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A Conversation with Scott Gilmour & Claire McKenzie

 

The story of Forest Boy seems like it was meant to be put onstage: out of nowhere, a boy emerges from the woods, and tells the story of how he hid out in the forest and is all alone in the world. Or is he?
 

Scott Gilmour and Claire McKenzie, a composing team from Scotland, brings Forest Boy to the New York Musical Festival this summer. We sat down to talk about making a living as an artist, social media, and the freedom to construct one’s own identity.

 

 

Helen Schultz: How did you first encounter the story of Forest Boy?
 

Scott Gilmour: In 2013, Claire and I were commissioned to write a piece for the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. We were brought in for a very last-minute notice – they said, “We have a development week thing and if you have any ideas, you can come in and work with this cast,” but we didn’t have any ideas. That story was trending at the time on Twitter and Facebook, and we kind of got a bit hooked.
 

Claire McKenzie: I found it on Facebook one night and I read it, and it’s a fascinating true story and I just wanted to keep on reading about what happened. It was still unraveling at the time, so back then there wasn’t an end to the story – where it ended was that he was found working in Burger King. I thought there’s something very poetic about that. He came out of the forest and this land and character he had created, but in reality he was working at a Burger King. I found that there was something theatrical in that for me.
 

SG: We took the story and a song into this development week as a starting point, and the conservatoire that we were working with liked it. They gave us some commission money to go to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The story was still unraveling, [so] the version at Fringe didn’t have an ending. This version does have an ending, don’t worry.
 

HS: And you both went to the Royal Conservatoire in Scotland. How did you guys meet and start working together?
 

CM: I studied composition in the music school – they have a music school and a drama school. For the first four years, our paths didn’t cross because I was in the music school. Scott studied musical theater performance. I moved to the drama school for a year and did musical direction. We met and became friends through that course and through meeting in drama school. We decided that we liked the same things, and we went to see lots of theater and just became friends. One day we decided we might try to write together, and, actually [Scott] signed me up for something–
 

SG: –yeah… I kind of forced Claire to do it. We had put together another project, and it was a new works thing. I was working as an actor in it, and you were a musical director. The vibe of the room was very cool, and I thought maybe we should try to do this, the two of us. At the end of my degree, there was this sort of collaboration thing between the Conservatoire and this theater in Glasgow that was an underground, new works venue. They had this collaborative project where if you had any ideas you wanted to develop, you could do that. I didn’t ask Claire, and I [just] signed her up to work with me. We went for the pitch, and our first piece was a piece called Freak Show. It was based around a Coney Island freakshow, so it was a song-cycle type thing. It was sort of immersive, so the audience moved around it and if you’d stop by a performer, they’d have a song and interact with you. That was the first idea we had. From then on, that show went on to have another life and we were like, “Oh! Well maybe we should do this again sometime!” That was four years ago, and now we’re here!
 

Scott Gilmour & Claire McKenzie
 

HS: Forest Boy is of course based on a true story and real people that are still alive. How did you go about culling all these facts and figures, and putting them into something that’s also narrative?
 

SG: For me, I find it a challenge in that when you’re able to come up with your own world and your own story, there’s a lot more artistic license to do what you want with it. When you take a true subject, there’s a respect there. You can’t lie too much if it’s a true thing. The biggest challenge was trying – with the theatricality – to fit in these facts.
 

CM: True, and I’d say structure. Because we’ve done three or four different versions of the show over the years, I think the main thing that we’ve been playing with is what the best order and structure to tell the audience this story, because it’s quite complicated. Do you tell them all of the forest story, then all of the real story of what really happened, or do you tell them at the same time, or do you try and tell them as it was unveiled in the press? That’s this version. You can tell it lots of different ways. It’s just very complicated story to tell – it’s not a linear structure.
 

SG: It’s also that dangerous thing that when you get a real story, you’ve got to try and find the version of it that’s actually true because it was a story that came through the press and social media, and they have a tendency to exaggerate. In order to get the facts, you need to troll through the different articles. For me, when it came to getting the actual facts and figures about when he was there, when he was kept there, and how long he stayed in Berlin and all that, I actually turned to the German papers. Everyone else was a knock-off version of the German newspapers at the time. There were a lot of news sources in the UK, but there was a sort of a diluted version of the truth, so you have to do the detective work to get the real story.
 

CM: He hasn’t done many interviews. There’s not much we found of what he made of the whole thing. He’s decided not to really talk about it.
 

SG: I think that was a way in, of making it a drama, because he’s the only one that has not spoken out. So you’ve got all these people saying that he’s like this, or like that, and actually there’s this kid in the middle of it all who still hasn’t done any press – he did one interview in a little tiny paper in Holland, and that’s it. Immediately you go, well maybe we can make a character out of him.
 

HS: So much of this show is about media frenzy.
 

CM: That’s a big part of the show.
 

HS: And I feel like that’s a big part of our world right now, too.
 

CM: They made “Forest Boy.” They made the story what it is. In reality, a boy turned up and tried to be taken in by social workers, but we – the media and social media and the press – made it into the story of Forest Boy, a big mystery that lasted about a year. Without them, it would have never become a story.
 

SG: It’s enticing and I think it was one of the reasons that we felt maybe now is the time to tell the story in that way because even five years ago, ten years ago certainly, it wouldn’t have happened. He wouldn’t have become this huge, massive “who’s Forest Boy?” and #ForestBoy would have never become a thing. It would have stayed local, it would have stayed a national thing in Germany and it wouldn’t have permeated across into all our cultures. Forest Boy is one story, but – like you said – social media is doing that all over the place. It’s exaggerating everything. As a person, I get most of my news through Twitter way quicker than I get it through a newspaper – it’s immediate. That said, you take what’s said there as truth… It’s a different time now, I guess.
 

Scott Gilmour & Claire McKenzie
 

HS: Has it made you consider these things differently in your own lives, and how it forms your opinions?
 

CM: Scott doesn’t have Facebook, do you?
 

SG: I’m really bad at it; I’m really awful. I’ve been told to get Twitter because of work. But I’m getting better at it. I’ve started doing hashtags and everything, but I never got Facebook. It is a really fascinating thing: how quickly you can become reliant on it being there, and how quickly you can rely on it not just for communication, but for information. We take what it says as granted right away.
 

CM: Also, we know something that’s happened, instantly, anywhere in the world. In the past, it would take time to feed through.
 

SG: Exactly! Like the thing in Turkey, the madness that happened there. The Prime Minister, he’s out of the country, and they cut off the internet in Turkey, but he’s got Twitter and can see everything happening, like the coup. It’s a really different kind of time.
 

HS: And now celebrities like Forest Boy have morphed into politicians like Donald Trump.
 

SG: Because he’s become a character in himself.
 

CM: In Scotland, we have an opinion of him through the media. That’s all we have.
 

SG: Taking it back to the story, what always took me about that story was that it he has been turned into a character, like Donald Trump – he’s become The Forest Boy. But who actually is that, underneath all that stuff? Why did he do that thing, and how does he feel about it? It began to become a window into why we wanted to make a piece about it.
 

HS: Forest Boy also constructs his own identity, that’s so disparate from his reality. Could you talk about identity in this piece, and what role it plays?
 

SG: I think one of the most exciting parts of this story, for me, is that it immediately divides people. On one side, you have people saying this guy is a hero! He managed to convince the whole world that he was this kid from the forest, he escaped his life, and he said I’m not going to accept that this is the life I’ve been given, I’m going to do something different about it. And I feel that. I think he’s brilliant. And that fact that his imagination could do that to the world. But then you get all these other people, who are like he’s like a little dick. How could you do that?! He lied, and cheated, and played everyone along in that way and I think it’s one of the interesting parts of the story: what is it about his identity and our own? Do you just accept what’s been laid out in front of you, or do you have a say in it?
 

CM: Can you change it? He did. He tried to.
 

SG: I think as a piece, it’s a massive part of it. One of the hooks about the story is that you kind of want it to be true. You want to believe that he actually did live in the forest. You think, wouldn’t that be great? Because in the back of your head, it’s the thing you ask yourself: could I do that? Could I drop everything and go live in this other place and become someone else? I think it questions an awful lot about how we feel about our own identity, and I certainly did when I first read it.
 

 

HS: Switching gears a bit: can we talk about the difference in making art in the US, Scotland, and the UK?
 

CM: There are some similarities – we have experience in Fringe; and this right now is a festival. There are some similarities in the kind of speed you need to make it, the speed you need to put it up in the theater; there’s no comfort time, everyone’s running at pace to make the show, which I think creates an energy. I think that’s something that, for shows that a take a long time, sometimes you can lose that momentum. So that’s a really positive thing. In terms of differences, in Scotland, musicals aren’t a big culture, and in the UK it’s not as big as it is here in the US. Scotland hasn’t made that many [musicals] so you’re trying to build an audience for musicals over there, while here the musical is the major genre of theater. It’s wonderful being in this environment where it’s such a big thing and you have a massive audience waiting to see the work.
 

SG: I think it’s a slightly different feeling about how you make stuff over here as well. It’s different in that – particularly in New York City, which is like this incredible place that all this wonderful work come from – even at this stage, you’re surrounded by a bunch of people asking you, “What’s the next thing? Where’s it going to go next?” I think that’s great, because to think in that way is really positive. In Scotland, because a lot of arts is subsidized by the government, if you want to do anything, you have to send an application into an arts council, and if they consider it and they like it, you get some money to do the thing. Whereas here, if you want to do the thing, do the thing. You’re on your own and you’ve got to make it. That energy is really present here, but sometimes you can see it clouding everyone’s vision on actually making a bit of art because everyone is so worried about the next thing, and how can we make it bigger.
 

CM: It’s very much a business here, isn’t it?
 

SG: That’s it! That’s missing from where we are.
 

CM: Well, we’re on a festival level, but on a Broadway level, there has to be a return. There has to be a viable business, which is understandable. Whereas in Scotland, you would get money to put on a show and if you made money, that would be great.
 

SG: It’s less for profit. It’s never “let’s sell this thing out.” It’s “let’s make another piece for people in Dundee because they don’t get theater that much and let’s make it for them” and that’s a slightly different tone. Actually, being over here, I think the best version is set somewhere between the two. I think it’s something that I think is a business, but also keeps the heart of it at the front.
 

CM: It’s probably why we’re grateful to be here, though, because we’re learning from both ways of doing it. We’ll hopefully find that middle ground of how to make work, but also make money while doing it. That would be nice.
 

HS: How does government funding affect the tenor of your work, and what it’s like to live as an artist in Scotland?
 

SG: You can live as an artist in Scotland. You can afford to. You can afford to do a couple of jobs throughout the year and that is enough to make a living and you can have your own place just by doing your job. Over here everyone has so many jobs and everyone does everything – it’s amazing! Everyone’s sort of like I do this at night, then that and that pace is really incredible.
 

CM: I have to move around Scotland to whichever theater wants some music for the next show, but I’ve only ever worked as a composer. I imagine I couldn’t have that here. I would have to do something else on the side. I imagine I would have to do something else and write in my spare time here with the hope that it would get on.
 

SG: We’ve been been quite lucky in that way. It’s that thing of allowing you some time to develop your craft. We’ve done five other shows since doing Forest Boy, and now we come back to doing Forest Boy and it’s like, “oh, we’re better at this now than when we started.” I think being away from it, working in a more regional environment, [in our case] Scottish theater, allows you that time to make mistakes; you’re allowed to get it wrong, and it doesn’t destroy your entire career if you get it wrong in an environment like that. It feels like – coming to a place like New York – it’s a wonderful place to bring stuff to when it’s ready to come here. If it’s really ready, it’s the perfect place for it to flourish. But if you mistime that, you kind of get eaten up, it feels like, and you can never come back here.
 

Scott Gilmour & Claire McKenzie
 

HS: Claire, I wanted to ask you, in the US, female composers are not the most common, and it’s just starting to get talked about. Is it the same in Scotland?
 

CM: It’s still a male-dominated industry. I’m a musical director as well, and that’s very male-dominated. The thing is, I’ve kind of gotten used to it because I remember even when I was back in school, I was the only one in my music class. I was the only girl in the composition department when I started at the Conservatoire. That’s gotten better though – they’ve started bringing in more girls. But I remember at the start I was the only girl in my year. I’ve just kind of been used to that environment. I stopped noticing it. I think if you do a good job and you keep doing good work, it shouldn’t matter, and I hope it would count over here as well. I remember I was warned when I thought I wanted to go into theater by quite a lauded musical director in London. He said, “It’s really hard for a woman.” At that stage, I think it really was. I hope it’s changing. I think it is in the UK, and I would hope it is here, too. It’s good that we are talking about it as an issue!
 

HS: I think Fun Home was our wake-up call.
 

CM: Yes. You know, you’re right. I can’t name anyone… even in London, can you name anyone? In the big shows?
 

SG: No, actually.
 

CM: It’s an interesting one. It’s funny – when you’re living it, you don’t realize it so much. Maybe we should change all that.
 

HS: The stories we tell about ourselves and others are at the center of this piece. When you choose to write stories about yourself and others, how do you decide on what stories you choose to tell? How do you take on that responsibility?
 

SG: The way we always work is the story has to come from both of us. Usually the idea has got to be a thing that we share and we both connect to because if it’s not that, it’s never going to work. From that point, we find a way in, make a story, make what it will be as a structure, and write the thing. And then I give it to Claire, and she makes it sound good. That way of working always puts the story at the heart.
 

CM: For us, it’s always picking the lyrics first. In terms of picking a story, we probably go with something that would allow music to have a voice, because I think there’s nothing worse than a very domestic story where you’re trying to chuck music in there.. Certainly with Forest Boy, there was such an environment and imagination, and so many themes that allowed me to be a bit freer in the writing.
 

SG: I think it has to be a story around an idea that has a way in for music and song for it to make sense, otherwise it’s a waste of the form and it just allows for a lot of storytelling that way. Even if it’s not on a domestic level, if it’s pitched right… Fun Home is totally brilliant that way. It’s allowing the music to do some storytelling for you. I think that’s where musical theater can suffer a little from “I’ve got this great idea, let’s make a musical from it!” Yes, but that idea has to be musical as an idea.
 

CM: In terms of our ideas, some of our ideas are completely original, whereas I think with Forest Boy and a couple of our other shows, it’s like more of an adaptation, but here’s what we can make our own. It’s always how original can we be with this?
 

HS: Does Forest Boy know about this musical?
 

SG: No, but we’ve tried to find him. We went to Berlin to try to find some information about him, and we went to the various places where he appeared. We found the people he appeared to and it was crazy! We met them, and they remembered him. When he arrived in Berlin, he turned up and said to them, “I’m all alone in the world; I don’t know who I am”. They totally remembered him. It was odd because we only knew about him through social media, and suddenly we’re at this place and it’s like my god, it really was real – this was a thing! 
He doesn’t know about it because he’s missing again. After they found out about him and that it was a hoax, he went on trial, disappeared, and they found him nine months later, as we said earlier, at a Burger King. After that he had to do the community service and then he just vanished. He was meant to be sent back home to the Netherlands but he never did. So that’s why he doesn’t know, I guess.
 

CM: We would love to meet him. We have a million questions for him.
 

SG: The biggest question that we’ve always spoke about is did he plan it? Or did it just come out? That was a choice in the writing and I had to decide that. But I’ve always been so intrigued: did he actually plan it, or did he just appear in front of them and it just came out at that moment? It just changes the whole color of the lie, and the story.
 

CM: Maybe if the story has another life and we can get to him some way, that would be a goal.
 

HS: Is it weird to talk about this person and think about what they would do and know that they are out there somewhere?
 

SG: In my head, if he is the character I think he is, I’d imagine he’d be quite cool in that he is a total fantasist, and I think that the idea that your story is so good that people would spend years writing a musical… I think that’s the fuel for more fantasy. It’s kind of weird, that he’s out there somewhere. All of them are! All the people in that story are really real. That’s the weird bit: the fact that these people are normal, everyday people and just were just thrown into this crazy limelight and then they go back to being normal again.
 

Scott Gilmour & Claire McKenzie
 

HS: And there’s this sort of empathy in writing about these people who are all pretty “grey area” – can you talk about theater and empathy and how you access that?
 

SG: For me, it’s where’s the heart? What’s the idea? It has to fit the theater and it has to fit the imagination. It also has to answer the question, “why should we care about it?” Going to the theater is kind of a pain in the ass, actually – it’s expensive and not always good and if you can answer why I should care about this thing, it actually helps with all of that. I think talking about empathy, it only becomes relevant when the story that you’re telling can in someway be taken back to the present, watching it and going “Oh that’s me, and my own life”. With this story, it’s the subject of identity, and do we have to just accept who we are, or can we make a change in that too?
 

CM: And we’ve played with different endings as well – we won’t give it away, but in terms of giving the audience the “oh! I could make my life what I want it to be!” and “I have some control,” it’s that sort of… you can make your life exactly what you want with some confidence and courage.
 

SG: And I think it’s the magic of theater. It’s that actual live conversation between the people onstage and the audience out there, and if we can strike some kind of note that the audience can take away, the note is what theater has over all these other forms. You can’t really get that note as strongly from a film or a book. They speak to us in different ways because they speak to us in the way of life. Think about this and it is magic in that way and I think that what you said in terms of empathy, that’s how you get into it.
 

HS: And I love that idea of courage too, and I was wondering where you get the courage to go out there and make something like this, and put it in the world as artists.
 

CM: Because… the two of us.
 

SG: Definitely.
 

CM: I was composing a little bit before we started writing together, and I was doing fine, but I think, like, having the courage to come up to New York is a lot easier when you’re a team doing it. And facing it all the difficulties, I don’t think I would be here without you.
 

SG: I think that is the thing though. We’ve been a partnership for four, five years now, and you give each other confidence in that way.
 

CM: And you push each other!
 

SG: Exactly. Absolutely.
 

CM: If I was on my own, writing a musical, the writing would not be half as good. It’s only because we’re trying to make each other write the best we’ve ever written. And I’m trying to not only write for myself and the audience, but I’m also trying to write the best thing for you as well. So I do think that we’ll get the best part of each other out of that.
 

SG: I do think that it’s being alone, I think it’s something difficult as an artist out on your own, it is hard – it’s hard to keep momentum, to keep courage, but when you do have that other person –
 

CM: – even in those hard times, those stressful moments –
 

SG: – it’s okay, because it’s just a stressful moment. In short, it’s because there’s two of us.
 

HS: What advice would you give to someone who’s where you guys were when you first met?
 

CM: Don’t try to be anything you’re not when you’re a writer. Write from the heart. Only write something you connect with and want to tell. Don’t think “I know what a musical is,” because we don’t follow a form. Try and find your own voice, try to be original, but mostly don’t be afraid of making mistakes while you’re learning. And I think we’re absolutely learning.
 

SG: Totally. Get it wrong. Allow yourself to be inspired by other artists – by other writers, by other stories. But don’t try to emulate them. Just find yourself. Be inspired, but don’t emulate.
 

 

 

 

Scott trained at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and now works as an actor, writer and director within the UK and internationally. Alongside composer Claire McKenzie, he runs multi award-winning musical theatre company, Noisemaker. Together Scott and Claire are dedicated to creating and developing original and innovative musical theatre. Previous work includes The National Theatre of Scotland, The BBC, Chichester Festival Theatre, The Royal Lyceum, Clerkenwell Films, Dundee Rep and Starz.
 

Claire trained in composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and now writes music for theatre throughout the UK. Claire has worked for theatre companies such as National Theatre of Scotland, The Royal Lyceum Edinburgh, Dundee Rep, Citizens’ Theatre and was recently nominated for a BAFTA New Talent Award for Original Music. Alongside writer Scott Gilmour, Claire runs multi award-winning company, Noisemaker, who create and develop original music theatre in the UK and internationally.

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A Conversation with Jaime Lozano & Lauren Epsenhart

Jaime Lozano & Lauren Epsenhart

 

Lauren Epsenhart and Jaime Lozano are hard at work. It’s almost opening night and there are decisions to make: what costume to choose; which lighting gel looks just right; where to seat their friends and family for the best view. But this dynamic team isn’t sweating any of it: having worked together since their time in graduate school at NYU, the two share a closeness and common vocabulary that is clear from the moment you meet them. Though these two artists were raised worlds apart, they’ve since learned to harmonize beautifully.
 

Their show Children of Salt, which has been in development for nearly ten years, is headed for its world premiere at NYMF. We sat down with them to discuss the state of diversity and empathy in the American theater, the wide-reaching Latinx influences in the show, and their longtime collaboration.

 

 

Esther Cohen: The two of you met at NYU’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program.
 

Lauren Epsenhart: Yes, about nine years ago.
 

EC: How did you decide to work together and collaborate; when did it start clicking?
 

Jaime Lozano: They actually put us together.
 

LE: NYU has a process: It’s a two year program, and so the first year, you collaborate – so all the words people collaborate with all the composers, so you get to kind of feel each other out. At the end of that first year, you compile a list of people that you’re interested in working with. They do their best to match you with your top picks and people on your list, so they paired us!
 

JL: Yup! It was so random, but so right.
 

EC: So it was an immediate click for you guys?
 

LE: Yeah, pretty much.
 

JL: We wrote a couple of songs together during the first year, and I think we have a great collaboration and that’s why we were in each other’s lists in some way. I don’t know where I was on the list –
 

LE: I’ll never tell.
 

EC: Obviously it was up there!
 

JL: [laughs] So all the second year, we worked on this project. During the summer, we were trying to figure out about what we should write –
 

LE: Yeah, school isn’t really over in the summer in that program because that’s the time you’re paired up, at the end of the year, and then you’re exploring material. What we had to do was, we had to present an original option, then an adapted option at the beginning of the year to the faculty. So we started an original piece, which we actually are continuing to work on, and then we – we didn’t explore Children of Salt first, I thought about that today. We wanted to write Like Water for Chocolate, and the rights weren’t available, which I suppose worked in our favor.
 

JL: I’m sure someone is working on it right now and bringing it to Broadway.
 

EC: Well, darn it.
 

LE: Darn it, what do we do!?
 

Jaime Lozano & Lauren Epsenhart
 

EC: So let’s talk about why you did decide to adapt Los Niños De Sal.
 

LE: Jaime had seen the stage production in Mexico.
 

JL: Yeah, I did. I saw the stage production in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2001, I think. So eight years before we actually talked about adapting this piece. I told Lauren that I’ve seen this piece in Mexico that I liked, that is very poetic, that it could be good material to adapt into a musical. I sent her the script –
 

LE: It’s funny, you had actually printed the script.
 

JL: Right.
 

LE: So I remember reading through it – I don’t think I ever shared this with you, Jaime – I finished reading it, and I’m scared out of my mind, even trying to think about tackling it, because the stage show is so existential in a way, and it is very poetic, so I had to ground that into a solid musical piece –
 

EC: – without it losing that touch?
 

LE: Right. So I was quite intimidated by it.
 

JL: It was a big challenge. Now we keep the story –
 

LE: – and the theme –
 

JL: Right, but no: it’s a very different show. We made it our own, and we added a lot of different scenes that weren’t in the original play. We even changed a character. I think we brought a lot of ourselves into the piece in so many ways. It’s changed a lot from during that time at NYU to now eight years later.
 

LE: Yeah, a lot has happened and a lot has changed in that time.
 

JL: When Lauren said go for it, we contacted the writer and we asked him for the rights, and from there we have been working during the last eight years.
 

LE: We’re not always in the same state. He went back to Mexico for a period of time then came back to New York, then I left New York, so we’ve been doing a lot of it through email, and messaging.
 

EC: I can’t imagine how hard that must be.
 

JL: I think we dealt with a lot of it during those two years [at NYU], and knew each other very well, good and bad. We collaborated a lot. So we learned a lot from each other and helped us to keep working.
 

LE: You learn your vocabulary. And there were periods of time where nothing was happening.
 

JL: Yeah, like even for a year.
 

LE: Yeah, a year would go by, and we wouldn’t work on it, because he was in other projects and I was working, so it just all depends on where life is taking you in that moment. But that’s probably why the time doubled for us to get this on its feet – because we were together.
 

JL: But that helped the show as well.
 

LE: Definitely. I think something really clicked this past year, at least for me, in editing it, cause I finally got to that point where… it’s a Mexican piece, and I’m a Jewish white girl.
 

JL: Really?! I thought you were Mexican!
 

LE: [Laughs] But really, there’s so much richness in Mexican culture that I’ve not been privy to in the past because I didn’t grow up around it. I finally got to the point where in making those edits and in working on the book and lyrics, realized I do have to make it my own in some way.
 

JL: But at the same time, I always say that when something is very specific, that’s what makes it universal, you know? So the fact that it’s set in Mexico and they’re suppose to be a Mexican story is actually what makes it universal because of that specificity.
 

Jaime Lozano & Lauren Epsenhart
 

EC: Theater operates on the idea of empathy. When you see or listen to a piece of music or theater, you can relate to people that are different from you. But on the other hand, Jaime, you may have a better idea of adapting a Mexican piece of art because of your background. Lauren, theater is about playing pretend, but you also have to respect and relate as a Jewish white woman, while not knowing everything about that experience. So can you talk a little bit about how you both approached it?
 

LE: Well thankfully, Jaime is in my skin now. He’s kept me in check. There are a lot of things that have come up in writing the piece that I didn’t necessarily understand. For example, there’s something that happened recently. You weren’t there for it, Jaime, but we were talking about costume design. They showed me the costumes for one of our characters, Ángel, and I thought oh wow, it’s a little over the top there. Then I was speaking with our director, José Zayas, and our lead actor Mauricio Martinez, who said, “No, that’s common!” I didn’t know that. There are things that I just don’t know. Other people in the cast that are Latino or Mexican are able to say hold up, white girl, that’s not what it is.
 

JL: We’re very glad that we have a good mix of people in this production. We have a guy from Venezuela, another from Spain, an American with Mexican parents, Puerto Rican, a girl from LA, two Mexicans. Our choreographer is from Hamilton, Stephanie Klemons. We have people from all different cultures, and that helped the show a lot.
 

LE: Definitely. And they’re very proactive in suggesting ideas, and it helps, and makes it a bit more authentic.
 

EC: It’s funny that you say that you’re the only white person in the room, because in most rehearsal rooms, in the United States and across the world, it is very rare for it not just be white people. So it’s actually a very unique experience.
 

LE: You’re right. My past experiences have been like that.
 

EC: Theater is usually overwhelmingly white, and overwhelmingly male, especially on the creative side. In theater right now, diversity is growing, but a big issue is that non-black people of color are still extremely underrepresented. Hamilton is definitely helping, but how would you like to see that change, or how do you think that is changing?
 

JL: We’re lucky to be living in this era of the musical theater. There’s a lot of diversity on Broadway right now. We have Hamilton, we have On Your Feet!. Right now, two very close friends of mine are the stars of Chicago, and they’re Mexican. So I think it’s the right moment for this show to happen at NYMF. New York City is this big diverse city, people from all around, but for some reason, musical theater was about Jewish people, and gay people.
 

LE: Well, hey now.
 

EC: My boss always says that American Theater, for a very long time, was just the white upper middle class Jewish experience in the living room, and that’s all that it was. And then people started realizing oh wait! America is not all white Jewish people!
 

JL: What’s great is that, me as a Latino, I can identify myself with a lot of shows that have no Latinos. And white people should be able to see themselves in shows not about white people. That’s the great thing about theater and art. You can reflect yourself and whatever kind of show.
 

LE: Right, and that’s the point. And I suppose my experience is a bit colored, but this is my only true musical experience. In terms of being a part of something like this, I don’t have any other experience. It feels different for me – not in a bad way, but this is all I’m used to. How I’m perceiving things right now is different because all I see is Latin things on Broadway, because my head is so in it right now. I know it’s not a lot, but to your point, there’s a lot going on right now.
 

EC: This year is definitely a jumping off point for the Broadway community. This year was the first time in a long time it was possible for all black people to sweep the musical acting categories.
 

LE: I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a moment. I agree with you, but did you follow what happened at the Oscars this year, with all the people boycotting? I wonder if the Tonys had something to do with that, not to say that all the people who won didn’t deserve it. When I watched them, I had that moment of, good or bad, but this person is extremely talented but why are they really winning?
 

EC: Three of them were from one show. So part of it was obviously that Hamilton was going to sweep. I think without Hamilton, having four actors from four different shows that are people of color winning those trophies would’ve been much less likely.
 

JL: We’re not there yet.
 

LE: Absolutely not.
 

Jaime Lozano & Lauren Epsenhart
 

EC: Jaime, you work with – I’m going to butcher the name of this, I’m so sorry – R.Evolucion Latina. Did I just totally ruin that?
 

JL: No! No you didn’t. And before [NYU], I didn’t speak English.
 

EC: Wow.
 

LE: That was the first thing that came out of your mouth when you got here. I remember that. You introduced yourself and said “I don’t speak English” and then you sat down. I still remember that. That’s brave. That’s strong.
 

EC: I have so much respect for anyone who has to learn English in the twenties and thirties.
 

JL: At the end of everyday, I get a headache, because I was trying to understand what they were saying in class, and I didn’t get it. After class, I’d have to talk with friends.
 

LE: Really? During the first year?
 

JL: Yeah, and every week or two, the faculty would go over all the information with me.
 

EC: That’s really amazing.
 

LE: You never gave that away. You were always confident.
 

JL: I tried to fake it.
 

EC: You faked it till you made it!
 

JL: Yeah!
 

EC: Back to R.Evolucion Latina, can you talk about why arts activism is so important to you?
 

JL: R.Evolucion Latina is a non-profit organization, founded and led by Luis Salgado, who was the In the Heights Latin choreographer, and now he’s in On Your Feet! We they do, what they say, is that they do “art with a purpose”, to touch people, to move people. Luis Salgado is bringing musical theater to every suburb, for example they do this summer camp with hundreds of kids. During the fall, they do a free workshop with New York City actors and dancers. They bring kids to the theater. They’re just trying to bring arts to the Latino community. I work with them as a teacher. I went to different schools to teach musical theater or theater or music –
 

LE: A teaching artist.
 

JL: Right. A teaching artist. I worked on a couple of projects. We did something with a lot of Broadway artists – Corbin Bleu, Janet Dacal, so on, all the In the Height people – recorded an album and I was the music arranger on that. It’s called “Dare to Go Beyond”. Things like that. What is it called, a catchphrase? “Dare to Go Beyond” is actually their –
 

LE: Oh, motto.
 

JL: Motto. “Dare to Go Beyond” is their motto. It invites people to know that they can do anything they want to do. Just be brave, and go for it. Some of their projects are very private, some are very big, like this album.
 

Jaime Lozano & Lauren Epsenhart
 

EC: That’s really cool.
 

JL: I’m really glad I crossed paths with them. It started out when I was very alone in New York City. So this took me into a Latino community in New York City. Because of that, I met a lot of people that now have collaborated with us in the show. That’s what’s really great about New York City and musical theater in New York City – we’re really a community.
 

EC: Everyone knows everyone.
 

JL: Exactly. And especially in the Latino community. So it’s been really helpful as a Mexican to have this community.
 

LE: Hm, I just learned a few things.
 

JL: Another thing I want to bring up is that we have a lot of women on our team. Of course Lauren, our choreographer, our music director–
 

LE: Your wife.
 

JL: Right of course. Anyway, we have three very important women in our creative team.
 

LE: It’s interesting because – you’d mentioned earlier, being a women – it’s interesting being a woman in this particular instance amongst all of that, and not being Latino. I’m not saying this to be like… and I’m not saying it’s bad, I mean Jaime, I don’t think you’d even think twice about it, but there are times when I’m not completely comfortable and at times I feel like wow I really don’t fit in here. I definitely have those moments.
 

JL: Is it because one person speaks Spanish and then all of a sudden everyone’s speaking Spanish?
 

LE: No, no, you guys are very good about that with me. No. It’s not that. It’s just sometimes I don’t – I’m not a part of your culture necessarily.
 

EC: You’re not sure where you fit.
 

LE: I think that’s very true, in a certain way.
 

JL: I mean that’s how I felt at NYU.
 

LE: But you’ve moved on in a way that I haven’t.
 

EC: But I think it’s an important experience, I think – especially – as white people, to be in spaces where you think you don’t fit. Because you fit in most spaces.
 

LE: I’ve felt that way my entire life. That depends on perspective and experience also, though. Not every white person has the same experience. But it’s there.
 

 

 

 

Born in Monterrey, Mexico. Jamie Lozano is an accomplished musician, vocal coach, composer, arranger, orchestrator, musical producer and musical director. Jaime’s musical theatre works include Tlatelolco (composer, lyricist, librettist), Myths (composer), The Yehuatl (composer, lyricist), Lightning Strikes Twice (composer) Off-Broadway, The Yellow Brick Road (composer, lyricist) Off-Broadway and National Tour, Carmen La Cubana (additional orchestrations) Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, France, Children of Salt (composer) New York Musical Festival 2016. Albums: Tlatelolco (producer, composer, lyricist), Carols for a Cure 2010 (arranger, orchestrator), R.Evolución Latina’s Dare to Go Beyond (arranger, orchestrator, music director), Florencia Cuenca’s Aquí – Los Nuevos Standards (producer, arranger, music director), Doreen Montalvo’s Alma Americana, Corazón Latino (producer, arranger, music director). As a director: The Last Five Years, Into the Woods, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Fantasticks, Jekyll & Hyde, Songs for a New World, Joseph and the Amazing Dreamcoat Technicolor, some of them Spanish World Premiere or Mexican Premiere; as well as his very own works Tlatelolco and Myths. He is a teacher and activist for the New York City based not-for-profit organization R.Evolución Latina. BFA: Music & Composition, Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León; MFA: NYU/Tisch, Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. Proud member of the Dramatists Guild of America and BMI. “A mi hermosa familia, Florencia (Mi Henrucha hermosa), mi inspiración. Alonzo, bienvenido a este mundo, y mi princesa Ely Aimé. Los amo todo, siempre”.
 

Lauren graduated from the SUNY Plattsburgh, where she received a BFA in Writing. Lauren earned a MFA in Musical Theatre Writing from NYU. Lauren began a M.S.e.D. at CUNY Hunter and finished her studies at Indian River State College. Recent projects include Children of Salt and Pushing Daisy. Past productions have been featured at Lincoln Center, Julliard, NYU, The Secret Theatre, Goodspeed Opera House, Triad Theatre, Queens Botanical and The Theatre for the New City.

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A Conversation with Aya Aziz

Aya Aziz

 

Look up any positive adjective in the dictionary and Aya Aziz should be cited as an example: bright, magnetic, gregarious, compassionate, insightful – the list goes on. In short, we’re utterly obsessed with her. Read on to see why you will be too.

 

 

Esther Cohen: Let’s start by learning a little bit about you.
 

Aya Aziz: I grew up in New York City in many different social spaces. I had a grandmother who was an actress, and my mother was a dancer and a mad scientist type, so I had an interesting childhood where I jumped between all of these different social spaces, classes, cultures and perspectives. I was a very loud, dancing child, and I’ve used that in this piece about identity and growing up. How do you become one thing from so many different things? What is the process of differentiating between different identities or honing in on one particular vernacular or perspective or culture? The question of who we are is very prevalent and interesting to me and I’m still trying to figure it out.
 

ES: Can you tell us a bit about what the piece is, and also how you came to create it? How did you make the transition from doing more traditional theater to writing specifically your own story? What challenges did you discover as you made that transition to being a solo artist and a playwright?
 

AA: I would say that this is – I don’t know if this is a real term – but a friend once said, “I write autobiographical fiction.” That feels like what I’m doing. I’m taking autobiographical elements and things that have happened, but weaving them into an arc that isn’t as consecutive. I take liberty with how I portray different people in my life, and also to protect my family so I don’t embarrass anyone. So there are many, many fictional elements within how this story is organized and how it came together.
 

Stage & Candor_Aya Aziz_03
 

The piece is about a young woman who travels to Philadelphia to see her Muslim Egyptian family. She’s not estranged from them, but she’s certainly distanced. She lives her life separately as an artist New York City and, ultimately, leads a pretty privileged life. She has a relaxed life where she can think about the world and take liberties with how she spends her time. So she spends a few nights with her family in Philadelphia and she’s pushed to confront what it means to have distanced herself from their reality. It’s a reality that she’s never lived. She’s documented and has a white American mom, so she has that privilege that her cousins do not; she’s taking liberty with her time and taking time off college; she lives as a performance artist while her family is very conservative and traditional. There’s a culture clash: in one scene, she comes out as Princess Jasmine in this performance piece that she’s devised against orientalism, and her family doesn’t know what orientalism is. She comes to her art with certain privileges because she hasn’t actually lived the experiences that she writes about. That concept encouraged me and guided me towards this piece. How did I experience so many different spaces that I never had to experience the consequences of?
 

Michelle Tse: Can you elaborate on those different spaces?
 

AA: I spent a lot of time in public housing. I lived across the street from the Elliott Houses in Chelsea and I spent a lot of time there just by virtue of my mom being busy and my dad being away. And yet, ultimately, I had vastly different experiences than the kids that I grew up with and who were my friends. The projects have a unique atmosphere and I got to leave that. Even though I was across the street, I was a world away. Similarly, I could visit my Muslim family but never feel surveilled, never have ICE pressure me for documentation, never have green cards denied, never having to leave the country, which they ultimately had to do.
 

MT: It baffles me when someone like you can accept your privileges, but a lot of white people can’t.
 

AA: I have so much privilege because I can get close to these parts of my identity but never experience the consequences of them. I can pretend to be them. I get to pick and choose. The play takes that lens and explores that privilege in her meeting with her family, reflecting on her childhood and moments of closeness she felt, and how that sits behind the present day distance she has from the traumas that happened between childhood and now.
 

MT: When did the piece take shape?
 

AA: The play came out of my time living in Lebanon. I was given a chance to play my songs at a cabaret theater. I didn’t have enough songs to fill an hour and fifteen minutes, but I love performing and telling stories, so I thought, “Oh, I’ll do short vignettes between each.” People really responded to it and I realized that all my music had this kind of common thread of identity because it was something I’d been working out internally. The play came out of that. I’d never produced anything myself before.
 

EC: So I’m sure it’s been an adventure.
 

AA: NYMF is a whirlwind! And it’s so shiny! And I wonder the entire time, “Who let me in here?!”
 

EC: Let’s talk about the challenges of doing a solo show. Is it hard to be critical of yourself, or to be a collaborator but still stay true to your work?
 

AA: Oh my god, I’ve faced all of it. It’s been a kind of continuous meta crisis. The work kind of came out of me whether I wanted it to or not. And last year, I turned 21 and I wanted to commemorate my adulthood by having done something. So I just sent these vignettes to Fringe and Planet Connections and they said, “Yeah, great.” And I was like, “What? No! No!”
 

EC: “I was kidding!”
 

AA: So I had to make an actual piece! There was a lot of cognitive dissonance in the process, because the people I’m writing about are inspired by real people in my life, right? So even if I change names, I’m still in a position where I can really embarrass people. I didn’t appreciate that until the opening of my first show at Planet Connections. Almost nobody was there, but my mother was. And in my former show, I talked much more about New York City than I did about my Muslim family. The show was about growing up in Chelsea and this triangle of different classes and that ever-gentrifying, changing space.
 

Stage & Candor_Aya Aziz_01
 

MT: How did Mom react?
 

AA: My mom told me she was really hurt by it. I was talking about growing up in this crazy tenement that was so unattractive and so shabby that it was featured as a heroin den in a Nicholas Cage movie. I mean, we didn’t have a bathroom in the apartment, it was in the hallway. And the whole time growing up there – I spent 16 years there – I wanted to leave. I was embarrassed about it, but upon reflection, I realized it was this great show material, because of all the crazy stuff that would happen in that tenement. Oh, the characters I wish I had space to fit into my show! 
Back then, I didn’t realize that the work carries its own narrative. Even if the place I was writing it from was loving, just by sharing it I could embarrass people. I don’t want to reflect negatively on, or hurt, anyone in my life. I’m in a position where I can do a lot of damage to people. So that’s been difficult, because that is truly my nightmare and I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I hurt someone.
 

EC: But of course you also still want to be honest.
 

AA: Yes. So I’m wrestling with how to be honest while also being careful. And of course I have to confront again that is such a position of privilege! How many people get to be in a space where they can reflect to mass audiences on other people’s lives that they have not lived, whose traumas they have not experienced? So I was writing about that and I was acting out that privilege – and it was a little overwhelming, honestly. But it’s also pushed me to grow up. Because ultimately, I can’t walk away from the piece. And that’s what Fringe and Planet Connections represented. I have to keep moving forward. I’ve since had many talks with my parents about it.
 

MT: Did you edit down or take things out because of those conversations?
 

AA: Well, another reality for me is that Egypt is not the nicest of places right now. My family is there and my father is not liked by that government. So it’s very real. I had a theme I loved in one of my earlier pieces where I rapped the Quran, because that was how I’d learned it as a kid! I loved learning the Quran and I wanted to be a part of that world, but I was also bringing my New York with me. And no, of course, I couldn’t keep that in.
I’ve lived so sheltered from that aggression and violence that I haven’t had to think about how parts of me that I love will be used as weapons against other people and myself. That reality has been difficult to wrestle with as I shape and go forward with this work.
 

EC: There are still huge gaps in diversity in theater. One of the big ones is that people of color, and especially non-black people of color, are still extremely underrepresented both on and off stage. What do you see as non-black people of color’s role in the American theater right now, and how would you like to see that change?
 

AA: Wow. I think you’re right, and that is such a good and such a frustrating point, the lack of availability of theater to non-white communities. And I think so many people are making their own theater because of it. There are so many people making incredible art in this city who are just not seen. They get to La Mama and then it’s the end, because, until recently, those stories weren’t wanted. Culturally, we’re now seeing a change by virtue of the immensity of globalization and multiculturalism. We’re seeing a change in the forced or protected singularity of the American narrative, and what it means to be American.
 

EC: American theater used to be only about the white, upper middle class Jewish experience in a living room. But now, people are realizing that white Jews in a living room is not all of America. It’s not even most of it.
 

AA: And it’s wonderful that Hamilton has done what it has done. But I want to see more shows like Hamilton that are accessible to people who can’t afford that ticket price. There’s certainly been a change in the pressure that the public is putting on big outlets to diversify their ensembles. We need to see more lives and more faces and bodies that are traditionally not marketed, intentionally not marketed. Those populations have been making work forever, so we should just keep making what we’re making and putting pressure on those outlets to attend to our art. The quality of the work I’ve seen out there is unbelievable and yet it never sees an audience more than 30. And that’s a real issue, especially in this city.
 

EC: And there’s definitely a balance to strike between only talking about niche identities and just using theater as a means of pure storytelling, which is something I think your show really does. Theater should be about the ability of any person to tell any story.
 

MT: And yet, some people can suspend their disbelief enough to believe a talking crab, but not to believe that a black woman could be, say, a 19th century explorer, like in Men On Boats.
 

AA: Arpita [Mukherjee, producer] would sometimes joke, when we’d go to festival meetings, that “when it comes to you and your presentation, folks are just not going to get it or believe it.” It never happened, but we always made that joke because in theater, people are reticent to suspend their disbelief when confronted with body types and faces and people they don’t want to see. And let me tell you, my whole show is premised on suspending disbelief. I have to completely get rid of disbelief.
 

Stage & Candor_Aya Aziz_02
 

EC: Let’s talk about Girl Be Heard. Girls, especially young and minority girls, are told to be small and quiet. Girl Be Heard completely throws that out the door and says, “Be big! Be loud! Tell your story!” Tell us about how you, as one of their teachers, encourage girls to tell their stories.
 

AA: I’ve been with Girl Be Heard since 2011. It started as this little collective of radical women and teenagers in a synagogue somewhere in Dumbo and now it’s an NGO and is co-sponsored by the UN! The organization works with young women globally and essentially says, “Whatever you are feeling, talk about it.” Because from those narratives, we can reflect on how the experiences of girls intersect with larger political platforms and problems in the world. The work is inherently political. Asking a young woman to speak out about her story is both a political and personal act. 
I work a lot with middle schoolers. They’re at this beautiful age that’s also somewhat tragic to me. The change that happens between eleven and fourteen with puberty and the pressures put on their bodies and the pressure to express femininity can be painful to watch. They’re at this age where they’re becoming something, and what they’re becoming is not necessarily what they want to be or how they really feel.
 

MT: So is it sort of like a seminar, or a writing class?
 

AA: When the girls enter the room I have them free write immediately. I say, “Write anything that you need to get off your chest! Give me something that you feel is really important that people should know! Either about you, or about the world – something that people aren’t thinking about that they should be!” It’s incredible what comes out of that writing. Kids have so much curiosity, but in women that curiosity is sculpted down into something that is acceptable and packaged. So I made sure that whatever we did in that classroom, whether it was talking about gun violence or talking about domestic violence or the question of “what is a woman?” came out of the questions that they wrote down. You give girls a pen and an incentive – they have so much of it – and they fly. 
I’ve seen that a lot of storytelling comes out of having the space and freedom to let yourself inspire yourself. As women, there are so many voices in our head telling us what we cannot do. I had one student who would constantly say, “I’m too stupid, I’m not good enough, no I can’t” about everything. But after many, many group hugs and read-alouds and chanting her name, she got onstage and went crazy with this incredible dance! When she got offstage, she immediately said, “I messed up.” So I said, “Yeah, but you did it.” And she said, “Yeah! I did!” Learning to turn off those voices is an essential lesson for women.
 

EC: I think that’s part of the reason we see so many women, and especially young women, embrace theater. Because theater is an empowering, but not too personal, way to express ideas and face doubts.
 

AA: Pretend and play have been powerful tools in the classroom. Even when we’re playing other women, at least we’re in control of those women. By being outside of your body and your head, you actually are more in control.
 

EC: What are the best and worst pieces of advice you’ve received? And if you were to give advice to a young, female theater artist, what would that advice be?
 

AA: Something my mom has told me throughout this entire process is, “Just let the work take you.” Once you’re not thinking about whether you’ll make it and who will like you, you’ll realize that if you’re doing what you love, you will be good at it. If you do what you love, what you love will carry you to where you need to go. Being unafraid to keep going and keep doing what you love is such a simple piece of advice, but it’s been incredibly helpful.
 

EC: That is such a Mom piece of advice. Only moms have that kind of wisdom.
 

AA: Yes! Thank god for moms! And to anyone who wants to do what I’m doing, I’d tell them not to second guess themselves. When festivals accepted my work last year, it scared the bajeesus out of me! But if you have the opportunity, you have to take it. Take every opportunity. 
On the other hand, festivals can be stressful and it can be difficult to know when to take time for yourself and say, “Actually, I can’t do that right now.” That knowledge is especially important for women because we’re conditioned to say yes to everything or give a highly apologetic no. Creative energy takes a toll on a person, and while being on a deadline can be a good way to be productive, it’s also a fast way to become exasperated with yourself. So to love yourself throughout that process and take time when you need it is really important.  
Love yourself, that’s my piece of advice. Just love yourself!
 

 

 

 

Aya Aziz is a performance artist and songwriter based between New York and Beirut, Lebanon. She is a graduate of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics and a longtime member of and current teaching artist for the feminist theater ensemble Girl Be Heard. Sitting Regal by the Window is her first full production and has been featured in the Fringe and Planet Connections Theater Festival in New York as well as at the Metro Al-Madina cabaret theater in Beirut, Lebanon where the show was first produced. When Aya isn’t preparing for a show, studying, or guiding middle-schoolers in the writing and performing of their stories she is probably playing her music at a local restaurant or coffee shop in the city. You can follow her work on SoundCloud and Facebook.

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A Conversation with Mia Walker

Mia Walker

 

Mia Walker greets us with a hug and we immediately feel like she’s been our friend for years. Maybe that’s what it’s like to be in the rehearsal room with her. It figures: Mia is responsible for some of the most galvanizing, vulnerable theater in New York right now. She is the assistant director of Waitress, the emotional and optimistic musical about a working-class woman surviving and thriving through an abusive relationship and illicit affair. Then there’s Normativity, the project she’s helming off-off-Broadway at NYMF. Penned by twenty-year old Jaime Jarrett, starring a cast as diverse in gender expression as anything we’ve seen onstage, the new musical is the buzziest show of the festival this year. So it’s natural that we feel right at home with Mia – she’s in the business of empathy.

 

 

Helen Schultz: Looking at the projects you’ve done – you’ve done American Sexy at The Flea; Normativity, which is about gender identity; and Waitress, which brought domestic violence to a stage that it hadn’t necessarily been on before. How do you come to pick projects?
 

Mia Walker: I wanted to do a show that told a love story between two women. To me, that hadn’t been represented. People don’t empathize with that, and that’s how homophobia perpetuates itself as well because we’re not identifying characters that are women falling in love. There are shows about lesbian love, but I wanted to see something that felt very real and honest for a younger generation. With Normativity, I don’t think I totally understood how bold it was or how needed it was in the theater community until I got involved. It wasn’t until auditions, when I was getting Facebook messages and emails from people coming in to auditions for us. Multiple people wrote me and said, “I don’t care if I don’t get cast in this show – thank you for letting me audition,” because our casting notice said, “all gender identities welcome.” Our casting director, Rebecca Feldman, works at The Public and is an amazing advocate for queer trans performers being welcomed and embraced in the community. People were saying how liberating and empowering it was to go into an audition where they could just be themselves, where they didn’t have to hide their gender identity, where they didn’t have to find a song that didn’t sit well in their voice because that’s not how they identify in terms of their gender, that’s when I started really realizing how necessary this piece was. It became a movement.
 

HS: How did that translate to the rehearsal process?
 

MW: When I first started it with Jaime [Jarrett], I was just really excited to be doing a musical, and I thought it was dealing with something that was bold and marginalized. And I was excited about that. But as we were getting more and more people involved, I realized that it was truly a movement. Normally, in theater, your first production meeting you talk about set design and you figure out when designer runs will be, you talk about budget – it’s a pretty straight-forward model for a production meeting. But our production meeting was different because I started telling our whole team about all these emails and messages I was getting. As I was telling our crew how important this piece really was, I started expressing how much of a movement it is, and how I’ve become part of that movement just by virtue of caring about Jaime and wanting to represent [the LGBT community] in the world and I saw their eyes light up, and I thought, “everyone on our team just became part of that movement.”
 

HS: Can you talk a bit about the phenomenon of “Bury Your Gays?” It looms very large in Normativity.
 

MW: What’s interesting about Normativity, the whole premise, is that there’s this phenomenon called “Bury Your Gays.” It’s a tendency in arts and culture and media where gay characters are killed off. It’s crazy – if you do the research, you’ll see. The percentage of gay characters that die, commit suicide, get hit by a stray bullet, it’s like society is subconsciously telling us that being gay is a sin. That is ever-present in the media, and Jaime has been reacting to that and trying to fight that. The quest of Normativity is to rewrite the queer narrative. The idea is that we want positive representation in the LGBTQ community, and everyone deserves a happy ending. There’s a song where one of the characters, Taylor, sings “I’m sick of reading stories about girls who don’t make it past age nineteen” because there’s this phenomenon of queer characters committing suicide.
 

HS: And in the wake of Orlando, that movement feels even more urgent.
 

MW: It was a very somber reminder that tragedy is still happening in this world to the queer community, and our show is not trying to erase that or deny that. I met with Jaime after Orlando, and we were both very shell-shocked and in a weird place and we sort of went through the show and we sort of worked on ways to recognize that it doesn’t erase the fact that tragedy still happens in the queer community, and that’s been a really important part of the piece. Something that’s so exciting about working on a new musical that actually deals with timely issues is that it’s being affected by the moment. It’s not like we’re working on a show that was written fifty years ago and isn’t being impacted by current events; we’re actually working on something that’s living and breathing right now. Jaime’s making changes every day based on what’s happening in the world. That’s been what’s been really eye-opening about this experience – how much our daily lives play into it.
 

HS: Could you talk about Jaime, and how you connect with them for this show?
 

MW: Rachel Sussman is the programmer at NYMF. I had an informal meeting with her, like “Hi! I’m a female director. Hi! You’re a female producer. Let’s meet.” She said to me, “If you could direct anything right now, what would it be?” and I said, “I’ve been trying to find a piece that has to do with a lesbian love story. She said, “I think I may have something for you,” and sent me the materials for Normativity. I met with Jaime and that meeting was pretty amazing because it was pretty clear that we were having some sort of soul connection. Jaime is a student at UArts in Philly. Jaime is twenty years old. Jaime wrote the book, the music, and the lyrics, which is an incredible feat for anyone, let alone a student. And the music is beautiful. When I met with Jaime, I really got this sense that Jaime was very open to making changes and delving through and working with this piece. I got the sense that there was potential, and a spark, and an amazing story that needed to be told; and I could tell immediately that Jaime’s voice as a composer was deeply needed in the musical theater community, but I was also reassured by the fact that Jaime was totally game to delve into an intense rewrite process. And that’s what we did – we cleaned for months. Jaime was churning out draft after draft, creating new characters. We actually went to an open call that NYMF had for casting, and we met one of our actors there, Soph Menas, and Soph inspired a whole new character – Jaime wrote a whole new song to do with the experience of being trans. And that was really inspired by Soph, who identifies as a trans man. I really felt deeply connected to Jaime, and excited to go on this ride with them.
 

HS: And this play is so personal to Jamie’s own experience as a gender-queer person.
 

MW: When I first met Jaime, it was like a whole new world opened up to me. … Jaime explained to me the use of ‘they’ as a pronoun. It’s amazing because now that’s so second-nature to me, because there are multiple people in the show who identify as gender-queer and so pronouns are a very sensitive issue in our rehearsal room, and we all take great care to respect people’s gender pronoun preferences. But I just think back to that meeting in October, November when that kind of blew my mind. And now it’s second-nature.
 

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HS: I wanted to ask you about the design of Normativity, in as much as the set echoes what’s going on in the characters’ minds and in their emotional lives. Could you talk about that process of putting together the design and the world of the show?
 

MW: So, we have an amazing set designer named Kristen Robinson, who studied at Yale. And her background actually is in installation art and painting. So she does a lot of set design for plays and musicals, but she also has that installation side of her. I went to see something she did recently – it was called The Heart of Darkness. And it was an immersive experience where you were thrown into the jungle. It was just incredible. But it also felt like modern art – it felt like I was at MoMa or something. I knew she was the right person to bring onto this because we had a few meetings with Kristen – it was me, Jaime, and Kristen – and we were talking about why Jaime wrote this show, where it came from in Jaime’s soul, why Jaime felt the need to write it. Kristen sort of took that away and came back with a list of locations that we needed to have: a high school, a writer’s office, and a bookstore. Then we had a meeting with her and she was like, “my instinct is rather than to have a very literal world, that we have a sort of surreal – this was her word – ‘poetic gesture.’ She wanted to have a poetic gesture so that we’re in a space that’s already surreal. I think the design element is very important because with NYMF, it’s a festival show, so there are certain restrictions. Their entire set needs to be taken down within twenty minutes and put up in half an hour. Every prop and every set piece has to be stored within a set amount of space. There’s a really incredible floor treatment that Kristen’s doing and it’s a very minimal set but it all comes together in this one poetic gesture. I’ve never been interested in literal theater and so, for me, the approach that the show takes is embracing the fact that we are in a theatrical space and we’re not in a cinematic world where we can just be in a school, a store, and an office.
 

HS: Choreography is a big part of that world too. And your brother is the choreographer!
 

MW: Adin just graduated from Princeton this year, so he’s right out of college. He’s an amazing choreographer. I’ve never had an experience with a choreographer before where it felt like we were really creating a vocabulary of the show together, and Adin – I don’t know if it’s because he’s my brother, or because he’s a genius – he’s illuminating the world of the show in a way that I don’t think anyone else would have. And I think that’s part of why Kristin and I wanted to keep the space sparse – now it’s really about bodies and space and the awkwardness of not feeling totally in your skin. Adin has been exploring how to create a stage vocabulary of that, and I actually think that people are going to see the show and go “who choreographed that?”
 

HS: Let’s talk about your time at Harvard. It’s interesting that you went from being a film major to working in theater.
 

MW: When I was nine, I was actually on Broadway. I lived in Washington, D.C. and my grandfather took me to a Broadway audition as a present. I wanted to be an actress – “I want to go to a real Broadway casting call!” Then I booked it.
 

HS: Can I ask what show it was?
 

MW: It was Annie Get Your Gun with Bernadette Peters.
 

HS: Oh, wow!
 

MW: Oh yeah. So I spent a year in New York doing that show when I was nine years old. I think that’s when the theater got in my blood after that. Like whenever I’m working on a show now, or on any of the shows I’ve worked on with Diane [Paulus], being in a Broadway theater to me feels like home. I thought I was going to be an actress, and that was my whole thing; after Annie Get Your Gun, I was auditioning for more shows, I went to LA for pilot season, but when I went to college, I started to feel frustrated when I was in shows. I don’t really want anyone else telling me what to do! I was lucky at Harvard that there wasn’t a theater major at the time because I was able to do whatever I wanted. I got space in the experimental black box, and I was allowed to do whatever I wanted as soon as the on-campus student groups gave us permission to do it. I was really able to explore and treat Harvard as my lab. I started out with directing a three-person play that was about college students, and then I did The History Boys, and Grease was my senior project.
 

HS: How did you connect with Diane?
 

MW: Diane actually generously came to see a tech rehearsal of Grease and that was sort of what connected us. I had been flinging myself into her office, asking for advice, like, “How do you work with a choreographer?” and in between meetings, she would for ten minutes bare her soul to me, and I was just taken by that: how generous she was to actually mentor me. It was incredible. She took me under her wing. So after I graduated, I started going from project to project with her. The access that she’s given me has been such a gift.
 

HS: What is it like to learn from a female director in a field that’s so hugely dominated by men?
 

MW: It’s funny because when people say to me, “theater is dominated by men,” I literally have not seen them. I’ve worked with so many women, because Diane surrounds herself with women – and not intentionally, by the way. It happens organically. I think she just has this incredible network of strong, amazing, talented women and she just happens to staff her shows with them. A lot of men, too. But I’ve gotten so used to working with women, and it’s been such a blessing. I guess in a way it’s how people say, “you grow up knowing what you know,” so for me the idea that women are not empowered or not represented in the theater… I’ve literally never seen that because I have had the blessing of just seeing women kick ass for the past six years. Diane is so strong, but she’s strong in a way that is non-gender. She’s just a person with the vision and the endurance to push people to their best. That’s what I’m most thankful for: the fact that I don’t see being female as any sort of hindrance. In fact, I see it as a benefit. I don’t want to make any gender-divided assumptions, especially after working on a show right now that’s bashing all expectations and assumptions about gender and sexuality that I’ve ever had. I do find that the women I work with are incredibly focused on detail and incredibly compassionate, vulnerable, and strong, and I feel very much at home working with other women. I hope that, as I continue to turn into my own director, that I’m also giving opportunities to women. Diane’s whole thing is that I’m a director. I’m not just a female director. I’m an artist. My gender is part of me, but doesn’t define me. I very much feel the same way too.
 

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HS: Something people talk about when they talk about women and directors is confidence and taking up space and being bold, things we really try to beat out of women from a very young age.
 

MW: I read this article about how women tend to use the word “just” more. They write emails with questions more. “Just checking in,” “just wanting to know.” There’s a tendency for women in rhetoric to excuse themselves or apologize. I do see that – I see that happens. Part of what’s great about working with Diane is that she doesn’t apologize for herself. She takes up space. Hugely confident. I think I, personally, have definitely struggled with confidence. I think part of being a child actress and getting rejected from auditions at the age of nine impacted me. Part of why I didn’t want to continue being a performer was I didn’t like that feeling of being rejected. My mom used to say, “you care a lot about what people think of you, and that’s what is going to be hard for you as a performer,” and that’s ultimately why I ended my career as an actor. It made me very anxious. I’ve found my confidence in directing. It’s funny – in real life, I’m very indecisive. It’s hard for me to pick out clothes; it’s very hard for me to make general life decisions. But in a rehearsal room, I’m decisive, I’m in my element, I’m working from my gut. I would like to try to apply that to the rest of my life.
 

HS: I think it’s starting to change now, but there seems to be a certain level of shame that women feel, just because we’re women.
 

MW: I do think that women have to stop apologizing for ourselves. I know someone that works in resources in a media company, and he told me how little women ask for more. Men ask for a promotion every six months, and women go ten years with the same paycheck. It’s the asking that’s scary. I’m really trying to attack that, because asking for more, for me, is also really hard. Asserting my needs is not easy. It’s definitely a process. I’m getting better at that; directing is forcing me to get better at that because I think directing is all about asserting your needs and not being afraid to take up space, ask for what you want, demand it, not doubt that you mean it, not try to please anyone.
 

Michelle Tse: As a director, you’ve stepped in so many other people’s shoes that are different than your own. Where does your empathy come from?
 

MW: I remember this moment in college where I was really trying to figure out what to do, and I wanted to be a director. But then I decided that my goal had to be bigger than “I want to be a director.” So that’s when I identified: I want to move people. I think it’s because I’ve had the blessing of being moved myself. My parents always took me to see shows when I was little. My parents would take my brother and I to Shakespeare festivals when we were five years old. I love that experience of sitting in an audience and feeling moved, or feeling sick, or scared, and I think that I wanted to give that to other people. That’s my goal, to do that. My parents have also said that I’ve always been very sensitive. When I was a kid, if something was upsetting me or I saw something in the news about a bomb I would just immediately throw up. I think in artists, that’s often mistaken for mental illness or depression or anxiety, and it can be all of those things – and that’s certainly part of my life. But, to me, that’s what allows me to tell stories. I think the most important thing about theater and about a piece worth telling is that there are not good guys and bad guys. I would like to never do a piece where I’m perpetuating an idea that someone is good and someone is bad. To me, it’s messy and I’m drawn to pieces where you can see the reasoning behind people doing evil things, and you see the reasoning behind people doing good things and it’s hard to locate a black and white structure in that.
 

HS: It’s hard to get people to really embrace that ambiguity, that discomfort.
 

MW: The shame is that the people who are seeing these things… it’s like preaching to the choir. I think that Normativity will attract people who are excited and happy about it, but I would love to go find some really homophobic people, sit them in the theater, and make them feel compassion for those characters. That’s the struggle, I think: reaching people who actually need these stories.
 

MT: That’s a doozy of a struggle.
 

HS: We can probably talk for the rest of the day about that.
 

MT: I’m hopeful, though, with musicals becoming more popular in the mainstream the past year, that people will start to seek out and do theater. Do you have any advice for aspiring theater artists?
 

MW: I am still learning myself, so it’s definitely coming from a place of still taking advice myself, but I definitely think that the most important thing that I’ve learned is how to listen. I think when I graduated college there was an environment that was so focused on your opinion, your voice, what you think, and as soon as I graduated and started working with Diane, I learned to silence myself and that didn’t mean that I wasn’t expressing myself, but that I was able to take in what other people were saying around me, and know that if I don’t express my idea right now, it’s okay. They’re going to eventually arrive at it in their own way. I think that’s a really big kernel of advice that I’d give to aspiring directors in general – if you are taking the path of assisting and working with other people, it’s learning how to listen and not have to voice yourself in order to feel confident. You can know that you have value without other people validating you.
 
When I graduated college, my icon was Lena Dunham. She was twenty-five and doing it. I was feeling that if I wasn’t doing it, there was no hope for me. But now I’m six, seven years out of college, and I’m grateful for every minute and I feel like I’m really ready for my voice and to direct. It definitely took me that long, and it may take me longer. My advice is, also, in this time and generation of feeling like you have to do everything now, there is something to be said for learning and developing a path and being ready. Growing and becoming ready. Once you express your voice, it’s out there.
 
 

 

 

Mia is currently Assistant Director for A.R.T.’s new Broadway musical Waitress, directed by Diane Paulus, with music by Sara Bareilles. She is also Assistant Director on Finding Neverland, Pippin (winner of 4 Tony Awards in 2013, including Best Revival and Best Director); The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess; Invisible Thread (Second Stage). Recent directing credits include world premieres of new works by Trista Baldwin and Israel Horovitz (The Flea); recurrent projects at Ensemble Studio Theater; Zoe Sarnak’s The Last Five Years at 54 Below; Gardenplays (East 4th St. Theatre). 
Mia is also in development for the film adaptation of American Sexy, her feature film directorial debut; she also made a dance film with Sonya Tayeh, award-winning choreographer on So You Think you Can Dance and frequently shoots and edits video content for Amsale the fashion designer and singer/songwriter Rachel Brown. Not Cool, a short film Mia directed was recently screened at the Soho Short Film Festival and LA Indie Film Fest. B.A. Harvard University. While at Harvard, Mia was one of the founding members of On Harvard Time, the university’s first student-run news station, that still exists today.