Looking Back from the Home Stretch

Since we begin tech today, I thought the  home stretch would be a great time to reflect on the play’s genesis.

As we launch into the final phase of production, she looks back at the beginning.

GENESIS OF THE SCRIPT:

I feel like, when I first began writing Mouse in a Jar, I’d left little breadcrumbs for myself, imbedded them secretly throughout the text because I wasn’t willing to admit what they were and this was what the play was about. I remember the first draft had a lot of supernatural elements to it. They’ve been mostly axxed. What was filtered out of that was a dark magical realism,where a family’s experience is translated in their world, specifically their basement apartment.

The first thoughts and images for MOUSE revolved around basements, Slavic food and the subterranean, nocturnal, urban animals that enter your home, uninvited. All these things, twisted in a different way than we’re used to seeing them. The basement apartment was especially vivid, with its pictures on the wall breathing in and out like bellies. And a certain…other thing. That shows up when the house gets nervous.

For a long time, I thought Mouse in a Jar was about the frustration of trying to ‘fix’ someone who wanted none of it. Then I realized the story was about the fixer and her dangerous determination to ‘fix’ the ‘broken.’ I think MOUSE looks a lot at excuses for taking the ‘easier’ way out and what’s behind our ferocity to defend that choice. Mouse in a Jar follows the relationship of two women for whom each other’s ‘easy way out’ is directly opposed and directly endangering the other.

With Mouse, I was personally less interested in finding the cause of Daga and Ma’s abnormalities than in pairing these two very different, oddly-behaving people with warring definitions of safety in a place such that each of their own goals was reliant upon the other changing her definition. And agency is a choice; when one character backs down to let the other pass, it’s like sending her off to the gallows. And when she stops her, it’s intrusion.

More recent, drastic changes to the script occurred with the character of Fip. He began as an awkward, impotent man-child. For the longest time, his name was Boy. His awkwardness has since morphed to inner disturbance and his impotence is no more. He’s more of a challenge to the other characters in the space. I think adding actors in the workshops – we’ve had two different sets – did great things for the characters. I just wasn’t comfortable having an actor play someone named Boy. He deserved a name and all the other aspects of a person. And the actors’ questions made me honest. I saw in myself my reasons for shirking him and I worked to fix it. I gave him more story, more meat, more of a chance to do damage and greatness.

It’s hard to say, at this point, what’s my own and what’s MOUSE. Memory is fickle.And so much has developed in the play. And there’s always a third and a fourth to every second side to a story. I’ll admit to a lot of psychology in the characters of Mouse in a Jar coming from my life and the lives of those in it. And, of course, the heritage. But I hope to one day write plays featuring Slavic people and immigrants with the breadth and honesty that August Wilson wrote African Americans and Adam Rapp Midwesterns, Jose Rivera Hispanics, where I can create people that shared my experiences and my America without them being seen as members of my life.

BECOMING A PLAYWRIGHT:

I wrote plays because I wrote too much. My first was for the New Jersey Young Playwrights Festival. This was in 7^th grade. I had been bringing into my English class in Kearny, NJ something like 25 pages of heft on 2-page assignments. (My teacher didn’t know why I was writing so much – sufficed to say it wasn’t entirely because I loved writing but because it was a quiet, consuming activity away from other things.) So I wrote a 20-page play and got to perform it, a one-kid show, in the most casual of workshops after class (what the crap was a ‘workshop’ then?, I don’t know if either of us knew), reading all the parts aloud from my special kid binder. I got to be a special kid, with a binder. One of my favorite memories – thank you for conjuring it for me with your question. Later, in high school, I would write and tape mini-screenplays for class assignments, some in Spanish for an after-school adult literacy program, and others just for myself. I didn’t write as much in college until closer to its end. There were other things going on then. I eventually found playwriting again when those other things reached their worst peaks and I needed some anchor to the ground. My first play, “wander/standing,” began as an unintentionally-darkest-of-dark attempts to articulate something I didn’t understand and hoped to. I was horrified. I imagine it was like seeing your lungs after decades of smoking – when “wander/standing” was performed at the University of Chicago, I couldn’t believe how black and corroded the inside of my head was. But, unpleasant as it was, it was something real for me – a big change from the years before it when I’d been heavily destroying and lying to myself. I knew this was it – and it wasn’t because I’d been praised for it (‘mixed reviews’ – I won some awards but I thought the audience hated it). I was struck that it was able to dig deeper than anything or anyone since I started losing myself. Theatre became the realest thing I knew then. I knew I wouldn’t get into grad school with the play or get it produced anywhere. All I knew was I needed time. So I applied for The Merage Foundation’s Fellowship for the American Dream, a 2-year, $20,000 stipend awarded annually to 13 US immigrant students in pursuit of their American Dream and, to my shock and elation, I won. So I bought time. I hadn’t really received any formal instruction in the craft of writing plays – only ‘write and read aloud once’ workshops of short scenes at The University of Chicago. I don’t blame them – they did feed me heap-tons of theory! – and things like character arc and dramatic tension were mine to learn, I gathered. So, after graduating, I wrote extensively and participated in workshops at theatres in the city – namely, Chicago Dramatists and Victory Gardens Theater – in hopes of gaining more practice in the craft to supplement cerebral sects of drama I’d collected as an undergraduate. I maintained a bibliotarian diet, consuming a play a day usually on the CTA to and from part-time jobs. I did the migrant work of one’s 20s as an artist – it’s quite a list — in addition to a brief stint (and now, a friendship) assisting Aaron Carter, the Literary Manager of Victory Gardens evaluate new plays. I worked. And I wrote some real crap and appreciated everyone who read it. I baked many cookies at first. I could tell things were going well for me in the self-edification area, when people started to forget about the cookies. Sign of success to young playwrights: abatement of the cookie conditional. I’d enjoyed a few workshops and festival inclusions of my shorter work and, in December 2009, began my grad apps. In January, I was gifted with a month-long development at Red Tape Theatre of “Mouse in a Jar,” where I met you, Daria Davis, who taught me more about psychology and drama than anyone. I think you’ve sharpened my eye. Things are coming into greater focus in general. And, after a production with you and three years in New Haven…I just can’t wait.

Certainly a life of being told to not talk about things or just forget them shaped my desire to write. Without going into too much detail, I was instructed that certain secrets had to remain that way – at least in the eyes of those making the rules and acquiring the bacon – so any cuts or scrapes, figurative and literal, were to be mended by forgetting. A part of me still understands that – I wholly understood that growing up – but another part lashes out and rebels.  And I don’t think I’m the only one that deals with this. I imagine you could ask any customer servant, refugee, teacher, student and there’s been some time when someone had loomed above them, doling directions or criticisms unfairly, maybe maliciously. Why does the diner spear the waiter? Why does the man kick the puppy? Odd behaviors, socially unaccepted acts, general meanness – they fascinate me.

So why not be a psychologist? A social worker? Probably because people scare me. At least right now, at this age coupled with this awkwardness. And because the people in my head will always be there, as long as I want them. And I’m not trying to cure them. Just watch them, think about them. So I set their worlds, twisting them at will (I’m big on ‘environment’ in plays – place inspires me most, I think.  In “Mouse in a Jar,” the house breathes. It heaves sometimes, in fact.). And I open parts of myself that are usually kept self-consciously closed to people in my day-to-day. I should mention I’ve no exemption either.  I look at my own odd behavior in the same way. I look back to (and right at) the dangerous or mean, the ‘abnormal’ things I’ve done and do.

Share Stumble it! • Share on Twitter