In the eighth grade I was going to a really religious Christian school and I had written this play called “The Deceiver.” I gave it to my teacher and she didn't understand it on the page. I wanted to submit it for National History Day. She said, “well, okay, why don't you start rehearsing it, I'll come in and watch.” So she came into rehearsal. We were in the sanctuary of the church. I remember my line was about a cow, like “Poor Bessie. 'Tis a wonder she gives anything at all. She's so skinny.” We didn't have a cow, of course, we had an invisible cow, but we had a bucket and since we couldn't afford milk, we put flour in the water to make it look sort of like milk. I looked at it and it was all curdled and I started laughing and then everybody started laughing because it was just ridiculous to be looking down at flour water and an invisible cow. My teacher laughed too and ended up letting us submit it. We won our district, state and then the nationals, and went all the way to Washington, DC. That sort of got me hooked, because it was just the fake cow and the flour water.

 

My family was very strict and my Dad was a preacher, so I wasn't allowed to watch television. So I was writing things that looked like church hymns. I grew up around the King James version of the Bible, I memorized a lot of it and lived around that kind of language, so I wasn't afraid of dense language or poetry. When I started getting into writing plays, I didn't realize that there was supposed to be a big difference between a play and a poem. So my plays have been very poetic.

 

 

I really almost think of myself as having grown up in a foreign country. I remember seeing a guy on my friend's television and I said, “oh, he's kind of cute” and my friend said “That's Elvis.” I didn't know who he was. 

 

 

And definitely Evel Knievel. I remember the first time I saw Evel Knieval, I was in sixth or seventh grade and I saw him going by on a lunchbox. And suddenly, it made sense to me that the kids in the parking lot down the street were doing jumps with their dirtbikes. I was very obsessed with Evel Knievel later in my life because I came to pop culture late and I wanted to catch up. When I was in my twenties I tried to watch everything, see everything, know everything. It was a bit of an overload trying to catch up with it. I think there's probably a little bit of an assaultive feel because I felt assaulted by pop culture. I feel that we are all assaulted by it. But people who grow up with it get used to it, whereas, if you grow up sheltered and one day step out into the real world, it comes at you full force. Maybe some of this piece is trying to capture that feeling. But I think also that I don't like a lot of it. Icons like Evel Knievel fascinate me, but I’m also scared of them.

 

 

Yeah. A friend of mine told me one time that if you're afraid of something, you should get very very close to it. I think it's also a martial arts principle: if something is attacking you, you absorb its energy as it's coming at you, then you use that power to throw it back. If I can get very close to the things that terrify me and try to understand them, try to write through them, then I can also grapple with the invisible forces that are acting on me every day. The other side of this play is the reality programming, which is something that totally terrifies me as well. We are living in a time in which almost half of television is reality programming (if you include some of the news!). We have the Balloon Boy dad, and all the craziness with people trying to get in reality programs and living as if they're in a reality program. I've also been fascinated and terrified by realism since I started writing plays in graduate school. Realism is imposed on American playwrights before we even breathe. And I just wonder why. Why can't I write something that has the jagged angular rhythms of anime? Why can't that happen in language? Why can't language also have trembling pop-up screen eyes like an anime child-like looking adult? Why can't language be assaultive or combative? Why does it always have to be this kind of slang that we speak every day? Why can't we look at something else and hear something else when we go to the theatre?

 

 

I always write from my heart. I write from my soul. I really try not to think about how is this going to be done, or how is this stage direction going to actually be produced. Sometimes that can really liberate me. This particular play is born out of a bunch of plays I wrote which had to do with me trying to get out of America. During the Bush years, I traveled as much as I could. I went to the former Yugoslavia and to India, Russia,  Japan--I'd been in Serbia for a month and for the first time I felt homesick. I realized “oh, this is what America has that I'm missing.” I had to go away in order to find my Americanness. This play is me trying to understand myself as an American and myself as complicit in the forces that created the Iraq war and that duped us into thinking it was a reality program. I think there's a real surge in this play, and it's me trying to find my patriotism. I think it's important for us to remember that we shouldn't just criticize this and that about America and not love the things that are really beautiful about it, too.

 

 

Yes. Shawn Sides, who's a director, and Graham Reynolds, who's a composer, and I received a TCG Extended Collaboration grant. I had worked with both of them before on other projects, so we knew each other's work. We laid on the table three huge piles of things we were interested in and we kept making lists and talking and reading. Shawn brought in a book called Battle Royale. So we read the book – and what I took away from it was its deductive structure. It's about the process of elimination, which is very much like a reality program, where you start out with all the Top Chef wannabes and you narrow it down to the Top Chef. So I wanted to see: what is it about our culture that loves this structure so much? Why do we love eliminating each other?   Graham brought in Godzilla. I brought in Evel Knieval, because I'd never finished my obsession with him. So we said, okay how can we put all these together? So we came up with Godzilla vs. Evel Knievel. We worked very collaboratively. Shawn and the ensemble would sometimes “order scenes like tacos,” where they would request certain ingredients in the scene and I would write from their ingredients. And sometimes I would give them writing exercises, then go back and rework their writing, So it was very collaborative. I watched their production, then considered everything and did another draft. 

 

Collaboration is a big part of what you do. 

 

Yes.

 

 

Absolutely. In fact, it's really hard for me not to write with music in mind. I think of language as music; there's always a cadence, a rhythm, a tone. I've thought about something I call emotional vibrato. When you're in a certain emotion, the vibrato of your voice changes and that moves you from speech to singing. It seems very natural to me that that could happen. A lot of times I don't pay attention to what somebody is saying, the words of it, I pay attention to the sound of their voice. I really think and hear that way. 

 

 

This was just a lark, really. The Actors Theatre Louisville Ten Minute Play contest was out there and it was one of their finalists, so I worked on it a little bit more with them. I'm interested in doing these snapshots of plays more, because I don't want to be this esoteric person and have nobody understand the play.  

 

 

That's really interesting that you're saying that. I've been reading some Brecht and when he talks about populism and realism, he says we have to constantly be working to stay ahead of reality, because reality is always changing, so our means of addressing it and confronting it have to be always changing. I was thinking about his philosophy of removing the fourth wall. I never felt like I want to remove the fourth wall; I want the fourth wall very solidly there. I want the audience to know they're watching a play and that they're not being acknowledged, that there is another world that they're watching that they would have to transform to enter. I don't like taking suggestions from the audience. But there's also a Brechtian concept of a formalized gesture that tells us that there's a defamiliarization because the actors are not moving naturally, the way they would in real life. So, I was thinking, am I Brechtian? I always thought I wasn't, because of the fourth wall needing to be broken down, but I also realized that our times call for something more poetic and dense, because that's the only thing that will be defamialiarized to us. We can't see anything else. So, I was thinking, maybe I could think of the next project I do more in this way.   I was kind of excited by that, because I thought, here I've been avoiding Brecht all these years.

 

 

Yes.

 

 

When I was in college, we didn't have a theatre program, but we did have plays that we put on. So I was acting in things like Tennessee Williams. I loved The Glass Menagerie. And one of my big influences was in 1996 when I met Dah Theatre, my Serbian sisters. And music has been my biggest teacher – my Roma gypsy teacher here in Chicago – Juliano Milo – and spending time in Greece, being exposed to the taverna singers. I think what happened to the ancient Greek theatre is now in the taverns. It's just as amazing as the ancient Greek plays were.

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