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An Interview with the Playwrights and Director - Richard Blanco, Vanessa Garcia, and Sally Wood
Portland Stage’S SweetgoatS & BlueBerry SeñoritaS An Interview with the Playwrights and Director Richard Blanco, Vanessa Garcia, and Sally Wood
Edited for Length and Clarity by Audrey Erickson
Audrey Erickson (AE): How exciting is it that this is the first play you've ever written? AE: What is the most exciting part of watching a play change so much?
Richard Blanco (RB): Yes. What a journey. As a poet, you do workshop your work and whatnot, [but] it's not very collaborative. That's been one of the most surprising and wonderful things, to realize just how collaborative [theater] is—from the prop folks to the actors, the director, even the director of the theater—everyone somehow has a hand in this and it feels awesome.
AE: Vanessa, what was your process like coming into this play?
Vanessa Garcia (VG): First of all, Sally [Wood] has been with us from the start. So that's a blessing, one, because she's Sally, and two, because you don't get to always be with the same director on a thing. And so, you're moving and developing the piece together in an extremely loving room all the time. When I came in, [Richard] had come to see a show of mine in Miami, and it had sort of a Cuban theme. Then we went to go have a martini and we started talking about this [project] and I don't know how but at the end, we were like co-writing this thing. We started with a new page so that we could come in together, which was really generous and fun.
AE: Sally, you've been with this play a long time, too. What was exciting about it to you?
Sally Wood (SW): It's just different from other plays. I can't even really articulate how, it's just this experience that you have. It is a play, it follows play rules, but there's something that I can't quite categorize. When people experience it, they come out lighter and smiling. It just feels like we've all been in something together, which I think is really remarkable. SW: When we were leaving rehearsal yesterday, Richard's like, "We cut so much, but I don't miss it." And that's a great feeling. It's like we're getting the play to its essence.
VG: From the first time Sally saw the draft, one character died and two characters disappeared.
SW: That's right! I forgot. Yeah, that's the way it goes!
VG: I love being in the room, I love making changes live. I never start in a place of preciousness because it's the closest thing to life we have and that's ever changing anyway. Where do things have to go? What has to get lifted, what has to be there in the first round, so that it's sort of echoing, as a sort of pentimento later. That tapestry is the best thing ever. I just think it's so fun.
RB: For me, as a first-time playwright, it was great to see how much the actors bring to it. Understanding the play from their perspective, it's just so cool. Nobody asks me what they need from my poem. Getting in their head and realizing, oh, my god, another piece of the collaboration, that's so essential. I think that in some ways, it is like poetry in the sense that you're trying to find out, what is the bare bones with this? Do I need 40 lines? Can I do it in 15? And if I'm gonna do the 15, it's usually a better piece.
SW: I've never seen more gracious, grateful, egoless [writers]. You can say anything about [the play] and they're like, "Do I think that? Yeah, I think that," or "No, that's not what I'm trying to say." I haven't had to hold anything back. Every thought comes right out. And I think that's a really special, safe play place. The actors [are] so excited, too, because they're being listened to in a way that actors
Portland Stage’S SweetgoatS & BlueBerry SeñoritaS typically are not; they don't [usually] get this kind of input. And so they're seeing like, "Oh, I said this about my character. And now Vanessa and Richard have written this in," and you can just see the actor like, "Oh, that's right. I'm a real part of this process now."
VG: It's a kind of blessing that we have people who are tracking each character individually because when you're writing a novel, you've got to track them all in your head. And if you're missing some part of it—you lose threads, you know. They won't allow you to do that, because they're like, "My journey, it's missing this," and that's super valuable.
RB: That's a great analogy, if you finished your draft of a novel and you actually had your characters talking to you. "Do you remember page 43? I don't know what I'm doing there."
AE: How do your past creative experiences (as poets and novelists, etc.) influence how each of you go about writing a play?
VG: I kind of think everything is [collaborative], even novel writing because you end up working with an editor. You're never really alone, you're alone for a little while, when you're getting the stuff out. But then eventually, I gotta get it into the world, so there's always some kind of a process. I don't know if the vehicle finds the theme or the theme finds the vehicle, when you write in different mediums, but I mean, [Sweet Goats] very much feels like a play.
RB: I've always liked theater, and I was historically a very poor reader because we didn't speak English in the house. We had no books in the house except books on how to learn English. So I would always do my book reports on plays because I thought, "I can get through it." And so initially when I got asked to write the play, I was like, "Yeah!" But it is the most challenging genre I've ever attempted. wwAnd now [that] I've seen the beauty of it, it's actually affecting how I write poetry in the sense of less is more. I find myself writing shorter poems and trusting almost the poem itself as an actor, that the poem will do the work that it needs to do and don't have to superimpose or overwrite it. And that's been a great sort of "aha”!
AE: Our character Bea uses baking as a way to connect to her home and to her identity. Is there a meal that connects you to your roots, connects you to your home, memories?
RB: For me, it's partly baked goods like pastelitos of all kinds, which are basically like a turnover but not really, with meat or cheese or guava. Sometimes when I visit Miami, that's all I do. I don't even need full meals. I just go to every bakery I can, and get wired on Cuban coffee and down these pastries all day.
VG: I think of French bread first. That seems a little weird. But my grandfather taught me to bake while telling me the family story. And you know, the thing that you learn as a kid is "Oh, wait, baking is about waiting." You're just waiting the whole time. So then what happens is you fill the kitchen with stories. So for me when I think of my roots and my family story, even though we're so based in Cuba, it's a baguette.
SW: I think this play is teaching me about food in a way that I typically don't experience food. I'm British-born and my mother was Canadian. So we had the worst food—scoopable meats, boiled potatoes... Food was something to be endured. It was never the kitchen filled with stories. It was "it's gonna be done in 15 minutes."
RB: It's particular also for immigrants and exiles because you can't just find Cuban food. But also it's this way of not only connecting to your family, but to your culture, to your past, or the country that we came from, that some of us weren't even born there. It's that kind of connection. I just discovered [Sal de la Tierra] around the corner yesterday and I got to speak Spanish, which was so cool. They make patacones, which are fried plantains. I'm like, "These are better than in Miami." And I was like, "Oh, I gotta bring back some for the Cubans [in the cast]. They're gonna flip out.
