On September 2, 2026, playwright Sigrid Gilmer sat down with Jesse Bliss – writer, performer, educator, founder of the The Roots and Wings Project and the writer/director of Realm of the River, which opens September 18th at the Rosenthal Theatre at Inner-City Arts – to talk about Jesse’s new play.
Here is an edited excerpt of their conversation:
Sigrid Gilmer: I wanted to frame this interview around friendship, because we’re friends and I love you. You are one of the most special people in the world to me.
Jesse Bliss: Likewise, Sigrid, I love you so much. You’re one of my favorite humans.
Sigrid: Oh, that’s nice! I want to talk about female friendship, joy, resistance, because your play Realm of the River starts with two friends on their way to pick up their other homie, so they can go wild out and dance. But the night takes a dark turn and they find themselves at the edge of a river trying to come together to make life or death decision. I don’t want to give to much away. People should go and see it.
Jesse: Right!
Sigrid: For me the heart of the play is the friendship between the three main women and how it saves them from a very tough night. Thinking about the importances of women holding each other, a question that came up for me was, was there a woman, when you were starting out, who was an inspiration for you?
Jesse: My acting teacher, Linda. Linda Lowry, who I met in San Francisco, was definitely somebody who really invested in me and pulled me up. She was a single mother, an actress and a prodigy of Bobby Lewis from the original Actor’s Studio. He studied with Stanislavski, so Linda came from that very strict old school lineage. I had so much respect for her because she was so talented and so hardworking, and she really was a person who had pulled herself through life. I respected that, you know?
Sigrid: Yeah, yeah. Tell me, even though I know – this is for the interview – tell me where you started?
Jesse: On my path with this work?
Sigrid: Yeah?
Jesse: I definitely started with Linda. I moved to San Francisco when I was 20 with nothing. I moved with my friend and we lived in the Tenderloin where we used to drop sacks of flour down to the crackheads so we could make a run for it. I mean, we were in the Tenderloin. It’s the worst part of San Francisco. We moved there, and three weeks after we got there I was walking up Geary Street and I saw this theater, the Phoenix Theatre, and there was Linda. And so I asked her, what is this place? And she said, “Come inside. It’s cold out there.”
I think Linda was the first woman I ever became close with in this profession. I was always searching for material to work on in her acting class because the work for women was nothing I could relate to, and so she would tell me, “You’re a writer. You should write your own material.” And that was…
I’d always written my whole life, but I just did it because it was in my heart to do it. She gave me the suggestion that I could create work that would speak truthfully to our experiences, and that appealed to me only because it wasn’t already in the landscape.
Sigrid: Hmm. Okay. I’m not even going to try to think of a clever way to transition this. I was thinking of your writing and your new play. I think most of all the stuff I’ve read of yours is very poetic. It’s like everyday language, everyday speech flipped and heightened. You use a lot of repetition. It’s the language mounted in a way that evokes slam poetry, liturgical ritual language. Talk about how you use language as a tool of resistance.
Jesse: You know what? You made me think of my friend Gustavo, who just passed away. I was reading something he wrote just the other day: “You can use language to build or burn bridges.”
Words have power. You know in our culture, in this country, we’ve been conditioned into silence and taught that it will protect us. And so words, when used in certain contexts, can help us to liberate. Whether it’s using your words to advocate for something that you need or advocating for something that somebody else needs, or if it’s like a play for instance – offering it as a reflection of what is.
Sigrid: In Realm, especially around Esme and Oshun’s relationship, there is this question of what are we honestly reflecting back.
Jesse: Brandon Ramon Williams, one of the actors in the play, said that nobody in this play can hide from themselves. Everybody’s taking accountability. They all face off with themselves, which is very metaphoric.
Brandon’s character is named Emir – a mirror. So there is that strong undertone of taking a look, you know. But I think women, especially, are conditioned from so early on to make our relationship to our reflection shallow and harmful. And we’re taught to detect flaws and detect in our faces and our bodies things that are in line with the preference of patriarchy, rather than things that are in line with nature and what makes us feel whole.
Sigrid: Yeah, yeah: I’m not seeing myself like it’s a one-way relationship, I’m looking at myself as I would think a man would look at me. So what do I really look like?
Jesse: Yes.
Sigrid: And how can I even evaluate because what we deem attractive is so narrow and framed by patriarchy and white supremacy!
Jesse: It’s a big industry. A lot of profit, right? Financial gain off making us feel that way.
Sigrid: Truly.
Jesse: Buy this to look like that. Get this surgery to achieve that, right? To give us something that we inherently have. It’s not even beauty, because what is that? It’s such a subjective thing. We’re made to feel so bad about ourselves because that’s profitable.
And this whole craze of media makes it all worse. All the filters that people are using on top of all of the surgeries that are happening… just combine all of that and people are made to feel bad about themselves, comparing themselves to some some weird, poisonous non-existent aesthetic.
Sigrid: That’s a crazy thing.
Jesse: It doesn’t exist, It’s not a true thing, but we act as if it is.
Sigrid: Speaking of belief in things that cannot be seen, there’s so much praying in in Realm of the River. So much just like straight up, I’m gonna drop to my knees here at this river. I’m gonna get on this dance floor and I’m gonna pray.
Jesse: Because prayer is resistance. I think prayer is that place that arrests all of these false notions that push along our society. It is to me. Prayer automatically stills that because when you’re praying, you’re acknowledging that there’s something beyond all of this that is beautiful, that’s a force of love, that is nurturing. And so yeah: I’m a big believer that prayer, no matter what you’re praying to. Or even meditation or anything that puts you in that state, it automatically is gonna disarm the false thoughts and the voices and all the buy-in that happens – buying into these ideas that I’m not what I should be.
Like in the play, there’s a reference to the flower could just enjoy being a flower. Just be fragrant all on your own. Yeah, just enjoy your rightness. But we’re taught that what we are is wrong. So the prayer, I think, is a reminder that we’re in relationship to something really beautiful, and we’re a part of that.
Sigrid: For me that’s what the play is about.
Jesse: Also, that the women just want to ride out and have fun! Like, could they just for one night not think something’s wrong with them? Couldn’t they just go dancing and enjoy themselves and just be free, just be a human being? Enjoy being alive and escape all of these weighing notions that something’s wrong all the time with who they are?
Sigrid: We’re so conditioned.
Jesse: Right. And if you try to walk around not buying in and just being free, it’s like offensive to people. Why is she having fun? Why is she laughing at the grocery store?
Sigrid: Like, stop it!
Jesse: It’s always with women about how we behave and how we’re expected to behave; it’s such a sham.
Sigrid: What do you think it is about joy – like female joy – that rattles people?
Jesse: Because you can’t make money off of it. It’s like it’s outside the realm of ownership.
Sigrid: Talk more… Oh wait. We’ve been talking for an hour!
Jesse: You started this conversation with the idea of friendship, and so just to speak to that as we close, I think there’s…
I was just writing about this the other day. I don’t think anything saves a woman like a friend, another woman friend. You know, because it’s like we call back each other’s souls. When I laugh with you, oh my God! I I mean, I laugh myself in oblivion, and it’s the best. I’m like, “Oh, there I am!”
Sigrid: To have somebody who… and I feel like with us. I feel like this with you. I feel 1000% seen and loved, and that is… I mean-I’m crying now. There’s nothing like that.
Jesse: It’s a lifeline. It’s like it’s breath itself. It’s not like a relationship to nature, but it’s the only thing that could even get slightly close to that feeling. You know when you’re someplace really really beautiful and you can’t help but feel alive? The air is so fresh, and you’re just like, “Oh, nothing’s bothering me right now. I’m so happy.” Right? It’s that beautiful.
“Realm of the River,” written and directed by Jesse Bliss, runs from September 18th thru September 27th. Fridays & Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 2pm at the Rosenthal Theatre at Inner-City Arts.
Visit www.therootsandwingsproject.com/realm-of-the-river for tickets and more information.
