Category: playwright
Interview with Playwright Yussef El Guindi
Walter Bilderback: Can you tell us a little about your background and your development as a writer?
Yussef El Guindi: I was born in Egypt; moved to London when I was 4. Went to school there until I was 17. Spent a year in Paris. Then went back to Cairo for my undergraduate degree in English and Comparative Literature. From there, I went to Carnegie-Mellon University for a graduate degree in Playwriting. Kicked around San Francisco for a couple of years after that, doing brief stints as a reader at the Magic Theater and as a dramaturg at the Eureka Theater. I landed a position as playwright-in-residence at Duke University for 7 years. Then moved to Seattle, where I pursued poetry, acting, film-making, before finally settling down to write plays full time. That’s the short and dirty. Actually, the short and dry.
In between all that one-thing-following-another, life sort of happened. And some sort of voice happened. Facilitated, I think, by my getting my citizenship in 1996. That event, strangely, concentrated the mind wonderfully. It gave me a subject matter. Or rather, it brought together a bunch of amorphous elements and subterranean emotions that were in effect, but to which I just couldn’t give a name to, or find a coherent story for. And that story was the simple one of the immigrant journey. One that had begun when my family left Egypt when I was 4. Becoming a citizen, in a way I hadn’t anticipated, plugged me into that unique template that belongs to this country in particular. Few countries owe their national character, and very reason for being, to the immigrant. This country got to be what it was with journeys such as mine. Millions of little such journeys. In Europe, if you’re an immigrant, you will always remain a foreigner, no matter how long you stay in England or France, etc. You will never quite be English or French. In America, some may gripe at immigrants, but this country’s life blood depends on them. Becoming a citizen plugged me into my own journey. Strangely. It allowed me to write about it.
Interview with Playwright Gina Gionfriddo
How did you become a writer?
I wrote stories as a young child, but in high school and college I really wasn’t writing creatively. I was acting in plays and studying literature. I felt I was either going to pursue acting professionally or get on a PhD track in English. Fortunately, I was attending college in New York City. So I was able to see what an actor’s life is like and decide it wasn’t for me. I interned at an Off-Off-Broadway theatre while I was in college and I sat in on auditions and rehearsals. I found the auditions really frustrating because the actor has such limited control over the process. At the same time, I was watching rehearsals for very new plays. The writers were rewriting a lot and I was very turned on by that—the process by which actors and audiences show the writer what their play is and isn’t. Obviously, you don’t want to be a slave to that kind of feedback, but I’m still really excited by the period of discovery in the rehearsal room. I feel like there are subtexts kind of bubbling under the surfaces in my plays and a lot of times actors see them when I do not.
As a successful writer for both the stage and television, what are the challenges distinct to each medium for you and what are the strongest similarities?
I feel a play has to say something important, or really shift an audience’s consciousness in some important way. I don’t feel that pressure in television, and that’s not to say I take it lightly, but I do think in film and TV it’s enough to entertain and I don’t feel that’s enough in theatre. Partly that’s a function of this cultural moment. Film and TV are increasingly accessible. I have movies on-demand through my cable service that were in theaters last week. The point is… There’s so much great film and TV available in my apartment, so I bring very high expectations to theatre. It’s expensive, it’s uncomfortable. More and more I regard plays as the place you go to hear some truth or ask some question that film and TV can’t or won’t give you.
The challenge I find writing for television is that you don’t have an audience captive from episode one to episode twenty-two (unless your audience is watching the season in order, beginning to end, on DVD, of course—but you can’t count on that). So you really have to be thinking clarity clarity clarity when you write. You have to make the episode accessible to a new or newish viewer, and I find that obligation somewhat limiting. Of course, the really excellent cable dramas like “Mad Men” and “The Sopranos” assume the audience is committed to watching the whole season, so the writers can get into character arcs and nuance and ambiguity. The shows I’ve written have been police procedurals. That kind of show is designed to be syndication-friendly. The episodes need to stand alone, you can run them out of order… I like those shows a lot, but they don’t accommodate character complexity very well. The goal is entertainment.
Interview with Playwright Athol Fugard
In August, Wilma Dramaturg Walter Bilderback was lucky enough to arrange a phone interview with Athol Fugard to talk about his new play, Coming Home, which opens the Wilma season. Although he is best known for his plays chronicling the pernicious effects of apartheid on his native South Africa, Fugard has remained active as a playwright: he has written at least six plays since the Wilma produced My Children! My Africa! in 2007.
Coming Home to New Bethesda
Coming Home is unique among Fugard’s plays as a sequel to an earlier play. Valley Song was the first play Fugard wrote after Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress party was voted into office, replacing the white apartheid government, and Valley Song reflects the mood of the time. “It was a moment of incredible euphoria in South Africa with great hope for the future, and I was not immune to that,” Fugard says. “I thought, you know, ‘My God, I’m going to actually see it happen in my lifetime’.”
Valley Song is perhaps Fugard’s most wholeheartedly optimistic work. The play is set in New Bethesda, a small town where Fugard owns a home, “no more than about 40 to 50 miles from the village where I was born.” Since buying the house, Fugard has set several of his plays in New Bethesda, beginning with The Road to Mecca, nearly 25 years ago.
Fugard wrote himself into Valley Song as The Author, and played the role in early productions. The other characters bear the names of real people from New Bethesda; One of these was Oupa (“Grandpa”), the caretaker on Fugard’s property. “He was my first and my closest friend in New Bethesda. When I bought my first property there, I inherited Oupa! Because he had been looking after that land and planting on it and harvesting the fruit and the vegetables for years, years, years before I even put my eyes, set my eyes on it. And…I had to come to terms with him. In a kind of a way I always felt that as long as he was alive that land would be his as much as it would be mine.”
The other character is Veronica, Oupa’s granddaughter, who he’s raised since she was a child. She was the real inspiration for the play. “Veronica was a real young girl who I knew and who dreamt about going to the city and I realized she could be an embodiment of the hope that we all had. And so Valley Song is about that. Valley Song is about the fact that the world, our world had changed, taken a dramatic one hundred and eighty degree turn in its identity and was going to try and forge a new identity for itself. For me, Veronica was an embodiment of that belief that the miracle had happened” and his belief that “we would be able to hold on to it and be bold and go forward.” Valley Song was an international hit: “it was a beautiful experience watching audiences respond to that hope.”
So why did Fugard decide to re-visit Veronica and Oupa more than a decade later? “Democracies have a lot to learn as we discovered,” he says. “it did definitely make strong strides towards being the democracy we had dreamt of but with time a debit side to the balance sheet began to emerge.”
Like her namesake, the real Veronica left New Bethesda for the city, hoping to become a singer. Fugard doesn’t know what happened to her, but she and Oupa stuck with him as symbols of those early, euphoric days. “I made people hope with Valley Song. And it bothered me that, in terms of my country, that message of hope—unconditional hope—was no longer valid. So to get the record straight I had to bring Veronica back to the village and write a play called Coming Home.”
