I went to school for theater studies at Ithaca College. My degree was general, but you could either do directing or dramaturgy or playwriting, and I was on the playwriting track. I had always really liked writing when I was younger. We were the type of kids when we had sleepovers, I would write little skits for my friends for us to perform. So, it naturally progressed that way when we were deciding on colleges. I was like, I love theater. I love writing, and I don’t want to get a real job. I might as well try it. It’s funny because when I graduated from Ithaca, I decided I didn’t want to be a playwright. I was like, it is too hard. It’s thankless, and there really is no career pipeline for it. I shifted, and I did a lot of sketch comedy. I did a lot of late-night writing, writing for TV. I was in UCB and stuff. Then, the pandemic happened, and I moved home, and I was like, well, there’s no better time than now to sit down and try to write a play. It just snowballed from there. I’ve really fallen in love with playwriting, and so now I’m very happy to call myself a playwright.

It started as a homework assignment for my playwriting class. We just had to write a 10-minute play. I wish I remembered what the impetus was to write Tobey, but I was like, “Oh shit, I have this homework assignment, I just have to finish it.” I’ve always been obsessed with pop culture. I’m a huge One Direction girlie. Growing up, I read a lot of fan fiction. I’m sure that changed my brain in some way. When I first graduated, we did it as a one-act at a small New York Winterfest, but then I put it away. It was only when the pandemic happened I called up my friend Tyler [Struble], who is my collaborator and director. I was like, “This is a really funny idea. We should try to do something with this.”

Was there anything in particular that sparked your interest in theater?

When I was growing up, I went to a summer camp every summer, and then I ended up working at it when I was in high school. It was a performing arts camp. You have a week. You pick a character you want to be. You write a play with the rest of the kids and the counselors. That was always the highlight of my year. As soon as that ended, I was thinking about what I wanted to be next year and the types of plays and stuff. I think that impacted me in terms of what I found the most joy in was just creating and being silly with all these other kids and creating plays. I didn’t realize it was something you could study or be. The first year I was Bubbles, the Powerpuff Girl. It let us use our imaginations to the fullest extent. I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.

Do you have a typical day routine or does it tend to vary?

It depends. I just moved to Chicago, and I have a job where I’m working box office, so I work at night. My morning routine is very sacred to me. I have to wake up, and I have to watch The View, and then I go on a little hot girl walk. Once I’ve settled in the day, I sit down to write in the afternoon. I try to not put a lot of pressure on myself to write if I don’t feel like writing. I try to write every day. I think trying to force it, at least at this point, is just not helpful in terms of the point of the process where I am in my artist journey and also in writing this specific play.

You mentioned you handwrite everything. Do you do it in journals or do you convert it to digital after that?

Yeah. I’m crazy that way and I’m definitely going to get arthritis, but I just have notebooks. I just get the 99-cent notebooks at Walmart and I handwrite everything in cursive because I feel like it’s easier to pump out for me, it’s quicker, but I also feel like it just helps me sink into the words. After, I’ll type it up, so I can send it over to Tyler. I’m really selective with word choice, and I think handwriting helps me. Everything is purposeful when you handwrite and it just is a little bit slower. That, to me, works the best right now when it comes to especially crafting dialogue. It’s helpful to know too, if you repeat a word, you can tell it when you’re handwriting, whereas I feel like just typing is a little more passive.

I’m wondering, because Tobey received a book form, and I’m curious when you’re writing your new play, if you’re trying to think if the lines are too long or if the dialogue’s too short, if that makes sense.

Yeah. I just had this conversation with Tyler because I’m on the fourth or fifth draft of this new play where I’m worried about page count. I’m worried about how long this scene is taking. I still think it is a formative draft where I’m still getting all of the ideas out. Tyler is helpful in being like, “Don’t worry about page count right now. Just get everything out.” I think I’m more of an editor than a writer. I will go over and edit a scene over and over and over again. I would still edit Tobey today if I could. That’s what I like about playwriting more than screenwriting. I’m dabbling in screenwriting right now, but that scares me because there’s a lot more rules and structure. Playwriting, really [you] can do whatever you want. It can take whatever format you want, and once it gets published, they put it in their own format, but they work with you to do that. Screenwriting is intimidating for me because it has so many rules. What I love about playwriting is it’s just a canvas, and you can paint it however you want.

That’s interesting. I do want to go back to Tobey a little bit. I’ve read that you were seeing a lot of playwrights leaning into the heavier stuff. You mentioned Arthur Miller, so on, so forth. You were also a One Direction fan growing up, and I guess in a sense, the play felt truer to the modern era and the rise of stan culture. I’m curious, do you find it’s easier to write based on possible personal experience? ‘Cause I was like, I think we’ve all been, I was a Directioner. We’ve all been those teenage girls, but obviously not to Shelby’s degree.

I write about stuff I’m obsessed with. Yeah, I was a big fangirl, but I’m obsessed with talking about this stuff. I say the play is not autobiographical. It’s not, but I’m such a big proponent of writing what you know. This new play is not my personal, I mean, the new play is, have you ever heard of To Catch a Predator? There are all of these people on YouTube who are amateur predator catchers, and I became obsessed with this one group specifically called Dads Against Predators, and I would just watch and watch their videos. That’s what the new play is about. It’s roughly based on their lives. It’s different from Tobey. It’s still a dark comedy. I have just been writing what I have been obsessed with. These guys are from rural Ohio, and I lived in Ohio for a little bit, so I definitely understand their world. Stuff that I could talk about for hours and hours on end is what I tend to write about because if no one’s there to talk to me about it, I’ll just write about it.

They’ll go on these meetup apps and pretend to be a little kid, and then they’ll go in public to meet the person. They’ll bait them, and then once they meet them in public, they humiliate them. It’s all about public humiliation and shaming. Now, they’ve started to just beat the shit out of these guys in public. It’s really about our view on vigilante justice and how far [people are willing to go] because everyone is like, “Let’s save the kids, let’s save the kids.” These guys are going to such the extreme to do it, and they get all this flak because they’re assaulting people. It was just something that I just became so obsessed with because these people are so black and white in their worldview. It was just so interesting to me.

With that and also even just with Tobey, the rise of stan culture, do you feel like that stuff has kind of increased over the past few years?

I think it’s internet culture too. I think we are at an age where people writing plays now have been impacted by internet culture, where Arthur Miller did not know what a computer was, right? I don’t think he was born with a computer, but now all these plays are getting written by people who have grown up with technology. I think playwriting is shaped by that and by our relationship to social media and technology and the internet, especially in Tobey and in this new play too. It’s all about internet culture online and about how people find community and solace online when in real life they feel isolated or alienated from people around them. The internet is a great place to go to find that connection and community, and I guess now it is a universal theme. I’m seeing a lot of that pop up in playwriting and in TV too. There’s a lot of that happening.

Were there any movies, books, or TV shows that served as an inspiration while you were making the play?

It’s funny because I didn’t watch Misery until recently, but people were like, “Yeah, it’s just Misery.” And I’d never watched it, but it did give me a lot of insights. I watched all of Tobey’s movies except for Seabiscuit. I thought that movie was terrible. Oh, you know that Penelope character from The Amanda Show? Her plight was she was going to go meet Amanda, and she had this internet blog.

I talked a lot about this to Tessa [Albertson], the actress who is one of the funniest actresses on the planet. I will go to my grave saying that. Male comedians are allowed to be big and brash and stupid. I grew up with Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey. They were just allowed to be so ugly, dumb, and funny, and women aren’t necessarily given that opportunity. If women are funny, it has to be in a vein of sexuality, or it’s the Melissa McCarthy, Fat Amy’s of it all. What I love about Tessa is just her fearlessness in being so funny. I think a lot of the reasons why Shelby is such a great character and what I wanted to do was give a platform for actresses to just be stupid, silly, funny, and unapologetic.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Lexi Lane.

I’m going to sound like a loser for a second, but the etymological root of utopia translates to “no place.” I learned that years ago and it demythologized a lot of what I assign as hope…the reaching towards something impossible. Because I work in theater, because I’m a playwright, asking myself to grapple with lofty ideas like the impossible or the unstageable is important when beginning a new project. What exactly is a world of betterment? Will we, as a public, ever be satiated? What sacrifice comes with that satiation? I think about this quote from Roberto Bolaño all the time, “We dreamed of utopia and woke up screaming.”

Hope’s always striving, it’s always in relation to something that has not yet been actualized or come into existence.

Right. Hope presents you with your lack. Hope presents you with the thing that you’re missing. So maybe, as an action, I find hope alongside loss can be generative, but utopia feels like a false target.

What makes you hopeful?

Playing games, being stupid. I don’t know, finding new rhythms in my day to day, avoiding monotony, embarrassing myself, tripping over myself, making mistakes, meeting new people, eating new food, those kinds of things. Hope comes from a consistent relationship with the journey, the process, the trajectory, never landing in a place of stasis. Hope is welcoming the puzzle of time, enabling the Rubik’s cube or the prismatic narrative so that you can be constantly turning, constantly seeking new perspectives. Otherwise, a kind of complacency is drafted. I feel like the reason I keep making work, and the thing that I seek in other people making work, is a defiance of an established status quo. Maybe that’s a hopeful thing. Recognizing that there are new lines of logic to be extrapolated. I never want to feel like I’m ahead of a piece. And then when it comes to collaboration, that’s the central tenet of making theater. It’s what allows me to be artistically ambidextrous as a playwright. This form is at once a literary and performance-based art. Collaboration is the hinge there. Collaboration is the thing that alleviates me from being by myself, the prospect that excites me when I enter a rehearsal room.

What you’re saying makes me think about a generative, non-reactionary opposition that opens up space. Do you think about that when you’re making work?

I think that shows up in a few ways. Holding a healthy dose of skepticism is always good, and something I’d never want to release. That includes being skeptical of institutions, organizations, of myself. That shows up in my writing too: characters arrive as trickster figures, preying on disruption as their central action, there to reorient.

Do you want to talk a little bit about the motif of the trickster and why it’s important to you?

I read Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde in grad school by way of my teacher Lisa D’Amour. It was formative for me because it mapped out the trickster archetype in early cultural mythology, but also left room for those tenets to be applied to contemporary figures, or even forms themselves, like theatre. A trickster methodology welcomes deviance—or any kind of transgression—as having a political reinforcement or existing as a measure of identity. That felt really resonant with me because there’s so much ambiguity in my life (in my queerness, in an ethnic-cultural identity, in the shifting places I call home). The idea of the trickster is that they live at the boundary between the worldly and the otherworldly, between heaven, earth, and hell. They are figures that are constantly seeking tools for invention. I think of the coyote. I think of the monkey. I think of the raven. A lot of my understanding comes from indigenous folklore. But then I also think of stories like Rumpelstiltskin, or high fantasy lore, the troll under the bridge, witches, demons, Prometheus, Mephistopheles, and Doctor Faustus, people who are trying to barter or gamble to change the trajectory of events.

Are tricksters parasitic?

Not necessarily. I think they can be. Hyde claims they often fall into traps, have accidents, or come upon chance encounters. There is an innate resistance here to the pre-ordained. I think about Jean Genet as a trickster. He was very famously a thief. I think The Maids is one of the best plays ever written, harnessing the narrative tool of role play. Genet and his friends were obsessed with that news story of the Papin sisters who murdered their madame and her husband, and were then found naked in bed together. Maybe a theft of real life events and subsequent obfuscation of that reality can be considered parasitic. Maybe more writers should strive to be parasitic.

Maybe being parasitic introduces a new approach to need, to abetting lack and reaching towards hope. An experimental approach? How do you think about experimentation? Experimental theater?

Lately I’ve been thinking about artists who talk about experimental theater as this homogenous descriptor, but I’m often like, “What is the experiment and how are we engaging with it right now?” My relationship to time and space is so askew after the last four years, but that’s thrilling because it has allowed things to burn and things to seed. The experimental thread I’m following in my own work might just be a consistent shifting of perception. In my everyday life, I am milling through all of these stimuli set against an intense economic instability. When I pair those things, memory gets really fraught. Time gets fragmented. Time as a concept is layered. It doesn’t move in one direction. There’s synchronicity in worlds that are impossible to map. I love that “not knowing.” I love not knowing if I believe in god or if I think my synapses are mis-wired. It’s jolting. Being able to replicate that dizzying feeling for an audience member is really special. The language I often use is that I hope to endear some audiences with a sense of bliss, but then I also wish to present them with their dread. These aren’t mutually exclusive states of being.

No, they’re directly tied. You arrive at bliss through dread. How do you make work without becoming overwhelmed?

Oh, I’m overwhelmed all the time. But I believe there’s a generative state in which you can be overwhelmed versus pure nullification. There is something beautiful about acknowledging the feeling, and going, “Okay, what are the things I’m stunted by? How do I tame this feeling through the questions I’m trying to ask?”

You can use writing as a place to find answers to your own questions?

Yeah. That’s often the pursuit when I’m sitting to write: how am I trying to coax out the things that make me uncomfortable, or embarrassed, or terrified? That’s actually a common exercise in contemporary playwriting—to write from a place of fear. Many writers follow that tradition. Lately, I’m thinking more about embarrassment and pity.

That’s interesting. Do you think you’re afraid of embarrassment and pity?

No, they’re just things I feel often. I have a lot of social anxiety. And I think because of the state of the world and its impact on performing arts I’ve felt a lot of self-pity in the last couple of years. I want to shake out of that, so part of the task involves understanding how I relate to pity. I’m reading all these texts trying to diagnose it, though it’s so subjective, of course. Scholars use such funny systems of evaluation. I think Barthes first compared pathos to compassion and then settled on it being a distancing technique, which I talk about in the interview at the end of 404 Not Found. I think I’m invigorated by the question, “What is the power we wield in pitying something?”

How does this recent play explore pity?

I’ve been working on this play for three and a half years. The root of it lives in my own strange feelings of comfort I find in abject circumstances. I’ve always found horror movies really cathartic, and as a result the play features Freddy Krueger from the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise as a central character. I’ve had this relationship with Freddy since I was six years old—my older brother and his friend showed me the movie. I was mortified.

Let’s learn about your relationship to Freddy Krueger.

It’s so fucked. In 2020 I was having a particularly hard time sleeping, though I’ve navigated these bouts of insomnia my whole adult life. At the beginning of the pandemic I started having these dreams about Freddy, which I had had when I was very young. He was arriving in my subconscious so frequently that I eventually made a deal with him. I was like, “You can live in my dreamscape, but you can’t hurt me.” I have distinct memories of always looking at his feet because I was so scared of his face. So zoom back to the early pandemic days and this was all resurfacing. My therapist was like, “You should write about this.” And I said, “Okay.”

That feels related to what you were saying earlier about discomfort, and how adjusting perspectives lets you modulate your relationship with brutality.

Totally. It’s the delight of director Wes Craven’s Elm Street movies. There are nine films in total, and they oscillate from being legitimately terrifying to incredibly campy. Over the years these movies were being made, Freddy becomes a cartoonish figure and the political goings-on of the world resurrect themselves in such goofy ways. I remember in one movie a kid smokes too much pot and gets slashed up — a real Reagan remnant. So as I wrote while rewatching the franchise, I was able to cartoonify this experience of fear. The play mostly consists of monologues. I think in one breath, there’s an attempt to strategize over, “How do I talk about violence in theater without replicating it?” But then really grappling with the horrors of the world, I think there’s a lot of power to talking about punitive onstage. Shame, embarrassment, pity—it all lives in the psychic landscape of the viewer. This can be a hard confrontation, but I think it’s also a deeply personal one.

Does 404 Not Found end with bliss?

It offers a fake utopia. It offers a notion of escape. But, it also offers a time loop that’s forever revolving: an exposure to the constructions of time we’ve built in order to distract ourselves, to appease our shortcomings, to save us from ourselves. This awareness, of the destructive and the negligent, is probably what helps me escape my own ego.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Theadora Walsh.

Gaza solidarity encampments, which started on U.S. college campuses, have now spread worldwide as students call on their educational institutions to divest from companies profiting from Israeli apartheid and occupation. The uprising echoes the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s, when many in civil society called for divestment from companies that profited from South Africa’s system of racial domination. Democracy Now! explored the parallels this week with South African-born novelist and playwright Gillian Slovo, whose parents were legendary anti-apartheid activists Joe Slovo and Ruth First. “I have been to the West Bank, and I had a childhood in South Africa. I knew what apartheid looked like,” Slovo says. “When I went to the West Bank, what I saw was apartheid in action.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

I had no idea what to leave in at first, because the book is so fragmented. There was also the question of, What can you visually show onstage? Early drafts of the script followed the book more closely. It was a larger ensemble piece—you had Boy Scouts and you had nuns and you had prostitutes and businessmen.

Deciding what to include or not came when I decided to center myself and not Jack. I would ask, What resonates with me? Trying to squeeze everything [into the play] and replicate images from the book exactly, in live theater—that wasn’t doing the book justice. Centering myself is what led me to think, What are the lines? It wasn’t so much [a question of] what scenes to include—it was, What language, from [which chapter], do I want to incorporate into this scene? The play is more like a language collage than a scene collage.

The play features a character who exists as a Siena-Jack hybrid. At what point in the process did you decide to insert yourself into the narrative?

I wrote 20 pages or so trying to make a medley of the scenes of the book, and it was coming off more like a montage. I was also becoming frustrated because I felt like I couldn’t bring the narrative back to myself, since Jack in so many ways is the opposite of me. After talking to Jack more, I realized, We have some similarities, for better or for worse, and I can center those. [Inserting myself as a character] was my way of doing so.

I also didn’t want to criticize Jack, especially when I didn’t know him as well. I didn’t want the play to come off as a riot piece, or to take the stance of, The book isn’t feminist, but I’m a feminist. I wanted us to merge into this one storyteller—and then I could criticize, because I wasn’t just criticizing him, I was criticizing myself. That gave me the freedom to stop being scared and do whatever I wanted.

How much was Jack involved in your creative process? How much work did you actually show him?

I didn’t show him any of the script until I had a solid first draft—until I knew exactly what I wanted to keep and what I was willing to change. We went through a few drafts together. His feedback was less like, “I hate this, Siena, take this out,” and more like, “This section reminds me of this section in the book.” We took a lot of influence from Reza Abdoh and William Blake and artists that we both connected over.

Once we started rehearsals, he wasn’t involved at all. He came to the first rehearsal and we told him he couldn’t come to any other ones. He didn’t really see anything until the show. He knew where it was going to go because he had read the script, but he had never seen it onstage until opening night.

Fear of Kathy Acker has been described as a proto-autofictional work. Do you see the play as a work of autofiction? Is autofiction a useful genre or label for you?

I think it is, although I fought it for a while. The fights in the play are all fights I have with my boyfriend. The entire first act is just my life. A lot of the ego-driven stuff, where the Siena character wants to become Jack to get those accolades—of course it’s a little bit exaggerated, but it’s [commentary on] what the show is. I’m taking something of Jack’s, and it’s bringing me a different type of attention because [his book] has all this hype around it. It’s kind of like a joke, especially because I had some friends giving me shit about adapting the book. I’ve made a lot of work about [the relationships between] girls and old men, and I got called a hypocrite by a lot of my friends while I was doing this—like, “You’re giving this man a platform when a lot of your work has critiqued this.” I wanted to create a nuanced take on the book, where it’s not entirely sycophantic but also not a full critique.

It got kind of dramatic socially for me. Friends accused me of using the play for clout—and now they’re all on board with it. But I’m glad they did—having those conversations influenced the writing a lot, in a good way.

On the note of clout—In the Fear of Kathy Acker play, we see that the success of Jack’s book has turned him into a local celebrity. In the era of social media—and in New York and LA, where distinct, sometimes cliquey literary scenes emerge from readings and parties—more and more writers are finding themselves in this position. Do you think the phenomenon of “the writer as celebrity” is a good thing for the culture, or is the pressure for writers to have a forward-facing persona ultimately a negative? Do you feel this pressure yourself?

Realistically, it’s a good thing and a bad thing. Part of me hates that there’s a “scene” for writing and reading at all. My writing persona is totally reclusive. When I’m truly working on a project, I’m just not scene-y. There’s a part of me that envies the people who can effortlessly do both—who are putting out work and actively maintaining this social media presence or showing face, because when I’m working on something no one’s seeing me for months.

It’s hard for me to maintain relationships because of that—romantic relationships and friendships. And a “scene” is all based on relationships—it feels like the relationships matter even more than the work sometimes. But it’s good that people are getting recognition for the work they’re making. I think most of my critiques are coming from envy or anger that I can’t do the same thing. I’m either social or working, and both aren’t going to happen at the same time.

I think when anything gets too scene-y, you can lose the substance. There’s a danger in that. But overall, a scene to celebrate any artistic practice is a way to connect. It’s how I met all my friends. It’s something I’m really grateful for, especially leaving the institution of college. I feel like I meet people wherever I am because of a “scene.”

You don’t shy away from representations of sex and violence—two topics which are often considered taboo. When you’re working with controversial material, do you shoot for a certain audience reaction, or do you let the chips fall as they may? Does controversy excite you, scare you? Are you neutral towards it?

I never feel like anything I’m doing is controversial at all until people tell me it is. I’m shocked whenever crew members are like, “You need a trigger warning.” I try not to make anything explicit for the sake of being explicit. That’s just where things go for me. I’m like, That’s what the story is because that’s what happens in life.

When I was writing my thesis show, Acts of Afra, I really kept it true to the source text. I was like, This is what happens in the story, and I’m going to show it onstage. But when my mom came to a rehearsal one time… We were rehearsing this scene of essentially torture. Nothing that bad happens—a character gets hot soup poured on her and she gets tied in Christmas lights—but it’s kind of rough to watch. My mom was like, “Oh my god,” and I was like, Oh my god, am I doing something horrible? Then I was like, No, it’s fine, we earned it.

Fear of Kathy Acker is sexual because the book is sexual. I feel like I didn’t bring the sex, Jack brought the sex. I brought the paranoia, he brought the sex.

In many of your productions, actors wear prosthetics or masks, creating uncanny visages. How do these special effects function symbolically for you?

The first long show I ever directed was called The Darling Program. I made masks for that production because I wanted each character’s face to represent a different body part—except for this character “The Audience,” who wore a gimp suit with a sign that said “The Audience” over her face. Seeing how effective that was visually, I [decided to experiment with masks in future productions.]

I have a visual background, especially in paintings from the medieval age. Depictions of Biblical faces and creatures really interest me. When I started adapting from different Gospels and martyrdom stories—like the Acts of Afra—I realized that masks fit those stories really well. The characters in those stories aren’t really characters—they’re characters existing as artifacts, representing figures or ideas. So I didn’t want them to have human faces—I wanted them to look more like paintings.

I originally went to school for oil painting, and I had a mold-making job for a while. All of that [background] went into masks. In both The Darling Program and Acts of Afra, everyone was wearing masks or really intense face paint. [After directing] other shows where that didn’t make as much sense, I decided that I only wanted certain characters to wear masks. Some characters in Fear of Kathy Acker, like Jack and Megan, are real people—but the Death Drives aren’t supposed to be real. They’re [supposed to represent] an idea of a woman—not a real woman, something distorted and obscure. I wanted them to have these prosthetic pieces so they would look like hot women but with something slightly uncanny about them—just the forehead is off, or the nose. Instead of having everybody in a mask because I like making masks, I want them to be an intentional part of the [characterization.]

You talk about characters existing as “ideas of people.” Are there certain archetypes you find yourself coming back to throughout your work?

Yeah. “Mommy” is the big one for me. My friend Gia [Oschenbein], who played one of the Death Drives, pointed this out in our first rehearsal for Fear of Kathy Acker. She’s like, “Siena, all your pieces have this mom character who’s the antagonist but someone we’re rooting for at the same time.” I often have a character who’s an antagonistic evil mommy who’s also not doing so well. You can empathize with her, but she’s also kind of the bad guy.

Other than that, I really try to veer away from “Big Bad Guy Man Character.” He’s been there a few times, but he’s a cliche. He wasn’t in this one, thank goodness, and hopefully he won’t be back anytime soon.

You’ve acted in several of your productions. How has your experience onstage informed your approach as a playwright and director?

That’s a good question. I’m not really a good actor at all—I’m just a performer. Really, I’m like a clown—I just commit. I did clown work for a really long time. I also did performance art, which always goes back to clowning for me.

I’ve never been in one of my larger pieces before—anything that’s over an hour. I usually stick to being behind the scenes for those. I’ve been in short pieces where a character has to do something crazy and I don’t want to subject anyone else to that, so I do it myself. But the way the other actors in my company transform… I don’t know how to do that. As a director, I can give my direction based on how I feel about the text, but seeing what they do onstage, I’m like, That is their craft, they physically put themselves through so much to play these roles.

I had the audience force feed me a pie in a show I did last year, but I can’t get up there and cry. I can physically subject myself to whatever, but emotionally, having that full transformation [is difficult].

Unlike writing a book, putting on a play is almost always a group effort. When you set out to direct a new project, how do you determine who you’d like to collaborate with? What makes an ideal collaborator in your eyes?

Collaboration is so hard. It’s what I both love and hate about theater. It’s like a drug. Collaboration is what’s so wonderful about theater, but it can make you want to kill yourself because you have such a particular idea of what you want, and when things aren’t going well, [it’s easy to think,] Oh my god, everyone’s ruining everything.

I’m a writer before i’m a director, and I’m still learning a lot about what it takes to direct a piece because it’s so hard. It’s also hard working with your friends. It’s a blessing and a curse—it can be the most incredible experience of your life, but it brings with it a fuck-ton of problems. When choosing collaborators, I like to ask myself, “Who do I know is going to show up and do this?” It’s about trust, really. I had a lot of trust in everybody who was in Fear of Kathy Acker. I knew that they would show up no matter what.

Rory [James Leech], who co-directed the show, and I are like yin and yang. Rory’s so physical—he’s like, “We’re doing breathwork and we’re all going to meditate.” I’m like, “What does the text say? Let’s look at the source text. Here’s this other reference. I’ll send you this article.” I think my approach comes from prioritizing writing sometimes over directing. Having Rory, a real-deal director, in there really helped the production. I love when someone’s giving me direction as a performer because I’m not a super physically connected person. When I’m directing, because my actors are so good at movement, I tend to be like, “You go and do that—I’ll focus on the words.” I like directing, and I want to be good at it, but it’s a learning curve for sure. I want to keep doing it, even though writing will always be my real passion. Rory’s taught me a lot.

The “Siena” character in the Fear of Kathy Acker play struggles with writer’s block. What do you do when you get writer’s block?

Usually, if I have a deadline, I don’t get writer’s block. If I set my own deadlines, my fear of failure and self-hatred will power me through any project. I shame myself into writing—but it works. I get things done. I’m grateful that I usually have other people setting deadlines for me, which is such a blessing. This is part of the reason I do theater and don’t write books!

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Brittany Menjivar.

Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny says he was immediately placed in a punitive solitary confinement cell after finishing a quarantine term at the so-called Polar Wolf prison in Russia's Arctic region where he was transferred last month.

In a series of messages on X, formerly Twitter, Navalny said on January 9 a prison guard ruled that "convict Navalny refused to introduce himself according to format, did not respond to the educational work, and did not draw appropriate conclusions for himself" and therefore must spend seven days in solitary confinement.

Navalny added that unlike in a regular cell, where inmates are allowed to have a walk outside of the cell in the afternoon when it is a bit warmer outside, in the punitive cell, such walks are at 6:30 a.m. in a part of the world where temperatures can fall to minus 45 degrees Celsius or colder.

"I have already promised myself that I will try to go for a walk no matter what the weather is," Navalny said in an irony-laced series of eight posts, adding that the cell-like sites for walks are "11 steps from the wall and 3 steps to the wall" with an open sky covered with metal bars above.

"It's never been colder here than -32 degrees Celsius (-25 degrees Fahrenheit). Even at that temperature you can walk for more than half an hour, but only if you have time to grow a new nose, ears, and fingers," Navalny joked, comparing himself with the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the Revenant film, who saved himself from freezing in the cold by crawling inside the carcass of a dead horse.

"Here you need an elephant. A hot or even roasted elephant. If you cut open the belly of a freshly roasted elephant and crawl inside, you can keep warm for a while. But where am I going to get a hot, roasted elephant [here], especially at 6:30 in the morning? So, I will continue to freeze," Navalny concludes in his sarcastic string of messages.

Navalny was transported in December to the notorious and remote prison, formally known as IK-3, but widely referred to as Polar Wolf.

Some 2,000 kilometers northeast of Moscow, the prison holds about 1,050 of Russia's most incorrigible prisoners.

Human rights activists say the prison holds serial killers, rapists, pedophiles, repeat offenders, and others convicted of the most serious crimes and serving sentences of 20 years or more.

In some cases, like Navalny's, the government sends convicts who are widely considered to be political prisoners there as well. Platon Lebedev, a former business partner of Mikhail Khodorkovsky who was convicted of tax evasion and other charges during the dismantling of the Yukos oil giant, spent about two years at IK-3 in the mid-2000s.

The prison was founded in 1961 at a former camp of dictator Josef Stalin's Gulag network. The settlement of Kharp, with about 5,000 people, mostly provides housing and services for prison workers and administrators.

Navalny was sentenced to 19 years in prison in August 2023 on extremism charges, on top of previous sentences for fraud. He says the charges are politically motivated, and human rights organizations recognized him as a political prisoner.

He has posed one of the most-serious threats to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who recently announced he is running for reelection in March. Putin is expected to easily win the election amid the continued sidelining of opponents and a clampdown on opposition and civil society that intensified after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Navalny survived a poisoning with Novichok-type nerve agent in 2020 that he says was ordered by Putin. The Kremlin has denied any role in Navalny's poisoning.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

Yeah! I went to shows in Chicago instead of going to New York. I didn’t have a real situated community in New York that could have given me all of the ins and outs of scamming the system to get cheap tickets for Broadway shows. Moreover, the shows that I could afford a ticket to were generally not the shows I wanted to go to. One of my friends had tickets to see A Doll’s House, Part 2 at the John Golden Theatre, which is where my play ended up going. He went to Juilliard, and Juilliard students get free tickets to a bunch of Broadway previews, so I tagged along with him.

That makes me think about the concept of wonder and how ideal that can be for tapping into creativity. If you’re too informed about something, you might not actually want to do it.

Absolutely. Almost none of my favorite playwrights ever went to Broadway. Even being this playwright who’s had this huge public presence and a lot of excitement around their work, the only saving grace is that a lot of people also said that they hated my play. If everyone had just come out and said, “Jeremy is a genius. This play is perfect. We love it. There’s no controversy,” I would have replied, “I’m not a real artist because all the playwrights I find to be real artists have some complicated reception in how people navigate their work.”

The idea of being a populist author, which is what it would mean to be a playwright on Broadway, was really foreign to me. All I wanted was to be an indie experimental playwright because that’s one space I had 100% not seen a black playwright thrive in. There were black playwrights who were experimental, and were doing experimental things, but there weren’t black playwrights that were able to do experimental things with their own theater companies in the way that The Wooster Group did, or even Young Jean Lee.

I’m benefiting from a moment where there’s an opportunity to fill that hole in the ecology of New York theater. A lot of artistic directors have started to do it by programming experimental or on-the-fringe work in normal seasons. Audiences are starting to understand it in a different way than they would have a couple decades ago. Even the fact that Tina Satter has one of the most successful off-Broadway shows this season with Is This A Room is telling about where an audience’s taste is moving right now—or was moving before the COVID-19 situation.

Does the intention of experimentation have to be put into an experimental genre box for audiences?

I think that’s shifting, even in popular music. For me, music is always a barometer for public opinion. An artist like Lil Uzi Vert being one of the most popular young rappers right now is exciting because it’s showing the audience for pop music wants illegibility more so than they want what Camilla Cabello is saying—and that’s not to say what Camilla Cabello is singing is very simple. But it does mean that there seems to be a lot more energy around someone like Lil Uzi Vert who has the type of lyricism and the flights of fancy in who he decides to associate himself with that are wildly more experimental than anything else you hear on a pop station.

You co-wrote the movie Zola, signed a deal with HBO, and are a co-producer of Euphoria. You’ve clearly branched out to other types of writing, but what was it about theater that drew your attention first?

I’ve always enjoyed the thrill that I got doing theater. Growing up, I had a lot of anxiety disorders. The only space of expression where I didn’t feel those anxieties well up and disable me were when I was doing theater. My main source of medicine or treatment for the anxieties that were crippling me in every other part of my day was when I’d step out on a stage. I’ve always been chasing that drug and wanted to be a part of it, a figure inside of it because it gripped my imagination in a litany of ways.

How do you make sure that you keep true to your voice while working on different projects?

The biggest thing I can do for myself is protect my light in whatever way I can. But if for some reason I get away from my voice, I have to also give myself grace in remembering that a lot of my favorite writers got away from their voice for whatever reason at different points in their careers. Kanye West was one of my favorite artists ever, and I talk about him all the time. People constantly say, “He’s so conservative now, blah, blah.” I’m like, “You obviously haven’t read enough about transgressive artists and what happens in the mid- to late-career transition.” Many of those artists get away from their voice and start engaging with conservative ideas. Look at Bob Dylan as a great example of that. He took a left, and immediately was like, “I’m Christian now, and here’s what I think.” That was around the same moment for him as it is for Kanye right now. There’s something about the maturation of artists that I find really interesting.

What other rewards do you earn from your creative practice, and what has it taught you about yourself?

One of the main things I’ve gotten out of this work is the community that comes from being a theater-maker. There are very few jobs where you have to actually sit in a room in conversation with your collaborators for weeks on end. Every time I do a new project my circle gets bigger. It’s really exhilarating to me. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.

What is the trait that you most enjoy about the way that you work?

A lot of people have said they admire some semblance of bravery that they see inside of the work I do, and my disinterest in what people might think of what I’ve written. I don’t ascribe that to any sort of bravery, but I do ascribe that to my many years of not being treated for multiple things, having to walk through the world feeling different, and articulating that difference unabashedly in order to try to get the help or resources I needed.

When I don’t like the writing I’m doing, I feel like Jeremy the writer is wanting to hide something for Jeremy the person. That can manifest itself because Jeremy the person doesn’t want to be embarrassed that maybe they aren’t as good at writing as other people want them to be, which is an anxiety that every writer has, especially a writer that has success early.

You constantly have some imposter syndrome. You think, “I’m not supposed to be here! Any move I make will reveal the mistake of this entire enterprise!” That’s the main thing that I try and stamp out as a writer because what I like about myself is that most of the plays I have written, I wasn’t writing thinking that I was a genius or that anyone else would say I was a genius. I was writing because that was what I wanted to see. I wrote down what I wanted to see unabashedly, and I didn’t worry about whether an audience would be shocked by this thing or that. If I don’t want to see the play I’m writing, there’s literally no reason for it to exist, which is one of the hard things about being a writer.

How has the experience of COVID-19 altered your perception of the physical space of a theater?

Assembly is very difficult for artists and audiences right now, and it is probably going to be difficult for a significant amount of time. I don’t know about you, but I don’t see myself wanting to go sit around 600 people, or even 20 other people, anytime soon.

I’ve been very loudly in a camp of artists saying this is a moment for us to actually reflect on the future of our industry, to look at this as the opportunity to reframe our understanding of what theater is. That’s why I don’t feel any pull to make some wild proclamation around what makes a theatrical event necessarily theatrical. That has shifted in history multiple times, and we’re in a moment that necessitates a shift if we want the idea of theater-making to exist. It might have to become some hybrid; maybe theater becomes hosting a meeting with seven other people in World of Warcraft. There are opportunities here for what theater can be that are outside of a building. I don’t want to limit my own imagination of what it can be by telling myself that I have to keep thinking about what theater has been.

I was so moved by the Blackout performances that you organized for Slave Play. It embraces theater, while making it a space that adapts for people who may not have felt welcomed or represented.

We can talk about all the ways that theater is not welcoming racially or class-wise, but the fact that theaters have so few seats dedicated to those with disabilities is insane. That means that if you’re a disabled patron who also has a full-time job and can only go see a play on Thursday February 20th, you have to hope that you are one of three disabled people who want to see that show that night, and not one of six—because if you’re one of six, you probably aren’t getting a seat. What happens for that patron who wants to see Slave Play but couldn’t go the one night that there was an available seat for a disabled person?

I’m thinking about how we can look at this moment when no one can get to the theater as a way to make a theatrical experience over the next 40 years that is more welcoming to people who are disabled, or people whose bodies generally just don’t fit in the seats that are very small and very impractical for most bodies. My body feels uncomfortable in theater seats because I’m 6’5”. There will most likely come a time when my knees won’t be able to take going to a theater six nights a week, and I’m going to have to figure something else out.

Has your vision of making a change in art shifted since you first started writing?

If anything shifted, it’s my naiveté that those shifts could happen quickly, or that people would be super receptive to those shifts. I was naïve in thinking that a lot of the issues were that the right people hadn’t said the right things yet. A lot of people have been saying these things. It just takes a lot to get people to listen. I’m seeing that every day, and it’s draining to ask people to listen. I wasn’t ready for how draining it could be. People listen more the more you succeed.

So how do you define success?

There are all these different markers of success. Slave Play hasn’t won any significant awards, but my plays have gotten the type of attention that very few 30-year-olds get for their debut plays. People take notice of that. When you tell people you’re going to do a play on Broadway, without celebrities, and actually ask young people, black people, and queer people to come see your play, they might laugh. But when they see it work, they think, “Maybe we should listen more.” Those little successes are what make people take note of what you have to say. One thing that I think is a marker of success is the fact that I’m able to take care of my family in some way. Another marker of success is that I’m happy sometimes. I think that’s a good thing. Markers of success are difficult because they mutate constantly.

How quickly does your creative process take shape?

Normally, having a title makes the idea start to form really quickly. But then the maturation of that formed idea takes months and months of reading and talking to people. I love to tell people my ideas, and watch them grow inside of their imagination. Before I even start writing, I’ll go to my roommate, who’s one of my drama teachers, and allow the idea to get bigger, and bigger, until the play is ready to burst out of me at the end. Then I go and write it down.

Do you have any rituals around your writing that you have to stick to?

I don’t really shave while I’m writing. I’ll shave when I’m done working on something big, but again, I don’t always stick to that because life happens. Sometimes I have to go to an event or there’s a photo shoot and I have to go shave. Or maybe my mom is coming to visit, and she’s like, “I don’t want to see you unshaved.” You just have to be like, “Okay, mom.”

I really hate being unshaved. I think I look so gross. But it’s like, “I guess I’m just not going to shave this week, and maybe that’ll give me some extra help to finish a scene.”

What is something you wish you had heard as a young playwright that could help as a resource for kids now?

The biggest thing is knowing that you already have it. The thing you’re looking for, the affirmation you’re thinking that I might be able to give you in this quote—you already have it. The biggest thing about being a writer is you have to have a brazen overconfidence that you have the “thing,” no matter how many people tell you you don’t. The more you’re able to believe that and move with that belief, the more honest your voice will be.

There’s no professor that can tell you if you have it or not. There’s no playwright who can tell you if you have it or not. The only one that can tell you that you have it is yourself, and so just remember that you do. Be fiercely protective of your autonomy as an artist.

If I didn’t have my own gut instincts telling me that I was a worthy artist, then a play like Slave Play would have never happened. Going to a place like Yale School of Drama is a gauntlet. It’s a lot of people telling you all the time that your work doesn’t make sense, that your work isn’t this, or your work isn’t that. If I wouldn’t have said I like my work the way it is, then Slave Play wouldn’t have gone to Broadway.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Lior Phillips.

Last week, writer Sherry Zhang was at the opening night of Auckland Theatre Company’s production of Single Asian Female. She’s waited to see it since 2019 and now, having finally seen it on New Zealand shores, she reflects on the play and what it means to her.

I’ve been waiting for a while to see this show. I first heard about Single Asian Female in 2019 from a Sydney friend who told me I had to see it. “I’ll fly over from Auckland then,” I joked, but more than half-serious.

So in 2021, when Kat Tsz Hung, who plays Chinese matriarch Pearl Wong, stared defiantly at me on a giant yellow post in Auckland Theatre Company’s Waterfront Theatre, I was beyond chuffed.

I’ve waited so long because it’s about time.

Single Asian Female premiered in Sydney years ago and only reached New Zealand shores in 2021.

To be produced at ATC is as mainstream as you can get with theatre in New Zealand. It’s validating to have an Asian-centric story, directed and written, right at the Viaduct. I’ve been to a few ATC shows now, and the audience is generally a sea of white hair on white people.

There’s been incredible mahi buzzing from Proudly Asian Theatre for the past few years, championing the community needs and interests. From producing works, supporting emerging artists, and calling out the lack of diversity in Aotearoa’s performance spaces for Asian creatives.

Working with PAT on this project is smart for ATC, it provides them with some street cred for an institution that has otherwise been slow on the diversity and inclusion front.

Just a few years ago, ATC was still pumping out predominantly all-white casts and all-white production teams. (The two actors of colour had fleeting, almost silent roles).

Sacrifice of our parents
Single Asian Female is a thank you to the sacrifice our parents endure to bring up children in an Australasian space. As the character Pearl says, “food is the great equaliser, our stomachs are the same”.

Our parents run restaurants or takeaways so we can have a chance at a better life. They cook because they can, and it pays.

A scene familiar to me: older siblings running the tables while you sit in the corner finishing maths homework. Or being pulled in to do shift work even if you have prior commitments, because who else is going to run the family business?

Playwright Michelle Law isn’t afraid to pick apart the “tiger mum”, parenting trope. Pearl has so much love for her daughters Zoe (Xana Tang) and Mei (Bridget Wong). She’s funny, supportive and would do anything to protect her children. But she’s also snappy, harsh and overbearing.

It tapped into a fair amount of mother issues I’m still carrying. My friends and I all walked out of the theatre slightly dazed, because “I’m pretty sure line for line, that’s something my Mum has said”.

I was pretty good at holding back the tears, until the final scenes when Zoe shares the songs Pearl would sing to calm her down when she has panic attacks. I sobbed a bit in the dark until the red lanterns and glitzy dance lights came on again for the karaoke finale spectacular.

I see how Asian mothers talk about their duty to their children. This martyrdom of suffering, of keeping up a strong face, often translates into coldness. Pearl’s chants of “I am strong,” is both inspiring and heart-wrenching.

Gorgeous one-liners
The transition from the play’s original setting on the Gold Coast to Mt Maunganui provides some gorgeous one-liners about Winston Peters and L&P. But there are some awkward translations, with jokes about Penny Wong, openly queer Australian MP, not sitting as smoothly.

It felt like a missed opportunity to flesh out queerness in Chinese culture.

I understood the joke was in Pearl’s unexpected openness regarding sexuality (and her complete horror of Zoe’s unexpected pregnancy). But to use queerness as the punchline felt like a slap in the face as someone who’s continuing to unpack the trauma of being queer in a conservative Chinese family.

Other moments that stung include the racist comments Mei endures from her Pākeha high school friends. The internalised racism and identity unravelling is a particular point of growing up Kiwi-Asian.

But it frustrated me when on opening night, non-Asian audience members laughed at these comments. “Oi, it’s literally just our reality,” I wanted to shout.

At first, I struggled to place how old Mei was. But through her growth, I found her characterisation to be realistically matched with the sophistication 17-year-old teenage girls deserve.

Xana Tang’s performance as Zoe was particularly charming, while Kat Tsz Hung was flamboyant and unapologetic as Pearl. To see Asian women taking up space, loud and demanding attention is a necessary breakdown of the small, quiet and obedient stereotypes enforced upon us.

Director Cassandre Tse expertly moves us from moments of immense heartache and grief to fits of laughter. A balance and lightness needed to transport us through a two and a half hour play that holds rather heavy traumatic themes.

We’ve been waiting to hear our mothers, sisters and ourselves speak for so long, and now I just want even more.

• Single Asian Female. By Michelle Law. ASB Waterfront Theatre, Auckland. 27 April– 15 May 2021. This review is republished from the Asia Media Centre under a Creative Commons licence.

Last week, writer Sherry Zhang was at the opening night of Auckland Theatre Company’s production of Single Asian Female. She’s waited to see it since 2019 and now, having finally seen it on New Zealand shores, she reflects on the play and what it means to her.

I’ve been waiting for a while to see this show. I first heard about Single Asian Female in 2019 from a Sydney friend who told me I had to see it. “I’ll fly over from Auckland then,” I joked, but more than half-serious.

So in 2021, when Kat Tsz Hung, who plays Chinese matriarch Pearl Wong, stared defiantly at me on a giant yellow post in Auckland Theatre Company’s Waterfront Theatre, I was beyond chuffed.

I’ve waited so long because it’s about time.

Single Asian Female premiered in Sydney years ago and only reached New Zealand shores in 2021.

To be produced at ATC is as mainstream as you can get with theatre in New Zealand. It’s validating to have an Asian-centric story, directed and written, right at the Viaduct. I’ve been to a few ATC shows now, and the audience is generally a sea of white hair on white people.

There’s been incredible mahi buzzing from Proudly Asian Theatre for the past few years, championing the community needs and interests. From producing works, supporting emerging artists, and calling out the lack of diversity in Aotearoa’s performance spaces for Asian creatives.

Working with PAT on this project is smart for ATC, it provides them with some street cred for an institution that has otherwise been slow on the diversity and inclusion front.

Just a few years ago, ATC was still pumping out predominantly all-white casts and all-white production teams. (The two actors of colour had fleeting, almost silent roles).

Sacrifice of our parents
Single Asian Female is a thank you to the sacrifice our parents endure to bring up children in an Australasian space. As the character Pearl says, “food is the great equaliser, our stomachs are the same”.

Our parents run restaurants or takeaways so we can have a chance at a better life. They cook because they can, and it pays.

A scene familiar to me: older siblings running the tables while you sit in the corner finishing maths homework. Or being pulled in to do shift work even if you have prior commitments, because who else is going to run the family business?

Playwright Michelle Law isn’t afraid to pick apart the “tiger mum”, parenting trope. Pearl has so much love for her daughters Zoe (Xana Tang) and Mei (Bridget Wong). She’s funny, supportive and would do anything to protect her children. But she’s also snappy, harsh and overbearing.

It tapped into a fair amount of mother issues I’m still carrying. My friends and I all walked out of the theatre slightly dazed, because “I’m pretty sure line for line, that’s something my Mum has said”.

I was pretty good at holding back the tears, until the final scenes when Zoe shares the songs Pearl would sing to calm her down when she has panic attacks. I sobbed a bit in the dark until the red lanterns and glitzy dance lights came on again for the karaoke finale spectacular.

I see how Asian mothers talk about their duty to their children. This martyrdom of suffering, of keeping up a strong face, often translates into coldness. Pearl’s chants of “I am strong,” is both inspiring and heart-wrenching.

Gorgeous one-liners
The transition from the play’s original setting on the Gold Coast to Mt Maunganui provides some gorgeous one-liners about Winston Peters and L&P. But there are some awkward translations, with jokes about Penny Wong, openly queer Australian MP, not sitting as smoothly.

It felt like a missed opportunity to flesh out queerness in Chinese culture.

I understood the joke was in Pearl’s unexpected openness regarding sexuality (and her complete horror of Zoe’s unexpected pregnancy). But to use queerness as the punchline felt like a slap in the face as someone who’s continuing to unpack the trauma of being queer in a conservative Chinese family.

Other moments that stung include the racist comments Mei endures from her Pākeha high school friends. The internalised racism and identity unravelling is a particular point of growing up Kiwi-Asian.

But it frustrated me when on opening night, non-Asian audience members laughed at these comments. “Oi, it’s literally just our reality,” I wanted to shout.

At first, I struggled to place how old Mei was. But through her growth, I found her characterisation to be realistically matched with the sophistication 17-year-old teenage girls deserve.

Xana Tang’s performance as Zoe was particularly charming, while Kat Tsz Hung was flamboyant and unapologetic as Pearl. To see Asian women taking up space, loud and demanding attention is a necessary breakdown of the small, quiet and obedient stereotypes enforced upon us.

Director Cassandre Tse expertly moves us from moments of immense heartache and grief to fits of laughter. A balance and lightness needed to transport us through a two and a half hour play that holds rather heavy traumatic themes.

We’ve been waiting to hear our mothers, sisters and ourselves speak for so long, and now I just want even more.

• Single Asian Female. By Michelle Law. ASB Waterfront Theatre, Auckland. 27 April– 15 May 2021. This review is republished from the Asia Media Centre under a Creative Commons licence.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.