I felt excited and raw. It’s a vulnerable thing to write about anything personal. This play is about policeing the sexuality and gender of women and girls in a violent manner. I’d written that play very swiftly, in my last year of graduate school. It had been written by some real-life Egyptians, so it was an exciting level of potential responsibility.
While you enjoyed a successful career as a regional theater actor, you had far fewer productions here than in New York.
Most writers don’t get their plays done at all. And almost nothing I’ve written has gone unproduced. I’ve worked with amazing people and been asked onto incredible projects. New York is an amplifier, in the context of the cultural conversation. So if I’m a mission-driven person, and my mission is to amplify voices, especially those of girls and women, and I myself am not amplified, then I am not doing my job. My work often involves me getting on a plane and living alone in artist housing. This festival is the first time that my own community, my friends, my writers’ group, my colleagues can see my work. It is an important personal decision.
Why do you think your plays haven’t found a home here?
Generally, the one narrow path from the early-career buzz that I was fortunate to enjoy with “Gum” toward a steady midcareer presence in New York is a rave in The Times. “Gum” did not get that rave. My journey has been longer and more extensive. The sense I got was, “We don’t know where to put you.” The stories I tell, which are stories that I think a lot of people want to see, are off base, but not in a particularly cool way, in a way that’s emotional. I live in emotion. That’s my home.
What is it like to have both a New York premiere and a world premiere at the same time?
The companies are exquisite — the level of artistry, these directors. I’ve described the nitty-gritty of it as like having triplets. They were all in previews at the exact same time. Lucy Thurber was the one I called, and she had a festival of her plays at Rattlestick. She’s the only person I knew who had gone through something like this. She was like, “Trust. And check in with every director every day.”
What do these plays have in common?
They’re all plays about how our intimate bonds meet our political moments and meet the laws of our time, but in very radically different times and contexts. How do we become the people we can be in the relationships we want? How does our time work for us or against us? I keep returning to the question of how can we achieve the deep, intimate closeness we desire. Or maybe I’m the only person who needs this.
Source: NY Times
