Thanks for checking out the LAFPI “tag team” blog, below, handed off each week from one interesting female playwright to another.
Who are they? Click Here
A Love Song| A Promise: A Renewal Poem
Grief, healing, white female violence
shattered mirrors, tainted vows.
She’s reminded hard questions require slow answers.
The woman sits with herself.
Grief lingers, she lets it live, lets it transform.
To sit with herself demands time, stillness, silence.
She studies old relationships—
professional, personal—
and releases what no longer serves her.
The heavy bricks that once drowned her every step,
now lay buried.
Instead of stuffing her face with food, she cannot name —she fuels herself with knowledge. Research, rest, reading,
recovering from the seen and unseen.
It becomes easier, lighter,
to release what does not sustain.
She allows grief to become a friendly foe.
She laments—– wails until her body crumples and warps– until she can no longer move, until stillness takes hold.
The storm passes,
Now able to breathe she welcomes the new season.
The aromatic smell of fall florets frees her mind from any fears.
The air of a new season greets her, filling her lungs with courage.
She inhales the fresh air.
She lets grief live and shift.
She turned generations of white female violence into art.
She freed herself from the weight of desperate, toxic ties.
To recoup, to sit with, to examine eleven years in the work
To perform in various mediums that feed the work.
She remembers she can fly.
She reclaims her time.
She remembers her power.
She reclaims her voice.
Time. A welcoming friend no longer feared.
She now welcomes him with open arms—-
an open portal that freezes and flows.
The FPI Files: Exploring June Carryl’s “The Girl Who Made the Milky Way”
By Sarah Garic
June Carryl has a love affair with a certain kind of magic: When you tell a child that they have a story, they blossom! They participate. They invest in the realization that their bodies and presence make a difference in the world. In June’s new play The Girl Who Made the Milky Way, we become one among the animal crew and accompany Little Sister on her journey to find her story amidst the vivid world of Khoisan mythology. Little Sister’s adventure is an empowering invitation to all children, notably children of color, that they too have stories to share! And those stories are important! They have a place in the world and will be illuminated by the light of many Khoisan stars and a moon.
For those, such as myself, who may not be familiar with Khoisan mythology and traditions, the Khoisan are an ancient ethnic group with a long and intriguing history, believed to be the oldest human inhabitants of southern Africa. June finds a brilliant balance between context and hands-on exploration of the Khoisan world.
And on that note, we had the delight of delving deep into this magical world in our conversation.
Sarah Garic: Younger audiences are a fun group! They’re unbelievably honest, no filter, and so much energy! What inspired you to write this play for younger audiences?
June Carryl: In 2013, I had the idea to write a play for young Black audiences. I was at a bookstore trying to donate books to the Union Rescue Mission in downtown LA. It was a reminder that we have to start bringing diverse voices into the mainstream. And a way to do so, is to do it myself.
Then, when Imagine Theatre’s artistic director Armina LaManna came to me with this Khoisan myth she’d learned about from a Star Trek episode and asked if I wanted to write a play about it, I said, “Yes,” as though this were my mandate in life. I had put out into the universe that I wanted to write a play for young audiences. It was very fortuitous.
Storytelling is so empowering for kids. Any exposure teaches them that they have stories too. I have seen this transformation on multiple accounts. When I was teaching Shakespeare and acting to students in a housing unit it was powerful to see them find ownership in these stories. As Black and brown students, Shakespeare is for them, too. The whole thing of working with kids really does kind of save your soul. The chance to do it again as a playwright? It’s heaven.
Sarah: In your play, Little Sister is searching for her missing father. It’s something many of us, and unfortunately many audience members, can relate to – a missing parent. What effect did this have on this play, on your audience?
June: A missing parent for any reason is a potent reason for damage in our world. And parents can be absent in so many ways, even emotionally absent.
I was on a bus one day, and there were so many loud kids. And then I realized that they just wanted to be seen and heard. This is how kids extend and ground themselves. And if they’re kids of color, they’re loud because they are invisible. Kids of color are turned into adults, forced to be adults at too young of an age. Black girls in particular often learn that they can’t be innocent. And a key part of that is related to who is at home? Who is missing?
Little Sister’s search for her father is reflective of children taking on the responsibility of what happens in their world. However, in this case, I was interested in bringing her responsibility back to a reasonable proportion. In this play, her sole job is to be a kid. Little Sister is not supposed to do more than is her share. The same thing needs to be there for little boys.
Photo courtesy of Imagine Theatre
Sarah: It’s ever a dance to balance cultural expectations and individual wants and needs! What are some of these unfair expectations for Little Sister? There seemed to be a trend around cooking? In fact, eating of all sorts seemed to feature prominently in this play, as even “The Mountain has eaten herself into a stupor!”
June: Little Sister has the opportunity to break out of the mold of what little girls are supposed to do. Importantly, this society is neither matriarchal nor patriarchal. The father may be hunting and the mother may be gathering, but you could also hunt if you were a woman. The gender roles are not very rigid, particularly at a younger age.
In fact, there is fascinating story about how a kid turns lions into stars. There is a sense of empowerment that is accorded to the feminine that works counter to the fact that women do things such as the cooking. It doesn’t necessarily mean that one is more important than the other.
Sarah: Shapeshifting is delicious in this play, particularly that of Mantis. I had always thought there was something extra special about a mantis! They’re far too wise to be contained in one being. What role does shapeshifting play in this world?
June: I love that this role can be cast as a man or a woman. This idea is, you can be anything! The body can do anything, become any animal or mythical creature. I loved being in the headspace of someone who is very smart, creative, and empowered by that creativity! This reinforces the idea that you can figure it out to a degree. You do need help, but you can become!
Mantis is a mentor because Mantis reflects back what Little Sister’s abilities are. We all need that reinforcement: mentor by mirroring.
Photo courtesy of Imagine Theatre
Sarah: Mantis emphasizes the importance of taking care of ourselves and the people and things we hold dear. Speaking of which, there were some lost Hare boots amiss! What was the inspiration for the lost things?
June: The idea of a collection of things that we lose and miss is relatable. Everyone has had that thing that meant a lot to them, that thing that you held dear, that you let go of, or that was taken from you. Father going missing involved a whole set of things lost: security, love, play, adventure, a sense of one’s own capabilities.
Little Sister has a sense of her capabilities in her head, but she needs to practice. Mantis says, “You should know that power of helping your friends.” She knows that cooking isn’t all that there is to her world. After her journey, she comes back with a story, which is reinforcement that she has a place in the world: I Am. But I am also Somebody.
Sarah: Hare and Lion have a joyful banter that reminded me of my family – lots of love even though Lion had almost eaten Hare. Fill us in, what is the tension holding these two together?
June: This touches on sibling rivalry. Big brother, little brother; funny and at the same time relatable. There is a constant trying to get the last word. Lion is the ladies man and Hare is the whatever dude.
I was also exploring masculinity. Hare finds his own self-worth when he finds the answer to the riddle about the shoes. Boys are so early ensconced in this societal pressure to be the aggressor, but sometimes you can just be smart, and that counts. So often, sensitive boys can fall onto that more aggressive path. There needs to be room for everyone, every type. There is no one way to be a person.
Photo courtesy of Imagine Theatre
Sarah: Ooo please expand upon the riddles! I loved them! Despite the fact that some of them really stumped me!
June: Most of the riddles were South African. Riddles are part of the culture of learning. They are a means of passing down the culture. I also value that they support critical thinking and engagement.
Little Sister also contributed; she came up with riddles. In this manner, wisdom is currency. With the riddles, Little Sister was able impart wisdom as well as to receive.
Also, the delivery of the riddles kind of breaks the 4th wall, without devolving into too much chaos in this younger audience. There were students who were excited to say that they had the correct answers to all the riddles!
Sarah: Is there an additional idea/theme that was important to you in writing this play that we haven’t touched on?
June: I wanted to make sure I wasn’t talking down to the kids. I was constantly asking the question: Would a kid understand and receive this? Because kids know so much more than we give them credit for, it’s very important not to baby talk. My hope is that the play succeeds in speaking to a younger audience without speaking down to them.
“The Girl Who Made the Milky Way” will have two final performances at The Colony Theatre on Saturday, Nov. 16 at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. and Sunday, November 17 at 4 p.m. For tickets and more information, call (818) 649-9474 or go to imaginetheatreca.org.
(Exhausted Sigh)
Well. That election happened.
It’s hard to know where to begin, and we are not short of hot takes, analysis, calls of despair, and confusion. And I don’t want to add to the noise. Because it is all noise. The reactions and emotions immediately after a seismic shift are valid but do not always point to solutions so readily as we would hope.
This is a theatre blog and so to just focus a little on that…
It’s not going to get easier to be an artist or writer. Most of us spend our lives working for the perfect situation in which to create — quiet time, your own space, DAYS of empty time to focus. But most of us have to carve our work into stolen bits between our obligations and work and life. And when big, overwhelming societal, climate, economic, etc. shifts happen…it becomes harder to find that time and harder to find the point.
Why am I so upset about my story being rejected from a magazine when there’s a genocide in progress? Why am I inviting people to the reading of my play when I should be marching for reproductive rights? Why do I have to work on new bylaws of the tiny theatre company I’m a part of when there are hurricanes and pandemics?
The perfect time to create doesn’t exist. And we will not be afforded a utopia to write our little plays any time soon.
I can’t sit here and say what we do is the most important thing. The more I saw posts this week about how THIS IS THE TIME FOR ARTISTS just made me feel more sick and lost and frustrated. But as the author Charlie Jane Anders said this week on Bluesky – we are in a culture war. And artists are the culture makers.
Culture and our media system has helped spread misinformation, radicalized people. These are the things that those in power try to control because digestible narratives are more often the thing that sway folks rather than deep understanding of policies.
Even saying this feels like I’m just parroting the reactions I’ve seen all week. But I think it is true that while a play will not save the world, what we decide to put into the world does matter. If some things that are put into the world make folks feel less seen or less safe, it stands to reason that we could put something in the world that does the opposite.
We can take the advice of life-long activists and find the one cause that we can dedicate our time too — if we focus on all the things wrong, we will get burnt out. If you’re not sure where to start, here’s a comic book version of Project 2025 that has been confirmed to be generally the incoming administration’s agenda. If there is something there that hits the closest to you — perhaps that’s where you put your energy.
There will be a lot of smart people sifting through the drudgery that is actually needed to keep a democratic experiment from slipping into authoritarianism. Much of our society has been shaped by the Chosen One narrative and so it is easy to imagine that “revolution” looks like us single-handedly punching all the nazis into oblivion. But real change is bigger and more boring than that. And depending on where your privileges and powers fall, being active, being an ally, working for change may look very different and may not always be easily posted to social media or framed as a hero narrative.
The last several months have made me do some serious reflection on what leadership truly means to me. I think as a society we tend to think that strong leaders manifest as aggressive, outspoken, stubborn — they tend to be the people we perceive as the ones who get-things-done-no-matter-the-cost. And these qualities have a gender-bias spectrum that cannot be ignored. Certainly there is a time and place for a force of will and hard uncomfortable decisions — but I think having a vision is not the same as having an ego, and the work toward that vision can look a lot more like care and collaboration than a single-minded drive. In the end, how we govern ourselves on the micro scale (in our theatre community, perhaps) reflects so much of what we aspire to in the macro.
You do not have to give up theatre in order to fight the fights important to you. Theatre is part of the practice.
So what stories do you want to make?
A father friend of mine wants to write a environmental socialist utopian novel. As a father, leaning into hopeful futures feels great.
As an auntie, I’m embracing my horror phase. I’ve been writing four plays this fall that all land on the horror spectrum. I’m okay with my role as the angry auntie.
A friend of mine told our group chat that a professor of hers once gave this advice: Find the thing that makes you feel alive and then become ferally protective of it.
So, go do that. Don’t stop doing that. Just as a baseline.
Also always helpful to get some dialogue advice:
Visiting the Dead…
by Robin Byrd
In my dreams the other night, I met my twin aunts. They were happy together; they were young again – just turned thirty – the age where I first took note of them and mother, who was thirty-two. I had wanted to make sure I remembered them as they were because they were getting old. They were no longer in their twenties. I was too young to know thirty is not old. They were laughing and asked me what I was doing there. “Visiting,” I said.
I am not sure why I dreamed of them. I will look into it further later. This is the second dream I’ve had in as many months where I was seeking out someone in a hidden place and being asked, “What are you doing here?” Again, I was visiting.
The places were nearly identical in that they were located in some sort of festival-like place, either underground or in a hidden realm. The atmosphere reminded me of the festivals we used to have in my school gymnasium when I was in grade school.
My biggest questions are: why am I visiting the dead, and why are they at festivals?
I am wondering if it has anything to do with my break from writing plays. While reworking some pieces, I have not started anything new outside of my deep inner process. Which, as I think on it more, may be where the dreams are coming from.
I am also wondering if it is time to shift back to writing plays again. Lately, I have been delving into alternative poetic styles of expression. I am also starting to lose interest in things other than story. I’m obsessed with research, knowing that the fodder will be used in something one day. I have got to get away. I need to get away lest I drown in an overabundance of stories cutting off my air, lest I bust due to the worlds growing within me fighting to be born.
Anticipating the many new branches growing from my tree of life, I am excited for the coming days. I look forward to many new birth dates and an answer to why I am visiting the dead in my dreams…
The Lost Dolans
by Cynthia Wands
Betty and Charlie Dolan, my paternal grandparents, around 1918
I recently traveled to Ireland and England, my first international travel in many years, and returned as a different person. I suspected that this journey would change me, but I was surprised at my intense internal struggle as I tried to adapt between me and my (travel sized) demons.
Thanks to the generosity of a dear friend, I was able to travel the Irish countryside, drink beer and listen to Irish music in pubs, and investigate leads to my mother’s family. “The Lost Dolans”, my grandfather’s family from Ireland, have always been a missing link in our ancestry, with many stories and wild claims that could never be tracked down. Now I was actually in the country of my mother’s family for the first time, and I hoped to find some connections.
Ancestry can be such an emotionally charged arena; there were hopes to find dissolved family ties, names that would refocus our Dolan legacy, and also, a discovery of a few fine country mansions and discretely wealthy family members. Dear Reader, I did not find these.
Instead I found that thousands of Dolans fled the island during The Great Hunger, a famine that decimated the island between1845-1852. The migration of over 2 million people by 1855 changed Ireland – and my grandfather’s family seems to have immigrated sometime, in phases, during the late 1800’s. I already knew that Charlie Dolan, my grandfather, was one of 13 children, had a twin sister, and was actually born in New York, not Ireland, and served in the United States Navy in WWI.
There was an evening in the Brazen Head Pub in Dublin, (I know, those Irish pub names!) where I was moaning about the fact that I was at a loss of finding my Dolan family roots.
Suddenly the fellow at the table right next us, overheard me, leans back and says to me, “I’m a Dolan.”
Yes, he was. Shaun Dolan is from Australia and he was in Ireland looking for his Dolan roots, and had researched a “Dolan’s Bar” in Clara, up in County Offaly. He had just been there, and suggested we asked for Dessie, Dessie Dolan, who owned the place. That’s the thing about Ireland: you can find a part of your family who went to Australia, and they’ll tell you the bar to go to so you can get more family information. So the next day we went to Dolan’s Bar in Clara.
So I did meet with Dessie Dolan and his beautiful wife, and I can tell you that they were wonderful people, and after a good 30 minutes of besieging them with questions about their Dolan family legacy, we agreed that a Charlie Dolan, an ancestor of his, could have been a distant ancestor of my grandfather. I’d like to go back to Dolan’s Bar in Clara; they have live music at night, and it seemed like a wonderful place. Dessie suggested we look for his brother’s place in Blacklion, County Cavan, at the Dugout, a pub where we could find more information about the Dolans. So we drove over to Blacklion and the Dugouot and- well. Here’s where we realized that we were playing whack-a-mole pub style. We could probably go to every pub in the midlands and find a connection to a Dolan family member.
And that was the end of my Dolan research. There are no church records, or civil register records of my branch of Dolan family that came from County Cork to Upstate New York. So we went on to have more adventures in Ireland, and I know I’ll meet up with more Dolans in my future travels.
And even though I didn’t find more of my Dolan family history, I did find some surprising lessons in adapting strategies. I found that having the courage of my curiosities to pursue the unknown, that I had to trust that sometimes, you just don’t find the answers you’re looking for, but you might find some different questions.
The next week, I was in London and I had a chance to see the Irish play “Juno and the Paycock”, by Sean O’Casey at the Gielgud Theatre. The production had mixed reviews, with the actor Mark Rylance portraying a “drunken fantasist” in a tragicomedy that features a tortured Irish family caught up in poverty and war. It was brutally funny, tragically bleak, fascinating and hard to watch.
Watching a play about an impoverished Irish family, having just attempted to find more information on my own impoverished Irish family, made for a strange dissonance. I could appreciate the performances and I was also far away, thinking of my Irish ancestors, and their struggle for survival.
In my writing I often think about molecular memory – the body memory – the platform in which our DNA dances to the tune of their biochemistry. The documented history of my Irish family remains beyond my grasp, but I carry them with me.
The FPI Files: Exploring, Healing and Educating Through the World Premiere of “Luzmi”
By Elana Luo
In lieu of a plane ticket from LA to Bogotá, HERO Theatre offers audiences the much more affordable and low-emission option of venturing into the mountains and rainforests of Colombia as a viewer of Diana Burbano’s new play, Luzmi. Devised and directed by HERO founder and producing artistic director Elisa Bocanegra, the play follows the eponymous young woman, Luzmi, as she returns from the United States to her birthplace of Colombia. There, she experiences the country’s abundant natural biodiversity as well as human threats to it, and embraces the communities that rely and care for it.
Luzmi serves as the inaugural production of HERO’s Nuestra Planeta, an initiative with the goal of generating new work about environmental justice issues in Latine countries. To prepare for and ground Luzmi in reality, Diana and Elisa took trips to Colombia and conducted years of research. Elisa, who is Puerto Rican, fell in love with the country, and Diana, who is Colombian, got to see a completely different side of it. I had a chat with them to talk through what took to put Luzmi together—what inspired it and how it inspired them right back.
Elana Luo: Let’s start at the beginning. Tell me about the genesis of Luzmi.
Elisa Bocanegra: I started Nuestro Planeta because I wanted to create a project that was reflective of what I was experiencing during COVID. I had suffered a great loss – I lost my brother – and I know a lot of other writers in our community and theater makers were really experiencing a great amount of sadness because all of the theaters were closing.
So once the airports opened, I got to go back to Puerto Rico and I started to write in nature. I started to go into the mountains, outside of the west coast of the island where my family’s from, [and to] the beach. I just immersed myself in nature in my homeland, and that was helping me a tremendous amount. I was losing my brother, watching him die over the course of 18 months—over Zoom because the hospitals were closed—and my only solace was nature.
I came back to LA and I thought to myself, “What if I created a program where I brought writers back to our ancestral homelands, and they can heal from the effects of COVID, from the effects of not being able to practice their art, and from the trauma that we have had to experience being artists of color in American theater? And what if we sought out nature in a place that we are not seen as others, and create there?”
Elana: Did you decide to work with just Latine writers?
Elisa: I knew from my studies that communities of color, especially Latine communities, are greatly affected by the climate crisis in California. I know that many of our Latine people are on the front lines of agriculture, [part of] workforces that cause us to be outdoors, experiencing that kind of punishing heat that the climate crisis has made happen.
We pay extra attention to narratives when they’re our own.
Elana: How did you land on Colombia for the first piece?
Elisa: I thought it would be great to start with Colombia, because it’s the second most biodiverse country on the planet, and the first most biodiverse country that’s Spanish-speaking. Diana and I had worked on another project at HERO, and I read in Diana’s bio that she was a Colombian immigrant. I was like, “Hey, I have this project, and I really think you’re so cool, and I like your writing so much. Do you want to take this commission on?” And so that’s how Luzmi started.
Elana: I heard there were some trips to Colombia that you took for research?
Elisa: I chose areas in Colombia based on some science research that I had done. The first was the Andes Mountains, outside of Risaralda, which has the highest amount of endemic bird concentration. Orchids grow there, and there are more butterflies there than anywhere in the country. And then the other part was that Colombian side of the Amazon rainforest. That was the first trip. After that, I asked Diana, “Do you feel like you have enough to get started on on this?” And she said yes. And I said, “Okay, I’m going to apply for a Fulbright to go back to Colombia and to do some more research”
Elana: How did that turn out?
Elisa: I didn’t think that I would get a Fulbright. I was like, “I’m in an online MFA program. I’m never getting a Fulbright.” And, you know? And I got it. I sent a letter to Instituto Humboldt, which is Columbia’s largest biodiversity research center. And I said, “I’m an artist, I have HERO Theatre, I have this initiative. I would love to come and be in residence there. I can provide theater education based on your science studies.”
They took about six months to write back, but they wrote back: “Sure, come!”
And so I was sort of like “the theater lady.” The biologist would come in and say, “We’re working in a community that we’re studying wetlands, or butterflies and insects,” and I would try to create theater for that community about the science work that they did. So that’s a long story, but I went back, Diana came back, and then we did the second part of her research studies.
Elana: What was that second trip like?
Diana Burbano: That second trip was steeped in actual communication with the actual people who live there—the people who are experiencing the day-by-day, the people who actually look at and own those parts of the Amazon, who belong there. And it’s a completely different experience. Seeing from a tourist’s eyes versus from those of the people who live there is really, really different.
Elisa: And then the biologist who took us through the Amazon Andes, Felipe Jiménez—we fell in love, and he’s now my husband.
Elana: Wow!
Diana: So maybe part of the story, maybe might have possibly been influenced, slightly, by—
Elisa: —by Diana saying, “Go for it, go for it!” And I’m like, the shyest—I got no mojo when it comes to boys, I never have! I’m a geek. My head has always been buried in theater books. And Diana was like, “Go, hang out with him tonight!”
Elana: That’s incredible. Diana, what were the trips to Colombia like for you, personally?
Diana: One of the most intriguing and important things that happened was sort of the ability to be there as a Colombian. It was literally being able to explore it knowing I belong there, but also with brand new eyes. That was really exciting. Going to Las Amazonas was eye opening, I mean, because it’s something that you read about and see in National Geographic Magazine, but to actually go and experience it—it starts seeping into your bones. You can see the climate change happening in front of your eyes. I mean, it changed my life.
Elana: Can you put into words what that shift was?
Diana: It’s a shift of responsibility. When you look at something—like you see it in a museum, or documentary, or whatever—you feel a lot of sympathy and empathy for it. But you’re always at a remove. When you’ve actually been to these places you can’t take yourself out of it. You can’t go back to looking at single use plastic anymore, because you’ve been there, you’ve seen the actual impact. And hopefully one of the things that we can do with our work is giving people the sense of what it feels like to really, really understand.
Elana: How did you go about connecting that with people at home in LA?
Diana: A lot of the times you get a commission and they’re like, “It can be inspired by or it can be this and that.” But we really did research and we really had things that that were important to to convey to the audiences, especially to our Latine audiences here in LA. I think so many Latine people want to be connected to nature. You find a lot of people who live in the cities with their little patches of land that they tend and their one fruit tree. And I feel like it’s bridging that connection between your own patch of land and the big patch of land that is the earth.
Elisa: Like a reconnection of sorts, right? Because our ancestors were deeply connected. Before lands were taken away, but that’s a whole ‘nother subject.
Elana: Elisa, how did you prepare to direct this piece?
Elisa: One of the reasons that really made me want to stay in Colombia was the fact that I am Puerto Rican, and I didn’t know enough about Colombia.
That’s one of the big mistakes they make in American theater. They’re like, “Oh, this person’s Latina, this person could direct that. That person’s Asian…” And we’re all from disparate cultures and countries. We’re not all the same. [Diana and I] embraced the similarities that we have, but I didn’t feel that I was equipped to direct a Colombian play, so being there for the two years really, really helped me.
Elana: How did that work with other members of the production?
Elisa: I also knew that the cast would not all be Colombian. We definitely strove to have as many Colombian actors as we could; half the cast is and half isn’t. That’s another thing about American theater. We just love to cast everybody in everything, but how do I direct actors to have a cultural sensitivity for the communities that they’re playing?
We can bring in an intimacy coordinator, but this is another element I consider to be very intimate. What is that sensitivity we should have? How do we work on this together? How do we make it so that the actors from the native homelands are feeling honored, and also feeling included in the building of the ensemble? So that’s something that I really wanted to do.
Elana: Luzmi was definitely a joint effort with the two of you working very closely together. What insights do you have from your experiences with creative collaboration?
Diana: Don’t be precious about your stuff. Don’t think you’re so great that you can’t reach out to somebody else and work with them. Because sometimes I find that people feel like, “This is mine, it’s only my thing—I don’t want to share it with anybody.” And yeah, there’s definitely pieces like that, but sometimes it’s okay to go ahead and expand your universe as far as how you write and how you create.
Elana: What’s your perspective from the other side, Elisa?
Elisa: For me, we have an infestation in American theater: It stank. It stinks! If we keep saying you have to have a Pulitzer in order for us to commission you, we’re not taking enough chances on playwrights from underserved communities.
I think what’s happening with a lot of our bigger theaters in America is that we’re not investing in community, and we’re also not giving credit to the subscribers. They actually want to discover. If I find a writer and I connect to the writer’s voice and I connect to them as a person, then I give them the opportunity to create a new play here at HERO.
Elana: It’s not all about pleasing every person in the audience.
Elisa: I’m less concerned about the finish line or what a critic would think and I’m more concerned about the collaborative experience that we have as writer, producer, director and actor in the room, and the healing of artists. I want a safe playground. Our artists have been so harmed in American theater. What I want HERO Theatre to be is that place where artists feel nurtured and we can create together, and the preciousness of what the finish line product has to be… that’s taken away.
“Luzmi” plays through October 27 at Inner-City Arts in Downtown Los Angeles. For tickets and more information, visit herotheatre.org.
The harvest
I speak often and often only of whatever is growing around me. How else are we to ground ourselves in life if not by the state of what lives near us too. In California especially, you must look more closely at the subtle changes happening around you, or you might miss the gentle shift of seasons that are taking place.
As we paint the canvas of our year, the boldest streaks of paint are of course, the unforgettable days when the outdoors dominated. The heat wave that caused rolling blackouts. The endless weeks of rain. The immense relief when the change so visibly came: the sun, the break in heat, the drop back to clear warmth, the kind that blurs the days together.
But I don’t want to miss what’s in between the moments that draw your eye first: the bougainvillea are blooming yet again. The grapes that crawl along the fence are beginning to turn from green to purple. New birds have moved into the neighborhood, there are new songs in the morning. Our foliage might be non-existent, but surely you can see that the sunset has turned from honey to amber now.
Our writing is like this too. As we begin to near the final stretch of the year, remember to ground yourself not only in the boldest marks you’ve made, but in the moments in between too. It is not about just what has been finished, but the pages started and abandoned, the thoughts you wrote down on a piece of paper and subsequently lost, and perhaps most of all: what changed in you this year, subtly, a small seed planted that you aren’t even aware will bloom your next work, maybe next year, maybe ten years from now. Take stock of your harvest. Even if there is not much visibly on the table today, that says nothing about the hard work taking place inside you.
wondering why
Have you ever had a moment and wonder why, why do I write plays? Or just, why do I write in general? This year has been filled with rewrites, a lot of producing, and some teaching, and I haven’t written. And I haven’t stopped to wonder, why am I not writing?
That brought me to another idea, was where do my ideas come from? But I think that’s a whole other conversation. Right now, I’m concerned with why I write.
I saw a play last night. A play that I have been wanting to see but afraid to see lest it ruin me and I never want to listen to that music again. In those first couple of moments, three rows away from the stage, and I was overcome with emotion. I wanted to cry. I didn’t because I got caught up in my thoughts and wondering, why am I crying? Why are these tears forming?
If you hadn’t noticed, I ask why a lot. And so as I sucked back the tears and watched as the cast danced and sang across the stage, my eyes were aglow, rimmed with tears. But I held them back. And I sat in awe, singing with the cast, enjoying some of the music. It didn’t quite ruin me, but some songs took me a few bars in to recognize what song they were singing. But at the end of the night, I was overjoyed.
And did that make me want to write? Mm, yes and no. It made me wonder about writing. It made me wonder why we write. Watching this play based on an album, written by a band, I wondered how the music all came together with the story and the dance. I wondered about the production of it. To know how things work.
So now I have to go back and find the documentary of the making of this piece. And maybe it will help me write. I’m hoping. Because I am in a funk right now. And I am overthinking things, if you couldn’t tell.
That’s what it is. I am overthinking why I write. Jennifer, just sit down and write! I tell people all the time, get in the practice of writing 10 minutes every morning. And even if you don’t know what to write, just write. Something will come out.
So, I guess as I’m writing this at 7 a.m. mornings are when I write. I should just do that instead of procrastinating by sharing with you the delight of a play that I saw last night and try and work on my own stuff because I want to write. I want to write plays and stories and share them with the world. Oh, but that’s a whole other different story, huh? Maybe tomorrow. For right now, I’m gonna set my timer to 10 minutes and hopefully write more than the same sentence over and over. I wish you good writing.
Bad Parenting
by Alison Minami
Over the weekend I took my five-year old to see Duel Reality by a group named The Seven Fingers at the Ahmanson. This show promised to be a mix of acrobatics, aerial stunts, and dance choreography set to the storyline of Romeo and Juliet. Think Cirque du Soleil, but on a much smaller, therefore, much more intimate scale. The morning of the show, I decided to explain the basic plot of Romeo and Juliet to my daughter. It was one of those things that I didn’t think through, and once I’d realized the folly of my ways, well, you could say, I was in too deep; I proceeded to tell my daughter the very end of Romeo and Juliet, death included but minus the graphic of daggers, and….surprise, surprise, she burst into tears.
As an aside, and perhaps, somehow, in some unconscious way, undergirding my questionable parenting decision, I’ll never forget in college going to a showing of the film Romeo and Juliet starring Claire Danes and Leonardo Dicaprio. It was the holiday season, and we were in a crowded mall in Cleveland. That was the first time I’d ever seen a family of four—mom, dad, girl, and boy—wear matching Christmas sweater outfits complete with Santa hats, without, I’d believed, any sense of irony. Having barely left high school, I could not stand the sight of these two sibling teenagers, leaner and taller than I (read: more American), happily donning the same gaudy red and green bauble sewn sweater as each other and their parents. I felt mortified on their behalf, and because I was young and judgmental—now I’m old and judgmental, but also much more empathetic and forgiving (I think, I hope), I attributed such behavior to all the stereotypes fed to me by my new-ish collegiate peers about the Midwest. Nevermind that I was then living in the Midwest, de facto a guest of the Midwest, drawing from its cultural and educational institutions like an ignorant leech, engaging in the worst kind of generalizing that I had hoped to escape when leaving high school.
I digress. It was on this same mall trip that I and a friend went to see Romeo and Juliet. And now that I think of it, I believe that this was the Thanksgiving Weekend, and we were the loners who had nowhere to go for the holiday, which tells you something perhaps about the origins of my judgment. Maybe, just maybe, in some twisted way, I was jealous of a family that loved so much, so openly, that that symbol of unification and holiday cheer overrode their tacky spectacle. Anyway, I was not as insightful as I’d believed myself to be at age nineteen. Sitting in the theater, I resisted enjoying the film. I used to reference Leonardo Dicaprio as Leonardo DiCRAPrio because I thought he was a shit actor. This wasn’t really based on anything except that everyone else seemed to think he was a heartthrob. I hadn’t even yet seen Titanic, which I’d later watch with a proselytizing Bible beater who tried to make Jesus ties to the film’s end to convert me to Christianity. I thought that movie was shit too. Why on earth didn’t Rose let homeboy onto the floating raft or whatever? And were we just going to gloss over all the poor people stuck on the ship, literally under lock and key to prevent them access to rescue boats? Why did it have to be about Leo and Kate, their love, and not the injustice of class discrimination? At the time, I was an anti-capitalist who didn’t understand capitalism, and certainly, not the capitalism embedded into the movies. Anyway, at the end of Romeo and Juliet (SPOILER ALERT), the theater erupted in clapping and cheer, and one kid in the row ahead gasped, “But wait, they die?” My friend and I took this as an opportunity to sneer and ridicule (privately) this presumed teenager. It was another way to separate and elevate ourselves–and to stereotype kids and their Midwestern origins, despite our likely only being older by a couple years. It really is embarrassing–for me, not them–to think of my snobbery. After all, just because I read Romeo and Juliet in eighth grade, doesn’t mean every kid does.
So back to my daughter. Yes, she cried, as one should expect at such a sad tragedy. Isn’t that what Shakespeare wanted? For us to feel. I tried to reel in my poor parenting decision, wiping away my daughter’s tears. “The main point of the story is that when you love someone, no one can keep you apart. Like me, I love you so much, that no matter what, I’ll always be with you,” I told her. To which, my daughter, without skipping a beat says, “unless you get arrested.” While this may lead you to question my other parenting decisions and to query why she might even know about the carceral state, try to stay focused.
Any description I come up with, cannot do justice to the extraordinary wonder of this show. There were people doing triple spins in the air before landing on their feet; there was pole climbing and sliding upside down, stopping short within an inch of their face hitting the floor; there was swinging and body tossing; there was hoop jumping and gliding like dolphins at Sea World but without water, and all without harnesses or safety ropes…I could go on. But suffice it to say, it was mostly a physical show, with very little in the way of Shakespeare, although audience members on one side of the house did receive blue bands while the other side received red bands, which we were supposed to raise into the air for our respective Capulet or Montague teams, until the end when we were encouraged to throw them in the air, casting aside our differences.
Despite the spectacular nature of acrobatics and body contortions, more than once my daughter leaned over and asked, “When are they going to die?” and “Is this the end, because I didn’t see anyone die?” As it turns out, no one dies. A performer, in one of the only lines in the whole show, announces, “We changed the end, because who needs that kind of tragedy these days?” (What?! I didn’t even have to tell my daughter about the poison and the fake death and the real death, not one, but two!) I guess the troupe had already thought through little children coming to see their show.
Why am I writing this? Because it just happened. It’s funny. It’s also a reflection of my bad parenting, I think. But also, also, drama is a thing that starts at the beginning (of life) and lasts forever. My daughter was a pure, or maybe I should say, unadulterated (literally) receiver of the story. She knows, at five, what sucks and what hurts, and she was waiting for it, even amidst the fanfare of triple flips in the air, she was waiting to see the simultaneous destruction and unwavering bond of star-crossed lovers reach its ultimate fate.
Art is the Yang and Yin is the Science.
by Analyn Revilla
Art is creation, the yang energy of expression. Edges define boundaries of dark and light and reflect upon the canvas of the retinal cones that mirror shapes and shades. Aural caves and visual effects filtering through the mind, a level of consciousness.
Where is the seat of consciousness?
Science is the inquiry and investigation, the yin energy of making sense of the stimuli of touch, sight, sound, smell and taste. The mind clutches to make order, sense orientation and have perspective of existence and reality. Truth is elusive through the lens of the mind.
Antennae probe into granularity of structures and grandiosity of formations of cosmic cliffs. Mirrors reflect back time of fading light like the waning of a siren, harkening what is to come and what too will pass. This form, illuminated with the light of consciousness, will also pass.
In Hindu philosophy all of the entire cosmos originate from the vibration of Aum (OM, ), since all existence is made of vibration. The breath expression articulated in the form and resounding the I AM.
