The political landscape has exacerbated a moral divide in the United States. Artists are facing battles on multiple fronts, from personal identity, to a scarcity mindset of artmaking, to our differences being pointed out as failings of a community, rather than strengths. How are artists responding to this moment in time? How is it impacting their work? And what is their responsibility, on a social level, to engage with the topics of the moment?
Phaedra Michelle Scott, Resident Dramaturg for The New Harmony Project, moderates this conversation between four NHP alumni writers, joined by Jenni Werner, Executive Artistic Director. The four writers in this installment include Vichet Chum, Lina Patel, Jonathan Spector, and Gloria Majule. Read their bios here.
“Without even trying, I’m already making a political statement and I think that’s because I am talking about an issue or issues that are affecting a group of people, and when you do that, whether or not it’s your intention, you kind of end up making a political point. ”
PHAEDRA: How do you define political theater? Or, what do you think is political theater?
Vichet Chum
VICHET: I've unmuted myself, so I'm launching right in. What a question. I think it's perhaps persuasive to get really semantical and also very cynical in our responses. Because I think politics and theater, those identities have obviously changed so much over time.
I read this article in The New York Times Magazine at the beginning of the year where they interviewed a fellow playwright, Sanaz Toosi. She defined political theater as a form that tries to make the lives of people better. That really resonated with me. I think we can say, yes, political theater has a concept and tries to converse with something that's happening in the world. I think in my Pollyanna way, and in the way I feel like I am activated by art, the question always goes back to, is it trying to help make the world better in some way?
Perhaps all theater is political, because the act of being in a space with people in a room, in a cave, there is something inherently radical about that.
LINA: Thanks, Vichet. I'll dive in. It's funny for me as an immigrant and a sick person and someone in the middle class on the socioeconomic ladder growing up, theater has always been political to me. It was where I saw stories of oppression and injustice that, while fictional, rang true. Yes, I think the definition of political theater has evolved over the last few decades and certainly recently.
Lina Patel
I remember a Sanskrit drama written a long time ago called The Little Clay Cart. It's about justice and social class, but couched in a rom-com. I think about that, I think about Brecht, I think about Kushner's Angels in America. Theater has always been political.
For me, the way recent playwrights have been grappling with politics in America has made dialogue more difficult. For a long time, like around COVID era, I felt like the only people that were showing up to the theater that I was coming to, were people that didn't really need to be there. In other words, I felt there was a lot of preaching to the choir. I want to see myself and my reality reflected. I want catharsis. I also want to be challenged. Where is the theater that’s bringing in people from different walks of life the way I grew up seeing it?
Jonathan Spector
JONATHAN: It's tricky because we live in a moment when politics really invades every aspect of our lives. I think we're pretty clearly coming to the end of a time when you could be an artist in this country and not have to worry about the possibility of either direct government censorship or more indirect pressures from the political realm.
Although they walked it back, we just saw the cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel's show, something kind of unthinkable a few years ago.
I had a play that was in New York last year. It was meant to launch a tour at the Kennedy Center March, and then that did not happen as a result of Trump taking over the Kennedy Center.
In this context, I don't know how you write something that's not to some degree political.
But the other side of that is for a lot of us, and certainly audiences, there can be a kind of instinctive knee-jerk reaction against being told something is “political theater”. It brings up the fear that you're going to be stuck in a space while the playwright is using an actor as a puppet so they can say all of the things they want to say. And you can't escape. I think that obviously is not what so much of political theater is, but I think that's what makes it a tricky term, since that's what it invokes for so many people.
Plays are, for me, very bad technology if what you're trying to do is advocate for a very specific political point of view directly to an audience. Unless it's a one-person show and the person is you, then plays are usually about characters, and the more specific the characters, the stronger the play. But the more specific you make the characters, the less they are like you. That character isn't going to say the thing that you want to say in the way you want to say it. They're going to say what they're going to say, the way they would say it. Then you layer on top of that the problem of needing to create reasons on why the character must say it right now. And suddenly you're doing an awful lot of work in order to create a structure to be able to directly say the thing you want to say. It would be so much easier and clearer to simply write an essay. Or a facebook post.
The third piece is that the timeline of theater is so long and slow. Even when we have the impulse to react to something happening right now, by the time it gets programmed, it’s a year or two later, if we’re lucky. And then it’s at least another year from when they decide to program it, to when it actually gets produced. So now you're very far away from that initial impulse you were reacting to. Not that it won't be relevant, but probably not in the same way that it was when you had the impulse to write it..
GLORIA: Thank you all so much for what you've shared. Lina, when you're talking about the experience of being an immigrant, I very much resonated with that, because that has also been my way of looking at theater and the political landscape.
I'm in America right now as a Black immigrant woman. I'm not an American citizen. And so, there's a lot to navigate. When I think about what is political theater, I think about the theater that I grew up with in Tanzania.
Gloria Majule
If you've talked to me before, you've probably heard this story a million times. Growing up, my mom used to work with raising HIV AIDS awareness, and this was post-colonial Tanzania. There were still a lot of low literacy rates in the villages at the time, so they would use theater as a way to educate the community and try to inspire social change. That was my introduction to political theater. I saw theater being used in real time to try to reach a community, to try to heal a community, and to also inspire social change. I saw it working and I was like wow. That was my first time seeing the power of what art can do. I think because of that, [it] inspired the way that I think about theater and the way that I create stories.
I am writing about Black African characters navigating what it means to be alive in this world. Without even trying, I'm already making a political statement and I think that's because I am talking about an issue or issues that are affecting a group of people, and when you do that, whether or not it's your intention, you kind of end up making a political point.
As an example, I was talking to somebody the other day who painted a series of just skin colors, and they were surprised that people said their series was political. I was not surprised, because skin color is something that can impact the quality of somebody's life, so in essence, by displaying that, you are having some kind of political conversation whether or not that was your intention. So that's where I come at it. I think a lot of it has to do with my background and how I saw theater growing up and my introduction into theater.
“I don’t like to label my work, but again, to me, the act of writing is inherently political.”
JENNI: I'm curious, just as a follow-up, because I wonder if the phrase political theater was the wrong phrase. Is there a different way that any of you describe when you're writing about an issue that's happening right now, or you actually are trying to let your characters make a point about something, whether it's a point that you personally agree with or not. I'm curious if there's a different way you would describe that work, or maybe the label is not a useful thing to try and come up with, but just curious.
LINA: You're curious if I didn't want to use political theater to describe a play that deals with politics, how I would describe it? I don't know if it's just my contrary nature, but there's a part of me that really resists labeling myself as a female, queer, you know, whatever, playwright, and in the same way, I don't like to label my work, but again, to me, the act of writing is inherently political.
Don DeLillo said: “Writers must oppose systems. It’s important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments…I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us.” For me, that's what the act of writing is. To speak to Jonathan's point, too, I do think that history is cyclical.
Like right now, it doesn't feel like history is linear. . I want to believe that the arc of humanity bends towards justice. And of course, we've made strides, but I do feel like it's circular. When I'm writing, and it's been really difficult lately, I've felt so oppressed by everything going on and by friends of mine across the political spectrum not being able to speak to each other, that I haven't been able to engage in my own writing.
I go see a lot of things, and I've been mentoring people, but it's been very hard for me to pick up my pen. But I always try to engage with eternal themes, because I don't like to react in the moment to something happening in the zeitgeist.
I do that on TV. But I think for me, as a playwright, I have to absorb, educate myself, and then respond from a place of generosity for all sides.
I saw Will Arbery's Heroes of the Fourth Turning, about a reunion of these young Catholic intellectuals, a few years ago at Rogue Machine Theater. I knew of him. I hadn't seen any of his work before. And I was kind of blown away. Like, seeing this point of view, really understanding it was awesome. It [the play] gave me a window into a world that I never would have sought out on my own. I don't travel in those circles - of conservative Catholics. So increasingly, while my pen is down, I've been trying to seek out other areas, get out of my comfort zone.
“Theater can, even in a small way, brush up against the scary reality of our moment in that way feels very different than where we were as a country even a year ago. There’s an important opportunity in that, but it also comes with a new level of responsibility and risk. ”
PHAEDRA: I think this is a good opportunity for the next question. How are you as an artist responding to this time? How has this time changed the impact of your work?
JONATHAN: I think it's changed quite a bit. I used to have an idea that was maybe true until very recently. Which is that plays are something people can enjoy, find meaning in, and occasionally even have a transcendent experience with. And that if you’re very lucky maybe in some extremely minor way, plays can shift something in a person who sees it. But that plays don't really impact the world. Not in this country. Because most people don’t go to theatre, most people aren’t even aware of it. So the idea that a play is going to have some substantial real world impact, it’s not that it’s never happened, it’s more that it’s so exceedingly rare that it’s a bit of a delusional thing to chase after.
But I now feel the porousness of everything and how scary that can be in a more direct way. To give a more literal example, I spent today deactivating my social media accounts. Which is of course something we should probably all be doing just for our own humanity, and something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. But the direct impetus was that MCC is about to announce a play for mine in the spring, Birthright, which is about the fracture of the American Jewish community over Israel. And while I don’t have much concern about the reaction of people who actually see the play, I have a lot of anxiety about the reaction online of people who just hear about it, assume they know what it is about in some totally reductive way, and then get very angry about that. The play premiered in Florida in April, and we had a bit of that happen. So it seemed a good excuse to step back from that social media world.
Bill Irwin (front), Eboni Flowers, Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz, and Jessica Hecht in the MTC production of Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day. Photo: Jeremy Daniel.
And I also think about some of the very tricky conversations we had around the Kennedy Center with Eureka Day. Definitely a question that arose was, do we make a public statement? What kind of public statement do we make? We don’t want to cower, but also I don't want to make myself the target of the day of Elon Musk's troll army, because it's just not something that I want to take on. Theater can, even in a small way, brush up against the scary reality of our moment in that way feels very different than where we were as a country even a year ago. There’s an important opportunity in that, but it also comes with a new level of responsibility and risk.
VICHET: For me, I do try to dull whatever perception I have of what I think the intended impact of a play will be. In all my work, I've returned to questions about the human experience that continue to plague me, that keep me up at night. Certainly those things are not created in a silo, those are things as a response to the world in which I live in.
I think the way in which I'm responding to this time artistically, it's more so about being catalyzed by the fear of censorship. There’s a real assault on our rights to express our viewpoints. I come from an immigrant refugee family, and I'm a queer person. I sit at this axis of identities in which I'm very aware of certain members of my community being targeted or being villainized. So much of my writing has to do with humanizing their experiences, making them the main character, making them feel complex and as textured as I know them as human beings to be. That unto itself is an act of political force, giving space and breath to people who aren't empowered in this moment.
GLORIA: I am always trying to make an impact. I am really inspired by theater of the oppressed. I think a lot of writers that I am aware [of] who grew up in post-colonial countries and are addressing and grappling with that are inspired by theater [of the oppressed]. I think that translated to my work.
I set out to write because I wanted to create authentic African stories that challenge stereotypes, and so, even without intending to, I made an impact by nature of being this Tanzanian immigrant, writing these stories in a way that people weren't used to seeing them told, and also, that weren't being done.
I wrote the first full length play with an all-Black cast to be produced at Cornell University. I graduated in 2017. I was the first African woman to get an MFA in Playwriting from Yale School of Drama. I graduated in 2021. All of these things, wherever I go, I am making an impact just by nature of me existing in that space. My stories are doing the same. And, I also grapple with relevance, but there are plays that I wrote years ago which are just now getting attention, and I think because I am writing about a people that is marginalized in society, the issues that we face, so long as white supremacy still reigns in the world, those issues are gonna take different forms and different shapes, but they're in conversation with each other.
The way I think I'm making an impact is I love when I go to a place around the country and a Black African audience member comes to me and they're like, ‘That's the first time I saw myself presented on the stage’, or ‘I was really impacted by that, I felt that was such an authentic and beautiful representation of my culture that I haven't seen.’
I don't know if I'm changing the world, but I think I am creating an impact in even just a small number of people's lives. I write for the Black gaze, and this is in itself political, because in a world where white is default, when you assume the audience is Black, you are making a political statement. I've actually been told that writing for the Black gaze is exclusionary, even though that's not the way I see it. I see it as writing love letters to the Black diaspora and people can read love letters that weren't written for them and still laugh and cry and be moved.
I want to make an impact because I want to reach the audiences that need to see these stories the most. I want to keep being inspired by theater of the oppressed because so long as there's more and more things being done to oppress the marginalized people in society, I think we need that even more.
I use humor because I feel like laughter can numb the pain, and that’s how I am responding to this time. I'm just trying to write even funnier, make people laugh even more. Even if I'm tackling issues as dark as xenophobia, we can still do it in a way that can provide healing. It goes back to that social change that I was talking about. How can I inspire social change in my community? If I can do that, then I am making an impact that I am satisfied with.
LINA: I love all of that. That's very inspiring, Gloria. As an artist, I'm responding to this time by mentoring emerging writers. I'm also doing things I've never done before because the worst thing for me that could happen is that I just stop and despair. This may be a particular Gen X mid-career thing - the idea of reinvention or expanding creative skills in order to survive. The world. The business. The patriarchy. But also, to challenge oneself. Women of color have to find so many ways to tell their stories. It’s not always through writing.
So recently I produced my first short film. I wrote and directed it, too. I produced a new play festival where I got to pitch six writers to Rogue Machine Theatre. I dramaturged some of the work [and] directed one of the readings.
I started teaching during the WGA strike. Lately, I'm asking my students, what's hottest for them right now as artists. As Jose Rivera said, what are you obsessed with? When I sensed last year that I was feeling depleted and defeated. I was like, let me reach out and do things for other writers who are not feeling that way, right? Support them, uplift voices, that I've known of, that I see something in. And teaching has been an unexpected gift. I initially was very much writing for a South Asian diasporic audience with my first works.
My first play was a very free adaptation of Three Sisters, set in pre-partition Bengal. My second play was set in the near future, examining colonialism through a conflict between a mother and her adopted son. But I feel like those plays, even though they were written years ago, are more relevant now. Or perhaps people, institutions, are more receptive now, because the gatekeepers are changing. Slowly. The impact of my work is still to come. I am told by actor-turned-directors (or writers) who knew me as an actor, that my work has inspired their career changes.
“I’ve actually been told that writing for the Black gaze is exclusionary, even though that’s not the way I see it. I see it as writing love letters to the Black diaspora and people can read love letters that weren’t written for them and still laugh and cry and be moved.”
PHAEDRA: Jonathan, you started talking about this with deleting social media, and Lina, you were talking about this in terms of going to see more theater and mentoring, but how do you protect yourself as a creator? How do you nourish yourself artistically?
And I'll add one more thing: I think this is something that artists right now are really struggling with, at least people that I talk to when I ask, how are you writing? How are you creating? What are some ways or maybe even tools that you would recommend?
LINA: In the interest of humor, honestly, sometimes how I nourish myself artistically, I'm like ‘I'm going to get a pedicure’, which is a real treat for me. It just allows me to think, like you do in the shower, sometimes you're just thinking and you solve a plot issue you were having. Or in my case these days, a plot issue another writer or student is having, ha!
I really am trying to get out of my comfort zone - for example, by attending all sorts of talks. I'm fortunate to live near college campuses, so I'll attend lectures by political scientists or economists or authors that I wouldn't normally attend, because they're on a different side of the political spectrum from myself. But I'm like, let me go do this. Or, taking a fiction class because I’ve never done that before.
I read novels and nonfiction to nourish myself and I try to invest in the everyday business of being a mom and a dog mom as well, and a good partner. And of course, seeing lots of theater, going to museums.,. I wish I could do what Jonathan's about to do [deleting social media]. I can't for various reasons, but, I think I've d tried to stop posting political things on my social media. Sometimes there's things I do post, which, as I did today, my friend Joy Gregory wrote a wonderful letter to Bob Iger, and I chose to post that.
But also, my social media following is small. I don't think it matters at all in the grand scheme of things., Like, who cares what I post? Lately, I feel like I have found it hard to dialogue with people whom I disagree with about something and that's been disheartening. Those disagreements played out on social media and caused me to back off. It’s the last place I want to use to express my pov.
As far as tools, Phaedra, you said for other artists, suggestions about how to nourish yourself?
PHAEDRA: Yeah, any sort of specific examples either that you've done or you see other people do?
LINA: You know, I volunteer at my daughter's school and for people running for office in my little city because I feel like that's where it starts. The national thing is just exhausting for me sometimes, I mean I will always vote, but people may not have the schedule to march every other day - I know we have to but it’s not realistic for many, including me, with kids, survival jobs, etc. Do something for somebody else is one suggestion I have.
GLORIA: I am also a fan of getting a pedicure Lina, I 100% agree with that. Something else that I have found has been very great is exercise. My personal go to is aerial acrobatics because it's just very fun and a little dangerous. The adrenaline is exciting and I find that to be very therapeutic. I think, also if you can, traveling and trying to get away.
I went home to Tanzania in March, which was just great to be back in my country and to see my mom and speak in my mother tongue. That was, for me, very nourishing. Something else which might be a little controversial is I have become quite ruthless in letting go of people whose values and beliefs don't align with mine. Because I think the environment you create around yourself has a lot to do with well-being. So the people who I let into my close circle, the people who I let be in constant communication with me, I'm being very careful because I want to make sure that I am protecting my heart and I am not exhausting myself.
Oh, and spending time with other artists, like in conversations like this, because we're all going through it in a lot of different ways. So it's great to surround myself with fellow artists and talk about, yeah, how to keep going and keep creating.
“Because I think the environment you create around yourself has a lot to do with well-being.”
VICHET: My beloved dog that passed away recently, Lucy, really taught me, out of necessity, how to go outside and take long walks. Towards the end, she mostly just sat, perched her happy ass on a picnic table or a bench or whatever, and watched the world go by.
I developed my own meditation with her. I tried to put away my phone, tried to put away my Wordle or my New York Times crosswords. I tried to find presence and become aware of the details of the park that I've been to a thousand million times. And man, that really has changed my chemistry. It's really shifted the way I look at things. I think it’s protected me as a human being and as an artist.
At some point, I do think I’ll try to take more breaks from social media, because I do think living in the comments is really tough. I don't want to be an elder millennial who bemoans social media because we created social media. But I do think that trying to develop boundaries for yourself around that and not making that the only language in which you are communicating with the rest of the world, is really healthy.
JONATHAN: Just to piggyback on that, in addition to all the ways social media is bad, one of the things it does, not just social media, but the way all of our lives online are structured by algorithms beyond our control. One of the things that it does is it can lead to us all kind of swimming in the soup of the same ideas all the time.
One of the things that's really important to do, especially right now as a writer, is [to] find your way out of that, which often means reading books that were published more than 40 years ago, or just finding your way into different rabbit holes that nobody else is going down. And let your curiosity be your guide to take you wherever it's going to go, as far away from the soup of algorithmic ideas as you can.
The other thing that I do a lot, if it's appropriate for the play, is to try and do as many interviews as I can with people. I find it’s a great way in because so much political discussion , so much of our politics, is very confrontational. There’s this idea that you need to convince the other person that you are right, and they are wrong.
And what's great about interviewing people is you get to be in a position where you have no responsibility or obligation or intent to convince them of anything. You're just trying to listen to and understand them. And that's such a human interaction. It's like embracing humanity to just be trying to understand a person.
And I find that really, I don't know, revivifying sometimes. Even if I totally disagree with that person. Because sometimes that conversation will go so off-topic of whatever the thing you wanted to talk about and you go into this totally other place. Every person is so strange and weird and interesting and different.
I mean I also enjoy good pedicure but I have two little kids, I have very little time in my life right now to find the space to do things for myself as much as I would like. Although of course being with the kids is also certainly a way of forcing yourself to be present in the moment in a very deep way, even if there is a part of you that would like to flee that moment and go be present by yourself at the same time. But that's the strange contradiction of parenthood.
“And let your curiosity be your guide to take you wherever it’s going to go, as far away from the soup of algorithmic ideas as you can.”
LINA: Yes, my daughter is now 16, so she's increasingly self-sufficient.But just to go back one question, the other thing I'm doing in terms of responding to this time is I'm reinvesting in myself as a performer, which is how I was born as an artist and what I studied in undergrad and grad. I'm devising work which I've never done before with a theater company out here about immigration and we're presenting at RedCat in November. Saying yes to doing readings of new works. So, reconnecting with that part of myself, which I neglected since I started writing has been a salve.
And then the other, I love long walks. And yeah, I'm trying to, I think it was Paula Vogel, at least that is who I heard it from, who talked about defamiliarization. In a physical, temporal sense, I mean.
When Robin, my daughter, is at camp, for example, I try to take myself on a solo trips in nature. It helps me as an artist to get out of my normal geographical location. To get my body elsewhere. To have that space that Vichet has when he's at the park. To see things anew when you return home. Travel is so key, even if it's just like, for me, a six hour drive to my brother’s cabin in the Sierras.
JENNI: What you're talking about is removing the need to urgently respond to something. You’re all talking about meditation and slowing down. There's an impulse sometimes when we think about writing and responding to what's happening in the moment, towards urgency. And it feels like what you're all saying, is actually, slow down, actually don't respond immediately. But give it some, give it some thought, let it marinate a little bit differently. Does that feel accurate?
LINA: I respond as Lina Patel citizen immediately when I feel the need to, but I am trying as an artist, especially since I started working in TV, to not respond that way as a playwright, right? That's how I started as a playwright. I'd be like, I'm pissed about this. I'm going to write about it. And that was great. And it's still great. And I encourage my students to do that. . But because I think TV, it's like the tail wagging the dog. You get some notes because your boss or the execs are trying to game the show to respond to right now. What's happening now? Now this is hot. Now this is not. So with theatre, I'm like, what is the human story? The complicated story?
In theater, I'm like, let me just think about this for a minute. And that's why I love places like New Harmony, because you can just go, there's no pressure to produce.
For me as an artist, it really is about slowing down, digesting, and like Jonathan was saying, I'm trying so hard to talk to people that I normally wouldn't talk to, hear their stories. And then I can write whatever the play I want, but after I've understood the other point of view. I try to talk to people on the other side of the issue and deeply understand them even when everything in my mind is screaming ‘You're wrong. You're on the wrong side on this issue.’ Because otherwise how can I embody that character if I'm performing, or write that character? Not on social media anymore. Because that's a disaster. Only in real life.
JONATHAN: In terms of your original question, every play is different. Some plays you can write a first draft of in four days and some will take you four years. It can sometimes happen that you are able to write something very quickly that is responding immediately to this moment.
I just don't know many people who could do that consistently and do it well. When it happens, it's sort of like a ‘How'd that happen?’ But every play dictates its own process and its own needs. You sort of have to follow that.
GLORIA: I may not be, intentionally, responding to something that happened yesterday. But I think by nature of the stories I am telling, and by nature of the characters I'm representing, whether or not it's my intention, I am responding to the moment because I'm writing about Black Africans who for years and years and years have been subjected to various oppressions by white supremacy, by colonialism, all of that.
So even if I'm writing a play right now, I'm here at Princeton doing a residency to write a play about climate change and how it specifically affects Africa, I'm responding to the moment without even intending to, right? So I think it's hard to say that I am not.
In terms of that question, is the time changing, impacting my work or is it like you don't have to respond to it right now? As Gloria, I have my opinions, I have my views of what is happening. And when I'm writing, even when I'm not trying to respond to the time, I just inadvertently end up doing so because of the kind of stories I am telling.
“We try really hard to write plays that make a difference. And sometimes, that conviction is more important than making a perfect play. ”
VICHET: Per what Jonathan was saying, there are many kinds of stories and there are many kinds of political stories. I think writing down your unfiltered and immediate feelings is an important step in the creative process but one of many. The reputation of political theater can be that you’re sitting in a theater and somebody is didactically telling you something that they really want you to believe in. Perhaps it is so raw, reactive, and underdeveloped in its argument, that it can make an audience member feel defensive or unable to hear it. The totality of the creative process is about offering you tools to create the conditions for an audience to really be able to listen to the questions you're posing. I think it takes a certain level of thoughtfulness and stepping away and developing a relationship to that first reaction and connecting that to all the reactions thereafter. Ideally, you want to try to carve out a story that makes an audience able to witness the landscape of conversations that you're wanting to have.
JONATHAN: The other thing to throw in there is, part of what makes playwriting so weird is that cliche that goes, plays are never finished, they're only abandoned. If a play has more productions, you can keep changing it.
And so if you're responding in a way that's relevant to the moment, the play is a living thing that can also change and evolve in a way that makes more sense or feels richer in the context of the moment that production is happening versus when you wrote it or when the first time it was produced.
VICHET: I should say too, sometimes I do like the experience of somebody yelling their convictions at me. I saw this play once that I honestly did not care for much, on a story level. But the playwright/performer was so passionate, you could see in their eyes how much they meant what they were expressing. It was undeniable. As an audience member, it didn’t even matter to me whether or not I thought the play was perfectly rendered. That artist’s level of conviction is something I will carry with me for the rest of my life.
We try really hard to write plays that make a difference. And sometimes, that conviction is more important than making a perfect play. There is no such thing, after all.
PHAEDRA: I'd love to move on to the next question, which is exactly tying to this conversation. What do you believe is your responsibility as an artist, or do you believe you have a responsibility as an artist?
GLORIA: For me, I do. I think the reason I write is because I'm trying really hard to tell stories that are challenging stereotypes and are presenting my culture in a way that feels authentic and with love and with care. And so for me as Gloria, my responsibility is to create that art in the best way that I can, so I can say that I am proud of the work that I've done because I did the thing that I set out to do.
JONATHAN: I feel like my first layer of responsibility as an artist is to the truth. To my subjective version of that. Not some capital T “Truth”, but that what's happening on stage feels truthful to me, moment to moment.
Sometimes in a political context, you have something that you as a person really want to express because you feel like it's important that this be said. But when you put it on stage and in a scene, it's flat and dead and doesn't feel true. The most common version of this is the problem of “Why would this character say this, when it’s a thing everybody on stage already knows? Why are they saying it now?” And if you don’t have a good answer to that, you have to cut it, and try a different approach. And so in that moment your responsibility to make what's happening on stage truthful is greater than saying the thing you want to say. Because if the play starts to feel flat and lifeless then the audience is going to check out, and you’ve undermined anything else you may have been attempting to do.
There’s this great Thorton Wilder quote about how the more you can avoid telling the audience what to think about your characters, the more likely they are to shift in their own thinking. Like, you create the space for the audience to do that by not filling it up with what you think. He says that most writers begin with some kind of didactic impulse, that’s the thing that starts the fire going but “just because we eat food cooked over a gas stove, doesn’t mean we taste the gas in the food.”
There’s also a second level of responsibility, which is me, the creator, and my responsibility for what's being put out into the world.With Eureka Day, which is about vaccine skepticism, I definitely was careful about not wanting to feel like anybody would walk out of the play and be like, “oh, maybe I shouldn't vaccinate my kids” because of something that was said in the play. I think you're always toggling between those two things: the truthfulness of what's on stage and your responsibility about what's being put out in the world.
VICHET: To contradict myself before when I said don't live in the comments of social media, there's this one that’s stayed with me. I had a production in Chicago. The play was entitled Bald Sisters. It’s about a matriarch, a refugee Cambodian woman who's just passed away. Her two adult daughters, one is a Southern Baptist and one is a Theravada Buddhist, are negotiating what to do with their mother's body. The play is very much about those conversations that we're forced to have when a loved one passes. It’s about how hard it is to find a common language and ultimately how hard it is to love one another.
Francesca Fernandez McKenzie and Jennifer Lim in Vichet Chum’s Bald Sisters at Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Photo: Michael Brosilow.
During the production, I saw a comment on the theater’s Instagram, where somebody (it could be AI, I don't know who it was, let's hope it's a real person), but this person said, after they saw my production, some time after their brother passed away from a terminal illness. This play offered the commenter a way to find language to talk to their brother before they passed. And that seared me. It continues to. It's one of those gifts you get as a writer that you put in your back pocket and carry with you forever. That's the responsibility that I hold myself to.
Also, I just went to Long Beach, California to feature my young adult novel [Kween], which is about the Cambodian community in Lowell, Massachusetts. Long Beach has the biggest population of Cambodians in the country, followed by Lowell. I find that whenever I'm in those affinity spaces, I'm always toggled back to my responsibility to them. I feel their endowment of wishes. They see what I'm doing, and they encourage me to keep going. I want to affirm those communities, shed light on them, and make sure that they are given the opportunity to have a microphone.
I think my responsibility is to write really passionately. To love what I do and to be unapologetic about it. To not write in a silo, but to continue to respond to the world that I'm in.
Cover image of the YA novel Kween by Vichet Chum
LINA: Yeah, I agree. I have a responsibility as an artist to my daughter to show her that I can start and finish something, and whatever the result is, is less important than the process. I mean, she sees me working every day. I think my responsibility is also to look internally at my own flaws, and then imbue my characters with them so they can have an actual conversation. I think that's my version of speaking to the truth of whatever it is I'm writing about.
My responsibility is research, which means getting out there and interviewing people, listening to people. Doing deep dive research, which can take time. Digesting that research, talking to people about it, doing the multiple revisions.
And that's how I avoid the algorithm that I've been talking to my daughter about for years now because she's growing up in an age where, we were the last holdouts to get her a smartphone and we almost had to her freshman year of high school, because her public school has an app what they use and she's not on any social media. But now she's like, ‘I think I might have to get on it because I hear that's how people find roommates when they go to college’, and I'm like–oh God. I guess my responsibility is just to show her that the real work happens outside of all of the screens right?
It's the sweat you share when you're on the picket lines with someone, or you're marching, or you're volunteering in a soup kitchen, and that's where your stories come from. Whether or not she becomes a writer, I think it's a lesson she can take with her in whatever field she chooses. That's increasingly my primary responsibility as an artist – to show her what that means by what I do.
JONATHAN: The other thing is the responsibility we all have to protect our plays. Which is, people may want to do your play, direct your play, produce your play, for whatever reasons they have and what they see in it, what they love about it. But those might not be the things that are important to you about the play. I think that's like a parent to a child. The core responsibility a playwright has to their play is to sort of protect it and let it be what it wants to be.
PHAEDRA: How do you protect your play?
JONATHAN: As best you can. Make sure you have the right collaborators for it, who understand what you're trying to do. To the degree you have any control over it, thinking about who is the right home for the play; or the right theater either in terms of that audience or that artistic director or producer. Who is going to be trying to row their boat in the same direction that you're trying to row yours.
Early on, anyone wanting to produce your play at all can feel like a gift. And in a sense it is. Though I think it’s also important to be cautious about that feeling of gratitude. People are not generally producing your work to be generous or kind to you. They’re doing it for their own reasons. Which is not to say those reasons will be in conflict with your reasons for writing the play - they’re usually not. But the important thing is not to let a feeling of gratitude, the sense that you “owe them something” cause you to not stand up for what you know is right for your play. Though easier said than done.
“You know, I’m sort of obsessed with the difference between intention and impact. We set intentions, and sometimes we set intentions to create impact, but I guess we never know exactly how it manifests.”
LINA: Yeah, Phaedra, I've only recently discovered my agency in saying no, but I did have an early experience with my second play. I don’t have an MFA in playwriting. I started to write because the roles I was being offered were not satisfying. But when my second play was in Cherry Lane's Mentor Project, way back in 2014, thanks to David Henry Hwang, they were excited, and wanted to pair me with a Name Director even though I had someone in mind who I felt really got this difficult play that was set in the future about colonialism and climate change and all of that. But, I deferred because I was so new and I was so grateful for this tremendous opportunity and I allowed myself to be paired with someone that just did not feel right. And then, thank goodness, that person took a bigger gig and they [the theater] felt so terrible that they talked me into this person that they let me pick the first time director that I had wanted from the beginning.
And that director, Jedadiah Schultz, was extraordinary and saw me, saw my play for what it was, and was such an amazing collaborator. And I remember at the end of that experience, was one of those treasured moments that, like Vichet mentioned, he got in the comments, it was Angelina Fiordellisi saying to me: this play reminds me why I do what I do.
And I was like, thank God that all worked out. God. But, you know, looking back, I wish I had just said no, because ultimately I think they would have been behind me because they were there to support the playwright, but I just didn't feel I had the agency then, but lately I do, and I have a few other examples that we can talk about over drinks sometime in the TV world.
NHP’s PlayFest Indy reading of Sick Girl, or don’t hate me ‘cuz I’m pretty by Lina Patel, featuring Kerrington Shorter and Jasmine Sharma. Photo: Indy Ghost Light.
PHAEDRA: Only because of where we are at time, I'd love to ask, are there any final thoughts or things you'd like to share?
JENNI: These will be your last words, so consider them. Kidding, I'm kidding.
VICHET: Last rites, like what do you want to say for yourself?
You know, I'm sort of obsessed with the difference between intention and impact. We set intentions, and sometimes we set intentions to create impact, but I guess we never know exactly how it manifests.
I was really inspired with what Gloria said about how she wanted to create impact. I can be so cynical about my own journey from intent to impact because things change so much. I think about Jonathan, your play Eureka Day, and how you wrote it in a different time period but those issues are evergreen unfortunately. I've been thinking about my one play Kween that is about a young girl whose father has been deported back to Cambodia. I started writing this play during the first Trump administration when deportations in the Southeast Asian community jumped up two hundred percent, and now we're about to premiere the play this next year. How could I have ever imagined the situation we're in now? Where we're watching people get disappeared off the streets in such frequency? It's reminding how important it is to set our intentions and then to activate them.
To make sure that we're writing truthfully and honestly, not in the hopes that this issue will still exist down the line, but to acknowledge that these issues, because we're responding to the world we live in, are so deeply rooted in our systems of power. These things will continue to manifest obstacles for us as creators and writers.
LINA: I hear you. I sound weary and sad, and I think I'm both. But I'm also an idealist. So I guess I'm a weary idealist right now. I don't think my work is going to change the world or anything, but I do think that storytellers reflect reality. And so my hope is, however we do it in our individual ways or by coming together at places like New Harmony or in the communities that we have that we are involved with on a daily basis, that we keep investing in robust artistic communities and that we invite the non-artists, the public in. I really do believe, and I say this to my students at Pomona College, I really do believe that storytellers with a voice can shift and have shifted culture.
I mean, why would we do it otherwise, honestly?
GLORIA: I want my last words to be inspired by the slogan from New Harmony that's on my t-shirt which is: we believe great writing can change the world. I'm also a weary idealist but I do believe that art can change [the world] even if you impact one person.
I'm always writing comedy. I just love making people laugh because I think in this time if I can make somebody laugh after what we're going through, I feel like I'm creating an impact in that way.
For instance, my play Culture Shock. I wrote it right after college in 2017 about two African students in an Ivy League institution placed in an all-Black dorm. Now it's had readings at two universities back in 2023 and 2024, and it's been used to address the tensions between the African and African-American students on campus during these times. It was in a university setting, and it helped inspire conversations for that community to find solidarity and find healing in this time. They were able to do it after laughing about the things they were seeing on stage.
Shiro Kihagi and Amandla Jahava in a staged reading of Gloria Majule’s Culture Shock at Vassar's Powerhouse Theater, 2023, Photo: Buck Lewis.
So yeah, I do believe what New Harmony believes too. I think my responsibility as an artist is to do my best to tell my stories as well as I can, so that even if it impacts one person and makes them laugh, then I can say I did that.
JONATHAN: It's so interesting talking about intention and impact because that’s the strange thing about an audience, it's like the way light is both a particle and a wave. The glory of an audience is when everybody is inhaling at the same moment and laughing at the same moment, and really having this collective experience.
And at the same time when I have had an experience in the theater where I’ve been deeply impacted by something, it feels intensely personal. It’s connected to that collective experience you're having with an audience, but it's also something different that's about you and where you are in that moment and why this thing is hitting you in this way right now.
I have a lot of intention around the experience of the audience moving through the play together in the theater. But then I feel like that individual experience people are having is so beyond my control because it's so much about what the person brought in with them to the theater that day. I don't know these people or their background. I don’t know how their day is going. I don’t know if they’re sleepy because they just had dinner, or hungry because they haven’t yet. So trying to control the individual experience people are having in addition to trying to control the experience that we're all having together…I feel like that way madness lies.
“The glory of an audience is when everybody is inhaling at the same moment and laughing at the same moment, and really having this collective experience. ”