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A Conversation with Morgan Green & Johnson Henshaw

Morgan Green Johnson Henshaw

 

To hear some people tell it, New York is the only incubator for the most exciting young artists. But as the Sharon Playhouse proves, creating work outside of the Broadway and Off-Broadway sphere isn’t just a way to pay the rent — it’s a way to make the art you really want to make.
 

We took a break from the city and met with Johnson Henshaw, Artistic Director of Sharon Playhouse, and director-in-residence Morgan Green after their first run-through of The Music Man — their third collaboration this summer — to talk about the inventive restructuring of the Playhouse’s season, the importance of trust, the goal to foster emerging theater artists, and their thoughts on the future of this art form.
 

 

Michelle Tse: How was the first run-through?
 

Morgan Green: It was good. I have a headache [laughs] but it was really good.
 

Michelle: Should we get you some water?
 

Morgan: I’m good. I just had some; I’ll be okay. [laughs] No, but it was very exciting to see everything together. Johnson was there, and we had the smallest little audience so I feel like there was a lot of pressure in a good way, so that the actors were really focusing.
 

Michelle: That’s good. That’s exciting! So I wanted to start with asking about why you, Johnson, chose to do a director-driven season, particularly with an emerging female director.
 

Johnson Henshaw: I’m a director myself, and in my 20’s all of my playwright friends had so many opportunities for fellowships and mentorships and all sorts of ways that theaters in New York were trying to connect with them — they were trying to foster and incubate them. There’s not a lot of that for directors. Then I did this fellowship with the Old Vic in London. I went over to London, and visited many of the major theaters there — the National Theatre, the Donmar. Those theaters have these incredible incubators where they take young directors who have just gotten out of drama school or university and they start giving them space and time and money — they’re fully salaried! — and they start prepping them so that they are ready to do mainstage productions at the National Theatre when they’re like 26 years old. So then those directors are being seen by commercial producers and other artistic directors. Their work is getting seen much earlier and their careers are so much more dynamic and fruitful because of it.
 

Directors in New York have to tie themselves to playwrights. They have to really fight for those relationships. [Morgan and I] talked about this a little bit. The playwrights you get, that’s how your boat floats or sinks. It’s so often that the director’s work takes a back seat. When I had this opportunity, I was like, This should be a place that’s a theater for directors. Where they get to come up and do work that they’re excited about, as opposed to an artistic director being excited about [a certain] play, and finds a director to do that work.
 

I wasn’t sure originally that it was going to be all one director for the whole season but I had reached out to people at Playwrights Horizons, the Public Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, and New Georges, and I said, Who are young directors you’re interested in? There was a bunch of names on each of those lists, and some people were on two lists, but maybe not all of them, and there was only one name that was on every single list, and that was Morgan’s. I actually didn’t know her work. I didn’t know her. [laughs] This was all happening around late December, and Minor Character the show that Morgan did with [her theater company], New Saloon, had been asked to be in the Under the Radar Festival as part of the Incoming lineup.The show was sold out, but I got a friend of mine to write Morgan to say, Hey, this is my friend Johnson, he just got this job, he wants to come see your show, can you get him in? And she said yes, of course.
 

I thought I would go see Minor Character, and if I liked it, I’d be like, Why don’t you direct a show this summer? What show do you want to do? And I was so blown away by it, it was so incredible, and one of the best things I’ve seen in the theater ever, I couldn’t believe it. And the ways in which it was great felt like the work of a really great director. It was so smart and so stylish and moving. So I met with Morgan, we had breakfast, and I sort of was like, Will you come and direct all the plays? Because first of all, I wanted to bring Minor Character here, but I didn’t want that to be the only show that Morgan directed this summer. Selfishly, the best part about this job, is I get to program work that I want to see. It’s the best part of being artistic director.
 

Because this audience is an older audience, the work that has typically been done here at the Playhouse is very traditional and I was trying to figure out what were the programming choices that would be great for a director to tackle but for this audience would feel welcoming. So my guidelines were a classic American musical, a classic American play, and a new work, and that was Minor Character.
 

Morgan Green Johnson Henshaw
 

Michelle: So Minor Character kicked off the season for obvious reasons that Johnson just touched on, and tonight we’re seeing Far Away. Why Far Away?
 

Morgan: Like Johnson was saying, there are all these opportunities to direct new plays and to ‘pitch’ yourself to playwrights as a director. I have been doing that, and I have relationships with playwrights that I like, but it’s really rare for an opportunity like this to come, for someone to ask me, the director, What do you want to do? So for the play, Johnson originally proposed it be a great American play, so I was thinking about Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, but I really wanted to fill that slot with a work by a female playwright. I love Caryl Churchill, and I’ve always loved her, and I feel like she’s not done enough in New York or America in general — she’s not as well known here, she’s in England. And she’s one of the greatest living playwrights. So it felt like a really special opportunity to do a Churchill play, whereas that would not happen in the city, and nobody would let me do it, unless I self-produced it. So I jumped at the opportunity, and Far Away is a play that I’ve wanted to direct since the first time I read it. I had visualized it when I was reading it, which is a good sign. I didn’t direct it when I first encountered it because I didn’t understand the ending. As I came back to it for this as an option for the middle slot, I still didn’t really understand the ending, but I was kind of excited by that challenge. I was also excited by its relevance, how it feels like the whole world is going to war, struggling with the responsibilities as an artist, and the distance between art and politics. Caryl’s is being self-aware and critical about artists, and I was excited to engage with that.
 

I was also really excited by the contrast between Minor Character which is Chekhov — but it’s also extra Chekhov, because we do 6 different translations on top of each other — with The Music Man, a musical with 27 people and huge, with this really spare, really poetic dynamite little play in the middle that is 45 minutes long, but has three distinct time periods and worlds within it, with this crazy hat parade spectacle. I got to have that theatrical event happening that is physical and design-based, which feels like an essential part of theater to me. I’m not that excited about plays that are just people talking to each other. It basically has all the things I like about theater in 45 minutes. [laughs]
 

Michelle: Well, that’s perfect then! You just mentioned being able to very quickly visualize Far Away. Is that how your process comes about most times? How do you negotiate between visual and literary cues?
 

Morgan: Yeah, I was thinking that [about Far Away because it can be seen] in terms of something that’s unusual. But to me it’s still not actually that radical because everything I’m doing this summer is text-based.
 

A lot of my work is text-based. The text is almost always the first thing versus a visual or an idea. So for me it does start with the text, and sitting alone and visualizing the text, and it feels right if I can get a picture [in my head]. It’s very instinctual, and it’s also about choosing the right material for the setting. I have maybe a bucket list of plays or projects that I want to do, but it doesn’t feel real till I’ve seen the space, see what would work in the space, what would be good for the audience at this time; it’s like this perfect storm of things that have to click into place.
 

Michelle: So how did the choice of The Music Man come about?
 

Johnson: I had two musicals in mind that I didn’t say anything about, but Morgan immediately said, I really want to doThe Music Man, and that was the show I wanted her to do. The story of a con man who comes to middle America is … so real.
 

Michelle: Absolutely. We just saw Death of a Salesman last night.
 

Johnson: Oh! Theater Mitu’s? What did you think?
 

Michelle: We loved it. We sat in the front row, so it was incredibly immersive. We very much interpreted it as empathizing with a Trump voting family. I also hadn’t seen that play in so long that I forgot about how agitated I get sitting through Willy’s monologues. It was very much like… dude, get a grip. We ran into a large group of friends and many of them didn’t make that connection, though.
 

Morgan: Oh, wow.
 

Johnson: That’s wild.
 

Michelle: They were either thinking about their own fathers, or family or friends, or whatever it was. Anyway, it just seems like it’s something that’s popping up everywhere, and folks are making connections whether the directors meant for it or not.
 

Johnson: Well, [Willy] is so emblematic of the worst parts of our culture. So as we look at these stories of patriarchy, and whiteness, and oppression, he’s in all of those.
 

Morgan: One of the things I was trying to deal with after Trump was elected — there was all this criticism about him, obviously, leading up to the election, every horrible thing he did, every lie, and everything that was revealed that was like, Is this the thing that’ll take him down? No, that’s not it. There was nothing that happened that was so bad that would prevent him from succeeding, so I was thinking about the public that elected him, and that there was more of those people in New York, around me, than I realized. So I was really connecting to The Music Man in that it’s a story about townspeople in middle America who accept a fantasy and enjoy it, because it sounds good and it feels good. They just buy into it, even when they find out that it’s a fantasy and they’ve been lied to and cheated. They kind of forgive this white guy. So I was interested in looking at myself and people who enjoy the feeling of believing in a fantasy. That’s so much a part of the American dream and the American psyche, and advertising, and Twitter — I mean, we’re just fed pieces of information and we consume them, digest them, and take them for truth. We don’t stop to think or criticize. And if we do, and something is revealed to be a lie, we’re still okay with it, because it felt better. It feels better, and is more satisfying to just buy the fantasy. And I experience that too in myself, so it was not so much getting to Trump voters specifically, but at American people who buy the fantasy.
 

Michelle: I definitely looked up the exit polls for this town when I was preparing for this interview. [laughs]
 

Morgan: You did?
 

Michelle: It went…
 

Johnson: For Hillary.
 

Morgan Green Johnson Henshaw
 

Michelle: Yeah, well, 800-something to 500-something. So it’s interesting to me. I also looked up the demographics, which says it’s about 98% white. This summer season you’ve put on and are putting on work that is perhaps challenging to the audience, but I wonder, at a place like the Sharon Playhouse, is there any fear of touching on subjects like racial disparity, gender disparity, or any marginalized issue, without basically pissing off most of your subscriber base?
 

Johnson: This pocket of Connecticut, Litchfield County, is in many ways a weekend community. So many of the people up here are city people, who come up here on the weekends. So it’s a sophisticated bunch.
 

Morgan: In Minor Character, men play women, and women play men, and actors of all races play the different characters. It’s really fluid, and one person who came to a dress rehearsal that the only good part of the show was when the women were kissing each other. So I feel like there is also that contingency of an audience here. There’s also people who totally loved it and embraced it. I think New Saloon, my company that I made Minor Character with, I don’t think we’re trying to make a bold statement about racial politics in our piece, but we are making a statement about identity and its fluidity and how we all hold many identities inside of us. I think that the intentionally diverse casting is trying to crack open some stereotypes. The diversity in the casting of that piece is essential to the project. We couldn’t do Minor Character with an all white cast. That felt important to get to do here.
 

Michelle: In that sense, what do you think of color conscious casting, which is what I’d call what you just described in Minor Character’s concept, versus a director and casting director trying to check off boxes in trying to satisfy diversity in a way?
 

Morgan: I try not to do those kinds of plays, or if I do, I play against it. In The Music Man, the Paroo family is written as an Irish family, which had more social stigma when it was first originally written, but no longer does. So I’ve cast the Paroo family as an African American family. The storyline is about how Marian is treated in this town in Iowa, so I think it heightened the urgency, especially because of the whole plotline about her younger brother and his safety and success in the world. So there’s a young Black boy running around in a town that is stirred up by this white guy and it becomes sort of an angry mob. That’s really scary right now.
 

Johnson: In the run-through today, I was so struck by the line about Winthrop’s father being killed, about being dead, which is usually, like, whatever. But when you have this young Black boy, upset, and his mother trying to explain things to him, it just made me think of Philando Castile, and so many others…. All the black bodies that are being killed every day, and those children that are left behind…
 

Michelle: Absolutely. I’m very interested in coming back and seeing it done in this way. I want to now zoom out a little and go back to a great point that was brought up, about the disparity between fellowships and mentorship for playwrights versus directors. I would argue there are even less for designers. Though all this seems very doable to me.
 

Johnson: Yeah.
 

Michelle: So, how has the experience been, what are the lessons learned, and what can others take away from this type of programming? How would you encourage other artistic directors or administrative folks to be inclusive in their guidance of emerging theater artists?
 

Johnson: It’s a leap of faith. You have to trust the artist. I’ve only seen Morgan do one show.
 

Morgan: He was very trusting. I couldn’t believe it.
 

Johnson: Well, I don’t think great work happens without great risk. There are so many theaters in this country. There are so many theaters in New York that are picking the trusted directors, the old steady hand, with the way that it has been done before. It feels to me, if I’m going to be a young artistic director, I should do something different. I should make a different choice. I should think about who’s going to make the next great theater, and give a platform. I’m really proud of Morgan’s work, and now she’s had three big productions in a row. I won’t speak for whatever she’s learned, but there have been insane learning moments. No artistic director can ever tell her she’s not ready to do a musical. No artistic director can tell her she doesn’t know how to do a stylized Caryl Churchill play, you know, and that’s so exciting to me. To give her that experience…
 

Morgan: Yeah, it’s a ton of experience right in a row. It forces this kind of feverish creativity.
 

Michelle: It must be all overwhelming.
 

Morgan: Very overwhelming. But it’s pushed me to be really collaborative with the designers and the actors and trust them in the way that Johnson’s trusting me. I think [Johnson] told me I brought about 80 people here, all in all.
 

Johnson: 70 people contracted.
 

Morgan: Right. So I brought my entire New York network with me. So it’s not like I actually did this by myself, you know? There’s a lot of other people involved. The pressure I find useful, but that’s just the kind of person I am. I like the pressure, but it is and was overwhelming.
 

Michelle: Right. Because other than the Lincoln Center Theater Lab—
 

Morgan: Right, which is not practicing, it’s a lab.
 

Michelle: Exactly. Other than that, I don’t think I’ve heard much else for directing.
 

Morgan: There are a lot of residencies and apprenticeships that are centered around assistant directing, and I’ve done a lot of those, and it’s a good way to learn, and met a lot of people I learned a lot from. In terms of getting our hands dirty, and making work, there’s not a lot of opportunity for that. There is in London, for example, so it feels like there’s a real dirth for directors in that.
 

Michelle: In Europe, to my knowledge, it’s mostly government subsidies that allow that to happen though, right? We are on a different system.
 

Morgan: Yes, it’s a completely different structure.
 

Johnson: Yes, but it used to exist in New York. New York Theatre Workshop, throughout the ‘80s, that’s where Michael Greif started, in the New Directors Project, where they would throw up these plays that were hugely foundational for a lot of the directors who are now directors on Broadway. The Public Theater, you look at what Joseph Papp was doing, he was finding young directors and just giving them rooms and giving them actors and paying those people, and saying, What happens in this room?
 

Michelle: That doesn’t quite happen anymore.
 

Johnson: It doesn’t quite happen anymore like that. I wish that all those Shakespeare plays in the park weren’t directed by Daniel Sullivan. I wish they were directed by young directors. We just keep seeing the same plays directed by the same people. It’s so boring.
 

Morgan Green Johnson Henshaw
 

Michelle: I agree. And so both of you are relatively young for being in the positions that you are in. What would you say is the steepest part of the learning curve so far?
 

Johnson: This summer has been a lot just in terms of getting 70 people up here to Sharon, Connecticut, and getting them all to the theater, making sure they’re housed. The logistics of producing here are tough. But in terms of the experience of being an artistic director…As a director, I’m always so nervous about sharing my own work, you know? And I have this sense of modesty, or I’m embarrassed to tell someone that I think what I’ve done is good. The great thing about being artistic director is that I get to scream from the rooftops about how special [Morgan] is, and that feels awesome.
 

Morgan: It also feels awesome to me. [laughs]
 

Johnson: But with the learning curve, I don’t know. Morgan and I haven’t agreed on every choice this summer. There have been some moments of disagreement. I think figuring out how to negotiate those disagreements has been a learning event.
 

Morgan: Right. And for me, it’d be how to take notes from an artistic director. I haven’t had that experience before, figuring out what things I can really negotiate on and what I need to fight for. Another thing that I think I’ve been getting better at out of necessity is articulating my ideas and my vision so that it is clear to people that are not inside my head, or don’t have the same relationship to theater as I do. To be clear about what I want to do, I have to change the way in which I’m describing it, based on who I’m talking to. I feel like being forced to do that so many times, with so many different kind of people this summer, I’ve gotten a lot better at it.
 

Michelle: Communication bootcamp!
 

Morgan: Seriously, yeah. I can’t assume somebody knows what something looks like in my head. I have to break it down.
 

Michelle: So as a theater and as directors, what do you hope the future of theater would look like? What do you want to see more of, or less of?
 

Morgan: I want to see more work that is breaking out of traditional theater conventions. I feel like I see a lot of theater that I’m sort of expecting. I feel excited to see work that is breaking the mold, so that in order for that to happen, people need to be given opportunities that aren’t necessarily given to them. So what Johnson’s doing here feels like that, but also for women, for queer artists, and people of color, having more opportunities to make their work — with support, because it’s so hard to do it on your own.
 

Johnson: I just want to see less of the straight white male gaze. I feel like so many of my theatrical experiences come through the viewpoint of a straight man, and we’ve seen that. I want to see so many more people’s work than I’ve gotten to see.
 

The funny thing is, in these Far Away talkbacks [which happens after every performance], there are people who love it, and people who are angry that the play makes them think. They’re angry because they’ve been challenged and not simply entertained It has emboldened me hearing that to only want to present work that challenges people, that challenges their perception of what should happen in a theatrical space. I want to make work and present work that people are still talking about later, that they’re still responding to. I’ve learned that so many people go to the theater and really want it to happen in there, and end in there, and to never engage with it again. I hope that nothing we do this summer ends in that space. I sort of hope that of all work.
 

The Wassaic Project, [an artist-in-residency program 20 minutes away in Upstate New York,] some of their residents came over, saw Minor Character, and loved it. They went back and told the rest of them, You have to come see this. They’re visual art people who don’t think that summer theater is going to be cool. They all came and lost their minds. I’ve now had so many conversations with people who have stopped working in theater because the rules of it, and the system of it, is so oppressive about the type of work that had to be made. So many of them have seen Minor Character and have been so inspired and thought, Oh right, theater can feel like this. It can feel dangerous and totally new while exploring something really old. I hope to keep being a part of work like that.
 

Michelle: Absolutely. Morgan, you mentioned quickly opportunity for women. I wonder if you can expand on your thoughts on opportunities for women and directors, perhaps particularly for musicals. I’ve been thinking a lot about not just what we touched on earlier about the lack of a support system, but even in terms of someone like me going to ‘diversity’ panels, and feeling like I’ve been going to the same one for five years in a row. It’s so circular. I wonder what a young 20-something just out of school can do beyond somewhat following the system that already exists.
 

Morgan: I can talk about my own experience with it, which is that I just made work. It was small, and dinky, and scrappy and self-produced, and I’d invite everybody I could to come see it. Most of them didn’t come until the third or fourth thing that I invited them to. I just kept going. A lot of the things I knew they wouldn’t come, but I’d invite them anyways, just so that by the sixth time – I guess I was pretty annoying… But it’s a dangerous line to walk because you can’t force yourself to receive recognition or gain support. It’s a delicate balance I think. But that’s what I’ve started to tell younger artists who ask me about it. Make work, and invite people to see it, as opposed to sitting and waiting. Instead of asking for opportunities, make them. I guess that’s pretty generic sounding.
 

Michelle: Yes, and it’s also hard to make it or make work as young theater artists if you don’t have some sort of financial support. So once again it becomes a very circular movement, where everyone who is able to make it in this industry is at least middle, upper-middle class.
 

Johnson: Totally.
 

Michelle: Yet theater is suppose to be a form of art empathy, and yet the spectrum of voices needed is impossible to achieve with this current model. It’s frustrating.
 

Morgan: That is really frustrating, and I think that without financial support, what I have noticed is that it just takes a lot longer. If you have that cushion, you can just do your work all the time and nothing else. If you’re working to support yourself, it’s a much slower slog. It takes a long time to get anywhere.
 

Johnson: That’s the worst. That sucks. It sucks that the big institutional theaters aren’t doing more.
 

Morgan: This is the first year that I am freelance directing and not doing five other jobs. So I tutored, did admin work, waited tables, did all the things. I actually have no idea if I’ll be able to sustain this. It’s very up in the air, so we’ll see.
 

Morgan Green Johnson Henshaw
 

Michelle: I think and hope that you will. Lastly, any other advice, and what’s next for both of you, after The Music Man?
 

Morgan: What I said before, I think: Make work. Sometimes you do have to be silent for a really long time and listen and learn. I was so frustrated by doing that for so long, but now I’m feeling grateful for putting in that time. Also, going to see stuff and learning from other people.
 

What’s next for me, is I’m directing a play by Milo Cramer, who is in New Saloon, called Cute Activist, at the Bushwick Starr in January. We just did a reading here this summer actually, very casually. Johnson read in it [laughs] and it was amazing.
 

Johnson: I would agree, make work, find artists you love and write to them and tell them you love their work and ask how you can help them make their work.
 

Morgan: That’s so good.
 

Johnson: Because the most important way to get people to come see your work is to be a part of a community. I think singlehandedly that is the key to success. It’s such a small world, and people want to help their friends.
 

Morgan: That’s true.
 

Johnson: And be nice to people. Don’t be a jerk.
 

I don’t know what happens next! This has sort of been a big, grand experiment. I think at the end of the summer we will take stock, and see what’s right for the playhouse moving forward. And I’m going to try to make some work. Morgan has very much inspired me to.
 

Michelle: Amazing. That’s the best type of collaboration.
 

Johnson: And I made a friend!
 

Morgan: Yes you did!
 

[Everybody laughs]
 

Johnson: It’s the best part of it all.
 

Michelle: Wonderful. Thank you so much for sitting down with me!
 

Morgan and Johnson: Thank you so much!
 
 

 

 

Morgan Green is a theater director and co-founder of New Saloon. She is thrilled to have the opportunity to direct three shows at the Sharon Playhouse this summer. Recent credits include Minor Character: Six Translations of Uncle Vanya at the Same Time (The Public Theater), I’m Miserable But Chance Scares Me by Milo Cramer (The Brick), Parabola by Sarah DeLappe (JACK), and William Shakspeare’s Mom by Milo Cramer (Ars Nova). Morgan is a New Georges Affiliated Artist, part of the 2012 Williamstown Theater Festival Directing Core, the 2013 Lincoln Center Director’s Lab, and a 2014-2015 Bob Moss Directing Resident at Playwrights Hoirzons. She was the Associate Director for Pam Mackinnon on Amelie, A New Musical on Broadway. Upcoming works include Cute Activist by Milo Cramer (The Bushwick Starr) and the West Coast Premier of The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe (Marin Theatre Company).
 

Johnson Henshaw is a film and theater maker. He has developed theatrical work with New Georges, New York Theater Workshop, PS122, Dixon Place, the Public, and the Goodman Theater in Chicago. While at the Public Theater he assisted the writers Tony Kushner, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins play An Octoroon whose production would be cited by the MacArthur Foundation when they awarded Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins one of their ‘Genius Grants’. For nearly 3 years Mr. Henshaw produced a monthly performance review in Brooklyn called Pillow Talk which featured performers such as Erin Markey, John Early, Kate Berlant, and Sasheer Zamata. Because of Pillow Talk, Johnson was approached by the Meredith Corporation to create and produce a comedy web-series for their new coporate channel DIGS as part of the Youtube 100 Channel Initiative. Johnson and co-creator Kim Rosen created Craft & Burn which the New York Times called, “raucous, and darkly funny.” In 2013 Johnson was selected by the Film Society of Lincoln Center to take part in their first Artist Academy, a laboratory for emerging filmmakers. He is a co-founder of Nobody Cares Productions with Kim Rosen. Their first television pilot “Entrepeneur” was bought last year and ultimately lost on the shelves of development. Johnson splits his time between Sharon and Greenwich Village with his partner Michael and their poodle, Henry.

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A Conversation with Rubén Polendo

Rubén Polendo

 

Last week, I had the opportunity to speak to Rubén Polendo, the Founding Artistic Director of Theater Mitu to talk about reinventing the classic American play by Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, and making theater in a time of change. A look inside his company’s process is a look inside one of the most innovative and creative minds in today’s American theater.

 

 

Darrel Alejandro Holnes: Why Death of a Salesman? Why now?
 

Rubén Polendo: I’ll tell you a bit about the arrival of the project, and then connect it to the now. When we first started exploring the piece, it came into the company’s conversation in a really particular way. We had been, as we often are on a yearly basis, in a conversation about what the next works we’ll be doing are. And I realized that as a company, we had fallen into a bit of a rut of saying, oh we don’t like that, oh we don’t do that. So there was an instinct in me to really unpack that. So I told the company — these are members who have been with the company for eight, six, or seven years, so there’s a fluency flowing through the dialogue — to make a list of all the things that we hated, that Theater Mitu “doesn’t do.” From making the list — and Arthur Miller ended up on that list — and it was oh, Arthur Miller. Who cares! It’s boring! It’s old-timey! All these things. After making that list, I told the company that I believe that this must be our next three years of work. If we’re asking audiences to open their hearts, their minds, their conversations, then there’s a kind of arrogance in the artist in then saying we only do that which is comfortable to us. I challenged the company away from saying Theater Mitu doesn’t do, be it Arthur Miller, Shakespeare, or musicals, into how does Theater Mitu wrestle with, or do, or engage with. It was such a wonderful space. So that was step one.
 

That summer, we had one of our training intensives, when we were in Thailand. I had packed my Arthur Miller plays and was reading them. I was gravitating towards The Crucible, just because the thematics I had some interest in and so forth, but I had several of his other plays with me. It happened to be that that moment landed during a company retreat, and in the timeline of the founding and original members, that while we were in Thailand, we started a whole other conversation, which was about really reaching that adult moment in your life as an artist and really coming to terms with who you are as an artist. The way that for me, in my early 20’s, so much was driven by what I was going to be and do, like it was a really conscious shaping of the future. Something really happened on the outset of reaching my late 30’s, which is that kind of realization of so this is who we are, and this is what the company has become, and it was really a celebration and admission to what it is. In some cases, it has become a letting go of what didn’t happen, or what did take shape, and so forth. And so in taking part in this part joyful, part sad conversation, and realize how much external pressure there was for us to be what we thought we were going to be, and do what we thought we were going to do, and so it became a very personal dialogue about aspirations that one has when young, and the realizations of where those land when you are truly an adult. I remember that night I went back to the place where we were staying at in Thailand, picked up Death of a Salesman, and then all of a sudden saw this incredible spectrum around that exact conversation, of Biff, saying, I am who I am, I am proud of it, let go of everything else, right up to Willy saying no, no, no, I am what I was supposed to be, I’m going to keep fighting for it. So there was a kind of entrapment to that, and within it are contradictions and nuances and so forth. I became incredibly moved by the piece. When I was rereading it, the four central characters became very clear to me quite instinctively, and their aloneness became very clear to me. And everybody else in the world of that Miller play felt so pre-recorded somehow, in the way that when you’re in some kind of crisis and you come to somebody and expect them to listen, that person always says, It’s going to be okay! Cheer up! – these kind of pre-recorded clichés. So that propelled a further instinct that all of the other characters would actually be pre-recorded, and the void of the humanity turns into these objects. That’s what started the process.
 

As we developed the piece and continued into the present time, it continues to reveal itself. One of the big revelations was, of course, being in this political moment — we’re in such a, I mean, the most benevolent framing would be to call it a moment of transition — there’s a way in which one of the biggest threads is this constant attempt to rewrite what is to be American. To actually see how literal it is to write people out of what is means to be American. To look back at Miller’s piece and realize he was dealing with the same things, which was revealing with this creature, Willy Loman, whose entire identity is tethered to his function, yet his function is being written out, by nature of industrialization, by nature of his age, and the nature of all of this change that is happening into the 50’s. The world is moving forward to this idea that it’s progress, it’s a new way of thinking, and people are being written out; Willy Loman is being written out. So to me that takes on a kind of Greek Tragedy quality to it, which really sets everything sail to where it is headed. I feel like it becomes a cautionary tale and a reminder of the moment and echoes the words of the play, which is that if we don’t pay attention, this is where it ends, just so everybody knows. The piece reveals itself so vibrantly. Manifesting it now really became important to us as a company.
 

Rubén Polendo
 

DAH: Can you talk about the theatrical approach to Death of a Salesman, and how you’re using the theatrical elements to answer the question of “What happens when you’re written out of the American Dream”?
 

RP: This goes back to that initial instinct. We as a company not only make work together, but we train together as well. One of the big goals is really to lean in and trust the artistic instinct, and to know that following that instinct will actually reveal the reason for that instinct. Often in making theatrical work, the artists have an instinct, and immediately that instinct is interrogated. So as an artist, you see the color blue, and someone says why is that? Why is that in the script? And you think, I don’t know! That was an instinct! We as a company actually feel that the rationale for all of our instincts we usually don’t see or truly understand until the work is complete because you’re being impacted by the text and your own ideas in the moment.
 

The instinct for me as a director became to manifest these four central characters and to really place them in a complete austere aloneness. That already had a kind of aesthetic implication which sort of implied an incredibly bare space, dry and absent of humanity. Once we did the pre-recorded voices, once that started, my instinct was to follow that and make [the supporting characters] these objects. There was also obviously a gravitation towards the time period so they became these objects of the time and they really became about manifesting the metaphorical language one uses for people. So if someone says, “that young man is so bright,” it literally manifests as a bright light that no one can even look at because it’s so bright. It was about taking the poetics of everyday language and manifesting them on stage. There’s something about that clarity that is so fantastic and exciting.
 

The equation that is then created is this world that has somehow stopped paying attention to the changes happening, but in fact, is just very blindly becoming another object or cog or piece in the machinery. We use this emotional focus on the family that is actually trying to stay human and ask questions and explore. The result is this very asphyxiating experience with, say Willy, as he’s sitting surrounded by these other characters that have now become objects, and truly saying, help me, please help me. And the objects are completely inhuman, and out of the recording comes, It’ll get better tomorrow! Willy, what’s going on next Thursday? And they keep ignoring him. It’s really frustrating to watch, because the objects just go about themselves, and it really becomes this cautionary tale of what happens when you ignore.
 

DAH: Thank you for sharing that; I just learned a lot. It makes me really curious about your work with your design team, and how they’ve all come together to create this very unique Theater Mitu aesthetic.
 

RP: One of the things that’s really important to us is to really promote a unified process, which is to move away from creating a kind of space that separates between director, designer, and actor. This makes for a longer process for us in terms of how it long it takes to develop work, but we do this because designer and actor and myself and all the other collaborators go from day one together. We actually don’t have pre-production meetings, we don’t have design meetings, we’re always all together. So what starts happening is that the aesthetic is really shaped in a unified way and links directly to the style. There’s never an aesthetic or design choice that is made and then revealed to one of the actors. It’s really about artists sitting together, having equal voice around this text, and really have it come from a central space; it becomes quite democratic. My job becomes much more curatorial, actually curating those ideas into unison.
 

I think of it as these three moments: First, it’s a really unified collaborative moment around the tables, the other is the moment is which everyone begins to bring out their skillsets, then the last – which is probably the most divided moment – is when we really separate to designer and actor on stage. In many ways that’s the least interesting moment as a director, but obviously is the one that gets us to the result.
 

Rubén Polendo
 

DAH: Can you talk a bit about how music works in this piece? I know you have the fortune of working with Ellen Reid and Ada Westfall.
 

RP: Yeah. So Ellen and Ada are incredible. They were very much in that first moment of sitting around tables. We were still trying to understand the piece and the instincts of it. For me, music played a really key role because it manifests a kind of emotional landscape to the piece. The entire piece is scored beginning to end. It’s a score that’s looking at a lot of source material that at first glance have nothing to do with Arthur Miller, so we did tons of research into funerary chants and songs from different parts of the world. Then of course we did a ton of research into 1930’s and 1940’s jazz, particularly into the 50’s and really begin to transliterate and play in that. Ada and Ellen are and have been in every moment of the piece. Every rehearsal they are there, creating along with the actors. So the score interestingly is really attached to the piece. I don’t know that I’ve even heard many of the scenes without music; I don’t know what that would sound like. What happens is that the rhythm, the emotional space, and the pitching of the actor’s language are really linked to the music. The music is music, but the music is soundscape, in a lot of ways.
 

The other pieces are from Willy’s long monologues. There are about four per act. Well, they’re more soliloquies, not monologues. And I hate them. I think they’re so incredibly boring. [Laughs] I always like it when the company kind of gives in to them. At the beginning we decided that we would not touch the text. So we sat there with this instinct of working around it, and then we started playing with song. With orchestrating and pitching and adding chromality to those moments, they kind of become these song-speak moments. And then I loved them. And then we all loved them.
 

When the character goes into these song-speak moments, it’s like madness. It creates these beautiful moments of madness that’s quite stunning. So the music is not only a score, but is integral to each Willy Loman scene. I can’t imagine it any other way. A couple years ago, I saw another production of Death of a Salesman and it was so confusing to me! [Laughs] He doesn’t sing? What does this mean?! [Laughs] I say that because the instinct I have for it was actually such a clumsy one, where it was not born out of this rigorous dramaturgical map. It was born out of an artist saying, When I hear this monologue, I, the director, disconnect. It’s uninteresting to me. So the music heightens it in many ways. Ultimately there’s a full score, and [Willy] is the only one who sings in this way, because of his state of mind.
 

DAH: The theme of the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab this year, which I am a part of, is “Theater in a Time of Change.” What your play is asking is very timely: What happens when you are written out of the American Dream? Can you expand on what it means to make theater in a time of change, responding to the current political climate? I’m thinking also about increasing diverse representation in theater.
 

RP: Absolutely. The theme behind the lab this year I think is terrific for obvious reasons. As a whole, I actually think oftentimes where there is dialogue or conversations around change, it either vilifies it, or somehow triumphs it too much. I think one of the big things that’s missed is that there is a great amount of responsibility in change in that change is often deeper than the aesthetics of change, but the big change is actually a change in the belief system. I feel that artists are essential in assuring that the process is a healthy and productive one for the great societal space. I feel very deeply that the kind of language we use in our company around the subject of mythology — and I don’t mean mythology as in ancient or western idea of myths, but more of the anthropological definition of mythology, which are the set of stories one tells to make sense of the world around them — I think that as artists, we create the mythology. In creating that mythology, we have this incredible opportunity to celebrate the belief that we have at the moment. So I feel the space of change, and the conversations around change — capital C Change in terms of belief systems — really can be impacted by artists. That’s what makes our work political and spiritual and social.
 

This piece is certainly key in that. But more than that in many ways, Theater Mitu in many ways is constantly looking at this notion of change and how we make art, and how that changes. How do we innovate, collaborate, have ideas of inclusion — how do we truly truly do that, knowing we can lead the conversation in terms of how beliefs develop and change. So that to me I feel is the work at the roots as artists. To me, that becomes an important part of our responsibility, regardless of the piece. I take it on very directly as a company who is interested in that. Forgive me for being a bit esoteric, but when we hear the word “change,” it’s very easy to get caught up in the cosmetics in terms of a change, but I believe it’s key to look at change in terms of belief systems and values. What in that is changing, when is it changing, and do we want it to? If we don’t, we get a chance to speak to it. But that also means we have to look at how we make work, and how we organize, and who we give voice to.
 

Rubén Polendo
 

DAH: That’s incredible. What is next for Theater Mitu? What is next for Rubén Polendo?
 

RP: [Laughs] For Theater Mitu, after we premier Death of a Salesman [at BAM], we begin it’s tour by going to Chile, and that will begin its trajectory in the next year. We’re developing a new piece called Remnant. And Remnant is a piece that’s made up of interviews with soldiers that have gone to combat all over the world — Middle East, Southeast Asia, the United States, Latin America — and interjecting that with sacred text concerning the subject of death. It’s quite an ambitious project. It’s at its very early phase. And then we have another project which will be premiering next year, which is a huge investigation into Hamlet. So it’s not a version of Hamlet, but more a dissecting of Hamlet. Those are our two development projects, but for now Salesman is our focus.
 

For me, I was appointed in September as chair of Tisch Drama, so I will continue doing that and building and shaping and continue to serve the department of drama at Tisch, and really bring a lot of the conversation you and I are having here more into the blood of the department. In many ways it’s already there, but it’s about activating and using innovative ideas of change. So that takes up my time just a little bit.
 

DAH: That’s wonderful. And congratulations on that position. I remember when it was announced.
 

RP: Thanks! It’s been really fun. Everyone keeps asking me, but I’m having a really good time, because I’m approaching it as a director and I love coming together with people and making things. Students have been really key in that. Colleagues have been really key in that. It’s a really great moment to do exactly what you were talking about which is what is the role of the artist in the time of change? It’s key to look at everything in terms of diversity and innovation and sustainability of the artists, so it’s been really cool.
 

Rubén Polendo
 

DAH: Do you have any advice for an artist making theater in a time of change? I’m specifically thinking about a theater director entering this current landscape. How do we make innovative theater today that challenges our audiences but also sells tickets?
 

RP: Again, the root of that kind of goes back to the previous questions. For me, it goes a little bit back to the making of the work. I think that the mindset becomes very important. Something we really believe in in the company and something I’m really trying to espouse at Tisch, is to move away from thinking of theater as an industry, and to begin to look at theater as a field. In a very small part of that field, is the industry, and the rest is this incredibly artistic field. So the job of the artist is to actually navigate that field versus to look at it as an industry space. What that means in the year 2017 is that the artist has agency. We can navigate, propel, make, communicate, on digital spaces, on a range of ideations and create new collaborative models. There’s some of us that are stuck in this 1920’s model that the phone is going to ring, and someone is going to go, I’m going to make you a star! I honestly believe that that is so debilitating to the artist, and absolutely goes against sustainability. I say this because I feel like that 1920’s model is so placed in me in grad school, that even though I kind of knew better, I still was kind of waiting for it. And that waiting is deadly. Waiting won’t create innovation, and in fact will limit you in the shaping of the artist to try to fit into an industry. So it should be the field that changes the industry. I feel like an artist should be doing, say, a large scale project within the industry, and then a global collaboration, and then should be publishing something, and then should be writing a column, and then should be teaching, and then should be doing an experimental piece in Mongolia, and then come back to New York and do something. So this navigation, all of a sudden, impacts the artist, maintains their sustainability, and frees them from this waiting model, which to me is so crazy. And I think we’re inspiring as artists, but also insecure as artists, in that when that phone rings… I mean, you literally feel like Willy Loman, right? They’re not calling him anymore! We make this crazy equation! I always tell my students that things happen in the artistic life, we really have to move away from making things a metaphor, so it doesn’t really mean anything. I say that because, for example, all the folks who are now graduating from Tisch drama, some of them applied to graduate school and didn’t get in. So their first response is, that must mean that I am fill in the blank. So I feel like, stop making your life a metaphor! It doesn’t mean anything! You didn’t get into grad school. So the next question should be, what’s next? You have agency. You’re not in a place where if you don’t get into grad school, forget it. We love making our lives a metaphor, whether it’s grad school, or any opportunity, or an audition. We keep beating ourselves up in that way. I’ve seen too many students who became colleagues who got lost in that. I see them 10, 15 years later, and they’ve left the field, because they believed it was only an industry and they couldn’t find a way to fit into that. It’s a little idealistic, but it’s also the idea behind Theater Mitu.
 

DAH: Wow, that’s incredible and so generous. Thank you for a wonderful conversation. Is there anything else you want to add that you didn’t get a chance to?
 

RP: No, your questions have been great. Thank you so much. It’s really a joy to chat with you.
 
 

 

 

Rubén Polendo is the founding artistic director of the permanent group of collaborators, Theater Mitu. He and his company work towards expanding the definition of theater through rigorous experimentation with its form. Polendo and his company research and investigate global performance as a source for their training, work, and methodologies. This is all driven by what he calls, “Whole Theater,” a theatrical experience that is rigorously visual, aural, emotional, intellectual and spiritual all in the same moment. His practice investigates trans-global performance; interdisciplinary collaborative models; the performativity of non-violence; the geopolitics of objects; contemporary mythology; artist training and education; investigations of the ritual and the sacred. In addition to his scholarly work, Polendo produces theatrical productions that bring these ideas to life. He has directed, curated and/or written a great many of Theater Mitu’s work, which has premiered in theaters Internationally and in the United States. Internationally, these include: The Cairo Opera House (Cairo, Egypt), Teatro DUOC (Santiago, Chile), Od Nowa (Torun, Poland), Mansion (Beirut, Lebanon), Centro Cultural Paso Del Norte (Mexico), Black Box (Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia), Visthar (Bangalore, India), Patravadi Arts Center (Bangkok, Thailand), Manarat al Saadiyat (UAE) and The NYUAD Arts Center (UAE). In the United States, these include: Mass MoCA (North Adams, MA), Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans, LA), Los Angeles Theater Center (Los Angeles, CA), Ignite Arts/CaraMia (Dallas, TX), and Z Space (San Francisco, CA). Additionally in the United States, Polendo’s work as been seen at Baruch Performing Arts Center, New York Theater Workshop, CSV, The Public, INTAR, Blue Light, Lincoln Center, A.C.T., McCarter, The Perseverance, NAATCO, Mark Taper, Alliance, ETC and South Coast Rep. His Awards and recognitions include the prestigious MAP Fund Grant, the CEC Arts Link Grant, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, NY Cultural Development Fund, National Endowment for the Arts, NEFA’s National Theater Project award, the Rolex Protégé Arts Initiative, Company Residencies at NYUAD Arts Center and at New York Theater Workshop, New York State council for the Arts Grant, The Rosenberg Foundation Grant, Alpert Award, Greenwald Foundation Grant and The Mental Insight Foundation Grant, The Watermill Center Resident Artist, and a Sundance Theater Lab resident artist. Polendo has an MFA in directing from the UCLA School of Theater, an M.A. in non-Western theater from Lancaster University in the U.K., and a B.S. in Biochemistry from Trinity University in Texas. Currently he is Chair of Undergraduate Drama at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Based in New York City, he continues to create, develop and present work in the US and Internationally.

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A Conversation with Mfoniso Udofia & Ed Sylvanus Iskandar

Mfoniso Udofia & Ed Sylvanus Iskandar

 

Mfoniso Udofia and Ed Sylvanus Iskandar are the latest dynamite duo to take over New York Theater Workshop, and this time with two plays, Sojourners and Her Portmanteau, two plays in a nine-play cycle Udofia is writing. We sat down with these dynamic, emerging, and important voices in contemporary American theater to talk about time, family, immigration, and history – all essential themes to the play and their overall work.

 

 

Darrel Alejandro Holnes: Thank you for sitting down with me.
 

Ed Sylvanus Iskandar: Oh, thank you!
 

DAH: And thank you for having me sit in on your rehearsal today. That was a really great opportunity and privilege. A lot of my first questions are in response to what I saw here in this brief scene that was rehearsed for the last hour. And my first questions is – both of you feel free to jump in – family is essential to the play, so what role does your family play in your process: inspiration, support, obstacle, all of the above?
 

[Ed and Mfoniso laugh]
 

ESI: I think because I left home when I was seven to go to boarding school I have been on a fairly consistent life-long journey in terms of defining and redefining for myself what “family” actually means. And family is…not special for me anymore. I still say I go home to Indonesia because my parents are still there, the home I grew up in is still standing, but I think when I say “family” now it feels like it’s about a community of people that I have been lucky enough to be accepted by. And that includes my biological family, but that seems to define for me not only a space emotionally in my life, but also the way I like to work and the kind of work I like to do with an audience watching. Which is really, I think, more than anything driven by the ability to further social connections – real ones. It’s how I conduct my rehearsal process. It’s how I like to let my companies and my car spawn – I’m constantly cooking. I can’t help it. It’s my nervous tick. It’s not a nervous tick. It’s a thing I like to do in order to keep myself grounded. This is actually kind of amazing here because I love working at New York Theater Workshop. There’s a little kitchen that just feels like a home. I really can settle into the rehearsal process in the way that you normally can’t in self-rented or borrowed rehearsal space. What the general managers do, which is really so amazing, is they literally give you the third floor. And you can figure out a way to make it work. And I do think with a play like that and a process like this – two plays together – that my job is to make family out of the people that are most regularly in the room, and to incorporate the designers who will now start to come in and join us in tech. And you know, I’ve come to the realization that once the play opens my job is actually over. And my real job is about making sure that whatever we’ve built together has a foundation to continue.
 

DAH: Like a family?
 

ESI: Yes.
 

Mfoniso Udofia & Ed Sylvanus Iskandar
 

DAH: Beautiful! And you, Mfoniso?
 

Mfoniso Udofia: I write about immigrants, also I’m the child of immigrants. My family’s been instrumental, at least for me, for the creation of these plays. In that my mother has become my biggest champion. When you talk about the child of immigrants and what trajectory is, there’s so many hopes and dreams. My mother looked at me and she was like, You are going to be a lawyer! Propah! You go do that. And so it was a huge thing when all of a sudden I was like, Mommy I’m an artist, and she’s like, No you’re not. At all. And so to turn around because family for me – it’s not as if I have much spread, you know, it’s quite localized. What my mom thinks, what my father thinks, what my brother, my sister – they’re my people here. So there are not many other people. So when my mother turned around and said, “Aye, daughter you’re an artist” it’s like breathing. And so it makes creating these plays…I mean creation in general is plot. So to have that family support, especially when I was wondering for the longest time if I would get it, is incredible for me. And then yes to what Ed said, you’re also building family. But I’m so lucky to have biological family to go, Oh yes, this is a good thing. as I’m building family and being in relation to some incredible artists, some geniuses in their own right. You know? I also have the core support that I find I need in order to write plays about families.
 

DAH: Sure, sure. And that’s a beautiful thing. Also beautiful, yet just as complicated, is how, in the scene that I observed, love seems to be defined as “mountains of desire, bitter river of burden.” Can you explain what this line means and how that works through the play?
 

MU: “Mountains of desire and a bitter, bitter river.”
 

DAH: Yes, that’s quite a line. Care to elaborate?
 

MU: I’m not sure, and this is where I get … Am I gonna say this? Yea. Sometimes I think American Western love is illogical [laughs]. It’s extraordinarily romantic, and this kind of straight thing. Maybe I’ve watched too many romantic comedies. I probably did and then I went, Ooo this is what love is. And then I was in the middle of it going, This is not love! I don’t know what that thing was. I think love is complicated – is an action, actually. It’s not this thing that just falls on you. And if it does, it doesn’t stay a thing that just falls on you. So, there is, there can be love and burden. I don’t know that it is necessarily a terrible thing. It doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t also have to be a thing that you…You know, you can look at that kind of love, you can go, I choose this. I want it. I walk into it. Or you can look at that and you can be like, I don’t. I can’t do that for now. Because the love I have of myself or my own desire won’t let me carry the burden of the love that I might have for you – it’s complicated. That line of love is complicated and purposefully convoluted. And love and desire, duty and birth date, they went through all my plays and they live side-by-side, because I don’t know if I…I think as an artist myself I’m trying to figure out exactly what the natures of love are. And at any given point, even in my relationship with Ed and relationship with the actors and my relationship with any production company, love is always changing. You know what I mean? So I’m not into the purest feeling of it. And so depending on where you are I think you will hear that line differently.
 

DAH: Interesting. And Ed, in your vision, of this play and of both plays, how do you see the characters negotiating desire and burden. How do you see those themes working throughout the play?
 

ESI: They’re not separate. It’s two flipped sides of the same coin, which is also how I think of both plays. I don’t think of them as two separate plays at all because I think the expression of love causes burden. And I think if love is going to be worth anything, it’s going to require that amount of work. I think that…Yes, I think I can say the experience of working on both plays and getting to know Mfoniso as a collaborator, it’s an amazing thing because I find myself challenging my own definition of what love means from the assumption of what I think I’ve given, and continue to find more that I’ve assumed – that I then need to ingest and choose to give more of, in order to actually continue deepening and building. And I can say that that’s probably the most full love I have given an experience. Because the journey of it has been so full and it’s been so expansive.
 

DAH: I love that word that you used, “journey.” Can you tell us a little about the journey of all nine plays?
 

MU: [laughing] How much time do we have?
 

Mfoniso Udofia & Ed Sylvanus Iskandar
 

DAH: Can you discuss how what people will see in these two plays are paintings that are part of a larger picture?
 

MU: So when I started writing, the first play I ever wrote was The Grove – it’s the youngest play and I was writing about the eldest daughter, some immigrants…And she was in the middle of figuring out what identity and duty and love, you know, where those things shred up against each other. Then I realized that in order to understand Mac you have to actually understand from whence she came. And so then from there came, what is now known as Sojourners, which was first called Towards because I knew I going towards something, but I didn’t know what,so that was the title of it. The Grove, then Towards, and then to understand the parents I had to understand the revolution in country and that’s where you get something like runboyrun – which goes back and forth between the Nigerian homeland and now the American resettlement place that they are in. Then from there came my number of nine, which will be five interior plays that follow Abasiama and Disciple Uffat, and the last four are gonna be love plays which follow their children as first generation youth in America or discovering what blackness is without a certain kind of historicity attached to it. Technically these could go on forever, they’re not. I’m gonna end it at nine. A promise that I’ve given to myself that it has to end at nine, but as I’m writing I’m discovering how concerned I am with lineage and I do think that that is something of a very immigrant mentality too. Like now that I’m here, what does “forward” actually mean on soil that is not my historical soil. So I don’t know if that explains the question, but that is at least the scope of the project.
 

DAH: Yeah. And I think that’s definitely what people need. I’m also an immigrant. So I absolutely understand what you’re saying about lineage. And in thinking about that I recall how the character played by Chinasa has a line about the baby’s name and time. Time must certainly play an important role in this play and in any sort of nine-part series, as you just explained,, that follows this family over generations. Why write about time? And let’s broaden that and also say, why write about lineage? Why bring that to the contemporary American stage?
 

MU: It was particularly important for me to write about West African, Nigerian, Ibibio, migration here and what lineage is. In my culture you actually count where you’re from, you hold it. You come from compound culture. You know your grandparents, you know the history of your great-grandparents, and your great-great – which is very, very, very different somehow, than what I find happening here, and I think we might be in the middle of a change. It’s like more 32-year-olds are staying at home with mom, you know. There’s a shift starting to happen. However, we don’t build community and lineage that way here. I see my people from home being able to count their history. Lineage is important for me, because when you come from that culture and you come into this culture, what do you retain and how? It’s as simple as, in one of the plays, Abasiama and Upem, you know, they’re fighting to figure out how to make fufu here. And they’re going to get products that are not yam in order to do it. So it’s fighting to figure out: How do I make lineage here now that it’s different than the way it was back home and I’m not going back home?
 

DAH: Are those some of the struggles you’ve faced?
 

MU: It’s some of the struggles that I’ve watched my people face. And yes, I can implicate myself here and I am interested in this because I have heard the stories of grandmothers and great-grands and my great-great who is this Big Man. And I wanna be able to pass some of that to my children as well, so I want to answer the question, what is that new tradition that I need to make here, in a different space, for me to carry on that culture?
 

Mfoniso Udofia & Ed Sylvanus Iskandar
 

DAH: And is that something that resonates with you Ed, as to why you were drawn to these projects? Is it also something that you can relate to personally?
 

ESI: What specifically?
 

DAH: This idea of time, lineage, and how it’s negotiated between the characters – what we carry maybe, from one generation to the next.
 

ESI: Yes and no. Because my relationship to time and lineage is very different for all the reasons we chose to work together. I am an incredibly linear person and everything about how I negotiate achievement, finishing, and construction is linear and very logical. And one of the very first things Mfoniso said – I’m paraphrasing – to me in one of our earlier conversations, before we committed to this play together, is the notion that for her time is a spiral and time is relative and your experience of time is completely insular and about how it is you understanding how to listen to yourself and how to contextualize yourself within the definitions of time of those around you. And I can relate to that very deeply. Although it still is interesting because it’s not necessarily natural in my thinking process. But I came to the scene in New York and created many long-form pieces, which is something I’m very interested in. The average run time with a show I’ve done in New York is typically six-plus hours. And I learned over the process of making those plays that an audience’s experience of six hours does not mean the same thing as an actual experience of six hours depending, of course, on your choice of activity within those. To be even more simplistic in that particular analogy, I have sat and watched plays that are sixty minutes that felt much longer and ones that are six hours that can speed by. So that is, I think, where we connect. And it’s also where we differ because my natural instincts normally take me to a place where I want to move forward when Mfoniso is still in a place of thought. And I think that is both our strength and our challenge. And we’re guilty of it in this relationship together.
 

DAH: Considering what we’ve just discussed, what do you hope the audience walks away with after seeing these plays? And I’m sure the list of things is endless, but specifically thinking about time, lineage, maybe time as a spiral, as linear – what are you hoping they walk away with at the end of the day?
 

MU: Multitiered. These plays aren’t just about time and lineage. The subject is something a bit more political. I hope that the audience walks away with a more nuanced imagination regarding the lives immigrant bodies lead on American soil. I also hope that people walk away a little shaken by how quick they are to potentially judge and assess someone’s motivation when they are within that struggle. Like the pairing of Sojourners and Her Portmanteau. Some of the weeping I’ve seen people do about what Abasiama does at the end of that play without understanding what Abasiama is going through to then maybe come back in Her Portmanteau and get even more information. Perhaps we can nuance-out what bodies of color do in moments of struggle. I hope that people will actually get up and go out and read some books. Because people don’t read books.
 

DAH: A couple titles?
 

Mfoniso Udofia & Ed Sylvanus Iskandar
 

MU: Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, Chinua Achebe’s There Was A Country and Things Fall Apart, Helen Oyeyemi’s Icarus Girl and the way in which she’s constructing fairy tale stories from other mythologies, which is part of what’s happening here as well. And then even just researching: exactly where is Nigeria? Where are the Ibibio people? Do I know these people? And why haven’t I even thought to think and ask about who and what and where they were? So, those are some of my hopes.
 

[Everyone laughs]
 

DAH: So, Chinese-Indonesian director with American training, Nigerian-American playwright, is the global perspective an American perspective? This should be a prompt for you to discuss trends in contemporary American theater, perspectives in a contemporary American theater, and what it means to have creators – playwright and director – with these different backgrounds in that space.
 

MU: Do you want to go first before I go? This is a complicated one.
 

ESI: I could try. I might be better able to answer this question by posing a response to the previous one. I’ve been thinking, a lot in the past two weeks especially, about the gift of being able to work on Sojourners a second time. It’s something that I have not had a great deal of experience in doing – having an opportunity to revisit and build upon and advance from and learn through. And what’s most interesting to me is in this second attempt at turning the story of Sojourners, is I find myself continuously letting go everything I imposed upon the play. And I find myself reaffirming the nuance in the text and the nuance in the stage direction.
 

That I was not able to fully comprehend the last time. Which also reveals a level of re-commitment and reveals an actual trust in what’s on the page that I feel I did not have the first time. Because my response to the play initially was, Surely this is a Nigerian A Doll’s House [by Henrik Ibsen], because my cultural framing is Western. And I feel the conversation I had with the play initially, even though I fully believed that I had advanced beyond the conversation that I actually did have was about trying to figure out how it fit within a Western construction. I honored it’s variation, I honored it’s uniqueness, but I do think my basic map in my head, or through my gut, was in comparison to linearity and a Western dramaturgy I have become used to, not just because of training, but because of the way a play looks on the page.
 

And what I feel the gain of this experience has been for me is, a further understanding of A) the basic truth that when we need to write something that it’s all intentional – which is something I fully love so much. And there I think she is similar to Ibsen. You ignore a stage direction and a word or a punctuation mark at your peril. And B) I also then fully understand that the play can only fully do its work and and fully realize its impact if it’s staged from the perspective of that trust.
 

It’s not that I didn’t believe I trusted the play last time. I would never sign on to a play that I don’t trust, or a voice that I don’t trust or a person I don’t trust. But it’s a higher level of trust that I’ve developed in the interim. And it is linked to what I now understand I can be more intentional about on the stage. And I find everything is stripped down in a gorgeous way. There’s just less of everything. There’s less space. I think I’m trying to make, in between scenes, to try and foreground story that is always useful, but may not be necessary because I was afraid that the story that’s in the text, wasn’t enough. And I find myself doing less in the scenes themselves – in a fairly radical way.
 

The scene that you experienced watching in rehearsal, previously does not look a thing like that. It has changed from a scene about a woman moving within her home and negotiating how it is to leave the door, to a scene in which this woman has no inkling to the choice that would take her to the door at all. And so has become a scene in which it’s two people on a couch. And that is also I think the right way to frame what I now believe fundamentally is my job, which is to construct every scene in such a way that the audience can listen.
 

The text is so rich it is outrageous how much work I have to do before rehearsing to actually get fully on top of it. And I suddenly realize that is also the level of attention I’m asking for from an audience. So if I’m not allowing them to tune into the auditory context of the physical picture, I’ve not done my job. I’ve created, successfully, distractions rather than amplifications, which was my original intention. So I do believe my intentions have always been sincere, but I do know how much I have learned.
 

Mfoniso Udofia & Ed Sylvanus Iskandar
 

DAH: Mfoniso, sometimes people say that the United States is a nation of immigrants. This play, and also our conversation so far has also discussed the idea of immigration and what that means and what those stories are. So my question to you now is, is the immigrant story inherently an American story? And is the American story essentially an immigrant story? Are Sojourners and Her Portmanteau inherently American stories?
 

MU: Am I gonna say some of these stigmas out loud? Yes. America has some work to do. And I do think yes, America is a country chocked full of immigrants that after maybe the third or fourth generation develop the worst case of amnesia and forget. And then we’re somehow cycling from an immigrant nation to a violently xenophobic one within the same – it’s a vicious spiral that is almost nonsensical. What kind of peculiar American amnesia is this? And so it’s like we have to constantly teach ourselves to remember, which is part of the plays, what it is to remember to not forget. Because we are a country of immigrants and that makes us special.
 

Ed’s sight is different than my sight; it’s different than your sight; and the way I look at the story is different than the way Ed will, or the way somebody else will. And as a nation of immigrants, we also have to be a nation of plural ideology. And that’s what I feel like America doesn’t do very well. There’s something else that happens as amnesia trips us up and then we become set in this weird non-porose American way. And so we should be. We are a nation of immigrants.
 

And it becomes a real issue for me when I don’t understand why I’m not seeing more plural stories on the American stage. Why me and Ed together – myself creating this play, and Ed setting it up from page to stage is just this radical, amazing thing. When actually that’s the thing. And why haven’t we been taught earlier how we shred up against each other? That our gazes are different? Why is this learning happening in what feels like a very singular narrow way? Why isn’t this the American theater normative, if we are a nation of immigrants and if theater is a representational art form – which we claim theater to be – because what Ed is talking about is true and is particularly salient in our case. There are two different gazes; we have read two different cannons; we have two different histories, none of them – I don’t know that we should be ascribing value to one over the other, but my sight is critically different than Ed’s sight. So the way in which we work together, that is the American theater. But by God, we’re taking photos of it and putting it in an exhibit and going, Look at this beautiful wonderful thing, when it should be the thing!
 

DAH: When it should be the norm.
 

MU: Right.
 

DAH: Right. Last question. I teach dramatic writing at NYU and I always end interviews by asking theater-makers what advice they have for young theater-makers: so student directors, student playwrights, you know. And not just students formally enrolled in the university, but anyone who’s just starting out and in this field and in this industry. Any tips? What do you wish someone had told you ten years ago?
 

ESI: I would say don’t do it unless you must because the theater is far too important a space to be met by anything less than a total commitment of your life. To squander even a single person’s gamble that night, on purchasing a ticket, only to be met by incompetence is the only real crime I can imagine an artist can commit.
 

MU: I second that. I tell some of my students to rigorously pursue their inherent, innate, illogical – the way I write plays, the way I construct plays, makes some people discomforted, some people…There’s a range of emotions when people first meet my play. But I had to. It’s been seven years now. The rigor that’s involved in the playwriting, and then the trying it out and teaching people and then knowing that it works, and then the rigor it’s advocating against a new – I shouldn’t say “new” because then it makes me like, like I was birthed now and there are other people who write like me. The rigor of the education and the teaching into and then the standing behind your work when people might not be able to see through it is a real skillset. And I say “rigor” because there are some students who are like, I did this new thing. It’s great. But they haven’t practiced it and gone through the steps to go, No, does it really work? How do I stand by it? I’m not saying just pursue your illogical passions – it’s like, do so rigorously. And perhaps it’s not illogical, pursue whatever is inherent in you. And I think the keyword is “rigor.” I don’t know that I’d be anywhere without it and I don’t know many artists who are. With the artists that I love, I think about their longevity, the span of their careers. There is rigor attached to it.
 

DAH: Excellent. So previews begin April 22nd and the play opens May 7th. I will be there. Thank you so much!
 

MU & ESI: Thank you!
 
 

 

 

Mfoniso Udofia, a first generation Nigerian-American storyteller and educator, attended Wellesley College and obtained her MFA from ACT. She co-pioneered the youth initiative, The Nia Project, providing artistic outlets for youth residing in Bayview/Huntspoint. Mfoniso’s Ufot Family Cycle plays, Sojourners and Her Portmanteau, will be produced this coming Spring 2017 as part of New York Theatre Workshop’s season. She is also Playwrights Realm’s 2015-16 Page One Playwright and in Winter 2016 they produced the World Premiere of Sojourners. In Spring 2016, The Magic Theater in San Francisco produced the West Coast Premiere of Sojourners and the World Premiere of the third installation in the Ufot Family Cycle, runboyrun. Mfoniso is currently working on Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! commission translating Shakespeare’s, Othello. She’s also the Artistic Director of the NOW AFRICA: Playwrights Festival and a proud member of New Dramatists class of 2023. Mfoniso’s plays have been developed, presented and/or produced by Playwrights Realm, The Magic Theatre, Dr. Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre, Hedgebrook, Sundance Theatre Lab, Space on Ryder Farm, NNPN and New Play Showcase, Makehouse, Soul Productions, terraNOVA, I73, The New Black Fest, Rising Circle’s INKTank, At Hand Theatre Company, The Standard Collective, American Slavery Project, Liberation Theatre Company and more. Mfoniso was a finalist for the 2015 PoNY Prize, the Eugene O’Neill NPC, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Many Voices Fellowship, Page73 Development Programs, Jerome Fellowship, NYTW’s 2050 Fellowship and Lark Playwrights’ Week.
 

Ed Sylvanus Iskandar has directed over 150 productions globally. NEW YORK: The Mysteries, Restoration Comedy, and These Seven Sicknesses (all NYT Critics’ Picks, The Flea Theater); The Red Umbrella (Drama League); The Golden Dragon (The Play Company at the New Ohio Theatre). REGIONAL: Head Over Heels (Oregon Shakespeare Festival), Don Juan, Translations, and The Collection (Stanford Repertory Theatre); Homemade Fusion (Pittsburgh CLO); Don Carlos, Brand and Miss Julie (CMU); The Dumb Waiter, No Exit, Death and the Maiden and Sexual Perversity in Chicago (Edinburgh Fringe Festival). INTERNATIONAL: Venus in Fur (Singapore); Memphis (Japan) OTHER: As Founding Artistic Director of invite-only NYC collective Exit, Pursued By a Bear (EPBB), Ed has served over 12,000 free home-cooked meals and shared 150 priceless nights of theater over the course of staging 8 Labs and 40 Salons, including NY or world premieres of The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, Arok of Java, and the musical Dani Girl, alongside new versions of Don Carlos, The Master Builder, and King Lear. Restoration Comedy and These Seven Sicknesses both began their NYC lives as EPBB Labs, later transferring to critical acclaim as productions at The Flea. EPBB fulfills a vision of theater that deepens the audience’s ability to engage by creating empathy for the human effort behind the art. Ed’s body of work with EPBB was honored with the 2013 National Theatre Conference Emerging Professional Award, conferred by Bill Rauch (Artistic Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival).

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A Conversation with Nathan Alan Davis & Megan Sanberg-Zakian

Nathan Alan Davis & Megan Sandberg-Zakian

 

The story of Nat Turner is going viral these days as the United States continues to confront slavery’s legacy when we witness and respond to police brutality, mass incarceration, and more. Nat Turner’s story is also made current by the premiere of the film, Birth of a Nation by Nate Parker and by the premier of the play, Nat Turner in Jerusalem this season at the New York Theatre Workshop. Since Nat Turner is on everyone’s tongue and mind, I sat down with playwright, Nathan Alan Davis and director, Megan Sandberg-Zakian, the visionaries behind the play at New York Theatre Workshop, to talk to them about all things Nat Turner including their new play, and the continued fight for diversity and inclusion in contemporary American theatre. Here’s what we had to say.

 

 

Darrel Alejandro Holnes: Nathan, you’re making your New York debut with what feels like a very timely play. Is it true what they say, that timing is everything?
 

Nathan Alan Davis: Who says that?!
 

Megan Sandberg-Zakian: They!
 

[Everyone laughs]
 

NAD: I mean, yes, timing. I definitely feel like there are forces at work, besides myself, in terms of this play. The way that Megan, myself, Phillip [James Brannon, who plays Nat Turner], and Rowan [Vickers, who plays Thomas R. Gray and Guard], all came together – the way the theater came around to support us and the work has kept us together as a team to continue the process all the way to production. [This] has just been a dream come true. It’s allowed us to, as fully as possible, develop this story and get the play out. So much of the timing and those types of things are out of my control as an artist, so when it all falls into line, it’s a beautiful thing.
 

DAH: Why is Nat Turner in Jerusalem so timely? What does it mean to see the piece produced now as conversations around race in America continue to heat up?
 

MSZ: Well, one of the scholars who writes about Nat Turner – his name is Ken Greenberg – has said that the story of Nat Turner continually resurfaces. There have been these moments over the last couple hundred years where the story suddenly arrives back in the consciousness, and how we’re telling the story this time and why we’re telling the story now probably has a lot to do with where we are right now. So I think the questions that you just asked are the set of questions that we are hoping people will be in conversation about and around the play. Why do we need to hear this story right now? I actually think that in a way, that is what the play is about. The play isn’t about here’s the story, the play is about why do we need to be in a room together and engage with this story at this moment? So I don’t know that I have a really great answer. If I did, I could solve everything.
 

DAH: Thank you for your response.
 

MSZ: Partially, for me, the thing that feels really rich and activated right now, around this story, is the questions [raised] about how we view violence. What is the story we tell around violent acts? What is our understanding of the social violence that is shaping our daily lives and our awareness of it? What is our stake in maintaining ignorance about violence? – Ta-Nehisi Coates calls it “The Dream” – What is our stake in staying ignorant of these really violent social systems? Then, what is our response to violence that resists those systems? For me – for all of us – it’s been a very uncomfortable conversation. When you read about – as we did in development – the shooters in Baton Rouge and Dallas who are taking out cops with sniper rifles… to experience the coverage of those things, and see the families of those people whose lives were taken, our reaction, whether it’s grief or activism or sharing on social media – whatever it is – [must be to] then consider our ongoing reaction of, or ignorance of, or complicity in all of the other kinds of deaths that are going on all around us…
 

DAH: What are the other kinds? To name a few…
 

MSZ: All of the deaths related to poverty and disenfranchisement in this country; the deaths of people who aren’t receiving adequate healthcare; the deaths of people who are in dire types of housing situations; the deaths of people who are wrongfully incarcerated in a system that is strongly biased; and of course, the deaths of people all over this country, particularly black people, gunned down by our police forces. So, it’s really hard, as a human being and a progressive person, to say that the violent taking a human’s life is somehow necessary.
 
In the play, when I hear Thomas Gray talk about all of the people that were killed during Nat Turner’s “insurrection,” as it’s called by Thomas Gray, the lawyer character, when 75% of the deaths were women and children – small children, infants and babies – it’s very hard to hear. It’s very hard to listen to, you know? You think about describing the deaths of those 55 people, and then you think about if you had a play describing all of the violent deaths of people under the system of slavery, it would be a 15 year long play.
 

DAH: Yeah, or a 400 year long play.
 

NAD: It continues.
 

MSZ: It’s just very uncomfortable stuff to engage with. So coming back around to my answer to your question, I wonder if part of the reason that the story comes back is that somehow we’re at a place where we’re more motivated to tolerate that discomfort.
 

NAD: I remember Megan and I had a conversation on the phone after I’d written an initial draft of the play, which barely anybody had seen; it was kind of a dream state type of the play; it didn’t really have a lot of the plot elements that this play has now. Megan read it, and it wasn’t even a complete draft, but Megan was like “I’m really uncomfortable! This makes me feel bad!” And that was the main takeaway for me; this is hard stuff to think about, to process, and to look at. It was actually a very important part of the growth of the play for me. You write something, and you have a response…I had to take a breath and be like, yeah, the territory that this delves into is extremely difficult to handle and it asks so much of the artists who are involved in creating it and carrying it and sharing it. It asks us to give everything to it, to honor it in the right way, and to live in a place of discomfort, and to not hide from it. It’s been extremely challenging and also a rewarding part of this process, staying in that conversation.
 

Nathan Alan Davis & Megan Sandberg-Zakian
 

DAH: So a few of the words I’ve heard you both mention are: difficult, hard, complicated. I have not heard the word contentious, controversial. I’m wondering, is this play about controversy? Is this play a controversy?
 

NAD: I never looked at it that way, and I never defined it that way. I think when I approach a play or a piece of art, I’m not particularly thinking of it attempting to cause a controversy or attempting to respond to a controversy. To me, controversy kind of is in the realm of what people find aesthetically acceptable or what people find can or cannot be spoken, or should or should not be said. I’m not saying that…Megan mentioned, when the Nat Turner story does appear in our consciousness over and over again, controversy does erupt out of it. Probably the most famous example is the William Styron novel about Nat Turner, which caused a lot of controversy, because William Styron is a white author portraying Nat Turner, so there was backlash of that from black writers and scholars and people who just found that that wasn’t a fair or accurate depiction. So it happens. But looking at myself now, as an artist, I feel it is my responsibility to tell as much of the truth of the story as I could see. That means me looking inward, and looking outward, having conversations, and keeping the story moving forward. I think for all of us, we really want to honor the spirit of Nat Turner and the spirits of everybody who was involved in that insurrection, you know? Knowing that that is a real thing, and that this is a thing that happened, and that we just want to do our very best to bring as much light as we can to it. As one of many Nat Turner stories that will be told – I certainly don’t claim to be writing any sort of a definitive interpretation, I don’t think that exists, but we’re just really focused on doing our very best.
 

MSZ: I will say though, that we have a lot more information than William Styron did. I would say pretty much more than anyone else has had, in creating this story, just because there’s been a couple of books published recently and one in particular that is extremely exhaustive in terms of the research. I think that book was published after Nate Parker’s film was already happening. So I think once we read that book, by David Allmendinger, we felt a lot of responsibility not to actually have facts that we knew were wrong. For a play that’s very poetic, and is really an invented event, it’s very factually correct. I can only think of one thing in it that is tiny, that I know is not historically true.
 

DAH: And what is that?
 

MSZ: The lawyer character was disinherited by his father. His father made him the executor of his will where he was disinherited. In the play, the father also wills that lawyer a desk, to be the executor of the will on. I would say that was a poetic, dramatic underscore of that historical fact, but really, I don’t think there’s anything else. And I’ve been very, you know, nope, that’s not right, find another way to do that!
 

DAH: So historical accuracy was a priority for you guys?
 

MSZ: Oh yeah. I mean, it’s more like I don’t want the play to contain something that I know to be a historical inaccuracy. Although, I don’t think that it can be historically accurate, it is a crazy idea anyway.
 

NAD: It actually helps a lot, artistically. I think if I felt limited to “Oh, I can only have hard facts in the play,” or “you’ve got to make sure all the facts will tell the actual story,” that would be a problem. But when you actually get down to real specifics of the story – like if you find the historical truth – it actually brings a specificity to the play, which I think actually makes it more poetic. You also just have to realize these were real people, living real lives, with real problems, who did real things. It’s not this portrait of a distant past.
 

MSZ: Every single new fact that we’ve found, has been like oh, shit! It feels like it drops you deeper and deeper into the truth of what the story was and why we need to tell it. It’s like there’s no inconvenient facts for this play… This is what we do all day, except you guys are not usually here.
 

[Everyone laughs]
 

Nathan Alan Davis & Megan Sandberg-Zakian
 

DAH: You mentioned William Styron and the controversy of who gets to tell Nat Turner’s story. Nathan, can you speak a little to the politics of racial identity and authorship?
 

NAD: Wow, that’s a big question.
 

DAH: I can point the question more if you want me to.
 

NAD: Please do, and I’ll either take the small point or the larger point.
 

DAH: In what ways does your personal experience of race inform your writing of the play, and what kind of responsibility does your unique experience as a person of color give you in telling stories with characters of color?
 

NAD: I guess the first part is that, in every way, being black in America yields full-time internal conflict. What does this country mean to you? How do I reconcile being part of this society? I think that the internal conflict and questioning, naturally, makes its way into all aspects of my life, especially the art that I create and the plays that I write. I don’t know that there is [a specific], identifiable way, it’s just a part of who I am, you know what I mean? The thing about responsibility is a big question because I think one of the biggest difficulties, being a person of any marginalized community, is that you feel the need to represent everybody in your group every time you have a platform, every time you have a chance to speak up. You feel that you’re not just speaking for yourself. I think on one hand, that’s just the truth, and I hope to embrace that responsibility. On the other hand, I need to find room for my own individual voice, my individuality. Who am I? What do I have to say? How do I do things as a person? I think oftentimes, if you get too caught up in representing, what does that mean? It doesn’t mean the same thing to me as everybody else. You can lose you own fire and your own artistic passion if you start to generalize your approach, because you’re repping a group. But at the same time, the need to rep the group is always present, you know? I think it’s a constant balancing act.
 

DAH: Megan, as a female-identifying director, can you speak to the absence of women in the show, and the ways in which their presence might be felt, whether it’s in the writing, or in any decisions you’ve made as the director?
 

MSZ: There’s a physical absence of women in the play. Women are talked about in the play, as the victims of murder, as mothers who die in childbirth or abandoned by their families – helpless victims. I think to some extent the play does a really great job of representing the 19th century view of women. The politics of the time, as we have them recorded, are very male. I am quite sure that there are lots of very interesting female viewpoints on this history that we just don’t have. That would be another really interesting play, but we unfortunately just don’t have it.
 

DAH: Are there any women referenced by the men who played an integral role in this particular history during its time? Someone we should all know about and have never heard of?
 

MSZ: The one woman that stood out to me in the research didn’t make it into the play at all. She was a woman named Elizabeth Harris, I think, who was a slave owning white woman whose house was deliberately skipped by the insurgents as a favor to one of the original core group. We don’t know why, we don’t have any other information on it, but the thing that we do know about her is that there’s a free black man who was living in the household of some of the white folks who were victims of the insurgency. Immediately following it, he sold himself back into slavery to this woman, Elizabeth, for $1, which to me is just the world’s craziest story. It makes you think about – as opposed to women as victims – women as protectors, and what women were actually doing at the time, in the context that they could, with whatever the oppressive and the unjust structures that were in place at that time. How were people resisting them? There isn’t anything about that in the play. The focus is on violent resistance and revolution.
 

DAH: That’s remarkable. She didn’t make it into your play, but has discovering her influenced how you think or dare I say fantasize about history at that time?
 

MSZ: My fantasy is that there were black women and white women – and women in between – who were finding ways to subvert this stuff everyday. But I think I kind of keep that narrative alive, because I need to, working on material that doesn’t really include us.
 

DAH: Would you say that intersectionality is a way for you look closely at mirrors that do not reflect your own face when you polish them? How is intersectionality at work when you work behind the scenes on this play?
 

MSZ: My assistant director is also a woman, a biracial woman, and it’s been incredibly important to have the directorial perspective of two intersectional women. Our design team is predominantly women, and our design team is very intersectional in terms of identity. That kind of multiplicity of holding of different identities and perspectives is incredibly helpful with this story. Working on a story like this, as a 21st century artist, I feel is an asset. If you are an artist that identifies as white working on this play, I think that it may be… More painful? Or harder. It’s like you get stuck in where the racial politics are now and then, somehow you can’t find your way out of it. Rebecca [Frank, assistant director] is black and Jewish; I’m Armenian and Jewish – there’s something about being able to breathe into owning parts of it and not owning other parts of it, and respect parts that I don’t understand. I think it gives it a little bit of the breath, and is maybe useful. As any human being, sometimes you just have to go, “This shit isn’t about me! And it’s okay that there’s a play that isn’t about women.” This play is very important. And it’s not about part of my own identity. It’s not about queerness, which is part of my identity. It’s really not about me or my identity, but in some ways, it really is.
 

Nathan Alan Davis & Megan Sandberg-Zakian
 

DAH: Hmm. Your answer makes me think, Is this history, her story, their story, is this our story?
 

NAD: Yes? I think what Megan said was really poignant – our ability to find ourselves in a story that is relatively narrow and limited in some ways, finding an expanse within that. One of the most beautiful things about this process for me… I think it’s sort of a mark of our maturity. There’s oftentimes talk in and around the theater and in general about who has the right to tell what story. I think those are always going to be ongoing negotiations that we should be involved in, but I feel like being able to collaborate with people who have widely diverse identities and represent the facets of life is so enriching. It’s shaped this production the way that it is. This play is this play because of the people doing it – I have no comparison, but I will say that the way that everybody has been together… Megan came in and said, “Okay, we’re going to pray together every day, we’re each going to bring our own version of prayer, whatever that means to us.” Everyday, somebody would come in, and bring some kind of offering – whether it was a poem, a prayer, or some spiritual practice – and we’d do it together, so we found this collective identity together. It has been really essential for us staying cohesive. Having that foundation has been so key.
 

MSZ: For me, the play is a kind of a dance between history and poetry. Even in just the physical design of it, there’s a kind of dance between the intimate and the epic, the physical shape of it, experience of both the elemental and the apocalyptic, the personal and the interpersonal. To me, that’s what it is – the relationship where you can hold history and watch it become something poetic that can help you come back to it and understand it better. For me, that’s what it is. I think it’s a story that is critically important to all of us, but I wouldn’t say that it is “our story.” I think that we have a responsibility to come together, live, in rooms that have a shared encounter around this story, but I don’t think it’s all of ours.
 

DAH: Megan you talk about how in a way, the play is a story of violence. Thinking about this play as a story of violence and as a story of all male characters, is the story of violence also a story of men?
 

NAD: Yes, very much so. I think one of the things that causes of violence is the imbalance between the masculine and the feminine aspects of society. I think our value of men and of masculinity and that as an ideal – or making everything revolve around it, marginalizing femininity and women and femininity in ourselves – I think this is one of the reasons why we have such imbalance and violence in society. I don’t know that I went into the play attempting to expose that thesis, but I think it’s very much a part of that world, and very much part of the fabric of the world we live in now, but certainly in a more obvious way, in the world of 1831.
 

DAH: Is it also a marginalizing of peace?
 

NAD: Yeah! That’s a great way to put it. I do think in some ways we don’t recognize the peace that we do have. It’s that old story of the more violent, the more extreme things that happen are going to get more attention. Certainly, we shouldn’t ignore [that]– when violence happens, it should be known – but marginalizing peace is an interesting way to look at it because do we honor the peacekeeping, not only of now, but of our history? There’s that book, A People’s History of the United States, that goes into stories of everyday people that often wouldn’t be told. It features more stories about women, of people working together for change than we usually get. To a certain extent, our obsession over the violence or the wrongs can drown out the goodness that’s happening. We have to know what’s working if you want to improve upon it. The play tries to hold some goodness in it, even though the situation and the events of the play are extremely violent. I do think it’s important to hold space for light to come in as well, and for there to be some sense of hope or a possibility of peace, even if it’s distant.
 

DAH: Can you talk a little bit about the poetry that’s in the play? Or perhaps, not “poetry” per se, but please speak about the lyrical language that’s in the play. What are some of your influences? Is the play’s language a mix of southern vernacular and biblical language? How have your aesthetics related to language come together when writing this play?
 

NAD: I do consider myself a poet at heart; I’m not a poet in practice, and I don’t write poems very often, but I’m always looking for and gravitating towards musicality in language and creating poetic images. That’s incredibly important for the kind of theater that I want to make. I think that the experience and the world that’s created in someone’s mind when they’re processing poetry, to co-create a picture, expand the person’s horizons, just by the way the words are put together, is incredibly important. A lot of it also comes from the actual document; “The Confessions of Nat Turner” by Thomas R Gray, is written in this lyrical, biblical, heightened style. When I read that, that sort of ignited me, reading the style of that document. I felt like it was a place where what I do, what I’m attracted to, and what the document has given me kind of met, and I retained some of that style throughout the play. I’m always thinking about language, poetry, hip-hop – I love Shakespeare, I love language, and always have.
 

DAH: Can you talk a little bit about Dontrell Who Kissed the Sea, and in what ways that play prepared you to write this one?
 

NAD: From the purely practical standpoint, that’s the play that helped me get engrossed into the profession. Dontrell was the play that I used to apply to the 2050 Fellowship here at New York Theatre Workshop. I also learned quite a bit from seeing Dontrell produced – it had a National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere, so several small productions in different places. It’s also how I met Megan. Megan directed the production in Cleveland, and I met her through that process. It certainly paved the way. I’d hope that every time I write a play I’d get a little bit more refined in my understanding of the craft, that I get wiser, but I also feel like every play is it’s own puzzle I have to solve, so I can’t necessarily take everything that I might have learned on Dontrell and just apply it to this. I think, everytime I write a play it forces me to grow and transform, and this is no exception.
 

DAH: A favorite moment of mine in the play was a scene where the two lead characters debate whether the lives of the slave owners’ children were more, less, or just as important as the lives of enslaved children. It made me think of the lyric, “I believe that children are the future” from Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All” song. Does that ring true as a key value in Nat Turner in Jerusalem? Can you talk a bit more about the thinking behind that scene in particular?
 

NAD: Wow.
 

MSZ: I think you saw the second time that scene was ever performed, so we’re still working on it.
 

NAD: I mean, for me, I have three children, all girls, and that’s just such a huge part of who I am that it’s always with me. I think it makes its way into my writing in different ways. When I’m around these little people who are just giving this very innocent unfiltered perspective about life – I find constantly refreshing, at times scary, at times challenging. What our children say or do – they mimic and reflect us – they live in the world that we made. I think that that scene is too fresh for me to have perspective that is useful right now.
 

MSZ: I was laughing at directing that scene because we got the scene at night, and these amazing actors memorized it – they must stay up all night or something. We have this tiny little amount of time to rehearse it before they perform it that night, so for that particular performance that you saw, they just did it in rehearsal. The guys have already figured out that at the end of the scene, Thomas kind of collapses, and Nat displays an enormous amount of compassion towards him, and it just felt like such a powerful moment of this white fragility idea that people are talking about now. The white guy falls apart by being overwhelmed by the things in the world that are really hard in his life, and the fact that he’s being asked to come up to this larger truth and be part of the revolution and it’s just overwhelming and intense. The person that’s actually in the oppressed position, in this case actually getting executed momentarily, is required to step in and comfort him and provide compassion. Yet that’s the only way forward. That moment is so real to me. I think that what the rewrite did, which is the text that you’re talking about, provided Nat with some language to say what you feel, what you experience, the things that cause you pain and grief, you can have company in that. You can stand with the rest of humankind and be in the beloved community if you choose to stand with us. I mean this is the poison of privilege. It makes you alone. It doesn’t allow you to be connected with other people. It’s so clear now how much loss there is there. Also, when Nat stands up and says, “The signs of revolution will continue to come until injustice ceases,” that’s one of my favorite moments, and also one of the things we were talking about earlier about what’s so scary about the play. It really does feel like that.
 
One of the things I keep listening to over and over again as we were developing the play is the long outtake interview at the end of To Pimp A Butterfly, that long interview he does with Tupac, and Tupac is like, yeah you’re young, but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do now before you turn 30 because the world beats brothers down once you turn 30. You have to make your mark. Kendrick is like, yeah, I mean, what do you see for my generation, because things are getting really scary. Tupac says, oh yeah, white America isn’t ready for us. They think that whatever the next thing is is just us looting TVs out of stores. But it’s going to be Nat Turner 1831 up in here.
 

Nathan Alan Davis & Megan Sandberg-Zakian
 

DAH: There’s this beautiful metaphor of crossing the river in the play, where Nat Turner discusses America coming to the river but not yet crossing it as a metaphor for this nation attempting to confront the horrors of slavery yet not engaging in true healing and reparations; thinking about diversity and inclusion in contemporary American Theater, have we come to the river, have we crossed it?
 

NAD: Wow. Great question.
 

MSZ: I don’t think that we cross the river. I think we go in the water. We get baptized, we come out, we go back in and get baptized again. I wish that everyone in the American Theater would let go of the idea that you could cross the river and come out of the other side and be like now we are diverse! That’s not a thing.
 

NAD: I’d answer just like Megan did. That was perfect. I do think that to some extent we look at it as a numbers game. We think if we check this box and that box, we’ve achieved. I do think assessment and numbers and important aspect of assessing progress, but they’re not the thing itself. The thing itself is a revolution of the mind and the reorientation of the way that we interact together, you know? It’s actually much harder and more painstaking, longer work. It’s not that it isn’t happening, but the question is where is it happening, and where isn’t it happening, and are we aware of that?
 

DAH: Any advice for young theater artists of color or who identify with a marginalized group?
 

NAD: I think the most important thing is to find a place where you have unquestioned support, where people know you and support you, and you feel as much as you can able to be yourself and grow. As a young artist, one of the difficulties I had was just being comfortable with my own skin – not that I’ve totally solved that in every way. I think especially for artists of color or marginalized groups, you often feel like you’re the person on the outside looking in, or you’re the odd person out. You just have to find that place where you’re you. People can hold you up and support you. You really have to believe in yourself, like authentically believe that you can do it, which is a very hard thing to do. I think maintaining a sort of somewhat irrational belief in yourself is a good thing, knowing that the mountain is really high, and if I just start climbing, I’m going to get there. There’s no guarantee that you’re going to be affirmed every step of the way, you have to cultivate that belief in yourself.
 
 

 

 

Nathan Alan Davis’ plays include Nat Turner in Jerusalem, Dontrell Who Kissed the Sea (NNPN Rolling World Premiere; Steinberg/ATCA New Play Citation), The Wind and the Breeze (Blue Ink Playwriting Award; Lorraine Hansberry Award) and The Refuge Plays Trilogy: Protect the Beautiful Place (L. Arnold Weissberger Award Finalist), Walking Man and Early’s House. His work has been produced or developed with New York Theatre Workshop, The Public Theatre, Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, McCarter Theatre Center, New Neighborhood, Baltimore Center Stage, Merrimack Rep., The Kennedy Center, Theater Alliance, Skylight Theatre, Lower Depth Theatre Ensemble, Oregon Contemporary Theatre, Phoenix Theatre, Cleveland Public Theatre, The Source Festival, Chicago Dramatists and The New Harmony Project. He is a 2016 graduate Juilliard’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program and a recipient of NYTW’s 2050 Fellowship for 2015-16. MFA: Indiana University, BFA: University of Illinois.
 

Megan Sanberg-Zakian is a theater-maker based in Watertown, MA. She is a current recipient of the Princess Grace Foundation Theatre Fellowship, working with Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell, MA, as their Director in Residence – nurturing, developing, and directing work that will premiere in MRT’s and other theatre’s upcoming seasons. Previously, Megan completed a TCG Future Leaders grant at Central Square Theater in Cambridge, MA, aimed at deepening the theater’s engagement with its community. In addition to her directing work, Megan is an activist and consultant supporting theaters to work towards inclusion and equity. She is a member of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, a Merrimack Repertory Theater “Artistic Patriot” and an Associate member of SDC. Megan is a graduate of Brown University and holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College.