Tag Archives: Jenny Soo

The FPI Files: Finding Empathy in Echo’s “For Want of a Horse”

Female Artists, playwriting, Producing, , , , , , , , , , , ,

by Casey Fleming

“PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE DON’T TELL ANYONE HOW THIS PLAY ENDS!” reads the page two playbill note of For Want of a Horse, staged by Atwater Village’s Echo Theater Company. 

Here is where I would put a brisk, snappy summary of the play for you – an implied promise that I won’t be perfectly keeping, because I’m not quite sure how I would explain this world premiere. This, I believe, is a compliment to the audaciousness of playwright Olivia Dufault who, in her “darkly comic, deeply human exploration of love, desire and unconventional relationships,” brings to the stage something challenging and deeply, unusually original.

From the Echo’s website, continued: “Calvin is devoted to his wife, Bonnie. But if Calvin is going to move forward, he needs to open up their relationship to include his new romantic partner. One complication: that partner would be Q-Tip – and Q-Tip is a horse.”

Jenny Soo, Joey Stromberg and Griffin Kelly – Photo by Cooper Bates

Put simply and likely predictably, it’s a shocking play. It is a testament to the writing, direction, and performance of the play that its innumerable shocking moments never felt played for the sake of shock alone, and even a note as direct as the plea in the playbill felt entirely warranted. Leaving the show, I heard two audience members say to one another that they’d have so much to talk about on the car ride home. What other marker of success should we determine theatre by? I don’t know exactly how to explain this play to you, nor to myself, nor what it made me walk away thinking, exactly. But I did walk away asking myself a multitude of questions and for that, I am grateful.

Prominently among these questions – on my way out and still now, as I sit writing – was why does it matter that a trans woman wrote this? As evident later on in this piece, I was able to send questions to playwright Olivia Dufault following the performance. I’m not sure I could tell you why, but I didn’t choose to ask a single one about gender. Sitting in the audience watching, my own trans-ness surfaced and stayed top of mind, and I felt my own interpretation of the play deeply and monumentally ground itself in what I heard the show say about gender, from its first line and every moment forward. What did it change, to me, knowing that this show was written by someone who shares an aspect of this identity? Everything. Nothing. Or in truth, something, somewhere in the murky space in between quiet relation and direct confrontation and a long, long road adorned with familiar waypoints, headed into the unknown.

Joey Stromberg and Jenny Soo – Photo by Cooper Bates

In addition to being trans, I’m aromantic- & asexual-spectrum – a set of identities that, upon their declaration, outline an even greater gulf between me and what/who this play works to portray. The profoundly distinct and distant experience I have with all types of romantic attraction thoroughly colored the type of attention I paid to this show, most explicably manifesting as what I think I’d term ‘heightened awareness’ of the questions it was asking in the moments and motions they were asked. An early line from Bonnie (played by Jenny Soo) about her reckoning with a difficult schoolchild echoed over and over again in my head: ‘as long as you’re not hurting anybody.’ As long as you’re not hurting anybody, as long as you’re not hurting anybody. You could take any word of that sentence and challenge it with this play. What is hurt, exactly? Who decides? How am I, the person sitting beneath the house lights, currently making that decision? “Anybody” accounts for who? What are the limits to empathy?

To dive further into the answers this play offers, and really, what challenges it strives to leave unanswered and openly on the table, I was able to send some questions to playwright Olivia Dufault who shared insight into the evolution, intention and staging of this world premiere.

Casey Fleming: Olivia, I read that your inspiration for this play came from your own reaction to an atypical interview (a New York magazine article entitled “What It’s Like to Date a Horse,” published in 2014). What, within your own experience reading and engaging with the article, made you feel that you HAD to write this play? 

Olivia Dufault

Olivia Dufault: When I first read the interview that inspired this play, my immediate response was shock, horror, and perverse amusement. But as I continued, I began to feel terrible pangs of empathy for everyone involved in the tragic situation – the husband, the wife, the horse. I found myself conflicted by these emotions; to what degree was empathy an appropriate response in this context? From this internal wrestling, this strange play emerged.

Casey: Walking out of the show, I heard a pair of audience members discussing how lively their conversation in the car on the way home would be. What two questions do you hope audience members walk away from this show asking themselves?

Olivia: What are the benefits and perils of empathy? And what exactly goes on in the head of a horse? 

Casey: What did you learn about yourself over the course of working on this play?

Olivia: I have a high tolerance for discomforting topics. Audacious subject matter invites audacious collaborators. And that it’s shockingly easy to write from the point of view of a barnyard animal.

Casey: How does your idea of what a playwright should do or be responsible for doing – universally, at scale – inform your approach to writing For Want of a Horse?

Olivia: Honestly, I wrote this play ten years ago, and did so very much for myself. That’s always been my relationship with my work. This play was made to challenge and amuse me; I hope it does the same for others.

I was lucky enough to get to speak with another artist who was challenged and amused by For Want of a Horse – director Elana Luo. She spoke directly to her experience working on the play and the practical, emotional, and logistical learnings that accompanied. 

Casey: In interpreting “challenge” to mean both content and technical ask, where were the areas of greatest challenge while directing this play? How did you approach and guide the cast/crew through them?

Elana Luo


Elana Luo: The play moves quickly between scenes in different locations, so we had to figure out how to utilize and transform the space accordingly, or perhaps not. It was a feat of coordination between all departments – Alex Mollo’s set, Leah Morrison’s costumes, Matt Richter’s lights, Alysha Bermudez’s sounds, and the actors who had to wrangle it all. I’m very grateful to my cast and crew for their collaboration and ingenuity.

Casey: Over the course of working on For Want of a Horse, what part of your understanding of the show shifted the most between table read and opening night?

Elana: I got to understand each of the characters much more intimately. Steve [Steven Culp], Griffin [Kelly], Jenny [Soo] and Joey [Stromberg] all brought their own perspectives and truly embody their roles, which has added more layers and realism to Olivia’s already well-drawn characters.

Casey: How has For Want of a Horse changed your approach to directing or helped you grow?

Elana: I’ve never directed a horse before. Lots of poop and subsequent mucking thereof. It’s a very humbling experience for a big and important director such as myself.

Casey: If you were to break down your vision for the technical design of the show into a few key words, what would they be?

Elana: Beautiful. Beastly. Hopefully Disney doesn’t come after us.

“For Want of a Horse,” written by Olivia Dufault and directed by Echo associate artistic director Elana Luo, runs at the Atwater Village Theatre through May 25th. For more information and to purchase tickets, call (747) 350-8066 or go to EchoTheaterCompany.com.

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The FPI Files: “Hungry Ghost” Completes “Her Vision, Her Voice” Season at Skylight

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by Carolina Pilar Xique

“The writer’s job is to be brave enough to be nostalgic.”

I heard those words from an English professor once. At the time, they resonated with me as someone who is often referred to as a nostalgic person—always bringing up a story of the past, over and over again. I come from a family & community that shares and retells all kinds of stories every time we see each other, whether they’re laugh-out-loud funny or overwhelmingly heart-wrenching. Storytelling has always been a way for me and my community to record our histories and form connections when it feels like there are only differences.

That’s probably why I became a theater artist & playwright.

That being said, I recently had the thought, “I’m getting so tired of writing and talking about the pandemic.”

I guess it’s difficult to feel nostalgic about terrifying moments in the past, especially if it feels like they’re still happening. The uncertainty, anxiety, and grief of the last three years is still so fresh that the retelling of it can feel not only exhaustingly overdone, but terrifying to grapple with. For so many of us, the pandemic exposed some of the most vulnerable, heart-breaking, unlikeable parts of ourselves. It separated us from our communities—which are often our lifelines—and forced us to deal with momentous social & political shifts while in physical solitude. Who wants to remember all of that?

But yet, the idea of “returning to normalcy” in this current moment of endemic is insulting to the millions of humans who are not the same people they were before 2020, and all of us who have lost friends & family & community members.

So where is the middle ground? Is there a middle ground? When & how do we as artists become brave enough to remember?

These questions and the words of that English professor were swimming in my head when I talked with Lisa Sanaye Dring about her new play, Hungry Ghost, directed by Jessica Hanna and premiering at Skylight Theatre Company for the final installment of their “Her Voice, Her Vision” 40th Anniversary Season. A play that centers the lives of a couple getting ready to start a family, a hauntingly humorous hermit, and a secluded house in the woods, Hungry Ghost invites audiences to meditate on ideas of true freedom, isolation from community, and the hilarity of tragedy.

So as weary as I am of the pandemic, after my meeting with Lisa & Jess, I was reminded of the importance & inherent absurdity of processing, looking back on, and learning lessons from resiliency & loss.

Carolina Pilar Xique: Lisa—What inspired you to write this piece and how has it grown since its inception?

Lisa Sanaye Dring – photo by Stephanie Girard

Lisa Sanaye Dring: It’s very beautiful for me because I found out I got into the Humanitas Stage Raw Group led by Shem Bitterman and Steven Lee Morris in April, 2020. And we all know what was going on then. *laughs*

I was so heartened because at that moment I didn’t know if I was still going to make art, and it was a lifeline for me to be like, “Oh no, you will be writing in this time!”

But I didn’t know what I was going to write.

I was watching a video article in “The Atlantic,” a story about the North Pond Hermit, Christopher Thomas Knight, who lived in the forest for 27 years and survived by pilfering from vacation homes. He would come out in the summer and get little supplies, get oil, and then he’d hibernate in the winter and just camp out in his location. I was really moved by him because I was isolated from my community at that time, and I found it to be excruciating at moments. And he went to isolation and found solitude and freedom.

He did an interview with “GQ “and quoted Thomas Merton; he talked about how when one is without reflection, one can become truly free. I thought about that impulse—that one’s true self is only without one’s community. And I thought about how we as theatre people make meaning inside community. And then it sort of distilled into this play, which is about someone who is about to be in community in a huge way because of birth. She’s about to grow a family with a woman she loves and is facing her own feelings of isolation and alienation from community, and has to encounter those two poles—to be with people and to be alone. She’s forced into this decision via her pregnancy.

Carolina: Jessica—What has the rehearsal process been like and how have your thoughts about the play evolved since you had first read it?

Jessica Hanna – photo by Peter Konerko

Jessica Hanna: It’s been a super collaborative room. Lisa has been really participatory and open to the collaboration and the questions that come up for both myself and the actors. We’ve been really heavily working on this play for some months, but in June, we did a workshop and did some really hardcore work of talking about the play, Lisa writing new pages, and trying new things .

I would say that the idea of “theater being a great experiment” is really alive in this room. I keep talking to the cast that being in this place of, “I don’t know,” is a really fertile, exciting, creative space. And it’s also deeply uncomfortable and sometimes can cause anxiety. I feel very lucky because nobody in the room is dictating what anything has to be. So the richness of the possibility feels heightened in our room. And there’s also the reality of like, this is the baby’s first walk, right? So I hope there’s another evolution of this play that is learned from these moments.

Lisa: Shout out to Boston Court Playwrights Group—they have also workshopped the piece with me over the last year, in addition to the Humanist Stage Raw Group. In this time where it’s so hard to make a play and harder for producers to get stuff up, it’s been a huge boon to this piece to have so many amazing minds and hearts of the theater pay attention to it as it grows, including Jess’s, including Skylight.

Carolina: How has it been balancing the hilarity and the weight of these themes, in both the writing and the directing process?

Lisa: I just think things should be funny. I think all plays should be funny. And I think these actors are really sensational at giving us humor and joy. I was taught in theater school, “You can’t make them cry unless you make them laugh.” Straight drama is easier than laughter because you can’t really fake laughter. Like you can hear that difference of really making an audience crack up as opposed to the sort of chuckles that you hear that where they’re helping a comedy be pushed along. And there’s so much play in the room that creates a really beautiful space where people can unfurl with each other and genuinely be with each other. And I think all these layers of trust is also helped by [intimacy coordinator] Carly Bones. My job is just giving them enough material that they can play with to make it happen.

Ben Messmer, Tasha Ames, Jenny Soo – photo by by Grettel Cortes

Jessica: Yeah. You have to have the light to have the shadow, right? For talking about grief, sometimes the best thing to do is to talk about the ridiculousness of life or to have that present in order to actually really feel those things. I think we’ve got a nice balance going. I find it [the play] funny. These three players, they’re all hilarious in their own, very distinct ways. And to give them space to find their funny or to be their funny selves makes them more human. Even the fantastical, possibly mystical character still has got to be based in some kind of reality for us to understand him and to bond with him.

Lisa: I find that laughter, humor, and play are paradigm-shifting and paradigm-breaking. So I’m hoping there is also a deep cognitive experience that happens with the humor. I’m hoping that this play celebrates the wisdom of this. We were talking with one of our actors about how this one character is light because they’ve had to be—they’ve had to cultivate a levity because the world is just so bizarre for them. And I think that there’s a deep beauty in the resilience of humor.

Jessica: I just want to also say that Lisa is very funny, straight up. *laughs* But also, there’s something really gorgeous about Lisa’s work. There are times as an audience member where your breath is taken away by the beauty that’s being brought to life through words, and then all of a sudden it’ll be, like, some left turn. You can’t help but laugh out loud. It knocks you out because the broken expectations are so exciting. That kind of duality is one of the really exciting things about Lisa’s writing.

Carolina: Why this play today, right now?

Lisa: I mean, I just got to play my first lead in [director/playwright] Jen Chang’s play this year, and I’ve been acting for a while. And so to be an Asian American actor who’s been a character actor their whole life and to create a big role for Jenny Soo is an honor, because Jenny Soo’s such a tremendous performer.

Tasha Ames and Jenny Soo – photo by Grettel Cortes

But I think it’s tricky because I don’t really write from that place of, “What does the world need?” I try to metabolize the world in a sincere way, and then write what’s in my heart and then be mindful of it along the way. And thankfully, I don’t have to make the decision whether to produce it or not, or have to be a critic, you know what I mean? The world will tell me if the world needs it, if that makes sense. I think as an artist, one just needs to be really deep in themselves and to try to be honest and as alive as possible, and then make what’s in their heart responding to their moment right now.

Jessica: I think the play also speaks to this place of grief and that processing that we are all in. I talk about theater as being the art form where we can work on, or build the worlds we want to live in, or try things out, or see examples of what we want to push back against in terms of the world around us. And I think watching characters make hard choices that are right for themselves, seeing an Asian American woman make those choices for herself and question and be a human is really important right now. It always is. But I mean, in particular, I think it is now.

Hopefully we continue having more awareness and revelations as a society, but also white people—myself included—are paying attention in a different way. This idea of the Hungry Ghost, which is a cultural phenomenon in many cultures… this idea of something that comes from grief not being taken care of, or not being cared for, and that it comes back at you, or that it haunts you—at least that’s why I’m interpreting it—I think that’s very appropriate for right now. Because the question of, “Are we going to take care of ourselves and our grief in this period of change after massive, massive upheaval and death?” I think is a big question. Are we going to fertilize the ground with our knowledge, or are we going to just try to go on and not deal with what’s been happening around us? That’s a question I think about when working on this play.

Tasha Ames and Jenny Soo – photo by Grettel Cortes

Carolina: What has the process been like working with Skylight for their “Her Vision, Her Voice” theme for the 40th anniversary?

Lisa: It’s really great. I really loved working with Skylight. I mean, this is of course playwright-centric, but their notes have been really good. They’ve helped the piece grow, and I felt like they understood what the piece was and gave me a lot of space to figure it out. But I really resonate with a simpatico of artistic vision, in terms of what the possibility of the piece is and where we all think it’s going. I felt like they—Tyree [Marshall] and Gary [Grossman] and Armando [Huipe] and everybody there right now—intuited and grokked what the piece could be when they read it almost a year ago. I’ve been really grateful for that.

And then it also felt, artistically, like an appropriate birth in terms of like trusting the vision. Jess came in with a workshop model that I’d never done before that was really beautiful. Because Jess is the director, she had a vision for this, and I feel like that started us off on a really good fit of trust and respect. And I also wanna say Jess is a really seasoned producer herself, so I think she makes producer’s lives easy. *laughs*

Jess, what do you think?

Jessica: Uh, I don’t know. You’re gonna have to ask Gary about that later this week. *laughs*

But I wanna just echo what Lisa’s saying in terms of the support. There’s been a lot of striving to make dreams come true as much as possible, which has been really kind of extraordinary. They’ve been really, really great about trying to figure things out and give us as much as they can. I love the fact that they’re doing this season, that we’re part of this season. It’s really exciting that they will have brought three new plays to life in a year. And the fact that they’re all plays by women is the extra cherries on top. So yeah, I hope people are inspired by it and see it as something to that they could also do. I hope it’s something that catches on.

The final installment in Skylight’s all femme-penned season, the World Premiere of “Hungry Ghost” by Lisa Sanaye Dring, directed by Jessica Hanna, runs at Skylight Theatre from August 26th to October 1st, 2023, with previews on August 19, 20, & 25. For tickets and information, visit  https://skylighttheatre.org/event/hungry-ghost/.

Know a female or FPI-friendly theater, company or artist? Contact us at lafpi.updates@gmail.com & check out The FPI Files for more stories.

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The FPI Files: World Premiere of “Untitled Baby Play” at IAMA Theatre

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By Alison Minami

Nina Braddock grew up with a tight-knit group of girlfriends dating back to kindergarten and managed to maintain this friend-group through the many different phases of adolescence and adulthood. But at a certain point, as we all know, friendships become challenging to negotiate as people grow in different ways. These transitional growing pains as we move into adulthood serve as the inspiration for her new play “Untitled Baby Play.” In it, Braddock explores how a group of women from childhood maintain their friendship and “invest in the way their lives have taken shape.”

Laila Ayad, Anna Rose Hopkins, Jenny Soo
Photo by Jeff Lorch

In the play, the women all join forces to throw their friend Libby a baby shower, but through their various text message and email chains, a lot of miscommunication and hilarity ensue. At the heart of the play is the theme of motherhood—deciding to become a mother, facing the challenges of fertility, anticipating birth, and the actual experience of being a mother. As the play’s title deliberately suggests, the women are struggling with their “evolving and unresolved” decisions around “the baby question.” They are each a work-in-progress, as is the unborn and unnamed child about to enter Libby’s, and by extension, their lives. While all the same age, each woman is at a different place in relation to motherhood, and this can be cause for judgment, pain, or just sheer ignorance. Braddock wanted to write a play about “women who love each other but also don’t understand each other.” Sisterhood is, after all, not always easy, though it is ultimately rewarding and, arguably, vital.

The Ensemble: Laila Ayad, Sarah Utterback, Sonal Shah, Courtney Sauls, Anna Rose Hopkins and Jenny Soo. Photo by Jeff Lorch

Technology and its many forms of communication is another interest of Braddock’s. She’s always been fascinated by the way “people are performing as they are writing their texts or emails.” It is true that there can often be a performative aspect of showmanship or joie de vivre in our digital voices that do not always reflect the reality of our lives including our feelings. For this reason, the play is as much an exploration of how we stay connected in today’s day and age and the limitations of these modes of communication as much as it is about the strengths (or weaknesses) of our friendships.

Also a television writer, Braddock enjoys writing in different forms as each offers its own set of constraints and possibilities. Writing this play allowed her to exercise a different kind of creative muscle and vision from writing for the screen. “Untitled Baby Play” had a professional reading at Clubbed Thumb in NY and continued development with IAMA theatre in Los Angeles, where it was set to premiere right before the pandemic. After a two-year delay, it is finally getting the World Premiere it deserves with IAMA Theatre. Directed by Katie Lindsay with associate director Melissa Coleman-Reed, it runs from May 26 through June 27 at the Atwater Village Theatre.

Click Here for More Info on “Untitled Baby Play”

Know a female or FPI-friendly theater, company or artist? Contact us at lafpi.updates@gmail.com & check out The FPI Files for more stories.

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Los Angeles Female Playwrights Initiative is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non‐profit arts service organization. Contributions for the charitable purposes of LAFPI must be made payable to “Fractured Atlas” only and are tax‐deductible to the extent permitted by law.