By Alison Minami

Emily Brauer Rogers grew up on a farm in Indiana with a large brood of siblings and cousins. Often left to their own devices (and imaginations), the children put on their own shows. As the eldest of the clan, Emily wore all the hats, serving as playwright, director, and star of the many theatrical productions they put on. This was the early beginnings of Emily’s life in the theatre.

Since graduating from the Master’s in Professional Writing Program at USC, Emily has been steadily writing for nearly two decades. Thematic to her work are “stories of strong women” that serve to answer the central question “How do we tell the stories of heroines we haven’t seen?” In her work “Bringing Iraq Home” Emily interviewed women who had been affected by the Iraq war, whether as veterans, family, or partners, examining both their struggles and sacrifices. Emily wanted to examine what it meant to go to war for women, and the lasting reverberations of wartime trauma, whether the women had been in combat or on the periphery.

I know Emily through the Company of Angels’ Playwriting Group, and I have read and admired her writing for over two years. Her play “Monstrous Women” explores the resilience and sisterhood of oppressed and unfairly maligned mythological female figures, including Siguanaba, a supernatural siren from Central American folklore with the head of a horse, or Yamauba, a mountain fairy from Japanese mythology, who seduces hunters before killing them. In another work “Undine”, Emily tells the story of a water sprite who is helping to alleviate drought while facing the wrath of her father. True to Emily’s words, these plays examine “stories that are bigger than life.” Emily is expert at teasing out the allegories of the patriarchy—the psychological traumas on women, their survival strategies, and their deep reserves of strength and empathy for each other as well as, yes, their capacity for betrayal and vengeance.

Her play “Bloomer Girls” follows the lives of women in baseball in the late 1800s and today. A play structured in innings, the scenes move back and forth in time as two central figures, Liz and Gwen, played by the same actress, must make difficult decisions surrounding their careers. Liz, a baseball player in 1800s, must decides whether to stay with her team or get married, while Gwen of modern-day struggles with being objectified as a female softball player in a PR stunt in exchange for the opportunity to be scouted for the National Softball League. Most recently “Bloomer Girls” had a professionally staged reading at Macha Theater in Seattle, directed by Anna Claire Day.

As a mother of two young girls, Emily continues to push the stories of women from the margins to the center as an artistic and moral imperative. This is something that she does in big and small ways, not just in her writing, but in her role as a mother, writing professor, and community artist. Emily has been a member of the Vagrancy Theater playwright’s group, Playground LA, Company of Angels, Hunger Artists of Orange County, and our very own Los Angeles Female Playwrights Initiative.

By Alison Minami

1. Wait until the last minute. Swim in a pool of guilt when you consider the months you were given. 
2. Get on Yelp to find the perfect coffee shop. Consider the seating, the available outlets, the parking, and savory food items, which means, must have melted cheese. Remember: location, location, location.
3. Situate. Why are coffee shops getting rid of their outlets? Do they resent the writers?  Sit next to someone who appears appropriately interesting (not too crazy, not too loud, but not too boring. Will they watch your laptop if you need to go to the bathroom? Of course not, you always say sure when people ask you, but you’d never leave your precious, half-written, non-backed-up scenes in the hands of others.)
4. Do a mental assessment of all those half-written scenes you wrote and decide to start over. New page, new document. 
5. Let your eyes and ears roam the room. Listen to people: on their phones, in their meetings, deep inside their gossip. 
6. Type up their words–dressed up in their inflection, their outrage, their excitement. Everything is copy, even this saying. (Norah Ephron’s grandmother?)
7. Ruminate over all the public plagiarism scandals. That girl from Harvard–name omitted here because she deserves re-invention; she was so young. The guy Oprah named to her book club. The ridiculous white woman who pretended to have a Black foster mother named “Big Mama”. You called that one right away after reading the NYT mixed review of her memoir. Chuckle at the memory of your perspicacity and your ensuing vindication. 
8. Start to cast the play for the developmental reading, even though you’re not even sure which characters to keep and which to ax. Too many is better than not enough right? Send a flurry of emails, inform them that the reading will be cold. Keep the pressure down.
9. Crave a cigarette. Pretend to smoke one and hope no one is watching. Wonder why you didn’t do more drugs in your youth. Would your life have been better or over?
10. Fill out your ballot. Begrudgingly. Remind yourself to incorporate your cynicism into one character. Or two, why not? 
11. Think again about your play–the one you’re actually trying to write. Make excuses–a lot of them. If you hadn’t taken on that second job that’s not even really worth the money. If you’d only started earlier. If you hadn’t gotten sick and slept through an entire week. If you’d researched better, this all might be so much easier. 
12. Speaking of research…get on Youtube. Start with a relevant question. Like, what is the strategy of Voir Dire? Watch some lectures. Take notes until you feel bored. 
13.  Jump into a rabbit hole of court tv sentencing videos. Observe the faces of defendants as they hear their fate. Be disgusted by your voyeurism. 
14. Turn your attention to your ailments. Start searching up about that strange skin rash on your finger. The possibility of early onset tinnitus. The pain in your bunion when the weather turns cold. 
15. Get sucked into the ads. Wonder why you’ve been so poor when there are so many ways to make money. 
16. Consider what it would actually take to get a flat belly. Or how to get flawless skin. Why are there suddenly lines around your neck? 
17. Think of metaphors too. Cliched ones, strange ones. You are lost out at sea with this damn play. You are in a perpetual permanent press cycle in the washing machine of your life. 
18. Think of alliteration. How cool it is, how crisp it is, how syntactically delightful.
19. Think of repetition. And rhythm. It’s pertinent; it relates. This is a patchwork play. Things, people, characters, they must weave through like colored thread. But order matters. And what the fuck is the order?
20. Consider your concerns about the climate. Why did it take you this long? What are you doing about it? Admit, nothing. Is putting it in your play a small measure of penance?
21. Think of the parts of a story, especially the climax. What is the climax of your play? Must a play have a climax? Can it be a series of vignettes that don’t actually rise to any dramatic moment of peril?
22. Notice the temperature. You are cold. It’s a cold world. Everything is a metaphor for capitalism and its grip on us. It lives in our bones. 
23. Notice the time. In minutes, hours, and days until your reading, and by the way, check your emails for actor responses. 
24. Map out a schedule, number of pages per day and hour until your deadline. Revise and rewrite as needed, as every hour escapes you and you stare at page 15, the place where you are stuck. 
25. Go home. Go to sleep. Pray that your dreams will inform you. 
26. Wake up early and try to manifest with meditation. Picture yourself banging away at the keyboard. The words tumble out of you. They dance on the page. 
27. Feel the mounting dread in the pit of your stomach. Think of its color, its texture. Consider if it is gassy or solid. Can you vomit it out? Would it be better expelled the other way?
28. Google contemporary playwrights.  Google the awards they’ve won. 
29. Eat a lot. Think about the concept of insatiability. Does it live in every worthwhile play? Is it evil, good, or neutral?
30. T-minus twenty four hours until the reading. Remind the actors, they will be reading cold. Apologize profusely. Promise they’ll have a script by lunchtime.
31. Turn off the wi-fi. Make more coffee. 
32. Tell yourself: a bad decision is better than no decision at all. 
33. Cut and paste. Cut and paste. Sew at the edges of words between the jaggedly cut fabrics you are willing into form. Think of the word interstitial. 
34. Look up how to pull an all nighter. Roll your eyes at their dumb tips, but do stick your face in the freezer. Then sit again at the keyboard. 
35. Set an alarm and take a nap in an uncomfortable position, so as not to oversleep. 
36. Wake up. Train your eyes on the clock. Remember, this work is for you. Remember, you have something to say. 
37. Write. Write a lot. Messily, desperately, with both focus and abandon. Focused abandon?
38. Invoke the Gods. Ask for a miracle. 
39. Strive for passable and page count, forget perfection. Work toward a semblance of cohesion, create a lot of filler dialogue to be replaced later. 
40. Grind. Your keyboard. Your teeth. The hours into minutes. 
41. Eyes on the page count. Eyes on the clock. Eyes on the words, the sentences, the stage directions. 
42. Think of the end, which will really be the beginning. Get to it. Complete the cycle, so that you can rinse and repeat. 
43. Think of the actors…waiting. Think of their frustrations, their judgments. You’re already two hours past the promised lunchtime hour. Re-frame your negative thinking. Think of their grace; think of their talent. 
44. Freewrite a monologue on the fear of death. This is the heart of the character; this is the heart of the play. This is the existential question. Make your audience consider their mortality.
45. Decide on an end. Then press send. 

By Alison Minami

I first met Judy Soo Hoo in our graduate MFA program. She was one of the first students to share in our writers’ workshop, and even then, I thought her work was energetic, lively, and original. We were fiction writers together, so it was a funny coincidence when I moved to Los Angeles, decided to be an actress, and landed an understudy role in a play that she was commissioned to write for East West Players through their Theatre for Youth Program.

Little did I know, prior to our time in grad school, Judy had been writing plays for years. She started in a playwriting class in the David Henry Hwang Writers Institute (DHHWI) and went on to produce shows with the Asian American Theatre Lodestone, Watts Theatre Project, and Company of Angels. She eventually went on to teach playwriting with the DHHWI. This past year, Judy has been a part of Center Theatre Group’s Writers’ Workshop, an all-female group (at least this season) run by playwright Luis Alfaro, an Associate Artistic Director at CTG and a professor of Dramatic Arts at USC. Judy values Alfaro’s emphasis on the creative process and his insistence that the roots of a play begin in our subconscious. Alfaro encourages the writers to “write from the body.” As Judy puts it “writing from the body allows the writer to tap into the emotion that is swimming in the play.”

Starting last summer, the group met bi-weekly to talk shop and share pages. This past Spring, they had a retreat at the Mark Taper to have their work read aloud by professional actors and to receive feedback to support the development process. This week, their plays will have professionally staged readings at the Kirk Douglas, as the culmination of their year-long playwriting communion.

Judy’s play “What Lies Behind” is about a Chinese American woman attempting to solve the disappearance of her sister by signing-up her dementia-afflicted father, who was the last person to have seen her, in a gene-editing study that may recall his memory. Judy very much wanted to explore the mystery genre “as a way to explore family relationships”. The play was inspired, in part, by Judy’s own mother’s experience with dementia in her final year. Judy acted as her mother’s primary caretaker and recalls a time when her mother did not recognize her at all, instead calling her by someone else’s name. This, of course, would be jarring for any adult child and prompted Judy to delve into the questions around what and “how we remember” our lost loved ones.

Another theme of the play—what is rising from Judy’s subconscious—is the wave of anti-Asian violence in America. Libby, the play’s protagonist, is also the host of “Yellow Peril”, a podcast that discusses anti-Asian violence. Libby’s growing concern with the spate of racially motivated violent crime promises to converge with the unravelling mystery of the missing sister.

The reading of “What Lies Behind”, directed by Jeff Liu, is this Friday, September 9 at 8pm. For tickets, please visit ticketing for this event at Center Theater Group.

By Alison Minami

The Company of Angels Theater (CoA) is gearing up for its New Works Festival, which will be held in-person at their Boyle Heights theater space from October 29 – November 13. The festival will include five full length plays and an evening of shorter pieces that were all developed through their playwrights’ group. 

The CoA playwrights’ group, of which I have been a member for two seasons, has been running for nearly fifteen years. Artistic Director, Armando Molina, explains that the group was born out of a need to support Los Angeles based playwrights from underrepresented communities. He says “During a time when other large theater [institutions] were dissolving diversity initiatives, CoA picked up the slack to support a forum for diverse voices to experiment and develop” their work.

While playwrights are not mandated to set their plays in Los Angeles, Molina describes the spirit of CoA as committed to creating work that “reflects and responds to LA” whether it be literal or embodied in the notion of LA as a “phenomenon” or a “state of mind.” In the past, the group served as an incubator for CoA’s annual LA Short Play Festival (formerly LA Views), which was a fully produced evening of theater cast with company members.

The group meets bi-weekly to share new pages that are read aloud, and playwrights receive feedback from those who’ve lived with the work from the ground up and know its overall aims. Additionally, CoA offers further support by bringing in a professional dramaturg to work with writers and offer feedback on their pieces to ready them for the rehearsal process, and ultimately, a staged reading. Sonia Desai, Literary Associate at the Old Globe Theatre, served as this season’s dramaturg, and my conversations with her were so insightful and cracked open the possibilities for my play.

Tamadhur Al-Aqeel and John Dubiel have served as co-leaders of the playwrights’ group for over a decade. They are both facilitators and participating playwrights who know the value of a supportive and intimate space to develop work.  Al-Aqeel describes the group as having been “a wonderful place to land” after taking a long break from writing to raise her young children. After seeing her first CoA show, she was inspired to get back to writing, and the group reaffirmed that she could “still write.” This is a huge epiphany for writers who are burdened by the insecurity that often comes with having shut off their creative faucet for years; I can relate.

For myself, CoA has supported a writing practice and helped me to stay connected to a creative community. At the height of the pandemic, I knew that the isolation was either going to take me down or not. I chose the latter. The past few years have been the most creatively productive time for me as a writer. Formerly, I was primarily a fiction writer, an even more lonely endeavor than playwriting. For years, I would beat myself up and think “If you want to write, just write” or “If you’re not writing, you obviously don’t want it bad enough”—all the unproductive, self-flagellating words that block an artist’s creative mind. CoA helped to resuscitate my creative voice, and I learned that it wasn’t that I couldn’t write, I just needed better structure and support. Dubiel echoes this sense of community, saying that CoA provides “a lot of opportunity for creative people to come together.”

Coming together will finally happen in-person after two long years of virtual zooms and shows. CoA is reuniting with their New Works Festival, and I for one am looking forward to meeting the people who’ve supported my creative life in real life. Maybe I can give them a big hug too! This season’s playwrights include: Tamadhur Al-Aqeel, John Dubiel, Leah Zhang, MJ Kang, Emily Brauer Rogers, Matt Callahan, Danny Munoz and Alison Minami. For a full schedule of performance dates and times please visit the Company of Angels.

My daughter has epic temper tantrums. They are developmentally age appropriate, but they are very uncomfortable to sit through as a parent. I witness with a mix of emotions–awe, envy, and irritation as she rages on. I must clasp my hands together, as if in prayer, and remain across the room for fear that I will grab her or hold my hand to her mouth, or worse. Sometimes I see my child self, and then my adult self, in her unrestrained volcanic eruption, and I think of my own parents, how they may have been raised, how they were so ill-equipped to understand a child’s mind, which is empty of words but full of raw emotion, how they would not allow or make space for my feelings, how everything was personal. I wonder if those feelings are lodged somewhere deep in my psyche or muscle tissue because they were not given permission to exist. My daughter’s fits are pure, unfiltered by the demands of civility. Once, after she’d calmed down and was sitting in my embrace, she told me “It’s hard to stop [crying]” because I had wrongfully implored her after a full half hour of her wailing to “Stop! Just STOP!”  I thanked her for sharing, for naming and processing the emotional experience so that I could understand just a little of what she was going through, and it was helpful and instructive; I got it. I was reminded that the tantrum is beyond her control; it needed to move through her in order to expel. Her self-awareness astounds and inspires me.

I’m thinking a lot about how we are not taught in school (or life) to name our feelings, to own our feelings, to make friends with our feelings, or to take responsibility for our feelings. Everything is so behavior oriented, but feelings are what prompt action. (Is it funny to think about a feeling? The writer’s brain must force feelings into justification, reason, transmutation.) I think about acts of violence and how the perpetrator was unlikely ever given permission to hold space for their own feelings, to sit with, to honor, and to forgive rage enough to let it dissipate. Yes, I am someone whose heart breaks for the school shooter as much as it does for his victims. I think of how social and economic forces are squeezing the citizenry to the point of self-destruction; their feelings, unprocessed, turn to darkness. We are not our feelings, I am told. Yet they are so seductive, so entrancing, so controlling…and they move us both negatively and positively depending on how we interpret them.

In his book “The Untethered Soul” Michael Singer writes:

When the energy can’t make it through the mind because of conflicts with other thoughts and mental concepts, it then tries to release through the heart. That is what creates all the emotional activity. When you resist even that release, the energy gets packed up and forced into deep storage within the heart. In the yogic tradition, the unfinished energy pattern is called a Samskara. This is a Sanskrit word meaning “impression,” and in the yogic teachings it is considered one of the most important influences affecting your life. A Samskara is a blockage, an impression from the past. It’s an unfinished energy pattern that ends up running your life.

It’s a fine balance, our brain’s relationship to the emotional experience within our bodies. One the one hand, we should acknowledge what we feel, but on the other hand we should not allow our feelings to define us, at least when they are negative. But isn’t our feeling world–particularly our pain and anger–what activates our creative expressions? And don’t our creative expressions elevate our sense of justice, ethics, and humanity?

My favorite poem by Amiri Baraka

Young Soul

First, feel, then feel, then
read, or read, then feel,
then fall, or stand, where you
already are. Think
of yourself, and the other
selves…think
of your mother
and sisters,
and your bentslick father, then feel, or
fall where you already are
if nothing else will move you
then read
and look deeply
into all matters
come close to you
city boys–country men

Make some muscle in your head,
but use the muscle
in yr heart.

In one of my writing groups, we recently did a 15 minute freewriting exercise based on the prompt: 2 Characters, 1 Mask (a real mask). Halfway through, we were asked to shift from writing about the literal mask to the figurative one. This was a prompt provided by playwright and teacher Alice Tuan. It was a lot of fun, and I offer it to you. Here’s what I came up with:

A is waiting for B. B walks in wearing a dramatic mask that covers her/his/their entire face.

A: Interesting.

B: I’m hiding.

A: From what?

B: From you.

A: I see you.

B: Do you?

A: What’s underneath?

B: You don’t know.

A: I saw you last night.

B: And?

A: Did you hurt yourself?

B: No.

A: Did you use a chemical peel?

B: No.

A: Then what are you hiding?

B: Myself, from you.

A: Why do you need to hide from me?

B: I don’t.

A: Then?

B: I choose to.

A: I want to see your face.

B: I want to see your brain.

A: What?

B: Why should I show you my face?

A: Because this is weird and not normal.

B: Well, what is normal?

A: I can’t work like this.

B: I can’t work like this.

A: I refuse.

B: Now you get it.

A: Get what?

B: Do you ever lie?

A: Everybody lies.

B: To me?

A: No. (Pause.) White lies maybe.

B: What’s an example.

A: Can’t think of one off the top of my head.

B: Go inside of it then.

A: Okay, I told you I loved to cook.

B: That one got blown pretty quick.

A: Yes, I fessed up.

B: You had to.

A: I’m an open book.

B: Only in cuneiform.

A: What is that?

B: Ancient scroll.

A: So you’re wearing a mask to prove that I’m a liar.

B: No, for fairness.

A: I hide the truth, so you hide your face?

B: Maybe it’ll make you listen.

A: I’m confused.

B: Embrace confusion. It helps.

A: With what?

B: Growth.

A: Please take off your mask.

B: You go first.

A: I’m not wearing one.

B: You are. You have many.

A: You’re speaking in tongues.

B: Take it off. Just one.

A: Fine.

B: Make it good.

A: I’m scared.

B: Of what?

A: Leaving you.