I’m often identified as someone who writes “issues” plays, but I’m less high-minded about my subject matter than I should probably admit. Generally, I don’t decide to write a play because I know I want to say something important about gun violence, military veterans, or the exploitation of young women—although I care deeply about these topics.

I’m activated to write about a subject when I have a Wait…What? moment. It’s what I call the moment when I find an idea so difficult to fathom that I react by saying to myself, sometimes out loud:

“Wait…what?”

I come across loads of stories where I think, I could write about that, but I feel no urgency.  A Wait… What? moment tells me that there’s a question begging to be investigated. And that if I don’t give it the attention it demands, someone nimbler will discover it and carry it forward. In her book Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert writes that she imagines ideas floating in space, poking us until they get our attention. She argues that if an idea is generous enough to present itself, it is our responsibility to coax it over and incubate it—and to give it life by channeling it through our distinctly personal thoughts and experiences, and even our generational histories. Gilbert argues, and I would agree, that if you don’t embrace and dance with an idea that shows up for you, the rascal will float off and find someone worthy—like a jilted lover who suddenly understands their value.

Certain Wait… What? ideas land with an iron thunk so heavy I can’t ignore them if I try. In 2014 I read an article about a 95-year-old German woman who had just come forward to tell her story of being conscripted to be one of Adolf Hitler’s food tasters. She claimed that he chose only young women who were of “good German stock” to test his food for poison.

Wait…what? Just when I thought I had heard every abhorrent thing about Hitler, I learned he had people test his food for poison. He didn’t choose Jews, Poles, homosexuals, or members of any number of communities he hated for this job. Rather, he conscripted young German women who were ostensibly the future of the Reich—the anticipated bearers of his ideal Aryan children. I imagined a room of girls alternately amusing and turning against each other to kill time between meals; waiting to see if they would die.

Suddenly, through the lens of incredible, reportedly true events, I had my opportunity to work through long-simmering questions I had about the way society treats young women as expendable, and the dangers of complacency.

I told myself I would not write my H*tler’s Tasters idea before I could do airtight research. But then, in 2016, I took part in a 48-hour playwriting challenge. Each participant got a sealed envelope containing writing prompts, and we had 48 hours to create a play—the only rule was that we could never look back and edit what we had written. The process is grueling, but also thrilling, in the way that you don’t have time to censor yourself.

I hadn’t researched the “tasters” at all at that point, but as soon as I broke the envelope’s seal, I felt the play screaming to be revealed. So I wrote. I set the story around 1944, but I gave the girls cell phones. I didn’t want them to feel like sepia-toned people in history. It felt critical that we could recognize our daughters, sisters, friends, and ourselves in the young women conscripted to do this terrible job for a madman. Forty-eight fuzzy hours later I had my first draft of H*tler’s Tasters. I started the hard work of investigating those threads that would make the play less impulsive and more grounded.

The line between past and present blurred. I was stunned to find that the rhetoric I heard during the 2016 election cycle paralleled those of 1930s and ’40s Germany—sometimes word for authoritarian word. Wait…What? I double- and triple-checked my sources to be sure. Vile rants about women during the 2016 campaign reinforced and deepened the intensity of scenarios I created for my female tasters.

Later on, when Trump firings ensued—underlings blamed and even jailed for offenses that came from the very top—I noticed another striking parallel. The young German women of H*tler’s Tasters were ostensibly at the top of society, and were sacrificed without a second thought. Ultimately, a tyrant will turn on his own. No amount of privilege will save any of us.

When I started working on my newest play, Room 1214, the Wait…What was more like, Wait… What the F***?  While researching another project, I had the great honor of meeting Ivy Schamis, a teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Two students in Ms. Schamis’ classroom were killed when a young gunman, swastikas etched into his combat boots and the bullets in his gun, shot his way through the school on February 14, 2018.

I thought I knew all the details of that event. But I hadn’t realized that Ms. Schamis was teaching a Holocaust history class—students literally studying hate crimes—when the shooting took place. Wait… What? Room 1214 became my attempt to make sense of a seemingly endless well of hate, and our collective cultural ability to shrug, shake our heads, and go back to business as usual.

Can we learn anything new about our personal and universal sins by sitting in an off-Broadway theater? When I get into an existential crisis about my time spent writing, wondering if there’s a better way to serve the world, I remind myself what the author Kazuo Ishiguro said in his Nobel Prize lecture, “…stories are about one person saying to another, This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?”

When the Wait… What strikes, it sparks something in me that desperately needs to connect, to know if this feeling of pained disbelief resonates with anyone else. If Elizabeth Gilbert’s theory is correct, then perhaps there is some metaphysical design that causes ideas to circle back in search of a medium, demanding we wrestle with them until, perhaps, we assign them their deserved value.

We live in a time when we are besieged with information, when it’s easy to feel numb to absurdity and bad news. I offer that sitting in a theater, collectively breathing and receiving stories, we experience a collision of past, present, and future in a space where everyone is vulnerable. The playwright offers her work to be scrutinized. The actors lay bare their bodies to sink into someone else’s skin. The audience members open themselves up to myriad discomforts—from turning off their phones for a couple of hours to watching a bitter truth on stage.

In that small moment in time, in the dark, we have the time and space to collectively feel the Wait…What together. Perhaps it is here, where strangers seem safe instead of suspicious, that we can open ourselves up to reckon with the sins of our past and their implications for our collective future.

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The level of stress we feel can be harder to cut than a Butterball turkey: Not only are we homing in on the family dinner table where so much that has determined us has happened, but this Diwali or Thanksgiving or Hanukkah or Christmas feast is a kind of recurring dream (or nightmare, as the case may be). We may not be thinking about it, but we are keeping the dead alive with each family reunion and culinary tradition. We are keeping customs so longstanding that we barely know their origins.

No wonder we feel a little crazy around the holidays.

And we continue to celebrate the pull of family ties even as they unravel, sometimes quite noticeably, all around us. It may seem as if our family identities are experiencing a forced reboot where preferred pronouns, critical race theory debates, and a million other powder kegs threaten to blow up the system—even before the turkey gets carved. We feel our present moment is especially fraught, even though our predecessors sometimes literally stepped through minefields to make their way home to hearth and family, even when it meant sitting across from John Birchers, segregationists, religious bigots, and worse.

Still, this year’s feast may seem like the last straw. Was it ever thus, or have we finally come to the family tipping point? Will this be our last supper before the great cancelling? Knowing the carnage to come, should we even come home at all? Are the ties that bind stronger than the tribalistic othering of our extended family’s persecutions?

Has coming home for the holidays become the definition of craziness?

We are likely to never know our whole family story, and we are probably lucky that we don’t—but it’s all still there underneath the silt of Time, affecting our actions and relationships through the sediment in unexpected ways. We are related to and loved by individuals who have survived wars and other global catastrophes just to get here, who have made choices and espoused beliefs antithetical to everything we care about, who may barely condone our life choices, and yet who share our blood. This is the primordial ooze that glazes our table’s honey-baked ham.

Indeed, we are indentured to family; it’s in the word itself—family. The Latin famulus is a servant or slave, and the historical idea of family goes beyond lineage to estate, property, and the collective value of a domestic household. We may adhere to it or rebel from it, but we will always have its mark on us.

The faddish interest in family trees and finding our roots makes sense, not only in trying to get beyond what we already know of parents and grandparents, but in helping us determine a narrative thread amid what is otherwise a tangle of opposing family values. Sepia photos seem less controversial than the talking heads on Fox or MSNBC. Perhaps genetic ancestry can bring us all together and off the firing line.

DNA may not lie—but what does it all really tell us? What meanings can we cobble together from racial and ethnic percentages on pie charts? What does a ship’s manifest really say about the long-lost antecedent emigrating from pogrom or famine? Perhaps it connects us to world history writ large enough to read in the dark. But the family mystery remains: Who were they really? Would they have understood me? Sure, we’re family, but might we have been friends? And beneath the old-world fashions and foreign names, what secret madness were they hiding?

Out of this fundament of doubt arises the family play. Of course, the genre exists also on film and in novels, but on stage the family play has grown roots so deep that they intertwine with the electrics and the plumbing and threaten to raise the floorboards. It would seem that the theater was made for teasing out the knots of ancestry one sin at a time.

We Americans are particularly good at dramatizing such narrative threads, but we certainly don’t own the rights. The Mahabharata, the immense Sanskrit epic about cousins who go to war over politics, sexism, and immorality penned by Srila Vyasadeva and Ganesha, recounts events from more than 5,000 years ago, 2,500 years before Oedipus Rex appeared. In the intervening millennia we have been inundated with families misbehaving in ways we can’t unsee. But you don’t have to carve your own eyes out of your head to get the underlying point: The families on stage are extreme versions of the ones we go home to.

In this moment of trigger warnings, let it be said that all family plays are triggers and that good plays trigger with intent. They zero in on past trauma and make it present and immediate. They cause a very specific kind of emotional distress: The audience, transported by memory, may find itself unable to remain present in the moment—yet it cannot look away, it cannot press pause.

Birthrights, grudges, feuds, illicit unions, and deeply buried secrets keep us watching even when we don’t want to. According to my mother, my own father sat watching all four acts of Eugene O’Neill’s great mid-century play Long Day’s Journey into Night while obsessively gnawing the skin off the cuticle of his thumb. Did he recognize his own mother in the doomed Mary Tyrone? Did Mary’s doomed son Edmund’s psychic stress reflect his own love/hate relationship to a family torn apart by the American Depression?

I wish I could have asked him. But when I am gnawing at my own thumb while writing my own versions of the family play, I realize that writers are, in a way, cannibals when we attempt to tell the tale of those who came before, tearing at themselves in the piteous search for the narrative thread. Mary Tyrone was not my father’s mother, nor was Edmund my father. Yet somehow, they trod the same narrative path with my father over the same Donner Pass in the dead of bleak midwinter. And watching it made him chew his own flesh.

But it doesn’t always have to be like that. In 1931, Thornton Wilder wrote The Long Christmas Dinner, a play where 90 years go by without a pause in the action. This is a narrative thread on an epic scale yet told in just a few scant minutes. Life courses come and go without fanfare but with love. Characters enter from a portal decorated with fruit and flowers and exit through another hung with black velvet. They age in front of us with little or no physical alteration, and the audience must examine a life span all at once.

The result is funny and tragic, often at the same time. Although no specific dialogue presages the specific rancor of our political tribalism, we get the sense that the holiday table is a place where family unloads upon one another their frustrations and fears—same as it ever was. “Every last twig is wrapped around with ice. You almost never see that,” remarks the unofficial family historian of the play and the character most aware of Time passing, Young Genevieve, not knowing that her mother observed the same thing years before, and that her daughter-in-law will make the same remark years from now at the same table. But, thanks to the telescoped nature of the piece, the audience remembers. They can’t forget, and they wouldn’t want to.

We are all the crazy children of parents too difficult to forget. Nature, nurture, love, damage: It’s all there at the family dinner table, somewhere between the rice and peas and the alcohol, and sometimes it might seem like it’s just too much to bear—especially when the narrative thread gets frayed.

Plays are both prompts and provocations. They point to the madness of our ancestors to help us understand the instabilities of our own lives, tendrils of triggering hostilities growing deep down just under the festive tablecloth. We differ more by degree than kind; we may share DNA or the scars of war, but at least we have perspective, as Shakespeare tells us, “to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”

Whether in the hands of Sophocles, O’Neill, Wilder, or the scores of other playwrights, the family play helps us see that aside from the birthing and the dying, our experiences are not all that different from each other’s. We are all a little crazy and a lot unforgettable. It is quite literally all in the family. The madness is both intrafamilial and interfamilial. Whatever madness awaits you at home for the holidays, not only will you get through it, but you’ll likely see—or have already seen—aspects of it on stage at some point. Perhaps your reflection will help you get through the next meal amongst those who made you what you are.

The post Theater Understands Your Holiday Dinner Angst appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When the new Confederate insurrectionists entered the Capitol on January 6 with their old battle flag, their white aggrievement, and their plan to sabotage the democratic transition of power, the American system held firm and stayed functional—barely. Now all of us are tasked with not only renewing the basic functionality of the Union but remaking it, and there’s not a moment to lose. “Build Back Better” may have sounded quaint a few months ago: Now it’s a mantra.

But how?

May I suggest that we look to playwriting for examples of reconstruction. The theatre is not a place for answers, but it is by nature a place for questions about what works and what doesn’t. If all good writing is rewriting, then all good construction is reconstruction.

Even the job title playwright denotes that the writer makes or builds their play, the way one might make or build a barrel or a wheel. Plays are constructs, and the best of them are built and rebuilt over time for optimal function.

Many wags have compared our current political players to Shakespeare as a way to read their characters, but I would prefer to focus on American plays—not simply to make pithy parallels, but to show how our theater history reflects our national history, and how playwrights and other theatre artists have struggled with that reflection, constructing and reconstructing over the decades. We own this history, whether we want to or not.

After all, Lincoln was shot while watching Our American Cousin. Although that play had an all-white cast, the post-Civil War Reconstruction was a time of minstrel shows and blackface. Stage adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (faithful and otherwise) played nationwide. One of the first known plays by an African American writer, The Escape, Or A Leap to Freedom, by William Wells Brown, was published in 1858 but did not receive a full production until 1871. If the Reconstruction had not been stopped in its tracks by the Compromise of 1876 and the KKK, then we might have seen more plays about the Black experience—possibly even with actual African Americans playing themselves.

It wouldn’t be until the Civil Rights Era that BIPOC artists finally constructed a stage of their own design and peopled it freely, giving voice and body to actual people of color. Productions such as Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman (1964), Ed Bullins’ Goin’ a Buffalo (1968), Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), and many more.

The dramatic breakthroughs didn’t only happen in cities. Using flatbed trucks as makeshift stages, playwright Luis Valdez reflected the fears and desires, not to mention the comedy, of grape pickers on strike in Delano, California, with actos such as Quinta Temporada. Perhaps for the first time, the workers saw themselves.

The progress could be slow. Frank Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman became the first Asian American play to receive a major New York production—but not until 1972. It would be longer still before Native American playwrights could bring their stories to light on stage. But they did, with time. As Civil Rights legislation addressed our original sin of discrimination and reconstructed something closer to equity in housing, voting, and policing, American plays such as these put dark meat on the bone.

These plays have inspired new work on both stage and film ever since; they help us not just to see, but to feel what it was like to be a person of color in America in a time when discrimination still ruled. They question power. They zero in on the cracks in the monolith, and they summon drama to break through to the other side—whether in terms of race, gender, economics, or any other identifiers used to divide and monetize us.

Perhaps, in order to reconstruct for better function, we need a bit of deconstruction too—particularly when it comes to ideals and concepts. Plays don’t just mean what we think they mean today, because meaning changes over time. What signified as progressive in the 19th century may look regressive now. It’s inevitable that the progressive constructs of our moment will one day look chintzy, wrongheaded, ignorant. But that shouldn’t stop us from trying to point to the painful places where America can improve to build back as best we can.

Set in 1898 in “A Deep South of the Mind,” a play of mine called Ragged Time (1996) takes on the original sins of slavery and discrimination. In a scene between Abe the Newsboy, a Jewish immigrant and self-proclaimed hero of a thousand fights and Freda, the woman he loves, who happens to be an African American prostitute trying to pass, the following dialogue occurs:

ABE: This is history. You, me. Hell, we make our own history. No matter
what happened in the past. This country is our slate—right now, right here—and we get to rub it clean. (a fighting pose) I’m the slate. And look at me now! Abe the Newsboy!
FREDA: (with disdain) Real clean.
ABE: I think so. I come a long way. And my kid is gonna come a long way
further. And his kid. And all the way, till we finally get to Zion. That’s what
a kid can be to folks like us. (tenderly) You done a bad t’ing. I done bad
t’ings too. But it’s got to stop. It’s got to stop! This is a free country!
FREDA: Nothing free. We both know that.
ABE: But one day it’ll be.

The “bad t’ing” here involves the sale of an abandoned Mexican boy, whom they might foster. Talk about an American nuclear family.

Plays of the New Reconstruction must not be cowed by “safetyism” and censorship. Trigger warnings are fine, but plays are about triggers—and good ones are willing to shoot. If plays can’t tell it like it is, then they lose what power they have left. Plays test us, force characters to make choices, and follow the consequences—even when things get ugly.

In America Adjacent (2019), the brilliant young Filipino American playwright Boni B. Alvarez writes about a group of expectant mothers of so-called anchor babies. Their children will receive U.S. passports, but the mothers are beginning to wonder if America is all it’s cracked up to be.

Sampaguita, a Filipina from the provinces who speaks Visayan, not Tagalog, starts her American journey with youthful curiosity, but grows disillusioned. She begins to form her own judgement about the big lie about freedom, which feels more and more like a prison:

We hide in chairs, living in low volume, pretending to America we are not here … if we are willing to endure these hardships for our children, it means our country is not as good, no?” she asks. “If our country is not so good as the U.S., that means we, Filipinos, we are unimportant compared to Americans also. … It is as if—it seems if our islands drown in the ocean tonight, the world will not be affected. Like nothing happened. This is not true for America, I don’t think.

Speaking about his play, Alvarez told the Los Angeles Times: “I’m still trying to find my place. I think that’s why my plays don’t really offer solutions or timelines. My plays just offer you things to think about, from multiple lenses.”

We may have dodged the bullet of the New Confederacy on January 6, but plays of the New Reconstruction must imagine what might have happened had the bullet hit. In 1935, as Hitler solidified his half-nelson on the neck of the German people, Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here, about a fictional American dictator’s rapid rise and the fall of democracy as we know it. No wonder the novel, and the play it became in 1936, have received renewed attention in the last five years.

The ancients desired catharsis in their staged tragedies so that they might cleanse and purify their minds and hearts, and thus renew, restore, and rebuild their human selves. Catharsis demands purgation. As in Lincoln’s time and during the Civil Rights Movement, we have reached a moment that calls us not only to bind open wounds, but to disinfect them.

Congresses and presidents and courts can only do so much. Art made by us and for us may well turn out to be the best disinfectant, its basic ingredients being truth, reconciliation, and recompense. These must go together if we are to ever truly sanitize the original sin of American injustice symbolized by the Confederate battle flag. Truth is essential. Reconciliation is a choice. Recompense is long overdue.

That’s why we need writers nationwide to engage directly in our New Reconstruction. Last year at USC’s School for Dramatic Arts, the actor David Warshofsky and I created New Theatre For Right Now, an event that will take place each fall, inviting actors and writers in our Master’s of Fine Arts program to deal head-on with the problems of our immediate present—from pandemic to protest, from climate change to loneliness. This and future years will give our student artists a new palate of themes from which to choose.

Chances are good that the next generation of United Statesians will be wondering how to build back the broken aspects of the national cultural institutions we hold dear. Writers can and should do the same. As one rebuilds a corroded barrel or a busted wheel, the new work of playwrights needs to test the function and then reconstruct our sense of who we really are, how we really feel, and why the Confederate battle flag and other symbols of injustice have no place in the Capitol, or anywhere else.

If thought moves at the speed of sound, then feeling moves at the speed of light. As our political thinkers in Washington, D.C., sound out ideas post-insurrection, what feelings will inspire change in the dramas yet to be told?

The post Can Playwrights Lead the Next American Reconstruction? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.