to glance at it, and you are Townsfolk or The Doctor or The Seer or… The Werewolf.

There is, The Narrator informs everyone, a Monster loose in this small community; it selects its victims at night. Night has fallen. Everyone droops their heads, closes their eyes.

“And now,” says The Narrator, “Let The Werewolf awaken” (or, you know, to that effect) and in the circle of ‘sleepers’ — and remember that it’s night, and ideally the lights are low — one person opens their eyes — and there is a curious intimacy in that moment, between the Narrator and The Werewolf, two sets of live eyes in a circle of closed faces; a secret, and a threat — and The Werewolf silently, subtly, indicates a victim.

“It is done,” The Narrator might say, or “got it” or, perhaps more menacingly: nothing.

The Werewolf closes their eyes, and sinks back into the small sea of sleeping Townsfolk.

I like to think the impulse behind theater is that it strokes the set of nerve endings we acquired in our origins as humans sitting around campfires in the dark studying each other carefully: who here is dangerous, who here is sexy, who is capable, who is lying, what will happen next.

We have a lot of instincts around watchfulness, around grappling with unpredictability, and it’s pleasurable to thrum them in safety.

There is also a Doctor who is awakened and, looking around the circle of suspended players, can make a guess and select one person to ‘cure’ — it can be themselves; there is a Seer who is awakened next and points to one person about whom they have a question; The Narrator gives them a thumbs up, or a thumbs down — and The Seer closes their eyes again, knowing more than they did before.

And then the sun rises, The Narrator announces, and (unless The Doctor has guessed correctly, in the dark reaches of the lonely night, and has healed the intended victim) there has been a death in this small hamlet. The name of the victim is announced (that person, maybe relieved, maybe disappointed, possibly slightly stung — because it’s never quite pleasant to be killed, even in proxy—pushes their chair back a bit, grabs their drink, and prepares to watch the rest of it all play out) and now — and this is the heart of the game — the townsfolk have to deal

W. Tré Davis. Photo by Marc J. Franklin.

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with anti-social impulses, and there are a million ways to approach this. A play doesn’t have to push any sort of boundary to be very great and very satisfying, but surprise is a fundamental pleasure because on some deep level we’re always tensed for it.

I saw the first 10/15 minutes of Tambo & Bones at Ryder Farm, at the end of the season presentation of work from the summer. I liked it fine. I thought: oh, I know what this is.

Playwrights sent me a copy of this play and I began reading it, thought: yes I know what this is. And then realized I didn’t quite. And then that I really didn’t; I don’t remember the happy moment at which I realized I couldn’t figure out what would happen next or how; I couldn’t game out this play. This is in part because it’s a play in which pretty much anything could happen, because Dave Harris is taking us on a cruise through not exactly all but most of the possibilities, the thoughts and counter-thoughts, the feelings and counter-feelings, none of which cancels the other out but which accrue remorselessly. A play which is furious, cool, humane, diabolical, truthful, calculating, funny, stirring, featherlight, ultra dark, heavy, bright. A play which lands…beautifully…and what a pleasure it is when plays land beautifully…but which lands in such a way that you suspect if you stuck around after the end, when the audience has filed out, and the aisles are swept, the big red curtain will woosh back open and it will all take off again, going to the million other places it is capable of visiting.

Dave Harris is The Seer – the one who sees, sometimes all, and sometimes just more – he’s The Doctor – sometimes healing or trying to heal, sometimes rationing that power to protect himself – he’s The Werewolf: a killer – or maybe just hungry; he’s a Townsfolk, trying to figure out what is going on, trying to figure out what is the best way forward, trying to convince those around him of the truth both subtle and obvious through rational argument, through emotion, persuasion; he’s making and fielding false accusations, sometimes just mixing it up, one of an angry confused mob. And all along, of course, he’s The Narrator, pacing the perimeter of the circle, the one who sets it all into motion but cannot control the outcome, cannot intervene, cannot save anyone, powerful and powerless at the same time.

And he’s in the audience with us, both figuratively and actually, included and therefore unsafe. [and here it might be worth flagging the very obvious; my gaze, multiplicitous in many ways, is also a very white one] What have we bought for our quarters? 90 minutes inside the head of Dave Harris.

If you spend 90 minutes inside of Dave Harris’s incandescent head, will that give you the power to detect Werewolves or, if you are a Werewolf to thwart Townsfolk and Seers? Will it give you, earnest Townsperson that you are, the power to bring the people to your side? No. Your personal powers have not increased but you’ve just spent some time with real Science, with a mindset which knows we have to offset our desire to see the world through the lens of what we understand and expect and hope and fear — the assumptions we’re most comfortable with — if we want to figure out what’s really going on.

Also: this isn’t Science, which is to say: it isn’t sentimental — doesn’t by temperament expect a rational outcome is possible — this is Theater and Theater, at its core, knows there’s no way to figure out what’s really going A on; you can’t game out life.

Dave Harris. Photo by Zack DeZon.

with a secret werewolf: accusations are leveled, sometimes at near random; the accused hotly defend themselves and generally turn to accuse another; expressions are closely scrutinized, protestations of innocence evaluated. In the end the town casts a vote on who must die.

It’s a simple and complex game in which people who don’t know each other well try to game each other out: some people are good at performing innocence, some innocents are bad at performing innocence, some people are good at guessing but bad at persuading everyone else and the reverse, some people are taking the game seriously and others are looking to mix it up.

Generally the werewolf survives to kill, and to kill again.

It’s like a play, in which the audience isn’t safe.

One thing I learned, when I was a member of the 2018 Working Farm cohort at SPACE on Ryder Farm (a beautiful and only slightly haunted artist and activism residency on an old farmstead in Putnam, NY) for various weeks over the course of the summer, is that you don’t want to be on the wrong side of Dave Harris in a game of Werewolf because he knows. Be you ever so cunning, he knows if you’re The Werewolf, he knows if you’re The Seer; he’s one jump ahead of everyone else. It isn’t just that he can tell when you’re lying, it’s that knowledge of what the hell is going on seems to flicker to life within him — be it psychical powers, preternaturalism, or a heightened degree of watchfulness/observation I don’t know; just don’t try to game out Dave Harris.

“Writing has a cost — and people will love you for paying it…So in this search for newness, in all this language and fear, what’s the cost that I’m paying in the work of each of my plays? And how will I contend with the reward?” Dave Harris says in an interview…

[This is an amazing question. I teach playwriting sometimes and when I teach will at some point ask the writers if they have Questions and this is a question I am always waiting for, which no one ever asks -- not, necessarily, because they aren’t wondering; they probably don’t think I have the Answer, I don’t have the Answer, I don’t know the costs I only know they’re there, always, matter doesn’t coalesce from nothing, and, rewards can be deadly. What, Dave Harris asks, are the particular costs paid by American Black writers speaking to a white audience; is there an American white appetite for American Black pain and when it comes to that question and that cost I’m just a consumer, wondering about that thirst and what is it, exactly, a dark rich mix of impulses, some of them very old and very deep, not all of them unwholesome; I can’t know the costs of supplying that nourishment, feeding that particular thirst; I can wonder about that hunger, and the consequences of that hunger, can wonder about what it means to give quarters for what satisfaction…]

We forget that theater is a form of near-infinite possibility and that we are living in a small corner of it. By “it” I mean the culture of theater as we understand it currently in, let’s say, the United States, and I include in this both the most familiar comfortable plays and the most insane experiments, but it’s worth remembering: just as Science is, properly speaking, not so much a set of conclusions (although it includes some pretty durable conclusions) as it is a mode of inquiry and rigorous curiosity, Theater is not the art of making a play, Theater (as a Western art, at least) is the form we use to grapple with the fact that we’re an inevitably social species which is positively larded

The American Voice: Dave Harris Natasha Sinha

ANTICIPATION for Dave Harris’ major New York City playwriting debut has long been building amongst those of us who read hundreds of new plays annually — and now, at long last, here in December 2021, the exhilarating world premiere of Tambo & Bones is upon us. It’s staggering to realize that we are only at the beginning of Dave’s theatrical life at this scale. The beginning of his virtuosic plays bursting with sharp insight and laugh-out-loud humor. The beginning of his wild romps through satire and surprise.

The beginning of storytelling built with a piercing awareness of not only who is watching, but what the exchange during performance does to both artists and audiences.

Like Adrienne Kennedy, Dave has a creative restlessness that fuels his formally inventive plays. Like Anne Washburn, he interrogates history, rebuilding, and storytelling itself.

Like Young Jean Lee, he follows what scares him. And Dave’s unique voice rings out clear and confident as it calculates the exact angle at which to approach Blackness, performance, violence, white nonsense, capitalism, the lens of storytelling, and so much more. And he delivers all of this with vibrant energy and an existential wit!

Dave’s oeuvre makes clear that he is truly an artistprovocateur above all. Mesmerized by craft and the ability to manipulate, he wields skills borne of both instinct and practice, in order to push the envelope and subvert expectations. Spend time with the honest ruminations on masculinity in Patricide, as he examines how we observe the world around us when we are reading poetry alone.

Look out for his upcoming film and TV projects, intentionally created for the screen. Experience the immediacy of his spoken word performance, where he mischievously plays with the assumption of an authentic self. Check out his Literary Ancestry Essay Series about the Black theater canon, via Roundabout Theatre Company. Read his Playwright’s Perspective! (Please, please do!) Go back and watch his hilarious Inanimate Object Battle League series with Issa Rae’s media company, which organically sprouted early in the pandemic.

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Whatever the medium of expression, Dave distinctly anticipates what the audience is expecting, and formally turns the piece on its head — not for shock value, but to advance the storytelling. He effortlessly creates striking prompts across art forms. So we are lucky that his OffBroadway debut is happening alongside Off-Broadway’s “post”-pandemic return to theater and efforts toward deeper thoughtfulness... Dave is a visionary and there are no passive choices in his work. If his story appears as a play, there’s an electric yet carefully considered reason for being placed in a theater. It insists on specifically existing as theater.

The pandemic triggered a long-overdue reckoning about race, while theaters largely remained closed, so we’ve been unable to work through those conversations via what we primarily do (ie: produce plays). This fall, shielded by vaccines and masks, productions are beginning amidst this charged cultural zeitgeist. Conversations about representation and authenticity often slide into an assumption that we need a sacred and unassailable truth — as if that would effectively squash injustice. After a year and a half of relentless instability and accumulating anxiety, grasping for certainty has become fashionable in many circles. But what is fully truthful? Can we trust it? Truth from what perspective? Truth for whom? Is that what we need right now? The concept of objective truth can understandably prove comforting in a time of fear. But is it an illusion?

With simple theatrical gesture, Tambo & Bones scrutinizes the idea of truth as objective (versus subjective), starting in the first few minutes of the play — what makes a chair a chair? what makes a tree a tree? — and it ultimately leads us to loaded questions about personhood itself.

Instead of pouring cement onto any single final answer, Dave’s work unleashes a prismatic range of realities that gives our imaginations a full workout. Instead of continuing broad yet admittedly noble arguments, Dave prompts our imaginations to go to unpredictable and savage and beautiful and dangerous places. (Imagination is an escape, but also…can we escape what we imagine?) Instead of positing the existence of clean and irreproachable truth, Dave offers surprise.

Surprise lives in the gut of all of Dave’s plays. White History introduces someone from the KKK at a dinner party, while tonally trafficking in the realm of comedy.

Exception to the Rule (which will premiere with Roundabout Theater Company this spring) is in conversation with No Exit and Waiting for Godot, as it shapeshifts into exploring abject results of education for Black teenagers just trying to survive. Incendiary begins with a sort of video game dramaturgy, to navigate us through the journey of a Black single mother planning to break her son out of prison.

Everybody Black is a project of defining the Black American experience à la The Colored Museum…or is it? Surprise shakes us loose, and feeds our own inquiry about the structures and realities of our day-to-day lives. Are these conversations about race indeed an escalation? Or is time the only thing that is actually changing — amidst a cycle of endless iterations, without material change? (For more on this, stay tuned for Dave’s upcoming Soundstage audio play, exploring discussions about Black freedom. Is there a growing edge in the discussion of Black freedom in this country? What are we hoping to break the cycle toward?)

Working from his own personal curiosity (and against the concept of a monolithic Black perspective), Dave 44

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Are these conversations about race indeed an escalation?

Or is time the only thing that is actually changing — amidst a cycle of endless iterations, without material change?

chases his own desire for understanding, consciously leaning into what feels surprising along the way. It is an individual pursuit honed by his unique perspective, then fully realized with lively collaborators, and forever marinating in the questions raised. Who needs to be in power in order to bring about meaningful change in our country? Is the very existence of traditional power keeping us from change? What world order would be most just?

Is discourse around race and class finally accumulating?

Is it stuck in a never-ending loop? What is fake? What is real? What is useful? What do we get swept up into?

How should we behave? What would bring sustained selfactualization, tangible freedom, and peace to Black folks in the U.S.? Eschewing oversimplification, Tambo & Bones mines the complexities of these questions in relation to perspective. Dave’s plays are built on the understanding that storytelling doesn’t exist without charged lenses: the perspective of the writer fabricating the story, and the perspectives of the audience.

This play wrestles with two men’s approaches to addressing the source of their troubles, while exploring the creation of a self that is fabricated based on who is watching — for example, selling Black “trauma porn” to elicit interest from (what is perpetually) a predominantly white audience; or, being the buffoonish entertainment for a white audience via minstrelsy (in which U.S. theater has its roots). We watch their success within the frame of capitalism, until we are made to question the very definition of success. We experience the “successful” performance of Black pain in exchange for money, for applause, for laughs, for empathy. We observe empathy operating as a commodified product of performance and as a means toward profit. And then, the fact that the play is an act of sheer manipulation by the playwright is brilliant! It’s karma! It’s Machiavellian! It’s delicious in its desire, its wickedness, its dreaminess, its relatability. Dave chooses to insert himself in this artifice, to perpetuate and popularize these depictions to land his point.

As Tambo & Bones leads us through a surprising, playful, and unapologetic odyssey, we constantly question ourselves. We are gifted an opportunity to practice curiosity about ourselves, our world, our desires, our reactions, our assumptions, our choices. We may not have all the answers at the end, but we can own the consequences of our own choices: do we decide to imagine another space or do we decide to participate in this one? It’s a story built on the necessity of a present physical audience, on the tropes of storytelling within minstrelsy and music and beyond.

Dave imbues every choice with intention and virtuosity — including the fact that this play is incomplete A without your presence and individual imagination.

Anaïs Duplan For Dave Harris

We were encamped on a bank high, high enough to where we saw the full thickness of the ground, sewn-up, cleared out of its large canes. Our escape we planned to some lampooning darkness. Our buffoonery, mysticism, happiness, and luck: the pleasures of the grotesque, of abandonment.

A kind of romance exaggerated into Black life, a cheerful, enslaved readiness, a dance pleasing to master-minstrels, a romance carrying on between mothers and a son thought dead in Alabama.

We all earned our freedoms by giving concerts, by acting spontaneously, naturally, all seized up by our willingness to be as darky as he be at home, as darky as he be in life, in the cornfield and the canebrake’s rivers and floodplains, its valleys lapping along the wet edges

We All Earned Our Freedoms

by Giving Concerts

of the waters that early settlers crossed over into indigenous attack, on boats built like floating fires, with heavily-barred windows, small sliding shutters, walls pierced through with gloryholes.

There were guns fired and performers stained in character up off the stage, dressed up in slaveness, that perpetual smiling of Jim Crows and Gumbo Chaffs, fighting, boasting characteristically animal, bleeding like wolves, having drunk ourselves full of ink to where we got sickened and had to restore the color. We were inherently musical for frolicking through night without no need for sleeping, ignorant of pain, poorly spoken for, having been shot up like balloons, waiting on the world below to turn.

The musics we hear jangle our nerves. Musics of those believed Black.

Propererous musics, respected, polished-up romantic tunes with recognizable attitudes. Our vigorous teeth-slapping footworks. I’m reeling from these songs.

First called plantation men, then Ethiopian serenaders.

Ineffable Blackness gives way to jealousy, as one who is himself living religion, is the beauty of his own person, is darkly himself, googly-eyed with pink red white teeths.

Goodness gracious, the gentlemen: the brothers named Tambo and Bones, in each other’s joking arms floating on a skiff in old Virginny, working from day-to-day, raking oyster beds. To them, it’s just playfulness, but now they grown old, can’t work no more. Carry them back to shore?

They’d choose another life this time.

They’d save their coin this time, buy a farm somewhere. But now it hits them tight in their limbs, grown sore. Carry them back after they jumps from their skiff, down into the river, catching in their mouths as many catfish as ever a nigger has seen. A circus of catfish.

Acrobatic fish, bareback lovers in dripping garb.

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Plays as Shapes

Mia Chung

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Abe Koogler

A Step-by-Step Guide for Calling Your Ex-Husband to Let Him Know That a Notice for Jury Duty Came for Him in the Mail Mara Nelson-Greenberg

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1) Open your phone, find his name Reminder that the last time you called him you changed his name in your phone afterwards so it will now appear as First Name: If you // Last Name: Call this number you are entering a world of pain (so under C) Another reminder as you even just LOOK at his name and imagine dialing: You are calling him to leave a message about jury duty.

YOU ARE NOT CALLING TO TALK TO HIM ON THE PHONE. You have called him 98 times and he has never answered before. You are in control of what can and cannot disappoint you based on YOUR EXPECTATIONS. Side-note about number of calls: Feels somehow okay to call 99 times. 100 not okay. This is your last chance to leave a GOOD, STRONG VOICEMAIL. DEFINITION OF GOOD, STRONG VOICEMAIL List generated with your next door neighbor’s eight year old daughter Rosie when you were babysitting for her this weekend (so list half yours/half hers): —

A voicemail that makes it clear a notice for jury duty has come for him in the mail

—

A voicemail that does not deteriorate into a long monologue about how you are lonely, how you are sorry, how you are still not sure why you do the things you do but you’re finally ready to figure it out and you just wish that he would be willing to go on that journey with you

—

A voicemail that makes it clear you are OVER things like arts and crafts for KIDS and you LOVE COMPUTERS

—

A voicemail that embraces the fact that you are independent from him, his opinion does not matter, you are not leaving this voicemail in the hopes he will give you anything in return

—

A voicemail that shows you do NOT need your parents but especially your MOM to tell you when certain things in a movie might be about to be scary, because you know it’s just a movie and you DON’T GET NIGHTMARES from things that aren’t real now that you’re 8

Remember what else Rosie said: ROSIE: The best part of being alive is that you can just smile and play and have fun with your friends YOU: But what if you have no friends ROSIE: No one has no friends YOU: I have no friends ROSIE: Maybe you have one?

YOU: I recently called Justine, who was the only person left in my life who I considered a friend, and she told me that the last time we spoke she was just trying to be there for me and I called her a hag and a shrew ROSIE: So say sorry

YOU: I did but now she has other friends who have never done anything like that to her before ROSIE: Then you can still smile and play and have fun alone, like, you CAN do that even if you don’t want to.

You actually only can’t do that if you are dead like my rabbit YOU: That’s nice, thanks ROSIE: And my dog YOU: Right ROSIE: And the boy who lives under my bed YOU: Can we talk about something else now 2) Dial his number (touch “If you Call this” etc on phone) It will be a thrill to touch it, it will be dizzying, like an orgasm or like when you got three answers right in a row as you were watching Jeopardy with his parents and you felt like they finally saw you as a smart person and maybe he did too Don’t bask in the thrill, don’t dwell in it, it’s going to go away soon and this phone call will let you down (similar to when the next question on Jeopardy was “The bride and groom do this together, often with a decorated silver knife” and you shouted at the screen, very loud and proud, “What is ritualized murder, Alex?”)

You will make the mistake of dwelling in the orgasm feeling because you always do When you return to reality after the orgasm, it is going to feel bad. Know that and expect it. It will feel like reality hitting you in the face Around now, something unnameable lodges itself in the very back of your throat 3) Wait for the first ring What to expect when you hear it (based on previous experiences): —

Every time: your stomach drops and your body freezes up

—

Sometimes: you think about how badly you need a hug

—

One time (unfortunately): you crapped

4) Let the phone ring five more times Priority now is to relax That means you must BREATHE Reminder: Breathe does NOT mean hold your breath until you pass out and when the ambulance comes say, “Just throw me out of the back of this thing, I’m done with life”— reminder that they do not think that kind of thing is funny

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Some things you should think about while you are breathing: —

You are doing well, in that you are eating and you are functioning and you are alive

—

You are TALENTED at something (just need to find what it is)

—

That kid at the grocery store was laughing at someone else

Remember that you only have one life to live. For a moment you will feel angry about that but that is not the exercise.

The exercise is to be grateful for everything that is yours: —

Be grateful for your apartment

—

Be grateful for your car

—

Even though it pays terribly and the hours are bad and your boss is a creep and your co-workers are unfriendly and you are actually not very excited about what it means that you’re selling growth supplements to little children (5 or below) for a living, be grateful for your job

Some things you should NOT think about while you are breathing: —

Maybe this time he will answer

—

Maybe he will want to get back together with you

—

Your cousin looked hot in his most recent Instagram post

(Note on last point about cousin: always good to take a beat and remember that you need to STOP thinking about that, and stop trying to figure out if he is single, think rationally, he is your cousin, you are related, he is thirty-five years older than you because of big age gap between your parents (not the most damning part but still good to keep in mind), and he is a criminal as in he once killed a man and when he was done confessing to it he said “that was fun, I want to try that again sometime down the line, but next time with a woman or a relative or both”) Now you are thinking about family 5) Disassociate That unnameable feeling that formed in the very back of your throat is now probably working its way down to your chest You can try to pretend it’s something casual, but once it gets down to chest area it feels ugly and even worse, it feels familiar, and it’s not casual at all A question will rip through your brain, which is: How can people just go away?

You picture ex-husband And now uh oh it’s happening You picture your dad You will start to panic. But! There is a solution (remember what Rosie said: “There is always a solution even if it means you have to kill the troll with your best sword” (she was talking about the game on her phone but still useful)) Solution is: Look away! Not everything needs to be examined all the time!

Instead, zoom out. Float above yourself. Remember that you are bigger than this moment, this phone call, this person you are calling. Go really big with it. As in…..

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6) Listen to his outgoing message What to expect: —

His voice will make you miss him

—

The way he clears his throat at the end will also make you miss him

—

The beep comes really fast (last time it came, you screamed)

The outgoing message will say: Hi, you’ve reached Jackson, leave a message.

[Then a computer will tell you how to do that] This is it Breathe in, breathe out The unnameable feeling has now settled in the pit of your stomach. Why can’t you stop thinking about death ever since he left?

Try to avoid doing that. Instead, think about: —

Rosie saying she trusts you even though you were mean to Justine

—

Your dad’s enormous laugh and how it sounded like a sneeze

—

Your dad tucking you into bed at night when you were little and saying to no one, “Hello sergeant, signing in for duty to keep my daughter safe tonight” and then doing a salute

—

The fact that just because people aren’t here anymore doesn’t mean the amount they loved you doesn’t count — you are still loved the amount they loved you

—

The fact that in the past, people have been notokay, and then time has passed, and they have become okay. It happens all the time. It happens all the time. It can happen to you.

7) Leave the message SCRIPT: Hi. You got a notice for jury duty, so I’ll forward it to your new address. Hope you’re doing well. Bye.

A

The Great Sondheim Pop Quiz Crossword Puzzle Adam Greenfield When I was twelve, I saw Into the Woods on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theater, and it blew my mind.

That night, unbelievably, I found Stephen Sondheim’s address in the White Pages and wrote him a fan letter on hotel stationery. More unbelievably, he wrote me back two weeks later. I would share photo images of our sporadic correspondence, which transpired over the next six years, but (tragically) these letters disappeared when the family moved out of my childhood home in Southern California.

I remember, though, Sondheim writing, “Your friends must think you’re crazy;” and my thinking, “Stephen Sondheim is the only one who gets me.” And I remember him telling me the key to becoming a theater artist is to just keep making theater, stubbornly, without giving up. I remember him politely declining my invitation to speak at my high school graduation because “I am due to attend the opening of Sweeney Todd on the West End.” And I remember that once, when I came across a stack of Stephen Sondheim’s Collected New York Times Crossword Puzzles at a local used bookshop, he asked me to buy them all and send them to him, which I did. …Except, I kept one for myself. Every once in a while I’d try to complete one, and fail, and in time I became a crossword fanatic.

As I became ensconced as a grown-up at Playwrights Horizons, I was chronically too shy to see if he remembered me. It would have been too devastating if he didn’t. I wish I could have thanked him for the plays that shaped my upbringing, and for giving me that first scrap of encouragement that I could have a life making work myself. But here, I wrote a crossword instead. He would not like this crossword, I imagine, but I hope he would read it as my way of saying, Thanks, Mr. Sondheim.

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The Great Sondheim Pop Quiz 1

2

3

4

5

15

16

22

23

26

27 31

37

32

38

6

7

8

17

33

81

88

100

105 113

117

118

86

111

87 92

93 97

101

102 107

114

Thick slice of a thing Three letters on the4 button Good (slang) The final, final, final word Popular spot for a run?

Color of the grass, part one. (“Sunday in the Park With George”) Attention-grabbers An Oskar for Schindler’s List Don’t have this around Bart Simpson, man.

Fabric for a Prince?

4,840 square yards Where they keep “Campbell’s Soup Cans”

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85

91

106

122

ACROSS

52

84

96

112

18.

21 22.

23.

25.

26.

83

99

110

79

90

98

74

58

69

78

95

73

52 57

89

94

1.

5.

8.

11.

15.

16.

82

77

43

48

72

80

121

47

68

76

104

41

56

71

42

21

51 55

14

36

40

54

13

30

35

46

12

25

34

75

103

20

29

67 70

19

28

50

53

11

24

45

49

10

18

39

44

9

115

108

109 116

119

120

123

124

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

33.

36.

37.

40.

44.

45.

48.

Inventor of the ATM, the UPC, and the floppy disk Not nay Some night school courses (Abbr.)

A ball in the arcade Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, or Cenozoic Where April will not be flying today. (“Company”) Prefix to -god!, -cron, and -nous Plácido Domingo, José Carreras, or Luciano Pavarotti, e.g.

Like Hester Prynn, Cain, and St. Francis Sixth musical note (alt.)

Autumnal flower, or “An herb that’s superb for disturbances at sea.” (“Pacific Overtures”) “Liebe” in Spanisch

ACROSS (continued)

49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

55.

57.

59.

64.

67.

68.

70.

72.

75.

76.

79.

80.

81.

84.

87.

88.

89.

The first Martha afraid of Virginia Woolf Prefix for an American ship Like trumpets, horns, tubas and trombones Snack for a luau Aware of itself Slices and _____ Catalytic event for Cinderella Wedding Barbie, e.g.

Destination for Charles Guiteau, from the gallows. (“Assassins”) LIke a guilty plea Incendiary Where to find Jim Morrison Home for the Baker’s sister (“Into the Woods”), and other prisoners Schoolyard bully Wonders abstractly Act without words After 70-down, a possible abbr. for Tinder Where drip coffee drips Diamond, sapphire, or emerald Frequent quality of a swimsuit model Commotion What the swimsuit model did

DOWN

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

16.

17.

19.

20.

24.

32.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

41.

42.

43.

46.

47.

54.

55.

56.

57.

58.

60.

61.

62.

A kind of marriage Crazy in Cancun Time that Mme. Armfeldt spent at the Villa of the Baron de Signac. (“A Little Night Music”) Helpful tip for pickpockets, dog, and the ides of March Whose national dish is the sauerbraten?

Groovy How to take an aerobics class Fundamental A kind of moment Ceasefires, “They’re what everybody wants!” (Pacific Overtures) A kind of donation The quickest trick for a thick thicket. (“Into the Woods”) Trim Captain Hook’s right-hand This pig is out of order For safe shagging, or a rainy day Sets up for a lousy shot Birthplace of Rosanna Rosanna Danna (Abbr.)

Tripoli, in a manner of speaking?

Path of history, the sun, or a character in a play Sigur ___, of Iceland U.S. Stds for a safe workpace The sound of silence?

What you do with the depths “Gunsmoke” or “Stagecoach,” in old slang Thanksgiving day LaRoche, Pearce, or Maupassant Increasingly, a common thought while gazing into the mirror.

Like a slinky, or Little Orphan Annie’s hair Birthplace of 20-Down Tra due et quattro Verb for the fripperous?

Like a guest spot on “Six Feet Under” Good (slang) Landed, as a sparrow upon a branch “_____ Buddies” For Beth, time that does not go by. (“Merrily We Roll Along”) The first Sweeney “Back in business and I mean just that / Back with Franklin Shepard, ___.” (“Merrily We Roll Along”)

93. “A very palpable ___” 94. “___ ___ know,” as per Alanis Morissette 96. Like library books, or recovered artworks 98 Almost-grads (Abbr.)

99. Targeting 102. ruof yb dedivid thgie semit eerhT 103. New Age Music icon 105. Cinema giant 106. French farthing 107. Good (slang) 109. “Altra” in Spagnolo 112. Prom attendee 113. Predisposed to worry?

116. Ozian roarer 117. “We’re all born naked; the rest is ____.”

118. Pamela of “Better Things” 119. Humility 120. Liberal arts major (Abbr.)

121. Irked 122. A lamb’s mother 123. East Germany (Abbr.)

124. Tms Sqr dstntn fr thtrgrs

63.

What Beth will do day after day after day after day after day after day after day. (“Merrily We Roll Along”) 64. Famed General of Chinese take-out 65. Term of endearment 66. Dir. from NYC to 115-down 68. Yoruban affirmation 69. A combo of sts, aves, hwys and fwys 70. Words to come out 71. Cool haircut 73. Medium for spams and scams 74. Lets 76. Lady of the house 77. A saucer, perhaps 78. Upper chamber mbr.

81. Minor character 82. Like a sinner at confession 83. Handbag that Joanna isn’t bringing to Paris, or to Spain. (“Sweeney Todd”) 84. What Peter Pan won’t do, or what Sally won’t do on Buddy’s shoulder. (“Follies”) 85. Hoop, stud, or huggie 86. CCCLXVII x III 89. Target for a poultice 90. Rowing on this side of the pond 91. Belgian currency (Abbr.)

92. What a witch might cast upon trespassing neighbors 95. Color of the grass, part two. (“Sunday in the Park With George”) 97. Color of the grass, part three. (“Sunday in the Park With George”) 100. “Out of many, there __ __” 101. “Now it’s he and ___ you who is stuck with a shoe in a stew in the goo.” (“Into the Woods”) 103. Airport stats 104. Demonic emperor of Rome 105. Goal for grade grubbers 108. One way 110. Origin 111. Coulter, Margaret, Richards and Raggedy 114. One of 21 in this puzzle 115. A breezy Cape

Answers to the crossword can be found at phnyc.org/crossword.

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WISH YOU WERE HERE

Written by Sanaz Toossi

Directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch April – June 2022

Nazanin Nour. Photo by Joan Marcus.

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“

When I think about the women who inspired this play, I hear obnoxious, cacophonous laughter.

The decrescendo of that laughter is the central loss of this play. But it does not define the play. These women do not need your pity, nor do they want it.

But they demand to be seen in their full humanity, as do all refugees, immigrants, and almost-migrants, no matter what part of the world they’re from. People everywhere — beautifully, tragically, obviously — strive for normalcy.

Sanaz Toossi Playwright’s Perspective: Wish You Were Here 56

Nazanin Nour, Roxanna Hope Radja, and Marjan Neshat.. Photo by Joan Marcus.

A Q&A with Sanaz Toossi Lizzie Stern

On January 24, Literary Director Lizzie Stern interviewed Sanaz Toossi at Sanaz’s apartment in Brooklyn. This is an edited transcript of their conversation. It’s worth knowing that Lizzie and Sanaz are good friends, so there’s a bit of over-sharing here (in parentheses) — which, for a play about female friendship, seemed only fitting.

Lizzie began by reading an excerpt from a 2016 interview with psychologist Pauline Boss, on Krista Tippett’s podcast “On Being.”

LIZZIE STERN (quoting Boss): “Homesickness was an essential part of my family’s culture… I think it may be true for all immigrant families, but it certainly was for mine.

And it was even in the village because there were many immigrant families there. So it became a sort of pathos that would be in the family when we weren’t even aware of it, except that I could see the sadness periodically, like when my father would get a letter from Switzerland, or worse yet, a letter with a black rim around it, which meant announcement of death in the family. So I was always aware that there was another family somewhere and that there was some homesickness. Except, where was home?

I figured that home was in Wisconsin where we lived. Yet I knew he had this other family across the Atlantic that he pined for. My maternal grandmother was the same. Of course, she refused to learn English. She said she lost her mountains, she lost her mother, she lost her friends, and she wasn’t going to lose her language.”

SANAZ TOOSSI: That is crazy beautiful.

LS: There’s a way in which, with this type of loss, and with any traumatic thing, people turn it in toward themselves and blame themselves. It’s especially true with ambiguous loss because you can’t point to a concrete fixed point in the swirling chaos of the lack of justice in the world, which feels so much like the moment we’re going through. But, really? This loss feels, to me, a part of your play. (Oh my God, it makes me want to cry.)

ST: (Me too, I’m on the verge of tears.) I’ve been looking for that term for a really long time because I think it defines all of my work. Homesickness. It’s hard to describe it when it was just the way I grew up. You know, we were the only ones here in our family. I’ve always been balancing the privilege in being an American. There were opportunities that were available to me that were maybe not available to my family members and I was always told how lucky I was. But I always felt like when we went back to Iran — oh. They were the lucky ones. We grew up naturally with a separation. All of us. We know what family separation means from the day we are born. And Iranians are so resilient. Our culture lifts up celebration and joy, and our parties are obnoxiously beautiful and egregious. We are a people who know how to celebrate.

“

I think I’m an expert in homesickness.

Detached homesickness — for somewhere you didn’t grow up.

I understand friendship deeply.

And I understand absences.

But even in our celebration, in our extravagant weddings, I am always so cognizant of what it means to celebrate when not everyone is there. I’ve never had a second where I didn’t know that. Everything I write has to do with that kind of ambiguous loss. In [my play] English, it’s about language and how hard it is to leave, and what it means to let that part of yourself go. Wish You Were Here is about friendship and what happens when people you love leave, and what that means about your connection to where you’re from. The loss of a friend can feel like the death of a friend… I always wonder if I will ever stop writing about this. I don’t know.

LS: In a way, it’s a more complicated grief if a person is still alive but not there. And when it’s a person who is such a part of you. Because something about homesickness, too, is that, yes, it’s about home but it’s also that idea, [quoting a line in the play]: being your best friend was my whole personality. You know? It’s when a person is home… and how alienated you become from yourself, and how hard it is to be at home in yourself, too, without them.

ST: I think with women, and I use that term broadly — for me, my relationships with women tell me who I am. In ways that I don’t necessarily get in other parts of my life. And the best parts of me come forward, as do the worst parts. But they’re the parts that feel like me.

LS: Which parts?

ST: That I can be mean. It doesn’t make me feel good to be mean to people, but I like that that part of me exists. That I’m not a pushover.

LS: Yeah, you don’t suffer fools. I’ve never seen you be mean in my life, but I also know that you stand up for yourself when you need to.

ST: Thank you. I hope so. I really have liked that about growing up: that mean girl isn’t not going anywhere, I enjoy her presence in my life.

LS: I want to go back to something you said before. Of knowing and feeling the presence of the absence of people.

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emotionally. How does writing about them, about homesickness, make you feel?

ST: That’s a really good question. You know, as I’m in the very nascent stages of planning my own wedding – LS: (Oh my GOD so much to talk about. I haven’t even seen the ring.)

ST: (I know, I got it re-sized.) Anyway. Writing doesn’t make me feel better. What would make me feel better would be if I could have all of my family at my wedding. That would make me feel better. But instead I’m going to have to have a million weddings so that I can celebrate with everyone I love. And that… has been a really hard reality to face. I think a lot of the reason why I write is that so much of this is hard to talk about. I think it’s the only thing that I’m actually able to write about. Because it’s the only thing that keeps my interest. You know, writing takes time. You have a sexy idea one minute and the next, it’s the most embarrassing thing. You’d die if anyone knew what you thought was your cool hot sexy idea.

LS: Totally.

ST: So [homesickness] is the thing that I will always write about because I will never have all of the words for it. I think I’m on a quest for all of the words. I think when I write, I want to be understood by immigrant kids like me.

With them, I know I am telling the truth. Even if it only makes sense to us. That’s what I try to remember. I get really in my head about reviews and it’s devastating to feel like you’re not understood by people. Playwrights don’t talk about it but we also need validation.

LS: Oh my God. ST: I’m a colossal pain in the ass. As are most playwrights I know. But I’ve found a real home in first-generation kids like me who validate the hours and make me trust myself.

LS: Do you know Sheila Heti, the writer? She’s a beautiful fiction/non-fiction writer and I just took a class with her called “What do people see when they read you?”

The premise of the course, which is implied in the title, is how vulnerable writing is — how much of yourself is in the work that you’re sharing. And we’re not worried about how people are going to respond to our artistry and how they’ll see our craft and structure, sure, we want to make something that’s beautiful. But I think really the thing we’re all preoccupied with is how that opinion bears on how they see me, what they think of me. And this is an often unspoken part of writing: it is an act of self-expression. And any self-expression is inherently going to be, in some way, a failure because language can’t do everything we want it to do.

ST: I love that about plays. If you’re able to fully capture what your play is about in words, maybe it shouldn’t be a play. I love that language fails us. It should.

LS: It should. And I do think that that is also something you write about, the failure of language.

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ST: I’ve tried to learn to be comfortable with the inability to fully encapsulate something and to be comfortable with the mystery and that I will never be able to fully describe it – that it is contradictory. And I feel both lucky and unlucky at the same time. I’m learning [that the project of playwriting is more about] questions not answers, which also makes me feel deeply exposed. Because, just to state it baldly, I’m worried people will think I’m stupid. And I don’t know a playwright who doesn’t worry about that.

But I would like not to let that fear rule my writing, or especially re-writing.

LS: Any fear can be something that works for you or against you. It can either motivate you to keep going or be debilitating. And I do think there’s a point at which, in a process, you reach a moment of acceptance. It’s hard to say if a play can ever be finished because the process by which that text becomes fixed is so fluid and has everything to do with your collaborators and your audiences. Which is a scary thing. Because a lot of that you can’t control. It’s not like writing a novel. A play morphs in real time in response to its reception. When a play is being performed, it’s responding to its actors and to its reader: the audience. And if you’re the playwright, and you’re sitting there hearing it, you have to decide: do I want to make a change to the text because of this actor, or this audience — or not?

ST: Right.

LS: Now, I want to go back to a basic thing that I took for granted in starting this conversation. Which is the question that Brené Brown (who you introduced me to, thank you) starts her interviews with. The question: tell me your story.

ST: I am a first generation Iranian-American girl from Orange County, and I love “The Real Housewives of Potomac.”

LS: Oh my God yes.

ST: I really never saw myself as a playwright. I had no idea that this is what my life would be.

LS: Well. It’s interesting. Because— ST: (Your eyebrows look amazing.)

LS: (Stop, I’ve been thinking that about you this entire time.)

ST: (They’re my dream eyebrows.)

LS: (Honestly I’m so glad you said that, I can’t even tell you what I’ve been going through with my skin this week, it’s been so horrible.)

ST: (When I rub castor oil into my eyebrows at night, risking my eyesight, I do it for your eyebrows.)

LS: (I don’t even get it because your eyebrows are aspirational for me.) Anyway, going back to this fear writers have of being seen as “stupid,” or wanting to be seen as “smart.”

Here’s a stupid question: what does “smart” mean?

ST: I used to think it meant being in command of language.

That’s when I wrote English. I am in command of language —

but not reliably. But I don’t know if anyone is reliably.

Unless you’re Barack Obama. The playwrights I love the most are okay with mystery. A monologue’s not gonna do it. Still won’t be enough. But what is “stupid,” what is “smart”? I wonder if it’s more about curiosity. Like how trendsetters are smart because they do the new thing when it’s super effing ugly.

LS: I also think being smart has to do, in part, with knowing yourself. It’s about being an expert. What are you an expert in? I could tell you what I think you’re an expert in. But I want to hear what you think you’re an expert in.

ST: I understand, in my bones, how cruel people can be when they’re trying to be kind to each other. I really love and feel at home in that. I know how to write that scene. I think I’m an expert in homesickness. Detached homesickness — for somewhere you didn’t grow up. I understand friendship deeply. And I understand absences. Really I do. And I’m an expert in riding the hyphen. The gap. The in-between. Feeling like half. I think all of these are just other words for homesickness.

LS: I would add to that: your writing is so funny. I mean, I don’t want us to get too dark here. I also think you’re an expert in loneliness, feeling alone with other people.

ST: That may actually be the definition of homesickness. Or at least when I think about Iranians — especially Southern California Iranians — it’s like we have found our people. We have a community. And I almost feel it’s controversial to say it will still never be enough.

LS: Because there’s no closure.

ST: Right, it has nothing to do with anyone. It’s not about intention or action.

LS: It’s the situation.

ST: Right, it’s fact.

LS: Pauline Boss also says this about “complicated grief,” which is what results from ambiguous loss: “it’s not pathological psyche — it’s a pathological situation, the situation is crazy, illogical, chaotic, unbelievably painful, chronic grief, an incremental death.”

ST: And it’s so complicated with Iranians because I’m not sure we fully understand what seeing ourselves as model minorities has done to us. That’s hard to talk about. When you talk about the model minority myth with minorities, you’re met with a lot of push-back. Because what they hear is your hard work meant nothing. But I’m not saying that.

My parents are so hard-working. We can be successful and trauma can still exist. We don’t want to look back at the pain. Because if we look back at the pain, it’s like saying we didn’t create something beautiful for ourselves. And I think we can do both.

LS: I’ve been doing Torah study classes lately, and there was just this interesting conversation over the weekend about an image of a forest that had been destroyed, and from the stumps grew seedlings. And from those seedlings

grew saplings. It’s a disgusting image of decapitated trees disturbingly growing saplings from their stumps. But there is such beauty in this image, this image of rebirth from terrible loss. And I think about who you said you’re writing your plays for: first generation kids. I think about generations, and trauma, and what’s unspeakable. And what the next generation, the people you’re writing towards, you as the artist who can find words for it, and the gift of that. And how painful, too. How painful it is to feel like it can never be enough. But still it must be.

ST: The mistake is always feeling like you have to put a value on it. That’s the mistake. Thinking I’m lucky, or no it’s hard - I’m really comfortable now with that it’s both. And sometimes that means you start a sentence saying one thing and end contradicting yourself.

LS: That’s what makes your characters so beautiful. They are filled with self-contradiction.

ST: What do you like about plays?

LS: Humor, deep insight, a shift in perspective, nuanced characters who surprise me in the ways they contradict themselves, and a sense of self-expression on the page that feels authentic and not forced.

ST: I agree with all of that. Humor especially feels so truthful for me. It’s unavoidable. Especially with the Middle East. I feel like it’s a quiet rebellion to have our plays be funny. And when you feel a deep quest for a truth in the play. I love plays that think through a question. I don’t necessarily think my plays do that, but I really treasure that. I love anything that’s a little bit ugly. I am so grateful for plays that you watch and you look over at the playwright and they look embarrassed because they’ve told on themselves. They said something they weren’t supposed to say. I admire that.

LS: Vulnerability.

ST: Our work should be a little bit embarrassing.

LS: Of course. It’s so so embarrassing.

ST: It’s like getting pantsed in public. Here I am, here are my granny panties bunched up in my butt cheeks.

LS: And I have my period and haven’t gotten waxed in a really long time.

ST: Yep, don’t know what you’re looking at but it’s not good.

LS: Right I haven’t even looked down there because I don’t want to see.

ST: Yes it’s important to forget that I have a body.

LS: (I can’t imagine a scenario in which I don’t want to know every single thing you think about something I’m dealing with.)

ST: (Me too. You’re the reason I got into “The Real Housewives of Potomac.”)

A

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A Letter to Sanaz Toossi Heidi Schreck Dear Sanaz, I’m leaving a Saturday matinee of Wish You Were Here—your dazzling love letter to your mother—and my KN95 mask is soggy from laugh-crying and also from regular crying. I’m writing this on my phone on the N train because I’m a new mother and there are two babies waiting for me at home to give them milk, wipe their poop, and hold them to my body until they are no longer furious at me for leaving and can believe once again that home is a safe place.

You said the first glimmer of this play came to you while looking at a photograph of your mom and her girlfriends laughing so hard their faces are a blur. It’s the 1970s in Karaj, Iran, and they don’t yet know how drastically the ground is about to shift underneath their feet, that the solace of home and friendships will be lost to the forces of revolution, repression, and ruthless political decisions made by other people’s governments, including ours. You chart the contours of this devastating loss powerfully by fixing your gaze on quotidian realities of these women’s lives. You give us their childhood games, weddings, dirty jokes, and the insistent realities of their bodies: hairdos, manicures, period blood, profligate leg hair, stinky vaginas, possibly ugly feet. You dive into the wild rivers of desire that so often run between women friends, the tight knots of love and need and jealousy and sometimes cruelty that bind us to one another and so often outlast the bonds we have with spouses.

And through all of this your play miraculously also brims with the irrepressible joy of that photograph even in its most painful moments. I feel you delighting in these women, loving them in all their flawed and messy human glory.

A memory just came to me and I think it might be important since I remember so few things since giving birth. (Apparently my daughters ate sections of my brain while they were in utero in order to build their own little brains. That’s a fact, I read it online.) When I was a kid in the 1970s, I once walked in on my mom smoking a cigarette and laughing with her friend Helene Henkle, like ladies in a Virginia Slims commercial. I had never seen my mom smoke before or since and I was elated. The next day I went to school and told everyone proudly: “My mom’s a smoker!” She was pissed off when she found out I was telling people this. It must have been galling to have her child intrude on her moment of private abandon and then shout about it to the world.

Sitting here on the train now, though, in the thrall of your beautiful play, I’m thinking that when I shouted, “My mom is a smoker!” maybe what I really meant is, “My mom is a person!”

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And there is something about your play that feels like you shouting “My mom is a person!”—except instead of an eight-year-old girl, you are a grownup artist in the fullness of your power, dreaming your young mother back into existence so that you might know her more deeply.

I’m also thinking that this is important work, for all humans. Don’t you think some of the difficulty we as people have in recognizing each other’s full humanity might be rooted in our inability to perceive the full personhood of our mother?

My N train is zooming into Brooklyn now, and suddenly I’m thinking about words like “home” and “safety” and how precarious those concepts are. There was a mass shooting on this train a few days ago, and now I’m jumpy and scared. I have to stay alert, watchful, as if somehow by staying awake I could keep the worst from happening. I am thinking of what your mother lived through, how terrifying it must have been, and how much my years of comfort, as a white American, have cost people all over the world.

It’s now 3 AM; I had to take a long break from writing about your play to feed children and play with them and put them to bed and by that time my brain was a useless rock. (How did our mothers do this, my god?!) Anyway, I’m up because my hormones are swirling in some kind of postpartum/perimenopausal shit stew, and I’m having my period every two weeks, and I wake up sweating around this time every night.

I had a dream about the spell of protection the character Rana casts on her future daughter (you). In this dream, I was watching my daughter on the baby monitor and she stood up in her crib and she was exceptionally tall, a goddess, and she also looked like you, she had your long dark hair, and just walked out of her room a fully grown adult. And in my dream, I said to myself, “Oh the floor will hold her.”

And then I woke up thinking of Rana, and also of you, Sanaz, of your extraordinary mind and how in the five years since I first met you as a brilliant young student at NYU, the magic of your artistry has become thrillingly undeniable.

Now I hear a baby crying, “Mama!” Okay I’m back. She’s fine. I think she’s just dreaming of me the way I’m always dreaming of her, the way this play is you dreaming your mother and also yourself into existence.

And don’t you think maybe a child dreams her parent into existence too? We create each other, right? It’s not a one-way situation.

And okay now I’m exhausted and a little loopy but the last thing I’m going to say is that watching your play gave me the same feeling I had when I was pregnant and my left boob would throb every time I heard a baby cry.

The rivers of desire that run between all of us are wild and unpredictable, aren’t they?

So much love to you and thank you for your astonishing play.

A

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Ghost Ships Martyna Majok

“I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”

I don’t remember when or why I came across this beautiful quote from Cheryl Strayed. But I both treasure and fight against its wisdom. Because I wonder often about the ghost ships I didn’t board. And I find it difficult to salute some of them, watching them sail away. Especially as some are so very far now.

There is a version of myself in my imagination that never came to America. She is the Martyna that stayed in Poland, even as hundreds of thousands left after the fall of communism. She lives as a separate person in my mind though her specifics are a blur. There’s another version of Martyna who moved to London once Poland entered the EU in 2004. That one has deep relationships with her Polish family, as she might have been able to visit more, and she has a fabulous accent. Though today she might be back in Poland, after Brexit, living in her small apartment with a recently arrived Ukrainian refugee mother and daughter.

There are many other variations of Martyna’s life in the multiverse (including ones where certain wars were lost… or never began…global and international and personal wars…). But I think every so often of those specific two versions, defined by the directions of a particular mass migration of Polish people out of the country of our birth. I think of them usually when things aren’t going well here in America. I wonder if either of them would be playwrights.

I wonder if my immigrant mother who brought me to America with her, just the two of us, this person I love more than anyone in the world, who endlessly fascinates me, I wonder if she wonders about her ghost ships. I wonder this almost as much as I wonder about my own.

I wonder if Rana wonders about hers. Or Shideh or Zari.

I wonder if that’s what Salme was doing, in that moment... or how much Nazanin wonders, still.

I wonder if every immigrant is connected in this kind of wondering. And every daughter of an immigrant mother, whether she was begun here – or there.

I’m in the fortunate position where the country I was born in is one that I could return to. For one, it still exists.

Same name, same language. It is not currently assaulted by 64

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war, even as it borders it. But my sleepless night thoughts are not about moving. They’re about what was already lost and built in the time between then and now. The paths that were interrupted. What those paths might have intersected or connected. The choice which spiraled into more choices…into the things I could not have anticipated… those global and international and personal things which would inform even more choices…until here it is, this life of mine, with all its losses and blessings.

But what else could have been?

What other courses charted?

When should I have stayed when I left? When should I have left when I stayed?

And would anybody guard the prayer stone I may have left behind?

Sanaz Toossi’s heart-rich ode of a play charts the sparks and the launches of many ships, the surprises and re-directions of five women’s lives over 13 years, beginning at a port of deep friendship. It conjures the children some of these women will bring into the world — as well as into which world – and in that, the beginnings of their own losses and blessings. A lot can happen in a year. So very, very much can happen in thirteen. That is the brilliance of Sanaz’s structure. Imagine if you could encounter yourself, a year from now, or two or three, the memory of who you were still freshly dissolving over this new present moment. It’s so fresh that you can still make out the certainty of your prior hopes and plans. You can still hear the echoes of a laugh, a promise, a declaration.

“I’ll never.” Or “I’ll always.”

You can make a promise to yourself, to your life. You can make a pact with your friends, with your family. You can make plans. And a government can betray you.

Then another choice must be made. Stay or go. And a ship is launched.

“

Imagine if you could encounter yourself, a year from now, or two or three, the memory of who you were still freshly dissolving over this new present moment.

If you’ve chosen to leave, and if you look back, you’ll see there’s someone waving to you from the shore, as you recede from them and they recede from you.

I think it will be those people, your people, your people, your friends who knew you, who know you, who will forever contain those parts of you that you leave behind. Even as you forget or abandon those parts of yourself. Even as they forget or abandon those parts of themselves.

I glimpse one of my mother’s ghost ships – the one where she stayed – whenever I hear her on the phone with my godmother. Which is every Sunday. She glows and unfurls in a way like at no other time, speaking to the woman who grew up (and still lives) right across the street from our old apartment in Bytom, Poland. Her dearest friend who stayed firmly and beautifully in my mother’s life even as she began a new one an ocean away. I will never know my mother like Marysia knows her. I am jealous of this but also marrow-and-soul-deep happy for it. That my mother, amidst the varied slings and arrows of migration and the life that followed, has had this eternal friendship which so contains her. Then and now.

As I watched the final scene of Wish You Were Here, I thought about the numerous calls that contain versions of former selves webbing across the globe right now.

Ghost ships. I thought about the various Ukrainian women’s voices now scattered across Europe connecting to the various Ukrainian women’s voices back in Kyiv and Kharkiv. In Bucha. I thought about a woman’s voice in San Jose, and later perhaps Orange County, connecting to another woman’s voice in Karaj, Iran. I think of them now as I think about Justyna’s voice in New Jersey connecting to Marysia’s voice in Bytom. In my imagination, all of them are looking out of windows.

I don’t know you, Sanaz, but I strongly feel the love and longing and wonder in your beautiful play. For your mother’s life and for all the women at the precipices of their futures and also deep within them. And for our lives – for yours and mine. I feel your yearning for the futures we didn’t choose or weren’t able to, as well as your compassion for the ones we did, the ones we’re living now. Yours is one of those plays that makes me feel so much less alone in this world in which my ship has found itself.

A Thank you for what you did for my heart.

Photos provided by Martyna Majok.

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I have an album of videos on my phone showing water in motion. There are rivers, lakes, oceans and waterfalls. I rock back and forth slowly as I film to hide my unsteady hand. The videos range from a few seconds to a couple minutes in length. I watch them to reset my breath. The expanse, the rhythm.

My mother shows me a ‘memory’ that her phone made for her. A series of photos of my sisters and me looking younger, standing in the kitchen laughing. I am in my early twenties. My sister is pregnant.

Imagine having four daughters. She looks forward to these reminders. A notification, an invitation.

When we broke up I had no idea what to do with all the photos of him, all the photos of us together.

They seemed impossible to delete. We were going to build a future. I kept them. I missed him.

I knew I was unhappy in the relationship, but it didn’t matter any more. I wanted to take it all back.

I walked into madness. I took a video of myself in a draining bath. I took a video of myself in an open robe. I kept them in an album titled ‘revelations.’ The great pattern decrypted.

I believed I was performing a transformation. I believed I was under divine influence.

There was an evening when I felt lost. I received a notification. He appeared to me as a ‘memory’.

Smiling, with arms outstretched, wearing one of my shirts. Time unraveled. I opened my photo library and selected ‘people’. A grid of recognized faces. I selected his face and mine, then clicked ‘merge.’

Later that week I read that a black hole had absorbed a neutron star. In wonder and fear I understood what I had done. I knew now that I was a black hole, and he was a neutron star. I pulled him into an irreversible collision. I held my phone in my hand and let its weight bend my wrist.

My delusions subside. Now I carry the residue. His face and my face, merged. I walk to the beach and take photos of disappearing things. I mark time like this during these numberless days.

A tangle of seaweed which the tide will claim. A rotting fish carcass being picked apart by gulls.

You have a new memory Deepali Gupta

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Plays as Shapes

Agnes Borinsky: The Trees is a play that accumulates. Is our sense of things getting bigger or smaller?

Are things being added or taken away? Each act should cast a tiny sliver of a shadow on the previous acts. And also: each act should overspill the play a little. nb. The paper and the table here are both made out of trees. There are some notes and to-do lists tucked away in there, some of which I scribbled, some of which a friend scribbled when she was staying with me. That’s also something about how the play works.

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blueberry

a monologue from Going Out and Coming Back (2012) by Agnes Borinsky Jess. I think I could head back soonish. No rush.

It’s hot.

Diane. It is hot.

Sue. I could head back soonish / too.

Martha. Sure.

(Cicadas... and they’re gone. Lingering beat. Martha alone.)

Martha.

Aren’t blueberries very delicious?

Aren’t the best blueberries just a little bit tart, and don’t they just pop a little bit in your mouth when you in a very subtle way press them between the rugged surfaces of your back teeth?

Aren’t blueberries, I hear from sources with authority, quite good for your health?

Isn’t there really no better way to spend a summer day than in a field, with one’s face in shade under the brim of a floppy hat, picking blueberries?

Isn’t conversation sometimes very difficult?

Isn’t it hard, sometimes, to bring the things one decides upon when one is alone and suddenly everything seems quite clear to bear on one’s daily life with other people?

Aren’t blueberries very delicious?

Didn’t we make a good choice, the best choice, the most perfect choice today, in choosing to come here to pick blueberries?

Isn’t it true that there really wasn’t anything we could possibly have done that would have been better, and contributed, so to speak, to our general wellbeing and sense of fulfillment, as much as picking blueberries?

Isn’t this the best row in the whole orchard to be picking blueberries? The very best row of all possible rows?

Aren’t we making the right choices? If not all the time, because who could do that, but at least most of the time?

And isn’t the color of blueberries magnificent?

And isn’t the sky gorgeous and blue today?

Aren’t days like today the reason we were born?

Aren’t blueberries probably the most delightful of fruit, really the best of all fruits?

Aren’t we lucky? Aren’t we blessed?

Aren’t we lucky and blessed to be here today, picking blueberries?

(Beat. Cicadas. Then they all gather around Martha and play: Semper Fidelis. It may not be perfect, but it is loud and rich and heartfelt.)

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CORSICANA

Written by Will Arbery Directed by Sam Gold June – July 2022

Deirdre O’Connell. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.

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Will Dagger. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.

“

I spent a month in Corsicana once, in an old empty building on Main Street, where I was doing a writer’s residency.

It was June and really hot.

The building was beautiful, but I was afraid of it because it used to be the gathering place for secret societies.

While I was there, I mostly thought about ghosts. I had a lot of nightmares. I didn’t write at all. I just stayed on my bed, watching YouTube videos and ordering too much Dominos. The air felt really thick. Later, back home, I realized that Corsicana was haunting me, and that I’d like to meet some characters in that thick air.

Will Arbery Playwright’s Perspective: Corsicana

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Take Care Jia Tolentino

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Will Dagger and Jamie Brewer. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.

THERE ARE TIMES, many of them, in my life, when I’ve been occupying myself with the tense indulgence of thinking in abstracted big pictures — feeling the white noise crowding in, the hum of the ambient suffering and isolation and devaluation and trickle-up hoarding that delineate so much of American life two decades into a century that will eradicate every dream that the last one manufactured — and I’ll think, as usual, we could so easily be tender the way we want to, capacious the way we want to, if only we implemented the Piketty tax, if only we fucking banned assault weapons, if only we had federal rent control, if only we had visions of safety outside criminalization, if only we rejected this economy of surveillance and extraction, if only we had public ideas of care and ambition, if only we could plant so many more trees. I’ll be thinking about all of this, my body full of plenitude and yearning two hundred feet above the Earth’s surface and then short-tempered once I’m back in my living room in the late afternoon on a Tuesday, irritably shaking my toddler off my leg while I open the fridge to make something that I won’t remember, turning my phone over on the counter, my blood pressure rising because someone I love is complaining about something so tiny in one of our lucky, vanishing lives.

There is nothing more urgent than figuring out how to care for each other, in the big ways, in the contours of the conditions that bind us. But then, at the same time, it’s the microscopic everyday — our daily trudging, the way we speak to and listen to and see each other — that anchors us, that’s the proving ground for all of it, the irreducible unit measurement of whatever flux, renewal, discovery, and meaning is out there to be found. Will Arbery’s Corsicana works at this smallest level, though it illuminates the other ones. It’s a play about four people who are each doing their best to care for another person. There’s the stifled filmmaker and community college teacher Christopher, watching over his sister Ginny, who has Down syndrome; Ginny, who’s older than Christopher, and reminds him that they both have to act like the adults they are; Justice, a freethinking librarian who keeps an eye on the siblings as they wade through long days in their late mom’s drab ranch house, and persuades Lot, an outsider artist, to finally let his work be seen by others; Lot, through Justice, is then roped by Christopher into trying to help Ginny record a song. At first, it seems like Christopher and Justice are the caretakers in this foursome. And they are, but caretaking and caregiving are not synonyms here, necessarily. The web of care and taking and giving in Corsicana is complicated, recursive, and not quite as it seems.

“

I found myself trying to understand what in my life I had offered and accepted most freely, my hands completely open.

How hard it can be to give and take care like that.

A thread of gifts runs through the play’s fabric, though all of these offerings are different: tentative, glimmering, delayed, unasked-for, mundane, lasting, oceanic. It made me think about what I’ve offered people, how I’ve given and how I’ve taken care. It made me think about the difference between hoping someone might want something and wishing that they could become the kind of person who would have thought to want it on their own. What happens in the intimate carries the echoes of the systemic: an interplay between love and coercion, the mess and necessity of interdependence, the way help can shift into manipulation toward a materially constructed norm.

It happens multiple times in the play: one character helps a second one realize their desires, and then later realizes they had projected those desires rather than perceived them. But maybe they were right to do this, and certainly they were human; maybe the dialectic that puts our unspoken instincts up against the perceptions of those who love us is the process by which we continue to become ourselves. It’s about an unforgiving land, Justice says, telling Christopher about a manuscript she’s written, which she’s about to shove into a tote bag. It’s about unrealized utopias.

It’s about how failing is the point. It’s about surrender. It’s about small groups. It’s about community. Our gifts, I found myself thinking, are our interference; what people make of that interference, then, becomes the gift. I found myself trying to understand what in my life I had offered and accepted most freely, my hands completely open. How hard it can be to give and take care like that, even if the world could shrink down to a small town, to you and three other people. Maybe that would be the hardest thing of all.

I loved the symmetries of this play, the doubled narratives. Lot and Christopher, both accused of things they didn’t do, of the opposite of loving, both of them branded with the iron of unearned shame. Lot and Justice, both of them conduits, seers, visionaries. Christopher and Justice, both of them hoping to shape a person they love into someone who can live in the world more easily, or more acceptably. Christopher and Lot, both driven to create their art. Lot and Ginny, both doubted as people with autonomy and fullness. Ginny and Justice, both of whom want love. Actually, all the characters want that, in the way they want it. All of us do. It’s just that we don’t always know what register to work in. In Corsicana you can see the shafts of light that break through the dust around us, that can, if we let them, move our little particles from plane to plane. The play is about the everyday and about everything, its lines shifting suddenly into hyperdrive, the way Will does so well, between the absolutely ordinary moment and the dizzying kaleidoscope of the rest: the world is a boop on the nose, the router not working, a dream where the bodies of the dead are standing in circles, an iPad from your dead mother, a two-liter Sprite returned to HEB, the impossible and beautiful requirement to love someone every minute and the constant failure to actually do it and the opening of your life up to some shattering revelation and the offering of every work of your hands A up to God or whoever will have it.

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On Invitations Aydan Shahd

LOT: “Outsider art.” Outside what? I’m right here.

In the second edition of The 53rd State Occasional, edited by Will Arbery in 2018, Will asks a collection of theater-makers about invitations: “I want to know who is invited to your show. Or what that invitation looks like. Or what an invitation is to you. Or if there is more that you’re inviting than people. Is there an event, a collision, an upheaval, a nesting doll of more invitations, a silence you’re inviting? [...] But now I’m interested in where you draw the line. Where does the invitation stop? Where does the show become yours and yours alone?”

Four years later, with his play Corsicana, Will seems to be asking a reformulated version of these questions; this time, though, it’s not (only) about theater. If we think of theater as a collective rehearsal of alternative social structures and modes of relating to one another — or, in other words, a ritual — then we can understand Will’s questions as being about who we invite into our structures of belonging, our care, our society. Who do we invite? And who is left outside?

Corsicana takes place in the city of Corsicana, Texas, following Ginny, a woman with Down syndrome, and her half-brother Christopher, as they navigate their mother Leanne’s recent death.

Near the beginning of the play, Justice, a librarian and honorary aunt of Christopher and Ginny, gives a copy of Pyotr Kropotkin’s book, The Conquest of Bread, to her friend, Lot — an “outsider artist,” though he resists the term. Kropotkin, a Russian anarcho-communist writing in the 19th and early 20th century, advocated for the essential human right to well-being, which he believed could be achieved through decentralized power, voluntary cooperative labor, and mutual aid.

At the core of his beliefs is the assertion that we are all responsible for one another and our 82

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Harold Surratt. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.

collective endurance. Kropotkin proposed that the main obstacle to the right to well-being for all is the privatization of property. Building on these ideas, family abolitionists, over the past 50 years, have pushed back against the privatization of care, arguing that all forms of care should be equally accessible to everyone in society, not just those lucky enough to be invited (whether by birth or otherwise) into a family that can provide for them.

The pandemic has taught us many things, and perhaps chief among them is how irrevocably interdependent we all are. Contrary to one of the tenets of capitalist America, there is no such thing as true self-sufficiency; structurally and socially, we rely on one another to keep us safe and to keep us going. The instinctive impulse to retreat into ourselves and “look out for our own,” though it can feel like the easier or even the only possible response to crisis, is in fact a myopic one that prioritizes individual, shortterm survival over collective endurance. Often, “our own” are our family — specifically, the nuclear family, though sometimes it includes members of extended or chosen ones. Corsicana offers the questions: what happens to how we care for one another when the family isn’t all it’s promised to be? When the family is ruptured? When the person who holds it together dies?

So much of the joy and mutual care in Corsicana enters through the open space that Leanne’s death leaves behind, even though this openness is deeply vulnerable. It can be frightening when the nucleus of the family is cracked open; it can feel like a gaping wound. It is uncomfortable to be confronted with the mutual responsibility we have to one another beyond the bounds of family. For many able-bodied people, this confrontation with societal interdependence is a mostly avoidable one — or, at least, it was more so prior to the pandemic. The same is not true for most people who are disabled, who are failed time and time again by the American capitalist culture’s valorization of independence and individual productivity, by the privatization of healthcare, and by woefully underinvested structures of support and intimacy beyond the lottery of whichever kinds of care their families are able to provide.

Rosmarie Garland-Thomson, a foundational thinker in disability studies, observed in her 1997 book Extraordinary Bodies that unlike other, “seemingly more stable marginal identities,” disability is “more fluid, and perhaps more threatening” in that “anyone can become disabled at any time.” Her emphasis here on the fluidity of disabled identity challenges the frequent pathologization of disability in our culture, which falsely suggests that it is only those who are distinctly “disabled” have “special needs,” or require dependency on a particular kind of care from others. In reality, of course, we all need care from one another, in different ways. This is not to imply that disabled individuals don’t have particular lived experiences in their bodies which profoundly impact how they move through the world, or to at all efface the fact that different bodies require different kinds of care. Rather, I point out the instability of “disabled” as a discrete, fixed category as an invitation to reconsider where and why we draw a line around some needs, bodies, and care to mark them as extraordinary, and not others. It is an invitation to reorient ourselves, to focus not on why individuals face challenges moving through the world, but what it is about the structures of that world which exclude them from accessing the right to well-being in the first place.

“

Contrary to one of the tenets of capitalist America, there is no such thing as true self-sufficiency; structurally and socially, we rely on one another to keep us safe and to keep us going.

In Corsicana, Justice extends such an invitation to Christopher, who struggles with the sudden responsibilities of becoming a primary caretaker of Ginny and of their household: CHRISTOPHER: …I could just go in and get groceries and I don’t. I don’t make things better. And look at all this dust. What am I, the king of dust?

JUSTICE: Oh— well there’s a writer I love who calls dust “matter in the wrong place.”

Justice is referring to Kropotkin — but nearly 90 years after The Conquest of Bread, Garland-Thomson uses the same vocabulary to talk about disability: “...[A]ll disability is in some sense ‘matter out of place’ ... what does not fit into the space of the ordinary.” Such language shifts critical focus away from personal “extraordinariness” and onto the exclusionary structures that constitute “ordinary space.” It removes the onus on individuals to compensate for how their differences in ability (whether circumstantial, bodily, temporary, or chronic) impact a capitalistic notion of worth based on productivity, and affirms the belief that people are valuable not because of what they are able to produce or do, but because all human life has inherent value. This rejection of the pathologization of disability is also responsible for how we now think and talk about neurodiversity. There are many ways to be in/with one’s mind and body, as opposed to one ordinary way outside of which are only “developmental or intellectual disorders.”

The so-called “outsider artist” Lot, then — who builds sculptures out of trash — troubles the border between what is excluded and what is included, between who is and isn’t invited inside his art as well as his home. There is great courage in Lot’s (and Will’s) determination to challenge where invitations stop, even while knowing how hard it is to walk away from the deeply ingrained impulse to retreat into solitude when things get scary. How hard it is to continue to extend an invitation into your space and your heart when somebody hurts you. How much easier it can feel to lock your gate, retreat into your room, stop seeing your friends, stop making art, stop wanting to share.

To make both your pain and your care yours and yours alone. And so, Lot persists: he chips away at building a space — and a world — where nobody has to be on the A outside anymore.

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Full Brothers / Full Sister Ryan J. Haddad

THE NIGHT NANA DIED, my brother, Bobby, called me from the car on his way home from work. I was sitting in our parents’ living room, alternating between silence and tears. Her death was not sudden—she’d been sick for almost a year and was nearing 90. But she had been a source of joy and light and faith and infinite love for our whole family.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Bobby said. “We don’t have any grandparents left.”

Or maybe he said, “Looks like we’re out of grandparents.”

Or was it “How does it feel to have no more grandparents?”

I can’t recall exactly. Memory is weird.

Whatever he said, it hit me like a brick. Not the words themselves. Of course I knew we had no more grandparents. It was the fact that he said those words in the first place. Underneath his totally matter-of-fact, unbothered “Bobby” tone, I heard a vast acknowledgement of loss. Of people. Of time. And some weird cocktail of youth and innocence, all gone in this moment. It wasn’t just a chapter.

We had closed a whole book.

And because I’m morbid, I started thinking about our parents. If our grandparents were gone, that meant our parents were next, right? Like, no but yes? Hopefully not for a long time? But eventually? My mom and dad are probably reading this going, “Why the f*** are you killing us for your theater essay?” (Judy and Bob Haddad approved the topic of their mortality prior to publication.)

Because I think about death pretty frequently. Never my own, always the people I love.

How? When? Where? Will they be ready? Will I get to say goodbye?

Death permeates Will Arbery’s beautiful and arresting new play Corsicana.

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There’s Justice, who is grieving her best friend and seeing mysterious dead figures in her dreams. But she finds them comforting? And also she might not be dreaming at all?

There’s Lot, the reclusive artist and musician, still grappling with the loss of his mother twelve years ago.

And there’s Ginny and Christopher, a sister-brother pair whose mother dies shortly before the play begins. They’ve lost their anchor and are struggling to move forward.

“We don’t know what to do,” Christopher says. “Like we’re waiting for her to come in and just be like, let’s eat, let’s go to church, let’s... but we’re just little kids.”

“No, we’re adults,” Ginny replies. “I’m 34 years old and you’re 33 years old... So we have to be adults.”

“

How will I ever be able to load the dishwasher when I no longer have my parents to talk to on the phone while I do it?

They call me regularly to check in about my work, my love life when I have one, my financial literacy, and my general well-being. Sometimes I take this for granted. Missed calls and voicemails I frequently forget to return. Watching a play like Corsicana, I’m reminded that my brothers have the potential to be in my life longer than anyone else, and I shouldn’t take them for granted quite so much.

Does it mean putting my pills into a weekly container so I don’t forget to take them?

We have four parents between us. They’re getting older, their health less stable. Each one faces a variety of medical issues, at a time when the medical system as a whole is still struggling through a pandemic. I try to be understanding. Doctors and hospitals are doing the best they can in impossible circumstances. But when your parent is the patient, not with COVID, but a bunch of other things that make them vulnerable, it’s hard not to feel protective.

Angry. Scared.

Does it mean cooking instead of takeout?

Doctors show up to appointments unprepared.

Does it mean not letting dishes pile up in the sink, especially since I have a dishwasher? I stopped to do dishes in the middle of writing this because I thought Ginny would be disappointed in me.

Specialists in the same hospital don’t work together, or even talk to each other, to find solutions for competing— and equally concerning—problems.

Reading the play and then watching it, I wondered what that means for me.

Does it mean making my bed every day? My bed is unmade right now.

Or does it mean losing a parent?

How will I ever be able to load the dishwasher when I no longer have my parents to talk to on the phone while I do it?

Who will want to hear from me every day?

Christopher wants a girlfriend. Ginny wants a boyfriend to become a husband. But in the time we spend with them, we don’t see them on a path toward those relationships.

For now, they have each other. And I guess I’ll have my brothers, too.

Bobby and Joe are my half-brothers, technically, but if you refer to them that way, I’ll get very angry. They’re my brothers. My brothers. In Corsicana, Christopher tells Ginny, “You’re my full sister,” even though they, too, are half-siblings, and I felt that deeply.

For just a few more months this summer, Joe, Bobby, and I will all be in our thirties. Which is to say, one of us is about to turn forty and it isn’t me. And to say, we are older than the images of us I have in my mind.

Most of our in-person memories are from my childhood, and most of our adult memories have formed through the phone. I’m the artist chasing my dreams in New York.

They are in Ohio with wives and kids and dogs and houses, levels of responsibility I can’t begin to comprehend.

And they run the same tests over and over, without any plan for improvement or results.

While these doctors grasp at straws to keep our parents healthy, I realize it wasn’t long ago that my dad, his siblings, and their spouses were fiercely advocating for Nana as she weathered stomach cancer.

What a difference a few years makes. There are no more grandparents for our parents to take care of. Now it’s our turn to take care of them, and to take care of each other.

As Ginny would say, we have to learn to be adults.

Oh, and one more thing.

Ginny has Down syndrome, and I have cerebral palsy. I didn’t intend to omit our disabilities, but the more I wrote, they just weren’t the focus.

And that’s one of the things I love most about Will Arbery’s wonderful play. Ginny is a lead character with Down syndrome, based on Will’s own sister, Julia, yet at no point is Down syndrome ever a source of conflict or strife or pain or tragedy. Ginny is a 34-year-old woman who loves pop music, Disney channel, singing, and helping people. She lives with her brother in Corsicana, Texas. Their mom just died, and they are trying to take care of each other. She is part of a family that is healing, and Down syndrome is just a part of who she is, not an engine of the story. This doesn’t sound like it should be revolutionary, but it A is. It really, really is.

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CRIB$ Adam Coy

I WATCHED SOME “MTV Cribs” to prepare for writing this. “Cribs” hasn’t aged well, but it’s aged incredibly. “Cribs” is a time capsule for the early aughts (we couldn’t get a better phrase for my golden age!?). The biggest stars of the era gave access to their lives, homes, aesthetic and culture ON CAMERA!! Being granted this access was unique then, pre-influence or brands, and we got an honest feel of what it might be like if Bow Wow were your best friend. Reality television was in its adolescence, a time of innocence and not great media training. “Cribs” is messy. The show has no structure, like none! I felt like I remembered some sort of flow, but in general we are shown a living room, a kitchen, something unique that is owned, the bedroom, and cars in a random order.

You’re probably wondering… why is there an essay in a theater magazine that’s about “Cribs?” Well, “Cribs” lives in a universe of abundance and transparency.

And the American theater, that I dream of, lives there as well.

In my “Cribs” re-watch, here are some things that I learned: • There are 18 seasons of “Cribs,” but 13 are the ones we know and love.

• Steve-O was one noise complaint away from being evicted. Pretty sure he got evicted.

• Usher has a room designed and textured to feel like the essence of his mother, which he would sit in when he missed her. His mother lived on the same street.

• Lil Wayne and Birdman had a jacuzzi in their living room, which is my new definition of success and fulfillment.

• Ja Rule featured a house that he did not own, and got sued, which really foreshadowed our general Ja Rule experience.

• Now here’s what I mean about abundance and transparency: Abundance: Those featured on “Cribs” have dope shit and a lot of it. Hot tubs in the living room. Stocked fridges. Pianos that nobody plays. A driveway full of cars.

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Transparency: Take a look at my bathroom. See the inside of my fridge, I eat like shit, just like you. These are my parents, they live here and I love them. My cousin sleeps on the floor. Here’s the bedroom, I’m going to make an uncomfortable joke about the sex I have here.

MTV opened up siloed information to the masses. For many celebs featured on “Cribs,” the story is rags to riches, the American dream. As a teen, I could be a voyeur to the lifestyle of the rich and famous, and believe that if I played my cards right and made it to the NBA, I could also have a lot of things and be a cool transparent famous person.

I thought the reclamation and reimagining of the American theater, which ignited from a racial reckoning in the summer of 2020, would feel like “Cribs” (but more community engagement and health care resources, and less materialism and tax evasion). We move into a suburban ass neighborhood, an exclusionary place, a place we weren’t supposed to be; THEN we take over the HOA and put a jacuzzi in every living room.

But unrooting the exploitative and systematically inequitable nature of the art form, to which I have dedicated my life, has been more a grueling slog…akin to the second-worst job I ever had in my life, working for my best friend’s mother, Barbara, during the pandemic. (The worst job I ever had was working until 3am on the food line at Mama Margie’s.) Barbara is a hoarder who had a good 10-20 storage units in South Texas. I did various tasks for her including: spray-painting sheds, mowing, raking, organizing logs of wood, freeing opossums from racoon traps, pulling weeds, and transferring one storage unit into another storage unit. I couldn’t feel progress, only physical aching and the delirium of heat stroke slowly settling in.

While I was digging through boxes of trash and old furniture, the only solution seemed like setting the storage unit on fire, surely there was nothing salvageable here. BUT just then, I would stumble across a really dope shirt or a photo album from the turn of the century with scribblings from ancestors. Setting the past ablaze and starting over was no longer a viable solution – every item needed to be accounted for. So the work went on, and on, in the Texas sun.

Strides have been made as we approach the end of the surviving theater’s first full season of in-person productions, which I collectively call the “our bad” season, but we still have such a long journey ahead. Let’s look at the progress we’ve made in two years.

In this part, I will show you our in-process CRIB, the-newbut-not-entirely-different American Theater. You thought I was done with “Cribs,” HA. ALMANAC

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<< *beats play* >> Over here, we have hyper-marginalized folx that have gotten staff positions or been elevated up!! They in there!

They also have the burden and pressure of representing a massive amount of community members who remain outside of those spaces. Some of these people are working in spaces that aren’t too ready for change, and their ideas will be questioned, they’ll probably smile at something they don’t want to. While they might not hold decision-making power, they will continue to advocate, push doors open a little further, and make small victories that add up.

Let me take you to where the well-meaning white people hang out! Some of them are cool and some of them still take up lots of space! One of them questioned my commitment to social justice because I didn’t want to change the name Egg & Spoon Theatre Collective to something more “justice-focused,” and a Pulitzer finalist blocked me on Instagram for being an organizer for the resident artists at The Flea! None of my white actor friends tell me it’s hard to be a white actor anymore, they’ll just think it! Progress.

Here’s a table where all the magic happens, all the new artistic directors and associate artistic directors! It’s kind of a cool kids’ club. I admire these people, I also worry about these people. They’ve inherited impossible and unprecedented circumstances. During this time, BIPOC leaders are getting invited to the table, and given the labor of solving all the problems with fewer resources and more restrictions than their predecessors. Without being set up for success, these leaders will assume all blame for decades-long institutional failures.

I’ll show you the front yard! AH, this is all of the next generation of artists that aint in the house yet. They used to work for us for free but we couldn’t really get away with it anymore, so we gotta keep them outside. They can come inside when we get the money thing figured out, should be any day now.

But what else? What if program and project budgets were simply made available to all collaborators working on the program or project? Documents with these numbers exist, and the siloing of information creates a power imbalance.

It’s not transparent and it’s not hot. Seeing and understanding budgets is empowering.

One institution told me I could be walked through a 990, but might be too stupid to understand the budget. I am indeed stupid, but I would feel better looking at a paper with numbers, seeing that we are both poor, and nodding a few times.

Transparency isn’t just how you take care of people that are already in the house, it is how you open the doors to future generations. It took a series of miracles for me to believe that I could have a life in the theater.

And the truth is… my mother bursts into song from Golden Age musicals, too frequently for my comfort. It’s memories of Ed Sullivan and elementary school assemblies that influenced her to put my older brother, who needed 88

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“

Transparency isn’t just how you take care of people that are already in the house, it is how you open the doors to future generations.

a behavior outlet, into theater camp at the JCC. It saved his life too. It’s her harddrive memories that dragged me to Fiddler on the Roof and Annie and Jersey Boys, where she would sing into combs afterwards. This is how theater audiences and makers are built.

Theater has mostly lost the national pop connection that it once held. Theater is culture to a specific group of people: they are historically white and upper-middle-class and Northeastern and love Golden Age musicals. The space is created to serve that audience, and so the cycle of elitism continues. Expanding the group for whom theater is culture, and widening the national connection to this art form, must be the way forward.

And that might also help fix the money thing! The biggest theater moment of the year for the nation was Lexi Howard’s play on “Euphoria.” (Lexi was also a toxic director for sure, but she’ll grow out of it.) Jeremy O. Harris’s twitter is pop. His TikTok is pop. Theater streaming as constructed for the ‘rona times mostly took a loss, and union negotiations for this were HARD. But still, a season of productions or a series of plays from various institutions should be dropped on platforms, like, all the time! Revenue streamz.

And why the hell arnt the theaters on the youtube and the TikTok!?! Inviting those that don’t live traveling-distance to your theater into the process, into the home. Basically, Adam Greenfield should be vlogging and influencing.

Playwrights Horizons dropped a cypher for Dave Harris’ Tambo & Bones and it went CRAAAZY. A cypher to market a play!? With bars that arnt corny!? That’s progress and the standard and I will accept nothing less going forward.

For the first time in my life, I had the impulse to make one of those videos where I watch a cypher and react to it, pause the video to hype up bars, etc. BUT Playwrights doesn’t have a TikTok to stitch the unreal content they made, forcing my career as a cypher/rap battle commentator to remain unexplored.

DAMN. There is so much more. A nonexistent work life balance, shitty boards, a fucked up MFA pipeline, an ongoing pandemic that has stolen energy and resources from radical transformation, and the unanswerable.

How many years can the field survive the pandemic’s stopping and restarting of productions?

Can we all really be liberated?

Can the cycle of oppression be broken?

I’m tired. I’m tired of theoretical imaginings of diversifying a theater audience. I’m tired of building a new table (how I would love to show up to a nice table that is set). I’m tired of hearing them say “they can pay for it” when I’m not sure “they” always can. At the root, many of the inequities and scarcity of the American theater could be alleviated with support and investment by the federal government. I will not be holding my breath.

When I got really depressed writing this, I called my fellow TCG Rising Leader of Color and accountability partner Danica Rodriguez (Casting Director STAR). Danica validated the exhaustion these past two years have taken on my spirit and body, but also reminded me of all of the work that did get done.

• Strides were made in transparency of compensation and hiring practices.

• There are more people in positions to hold this industry accountable.

• With the time to organize, groups of humans did come together and build community.

• The collective consciousness of the industry did shift.

• Theaters of Color received funding they had been owed for decades.

• Artists are joining boards.

• Playwrights Horizons formed an Artistic Advisory Council, inviting artists from the field into the institution to prod around, very “Cribs” of them!

• Programming at theaters did shift.

(Even when it was for optics.)

• Hoarding power is OUT, very network TV. It’s old, it’s been done. Power SHARING? Oh, it’s in. It’s hot. Everyone is talking about it, ask The Fled or Movement or Wilma Theater!

We’ve been holding so much grief and anxiety in our bodies. Change is slow and hard. There is no end to progress, but I feel the obligation to continue to push the ball forward for as long as I’m able to, like my theater heroes do. The small wins add up, and one day I hope to look up and see the industry that I always dreamed of. An industry of abundance and transparency. Hard beats blowing out speakers. A hot tub in every lobby.

ALRIGHT get the hell out of my house, but come back again soon.

Sincerely, A tired ass theater artist

A

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MICKY

Micky munches and munches, turning the leaf into Swiss cheese. Nerv stares off into the distance.

Beyond the children, the swing set and slide, the trees and blades of grass, are two lil caterpillars – MICKY and NERV – chilling on a large leaf.

It’s a peaceful evening in The Bronx, the sky the color of mango. We’re at St. James Park off of Jerome Ave. The melodic jangle of Mr. Softie ringing in the background.

Sounds of running, pushing, crying, laughing are heard from the mob of children playing tag. Then we hear the sound of soft crunching.

Huh?

MICKY

Micky... I don’t want to change.

NERV

Ight, we good. False alarm. Bitch ass twig tryna kill me before I peak.

MICKY

Micky chokes. Eyeballs poppin out their lil sockets. He dramatically gags as if he’s about to die. Then –

Aw man, don’t tell me you still thinking about Lily. I told you. Once these girls become butterflies, they forget all about us. But don’t worry, our time is coming.

MICKY

I don’t really have an appetite today. I don’t know. I just feel weird. You don’t feel weird?

NERV

YOOOO! I’m so fuckin hungry. I can’t stop eating. I’m gonna be so thick when I’m done that I’ma be a fuckin problem in these streets. I feel like I could bench press a whole twig. You know what I mean?

Butterflies from the Bronx David Zheng

Nerv. You my boy. We been in this caterpillar shit for weeks now. You my day one.

My brotha from another motha. My bug from another slug. My pillar from another – I can’t think of anything that rhymes with pillar. BUT. If you become a moth... if you, my boy, from day one, become a moth... thennnnnn I can’t really rock with cha. Gonna be bad for my image, you feel me?

MICKY

What if I don’t like who I become? What if I become a moth? WHAT IF I BECOME A MOTH?!

NERV

You always worry so much.

MICKY

But what if something goes wrong? What if I don’t hatch from the cocoon?

NERV

What is safety but a personal interpretation of comfort?

MICKY

But we’re safer here. At home.

NERV

Exactly, Nerv! All we do is eat and make holes in things. Ain’t you tired of being so small and slow and slimey and useless? I’m tired of looking like this. LOOK AT US. DO YOU SEE THIS? WE LOOK LIKE GREEN CHALLAH BREAD! I wanna be hot and soaring through the world.

MICKY

I just really like what we’ve been doing, you know? Just eating and hanging out all day.

NERV

I ain’t scared of no bitch ass death. I’m scared that I’ll never know another life beyond the one we’re living in now.

MICKY

I do! But what if I can’t get my wings to work and I die.

NERV

You trippin, Nerv. Don’t you wanna learn how to fly?

MICKY

To become a butterfly.

NERV

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NERV

MICKY

NERV

I’M A FUCKING BUTTERFLY! MICKY! LOOK AT ME! I’m FLYING!

NERV

Complete stillness. Then, a pulse. One of the cocoons shakes and stirs, swinging back and forth. The pulsing gets more dramatic, and we realize something inside is fighting its way into a new life. Quick, animated-like, punches happen inside the cocoon. Then –

The sun slowly rises and light breaks through the fragile leaves. Hanging on the branches are two thick lil cocoons.

But then – finally –

Time passes. Maybe a week goes by. Maybe a whole month. Maybe even 3 whole fucking years. That’s right.

Google it.

The sun sets, and everything disappears into the vulnerable darkness. The kids. The parents. The trees.

The buildings. The cars. The shops. Student debt (hehe).

Racism. Flat earth-ers. People who pay $12 for a smoothie. The pimple on the back of my neck.

IT ALL DISAPPEARS. VOOM. VANISHED.

Not saying that you will become a moth, but if you do, you own it and make a life out of it.

MICKY

What the fuck.

MICKY

END.

Let’s go to someone’s closet and fuck up their clothes.

MICKY

What?

NERV

Naw. I gotta better idea.

MICKY

Let’s go to Central Park! I wanna land on some dog’s nose.

NERV

I wanna go fuck shit up.

MICKY

You look great :)

NERV

WHAT!

MICKY

Micky.

NERV

No no no no no no no no no. I can’t do this Nerv.

You guessed it. He’s a moth.

YOU’VE GOT TO BE FUCKIN KIDDIN ME.

MICKY

Uh.

NERV

The cocoon wobbles. Then cracks. Then breaks.

Micky breaks out of his cocoon.

Nerv looks at the other cocoon, still intact.

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Plays as Shapes

Christopher Chen: This is a singular drawing for two of my plays: Caught and Passage (though the central image shows a cave, which is a direct nod to the latter). Both plays have a state of tabula rasa blankness at their core, from which a multitude of realities take flight. In fact, the basic truth that a multiplicity of realities exists simultaneously is the central idea of both plays. Where the plays differ in execution is how they are structured: In Caught, these isolated realities methodically unfold one after another, each one upending the absoluteness of the one that came before; Passage is more non-linear, with a greater sense of all different realities being present at the same time.

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Jordan Harrison:

The first reading I ever had at Playwrights Horizons was a play called The Museum Play. Ostensibly it was about a museum where the exhibits are escaping; but more sneakily, it was about wanting someone you can’t have. Long before I knew anything about the plot of the play, I knew that I wanted it to have three kinds of scenes: Cabinets, Habitats, and Hallways. (“Cabinet” in the sense of a Cabinet of Curiosities, not the thing in your kitchen.)

As I’ve tried to illustrate here, the three categories partly signify proximity: a Hallway corresponds to a long shot in film, a Habitat is a medium shot, and a Cabinet is a close-up. The same object, or person, is different depending on what kind of scene it’s in. A walkie-talkie in a Hallway might escape your notice, in the hand of a museum guard. But the same walkie-talkie would take on a kind of fixed, brightly-lit interest in a Habitat. And if you saw that walkie-talkie in a Cabinet, it might as well be the Hope Diamond, precious and intimate in its dark alcove.

As the play progressed, Cabinets occurred more frequently as the characters pursued what they desired. We were trapped in their wanting – or at least that was the idea. The way we look at something changes it, and I tried to build that into the shape of the play.

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When a Chart Becomes a Knot Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas Many years ago – after I had worked for a long time as a community organizer, burned out, then started writing plays – I had reason and time enough to think about the differences between making social change and making art. I made a chart to lay out the differences. In one column, I listed the traits of an ideal artist and in the other I listed the traits of an ideal community organizer. I’ve lost the original; here’s a reconstruction:

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The Artist

The Community Organizer

Able to surprise or shocks us with their shifts in style, content or even goals

Sticks to reliable principles and goals that are not subject to capricious shifts

Apt to shift the form they use suddenly; form and content can be arbitrarily matched

Should use tactics that bear some relationship to goals

Open to sacrilege

Respectful

Can keep process hidden

Transparent

Might employ obliqueness, even abstraction

Clear communicator

Independent

Accountable

Can just ask questions or even be entirely negative

Strives to be constructive

Success or failure of their work is subjective

Success or failure of their work can be determined, even quantified

Allowed to linger, be ambivalent

Should seek to win, reach a goal

Might make art for art’s sake

Should be proposing and working towards concrete solutions

Whatever the foibles of the individual artist, at their best they make something that can transcend the muck of the present

No matter the nobility of the individual activist, whatever movement or institution they build it will always drift away from its inaugurating values, will always disappoint

We hope they never take over the state

We hope they take over the state

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Having laid out this chart, I saw immediately that there were many – primeval forests worth of – exceptions to each of the attributes listed, plenty of times that artists blurred these distinctions. My own trajectory as a writer included a stint on the spoken word scene – especially that corner of the scene populated by queer writers of color – and so time and again I had seen fierce poets demonstrate the shortcomings of my bisected chart. If you aren’t born into full citizenship or into the shelter of affirming tribal bonds, then you need to create those conditions yourself, and many of those spoken word artists did just that on stage, live. Those writers made it impossible to untangle the performance of a poem from the building of an ontology; they were doing both, simultaneously. They did what the dispossessed often do: create new conditions for themselves through art.

So I added a heading to the chart and dotted the dividing line between the two columns to make clear I intended not a binary, but a continuum. The revised chart looked like this:

A Continuum

The Artist

The Community Organizer

Able to surprise or shock us with their shifts in style, content or even goals

Sticks to reliable principles and goals that are not subject to capricious shifts

Apt to shift the form they use suddenly; form and content can be arbitrarily matched

Should use tactics that bear some relationship to goals

Open to sacrilege

Respectful

Can keep process hidden

Transparent

Might employ obliqueness, even abstraction

Clear communicator

Independent

Accountable

Can just ask questions or even be entirely negative

Strives to be constructive

If my own experience as a young writer presented me with such an emblematic example of the potency of politicized art, you might wonder why I am bothering to hold out for a sphere of artistic production that functions independently of activism. Why not dispense with the left-hand side of my chart and focus on producing art that works in service of the noble goals of the community organizer? Many in our current epoch seemed to have considered this very question and (just before dusting their hands) resolved they were convinced of the importance of politics, but ambivalent over the value of art. Given our longstanding national penchant for the practical, this is not a new development. Coco Fusco has described a dynamic in the early 1970s when the expectation was that African American painters would make work that

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was figurative and didactic. The result was bracing, inspiring work and the marginalization of Black abstractionists.1 Such a narrowing of possibility is what happens when we borrow a set of strategies developed for the political realm and apply them too seamlessly in the aesthetic domain.

We are once again in an era in which the ability of art to transcend any current political moment is viewed with marked distrust. The burden of that distrust falls most heavily on artists of color. In our most anxious moments, we risk turning identity from something that enables into something that restricts. I hope it is not controversial to point out that dynamics in which the identity of an artist means that their work cannot be recognized, rewarded or even understood, unless it employs certain aesthetics or deals with certain content, is a dynamic that is not free.

That such constraint might develop from the best of intentions is immaterial. With depressing alacrity, a stated goal of our politics (let’s call that goal freedom) warps itself into an expectation of uniformity.

To get a better sense of what we lose when artists grip a political program too tightly, it would be useful to turn to the thinking of a German philosopher and a Marxist by the name of Herbert Marcuse. He wrote an indispensable book titled “The Aesthetic Dimension” and throughout its pages he keeps noting problems that are best addressed by art because they are problems politics can never fully resolve. Here are some of those problems: • • • • • •

our mortality love and its complications the tension between an individual and a society the irreversibility of time conflicts between human beings and nature the reconciliation of the Dionysian and the Apollonian • etc....

• These are perennial concerns and they live most fully, they can best be wrestled with, in the realm of art.

Devoting some of our attention to these concerns does not entail the abandonment of politics, quite the contrary.

Marcuse emphasizes this point: he believed that art absolutely has a political function – but – and this is the crucial point – not because it champions or even mentions any political program. The revolutionary capacity of art resides in the way it can function as largely autonomous from existing social relations, the way it transports us away from our stifling status quo. It’s this capacity for transcendence that constitutes a protest, not the content of any particular play. Marcuse sums this up when he declares that there may be more revolutionary potential in the poetry of Rimbaud than in the didactic plays of Brecht.

turn away from the emancipatory potential of art. Politics is indispensable – at its best it’s a tool that can alleviate suffering – but it can only ever be an approximation of our values; it can never fully account for the vast expanse of who we are and who we might yet become. This disconnect between art and politics is the reason conflict between the two is inevitable. No amount of planning can preempt that conflict – but if we’re brave enough, we can become better at navigating it.

This inevitable conflict between art and politics brings me to another problem with my impulse to design a chart. For artists of color, moving between the two poles on my chart is rarely effortless. On a good day, it can feel as though the distance between the two is entirely constituted by friction, and on a bad day that distance becomes something of a minefield. The double-headed arrow I added to the top of my chart – and the ease of movement it suggests – seems glib to me now given how volatile I’ve learned the terrain is.

If I were a better visual artist, I would draw you not a chart but a knot. It would be a knot made of two strands, one for art and one for politics. How better to visualize the way art and politics both mutually constitute each other and at the same time pull against each other? It would be a tight knot; there would be places where it might be impossible to distinguish one strand from the other, but even at their most entangled the two strands never dissolve into each other, not completely. Even in the worst crisis, art continues to exist as an ideal. Art continues to offer us a realm in which the weight of the status quo can sometimes be lessened.

When describing what motivated Black abstractionists to work against the grain of their epoch, the historian Darby English said that “art served them, as a place to go, where things were airy-er.”2 That neologism, “airy-er,” works because it describes a sensation as old as art itself. We know what he means because we’ve all felt it – whether as creators or as audience members – we’ve felt it. If we afford that liberating sensation the value it deserves, then art becomes not a retreat from politics but a A fuller realization of its promise.

We’ve honed our talent for reviewing art to make sure it doesn’t threaten our political effectiveness, but the more immediate risk is that we will diminish our politics if we

1 https://scalar.usc.edu/works/bodies/coco-fusco-censorship-not-the-painting-must-go-on-dana-schutzs-image-of-emmett-till-in-hype 2 https://hyperallergic.com/352161/how-black-modern-artists-defied-a-singular-narrative-in-1971/

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OUR FUTURE

STARTS WITH YOU When I was putting together my plans it was a no-brainer to leave a percentage of my estate to the theater that has defined the American theater landscape for the last 50 years. A gift in my will is an easy, highimpact way to make a commitment to organizations that I am passionate about, and I hope others join me in making sure that Playwrights Horizons is around for the next 50 years and beyond. – Briel Steinberg If the past few years have taught us anything, it is that the best laid plans can still encounter bumps along the way. However, our commitment to supporting artists who use their unique voices to tell our collective stories has never wavered.

As you look towards the future, we encourage you to contribute to Playwrights Horizons’ future by planning for a special gift, such as a bequest in your will or trust. A charitable bequest made through your will or retirement account is one of the simplest ways you can make a significant contribution to Playwrights Horizons. Your gift will help us maintain and improve our important programs for writers, artists, students, audiences, and the larger theatrical community. Plus, you’ll receive some exclusive benefits and behind-the-scenes access each year.

Estate planning doesn’t have to be complex, scary, and expensive. We’ve partnered with FreeWill to demystify the process and make planning for the future easy, intuitive, and free. If you would like to learn more, please visit freewill.com/playwrightshorizons.

For a confidential conversation about how you can make a lasting impact through our Legacy Circle, please contact Meghan Gaur, Major Gifts Officer, at mgaur@phnyc.org.

Let’s look to the future together! Thank you for your support.

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“

Art continues to offer us a realm in which the weight of the status quo can sometimes be lessened.