Playwright

writing plays and putting people in them since 1989

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@ The Playwrights Center in Minneapolis working on MALICIOUS ANIMAL MAGNETISM with my co-writer, the magnetic Jeremy Cohen, gorgeous (summer) Minneapolis and my ungorgeous desktop after a week of writing non stop. 

Ps: That is no longer how act two goes. 

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Cryptic adventures in Louisville include the above fried foods (I didn’t eat all of that myself) and two new pieces inspired by those weird photographs both featuring...yes, tables. 

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RESISTANCE

Thanks to the Lark Play Development Center and Caridad Svich who invited artists around the world to think about this word and what it means to us. 

To read more go to STAGES OF RESISTANCE:

http://larktheatre.org/blog/categories/stages-resistance-salon/ 

I think it’s best I take this opportunity to tell you a story. And because I’ve been asked to share my thoughts about resistance. I think it’s best that the story be mine. I was born of parents who were themselves children of refugees. A generation who had no voice. And didn’t expect one. My parents were, then, immigrants. Who had no voice. And didn’t expect one. My inheritance is wrought in silence. A kind of sharp muteness First alivened by the words of others. Novels and poetry. Incisions into the dense cloth of consciousness. I first felt that flash of recognition in dark rooms squinting at yellowing pages. My mother’s marginalia cluttering the sides of her books that breathed life. When her life was unbearable. My inheritance, you see, is resistance. My birth might as well have come with a small note of apology. It might well have said ‘we’re sorry for taking up more brown space, we’ll try our best not to’ It’s not that I was unwanted. At least, I don’t think so. It’s more that they were unwanted. My parents. My grandparents. Unwanted by the countries who took them. Unwanted, in some way, by each other. It turns out quiet runs in the blood. I was raised in resistance. A cloudy negation of life itself. It’s what I learned. As a considerate child, I reviewed my options. And felt it best that I say nothing. Nothing came to feel natural in my throat. (They took my tonsils anyway) So I didn’t speak. For a long time. Until someone put me in a chicken costume. On a stage. I began to speak and it was a torrent. All the lines in the school play flying out of my mouth. I’d stolen them from the other children. Like the best thieves, I was a quiet one. The revelation that I could speak brought the house down. My body told me it was okay to speak when I pretended no one was there. And so, willfully, I pretended. I pretend. I pretend about a lot of things. Creativity is the opposite of resistance. I learned this. From Rilke first. Then from a friend who saw me in my cage. Who hauled me out with her teeth. And smacked the breath back into me. If you resist who you are, it comes for you anyway. Words came for me, dragged me out of my sleep. But resistance, well, it’s in my nature. Like an alchoholic, I’ve come to depend on it As a way of understanding myself. I have a lot of liberty now. But I know that silent, darkened place of no As well as I know my waking body. All this to say, I have a long acquaintance with resistance. And have some thoughts I’d like to share, if I may? I think resistance is a fact. Like fear, it exists. It’s best to know that you are not dealing with a malleable thing. You may have to move other things around it. So if we are collectively, in our resistance, hard, like a fact. Then the hope is, other facts will change around us. That our given circumstances will mold around our intractability. The problem though, as we now know, is that facts are no longer real. Our subjectivity changes what we are looking at. (Remember Schroedinger? And then there’s all that fake news business.) So if resistance is an attitude and not a fact. And I am wrong and it is, in fact, malleable. Then it’s our subjectivity that’s important. What is the correct way to see resistance? Is it a living force of opposition? A dense muteness? An inheritance? Or as Gandhi said, passivity. To resist, he said, is to lay down resistance. To stop fighting. In stopping, you change the terms of the conversation. In stopping, you cease to locate the subject of resistance as an outside force. The subject of resistance is not the opposition. It is resistance itself. So, now I think this is really the key to our survival. Not just mine. But all of ours. Trust Gandhi to solve a paradox. And make it actionable. Smartypants. This is a long process. We have to give up reacting. And anger. And judgement. And say yes, to what’s coming at us. Even to what’s coming for us. Because the best resistance is acceptance. A radical disengagement, a revolutionary breath in. Unhooking from the hooks that trigger us. This is how we’ll win the war. This is how we’ll win the peace. Our peace. Justice.

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YOGA PLAY and UNRELIABLE on the KILROYS LIST 2017

So excited to share that YOGA PLAY and UNRELIABLE are on this year’s KILROYS LIST! 

For the full LIST of incredible un and underproduced plays by trans and women writers of colour click here: 

http://thekilroys.org/list-2017/ 

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Article about YOGA PLAY in Modern Luxury

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Beautiful cast of YOGA PLAY Lorena Martinez, Nike Doukas, Tim Chiou, Jeff Marlowe and Dileep Rao. 

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South Coast Repertory Theatre, April 19th-30th 2017 

Read more about YOGA PLAY in this wonderful article by Kathleen Luppi

http://www.latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/entertainment/tn-wknd-et-pacific-playwrights-fest-20170416-story,amp.html  

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THE VIGIL

Over the summer I spent a week in New Mexico at A Room of Her Own’s (AROHOs) gathering at Georgia O Keefe’s home in Ghost Ranch. I wrote a piece for AROHO which Ellen McLaughlin read. I thought I’d share it here with you. 

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Climate Change/Seeking Refuge

Caridad Svich and Chantal Bilodeau recently invited me to write a piece about climate change for Climate Change Theatre Action, a project in support of the UN Conference on Climate Change in a few months time.

I am posting it because even though writing is not helping, sometimes it is.

It’ called Song For the Sleepers

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Faith

In dreaming up (it feels more like dreddging) in dredging up the newest piece on my mind for my Shakespeare’s Sister Fellowship, I found myself going back to Jeffrey Eugenides’ ‘Middlesex’. Which led me to reading about that small literary circle in the eighties and nineties (David Foster Wallace, Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen) and associated with them was poet Mary Karr. This interview with Karr interests me because of the way she speaks about her faith, interesting because hers seems to be a faith forged in skepticism....

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5992/the-art-of-memoir-no-1-mary-karr

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Audience Reconvening

The prolific and brilliant Caridad Svich asked me to contribute to Theatre Communication Group’s blog salon Audience Reconvening. It gave me a chance to think about my relationship with literature and art, what gave me a sense of access and how creativity is a greater power than any other. It was also an excuse to pay tribute to one of my favourite writers, novelist Amitav Ghosh. 

http://www.tcgcircle.org/2015/03/where-art-is-equal/ 

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LIFTED

My new play lifted is about double vision; it’s a direct encounter with what the English literary tradition has to do with colonisation or where power and culture interconnect. And of course, it's about love. 

Thank you to Adam Coleman for directing me to Gauri Vishwanathan’s ‘Masks of Conquest’.

https://notevenpast.org/masks-conquest-literary-study-and-british-rule-india-1989/ 

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new website

currently working on the new website!