Recovering Trauma:
An Interview with Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig
By Caridad Svich
[Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig's play Lidless
will receive its New York City premiere as a P73 production at Walkerspace
on September 20, 2011, directed by Tea Alagic. The play was the third
winner of the Yale Drama Series competition for emerging playwrights
selected by contest judge David Hare. It re-imagines a futuristic reunion
between a Guantanamo detainee and the female interrogator who tortured
him. Since its world premiere at Lab Theatre of the University of Texas-Austin
in 2009, Lidless has been seen at the 2010 HighTide Festival
in Suffolk, England, where it transferred to the Edinburgh Festival
Fringe, and at Interact Theatre in Philadelphia and Contemporary American
Theatre Festival in West Virginia. This email interview was conducted
in September 2011.]
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Caridad Svich: History teaches
us that memory is fleeting, that the same, if different, wars are fought
over and over, and that the power to invade other countries, defy civil
liberties, and "right" wrongs can override even the most nobly spoken
intentions of those possessed of the larger army/power (beware of good
intentions, as playwright Mac Wellman says!). What draws you to write?
Not only Lidless, which is the focus of our interview, but
other plays as well? And why for the stage?
Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig: I wasn't
a scribbler as a child, and didn't have any creative writing courses
in high school, so it really was something I stumbled on accidentally
in a playwriting class my first year of college. I had gone to Brown
thinking I would (or should) study public policy or international relations
since I had grown up as a diplo-brat moving around from country to country.
But then I took a playwriting class my first semester, my professor,
who was the artistic director of a campus theater, produced the first
play I ever wrote, and I really found grounding and a kind of rootedness
in the process of writing, and kept at it for many years not because
it was enjoyable or I was any good at it, but because it was something
to focus on and get better at.
Only three of my plays have ever been produced
-- the first one, only produced on campus at Brown University, was about
foot-binding in ancient China and one woman's decision to defy tradition.
The second one, 410[GONE], which was produced both at Brown
and UT-Austin, is about a sister trying to use any means possible, digital,
ancient or otherwise, to make contact with her younger brother who has
just killed himself and entered the Chinese Land of the Dead. Lidless
is the third play, and the only one of my plays that has been professionally
produced.
I wish I had some grandiose reason for focusing
on the theater as opposed to other genres -- but it just happened to
be the one I started in, the path I was encouraged along, so by the
time I decided to apply to graduate schools as a way to have something
to do, a structure for life in my early twenties, the only work I had
produced that could get me into anything was a play, so I applied to
a playwriting program. And spent the next three years writing plays.
I'm not really the story of finding your passion and pursuing it. More
like pursuing something until it becomes your passion. I was a sociology
major in college, and my interest in how a person's background can influence
their character and choices certainly is something I think a lot about
in my work.
CS: Lidless is explicitly
political. But what is your relationship to entertainment? Are there
obligations you feel as a writer to have the audience be "with you"
on the play's ride?
FYC: I'm quite populist in
my belief that a story needs to be interesting and engaging before it
can be anything else. The novelist Ian McEwan once told me in a fiction
workshop something I try to remember: that the reader is trusting the
writer to hold their hand and help them walk through the dark. And if
the writer doesn't do this responsibly, the reader will trip in the
dark and stop trusting the writer. For that reason, I believe that if
entertainment is not accomplished, nothing anything else can happen.
As a viewer or a reader, if I don't care what happens next I don't want
to listen for another minute or turn another page. That being said,
I do always have lofty and grandiose goals about what I want to accomplish
in a play beyond entertainment. But those must be secondary to good
storytelling. Of course, a dynamic, physically rigorous production could
make someone reading a phone book hold my attention for hours. So good
storytelling doesn't necessarily have to be confined to the writing,
and of course many a play has been saved by a director who has found
a way to create enough distance between the text and staging that another
story emerges.
CS: In regard to Lidless,
did you know when you began that your antagonist/protagonist Alice,
the former U.S. interrogator at Gitmo, would be female? And that she
would have a daughter? The future-scape is a given in the play, but
the more complicated terrain between mother and daughter, and between
female interrogator and male detainee, emerges, and for me the various
complex lessons and anti-lessons handed down are at its heart.
FYC: I began writing the play
that became Lidless with very simple constraints: I wanted
to write a five-person ensemble play for three female and two male actors.
I didn't want to write a ghost story, and I didn't want there to be
any magical worlds that I would have to elaborate rules for. (The previous
two plays I had written both fall into the category of magical ghost-story.)
I was pretty sick of my previous work and aesthetic and wanted to do
something radically different. Each of my projects are in part a rejection
of or violent departure from a previous project. This is just another
way to say that I go hard in a different direction from play to play
so I don't get bored with myself. The protagonist was always a female
interrogator, because the original idea for the piece came after reading
an article in The Economist about the sexual tactics being
used by female interrogators in Guantanamo. In my work I am far less
interested in the actual traumatic event than in its consequences over
time, which is why I knew that Alice had to have a daughter, so that
I could begin to examine how Alice's choices and behavior in the past
continue to affect her present life and specifically her daughter (her
future.) I also knew from the beginning that I didn't want to write
a political diatribe or anything that could be reduced to a simple "Shame
on you America" anti-war piece that could just as easily be expressed
in an op-ed essay.
CS: You recently completed a
playwriting residency at Marin Theatre Company. Would you like to talk
about the piece you were making there, and how you see yourself as a
writer facing the page now, three years after Lidless first
was staged?
FYC: I finished up my Marin
Theatre Company residency in June, and recently completed my first commission,
72 Transformations, written for South Coast Rep. The dramatic
provocation I gave myself for this play came after reading Arthur Miller's
essay "Tragedy and the Common Man" -- Can I make an uneducated, 19-year
old Chinese peasant girl who works in a Christmas Tree Factory in Southern
China a Tragic Hero?
In terms of where I am now as a writer, I would
say that I am more disillusioned than I was three years ago, but not
in a bad way, if you consider what the word actually means: to be freed
from illusion, or enchantment. I understand now, more than I did a few
years ago, that Western theater, with a few exceptions, has failed to
reinvent itself after the advent of film and television, and I understand
the economic forces at play in season selection and audience attendance.
I agree with activist Ward Churchill, who asserts
in his book On The Justice of Roosting Chickens that if any
work of art, alternative lifestyle, consumption decision, peace vigil,
or mass demonstration actually threatened the status quo in any way
it would be illegal. Quite frankly, I think the mass media could do
more in a month than all the playwrights in the world could do in the
next hundred years if they chose to focus their reporting and images
on the human costs of war and capitalism.
What this means for me as a writer today is that
because I don't hold onto any delusions that the work of writing is
important and meaningful in any big picture way, my theater work must
always push and provoke me personally and creatively, and create a structure
in which I can interact with great artists and interesting people in
intimate and surprising ways. In my theater work, the journey has to
be the destination because any other way I look at it would make me
stop writing, and I like writing a lot. So I suppose I do cultivate
deliberate enchantment in this regard -- and see playwriting as a way
for me to connect my interior self with the vast world beyond me.
CS: Would you speak to your
relationship with the director Tea Alagic in NYC working on the play?
What are you learning now about the play that is different from when
Steve Akinson staged it in Edinburgh?
FYC: I have wanted to work with
Tea on this play for four years because of the personal and artistic
perspective she brings to this piece. Tea is a native of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, and her life has been shaped profoundly by war and its
aftermath. So her understanding of the plight the characters in the
play find themselves in isn't as hypothetical or imagined as it would
be with someone who hasn't experienced war first hand. Additionally,
she has a lot of training in physical theater, having worked with some
of the greatest European theater companies. I wrote this play to be
a text that could be best activated by artists who come from an ensemble
physical-theater background, and Tea really gets this, and has really
drawn on her knowledge to activate a lot of these principles with a
cast that doesn't come from this background. So some physical dynamics
and ways of staging that I have always wanted to draw out of this play
are finally being explored under Tea's direction. Both Tea Alagic and
Steven Atkinson chose to stage the play very simply on a minimalist
set, so that colors and objects really pop.
CS: I've spent at least 10 years
writing plays that reflect upon and deal with traumatized bodies and
societies in one way or another, and I often wonder: how to you tell
such a story truthfully, give it its due, but not overstep the limits
of effectiveness in a Western culture inundated with and anesthetized
to images to trauma?
FYC: As a writer, I'm more interested
in the recovery process than the traumatic event itself. So far, in
all that I have written, the traumatic event happens either at the very
beginning of the play or right before the play opens, and the play itself
is about consequences of that original event, the characters' attempts
to reinvent themselves and reframe their worldviews after their previous
one was ruptured by the traumatic event. When I was researching Lidless,
I talked to a psychologist who worked with survivors of war, and from
her perspective the whole idea of "Post-Traumatic Stress" was a flawed
notion. She thought the more accurate way to understand it was through
the term "Cognitive Reframing" because the experience of war, for example,
is not one emotion or experience -- it is a complex, heightened experience
that shatters one world view and forces another. So I suppose I am not
interested in straight victim stories, or what might be the most common
experience for survivors of X event, but in the unusual, more complicated
situations that provide a way into looking at a dynamic or relationship
from a different perspective. Honestly, because any image in theater
is happening right in front of you, as opposed to being mediated and
framed by a screen, I don't think the questions of inundation and anesthetization
are the same as they are in video games and on-screen entertainment,
because very few people go to the theater casually. It costs money,
requires time, attention and a physical journey from one place to another,
so when you go it is an event to which you try to give your full attention.
And I think anesthetization takes place when one is trying to shut out
the full impact of violence because it is peripheral to whatever task
one is trying to accomplish.
CS: Some basic questions: when
did you start writing? And why? And do you wish to enter into a conversation
with writers who draw upon their heritage, ancestry, background, ethnicity
and see their work in part as a way to represent voices that are less
represented?
FYC: As I said, I started writing
plays because it was the first genre I was exposed to, during my freshman
year at college. I didn't like it more or less than anything else I
was doing at the time, though it suited my personality, so I kept at
it. I liked that it created a structure for learning, required both
years of solitude in the scripting process, and intense community during
the rehearsal and production component. So really writing for me has
always just been a way to structure life, and the thing I could pursue
that best suited my somewhat aloof, awkward creature who craved intimacy
and solitude in equal parts.
I write in multiple genres, and usually start
with ideas and relationships, working somewhat impressionistically at
first. Different stories fit naturally into different genres, and while
I don't have allegiances to one form over another, I'm afraid I currently
am a bit of a capitalist in regard to why I choose one form over the
other. For example, even though I love writing short stories, they don't
pay enough to scrape together a living, so I am not spending much time
in that genre at the moment because I am trying to make my living with
my writing and not have to pursue additional employment.
And in terms of your question about dialogue
with writers -- I have grown weary of identity-politics conversations
and questions of representation, not least because very often the works
discussed in these regards aren't even very "good." I love Suzan-Lori
Parks's provocation to "Write for them, fight for them" when talking
about telling marginalized stories -- but this is complicated because
the more marginalized the group I am trying to represent is, the less
likely it is that a member of that particular group will ever even see
a production of the play I've written. For example: the way I wrote
about the female migrant worker in China and tied it into contemporary
events going on inside China has made the play one that will probably
never be produced in China and seen by the peasants who inspired the
story, because the political slant of the play would cause it to be
banned.
CS: Naomi Wallace and I talk
often about the U.S. theater and its need for poetry, as well as its
surprising disdain for poetry. Poetry in theater: what are your thoughts
about the ways in which language is deployed, staged, put in motion,
and composed for the stage?
FYC: It's interesting that you
bring up Naomi Wallace, because I think she is one of the masters of
putting poetry or ideas into physical objects on stage, and making theater
happen through the physical manipulation of objects in front of a live
audience. This is where I find poetics most interesting -- when, in
a strange kind of alchemy, language is endowed into things that we can
track non-verbally. I don't know if it's generational, because I didn't
grow up listening to many speeches or sermons, or play too many computer
and video games as a child, but I tend to just space out if someone
is just talking on stage, poetically or not, and not activating the
ideas and language through some physicality. If I am just listening
to a talking head, I might as well just be reading the play at home
in the bathtub, which is always more comfortable than a theater seat.
CS: Lidless is playing
in NYC now after the ten-year anniversary of September 11th, right down
in Soho. Do you feel the experience for the audience in NYC will be
different comparatively than, say, for the audiences at Trafalgar Studios
in the U.K. or CATF in West Virginia?
FYC: I don't have enough of
an idea of what the audience for this production will be to speculate
on that question. It is true that all the events that happen in the
play are direct consequences of government actions taken after the airplanes
hit the WTC buildings. I hope that the play will be felt and understood
in juxtaposition to the events going on at the Ground Zero site. It
could be interesting and provocative to walk from Ground Zero to the
play, or from the play to Ground Zero, and see what is provoked by that
experience.
Beyond proximity to the WTC site and 9/11's relationship
to the play, I think the downtown New York audience is younger than
the regional audience that the play had in Philadelphia and West Virginia,
and there has sometimes been a generational divide in how my work is
received. I'm not sure that the American archetypes of the born-again-hippie,
the tough Southern woman, or some of the text's very American references,
made sense to the British audience, though to their credit Brits seem
to be far more receptive to plays that are politically inspired or "about
something" than American theatergoers.