Immigrant Imaginations 1

 

[Immigrants and immigration has become a top-of-mind subject in recent years, especially so at this moment in time.  When I saw that the Theatre Communications Group’s quarterly magazine American Theatre entitled its Summer 2025 issue “Immigrant Imaginations,” I thought it would be useful and interesting to repost some of the articles on the topic on my blog. 

[The first one that struck me is a conversation among six playwrights working in the U.S. whose origins are all beyond our borders.  In the published discussion, the writers touch on several aspects of their work that have been affected by their change of venue, so to speak.  Some of that has to do with culture, some with language, and some, I was curious to read, has to do with time.  I won’t try to explain that last one; I’ll let you read it for yourself.

[The article ran in volume 41, issue 4 (Summer 2025), of AT.  It was also posted on the journal’s website on 29 July 2025.] 

“HERE, THERE, AND EVERYWHERE:
AN IMMIGRANT THEATREMAKERS ROUNDTABLE”

by Lyndsey Bourne 

Immigrant theatremakers working in the U.S. reflect on what they write 
and who they’re writing for.

“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.”

That’s an Agnès Varda quote I love. I think about it often. These past few months, I’ve been thinking about landscape and place, and how they are present in a play. How, for example, Cuba feels so present in María Irene Fornés’s work.

[Agnès Varda (1928-2019) was a Belgian-born French film director, screenwriter, and photographer. The quotation is from her 2008 autobiographical documentary film The Beaches of Agnès (Les plages d'Agnès; Ciné-tamaris and Arte France Cinéma; distributed by Les Films du Losange).

[María Irene Fornés (1930-2018) was a Cuban-American playwright, theater director, and teacher who worked in Off-Broadway and experimental theater venues in the last four decades of the twentieth century. See a report on Fornés’s play Drowning in “Signature Plays” (3 June 2016).]  

I’m a playwright, a Canadian with an O-1 visa. I’ve been living in New York for nearly 15 years. Even when the plays I write are set in the U.S., somehow I’m always writing Canada.

[According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency within the Department of Homeland Security that administers lawful immigration and naturalization, the O-1 visa is for the nonimmigrant individual

who possesses extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics, or who has a demonstrated record of extraordinary achievement in the motion picture or television industry and have been recognized nationally or internationally for those achievements.

[There are two classifications of O-1 visas; the applicable one for this discussion is the second one (O-1B):

O-1A: individuals with an extraordinary ability in the sciences, education, business, or athletics (not including the arts, motion pictures or television industry)

O-1B: individuals with an extraordinary ability in the arts, or extraordinary achievement in motion picture or television industry

[There are also special visa classifications for those accompanying O-1 visa holders.  See the USCIS website for details.]

In early April over Zoom, I spoke with a group of international playwrights all living and making theatre in the U.S., writing stories and landscapes between places: Bazeed [aka: Mariam Bazeed; born ca. 1976 in Kuwait; relocated with their family to Eqypt during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990], an Egyptian playwright, poet, performer, and multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn; Francisco Mendoza, a playwright who was born in Argentina and partly raised in Brazil before moving to the U.S. a decade ago, now also based in Brooklyn; Stefani Kuo [b. 1995], a playwright and actor raised in both Hong Kong and Taiwan now based in New York City; Khristián Méndez Aguirre, a director and playwright from Guatemala now based in New York City and Austin; and Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke [b. ca. 1988 in Helsinki, Finland], a playwright and director (and sometimes actor) from Sri Lanka now based in New York City.

Together, we reflected on the ways our immigration status, cultural distance, and shifting audiences shape our work. It’s a precarious thing to be an immigrant artist—a tension too often made invisible. For immigrant and diasporic theatremakers working in the U.S., writing is often shaped not only by personal or political urgency, but by the realities of bureaucracy, translation, and institutional legibility.

Here we gathered to engage in questions of authenticity, audience, representation, and survival, from the politics of language and translation to the very real pressures of visa applications and institutional gatekeeping. We considered how lived experience shapes approaches to our artistry, and how for international artists working in America, storytelling itself becomes a site of both constraint and possibility. What happens when you write about a country you no longer live in? How do time, language, and place intervene in the storytelling?

Below are excerpts from our conversation, edited for concision and clarity.

LYNDSEY BOURNE: I want to start by asking about your writing practice. What is your process like these days? How are you thinking about your plays and where they come from? Who are they for?

FRANCISCO MENDOZA: I came to the U.S. as a student and then I transitioned to an O-1 visa. In some ways, the O-1 did shape the writing, because I was writing plays that were most easily going to lead to the kind of achievements that I needed to show for my visa. Then I got my green card, and my writing has gotten weirder and weirder. The further I walk away from the necessity of achievement, the more the plot doesn’t necessarily make logical sense. I am not as afraid to branch into a way of writing that maybe people won’t understand. And it’s okay if they don’t! I think the safety of not feeling like I have to perform has influenced, not necessarily the kind of stories I’m telling, but definitely how I’m telling them.

ARUN WELANDAWE-PREMATILLEKE: In Sri Lanka, I ran a theatre company [Mind Adventures Theatre Company in Colombo; an associate artistic director, 2011-17], and I worked with the same people from the time I was 18 until I was in my 30s. Moving somewhere else, of course, changes the way you work and what your concerns are. The day I got into NYU was the day everything shut down in the world [in 2020], so my first semester was in Sri Lanka over Zoom. But the writing changed when I was writing for that audience, even from home. At that time, we were heavily under the Mahinda Rajapaksa regime—essentially a dictatorship. My work had always been political, and we had always changed scripts to get through censor boards. I was very used to it, and I always felt like I was saying what I wanted to say. But the moment it had the safety of a different audience, the work changed—I became much more willing to point at the thing and name the thing in a very different way. If anything, I found a kind of political freedom.  

[Mahinda Rajapaksa (b. 1945) served as the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka from 2004 to 2005, then the sixth President of Sri Lanka from 2005 to 2015, and then PM again in 2018 and from 2019 to 2022. He was the Leader of the Opposition from 2002 to 2004 and 2018 to 2019, and the Minister of Finance from 2005 to 2015 and 2019 to 2021.

[When Rajapaksa was forced from office in 2022, he launched what amounted to an attempted coup, but ended up signing a letter of resignation. During his political career, he’s been accused of war crimes during the last years of the Sri Lankan civil war (1983-2009) as well as other criminal accusations including human rights violations during his presidency, corruption, and for instigating violence on anti-government protestors during the failed 2022 coup. As of 2023, he’s been sanctioned by Canada for human rights violations.]

STEFANI KUO: I write a lot about Hong Kong and Taiwan, especially Hong Kong. I remember going through a phase where I was reading about all these theatres and their mission statements, which all have the word “American” or “America” in it. So even if I’m writing about an international thing in Hong Kong, it still has to relate back to America. Sometimes the actors I work with in the U.S., even if they have heritage from where I’m from, don’t understand how to relate to my work, even if they speak the language or understand the culture from their grandparents or parents. That was shocking to me; I thought we were all in the same box. But there’s a gap because of where I grew up versus where they grew up.

That gap really interests me—the shared feeling of “I’m not from here.” It leads to my next question: A lot of the plays getting produced in the U.S. telling stories that represent other countries and other cultures are written by second- or third-generation Americans, who are often writing about the experiences of their own parents or grandparents. There are obvious reasons for this: Bureaucracy, gatekeeping, and systemic barriers make it much harder for immigrant artists to break through. As we’ve been saying, there are also the ways in which we have to tailor our writing to an American audience. Is this something you think about? How is this sitting with you?

KHRISTIÁN MÉNDEZ AGUIRRE: Right now, I’m trying to find Guatemalan actors and a director for a reading I’m doing, and you can imagine what that process is like. The assumption is that I have something in common with someone who is Guatemalan but perhaps grew up in the U.S. and is first-generation Guatemalan American. That’s an assumption that makes both of us legible to the artistic leadership of those institutions and how they make us legible to their audiences, because the question always is: Will the audience get it? Will the audience come? 

FRANCISCO: I think Americans are always more comfortable seeing immigration as a cultural issue rather than a legal one, because it demands less work to make space for a cultural experience than for a legal reality. I have been here 10 years and I’ve seen more and more plays about international experiences, and even about immigration, getting produced. Yes, the vast majority of those plays have been written by Americans, even if they come from families who were not originally American. So clearly the appetite for the experience is there. The barriers that prevent immigrants from getting to write and direct their own experiences on American stages are also in place. 

BAZEED: There is a divide that I feel as someone who very much still identifies as “fresh off the boat.” I am not from America. I am not of America. I just live here—and that has meaning in my life. There’s a sense of belonging that isn’t here. I’ve lived in New York since January 2002, so it is the place where I have spent most of my life. At this point, English is more accessible to me than Arabic. It comes easier because I use it every day. But I was born into a condition of diaspora. I was born in the Gulf. I was there for 14 years. Egypt is where I have spent the least amount of time in my life.

All of those things funnel me into a certain perspective and positionality. I’ve worked with first-generation Arab Americans and we’re different—we’re trying to tell the story of these places differently. In some ways, their access to their culture has been mitigated. There’s a local access that happens in the family home, or you may have it in the community around you, but otherwise, in most American immigrant households, it’s these tiny nuclear families that are still getting access to the stories of their cultures through imperialism and through American hegemony and American media. So the version of life that they’re often talking about when they talk about their cultures is a little bit Orientalized, and you can see that filter; mine is becoming more Orientalized as I have more distance from my culture. I can’t make a contemporary reference or joke if my entire life depended on it. For me to name a cultural meme from Egypt that’s big right now? I wouldn’t know. I’m not there. 

[I can’t be certain if Bazeed chose the word ‘Orientalize’ for the overtones expressed by Edward Said (1935-2003; Palestinian-American academic, literary critic, and political activist) in his 1978 book Orientalism (Pantheon Books), but it sounds as if they did. In Said’s terms, the word means to represent or portray cultures of the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa in a stereotyped way that emphasizes their exoticism and otherness, often reinforcing colonialist views of Western superiority.]

I would love to talk a little more about something that you just brought up, Bazeed, which is how time shifts your relationship to your own culture and the ways that you are writing about culture and place.

STEFANI: I write a lot about Hong Kong, but I didn’t used to. I remember in 2019, when the Hong Kong protests [15 March 2019-30 June 2020] started, a friend was like, “Have you written a play about it?” Which I was totally taken aback by, but then this friend said, “Well, you know, if you don’t write it, some British guy who’s never been to Hong Kong is going to write it.” So I wrote a play, and in the play Trump is mentioned because he was president back then. Because of that, because American politicians are mentioned, the play is relevant to America. There’s a relatability thing that I find to be very American. People often ask, “Would you do this play in Hong Kong?” And the thing is, if this play was done in Hong Kong, it would be done entirely in Cantonese. It would be a different play. People think because it’s multilingual, it’s globally applicable. That’s not true. If you put it in another place, it will become a different play. It has to.

FRANCISCO: I often feel like I’m existing in a world that asks me to be sure of who I am. My bio starts with my markers, and I am those markers: I am this sexuality and this race and this nationality, and this is what I’m bringing into the rehearsal room. I have a connection to Argentina, of course, but, as Bazeed was saying, ask me to pull up a meme and I won’t get it. I think the natural instinct is to feel shame about it, like I’m an imposter, and I feel like that shame has the potential to bring in a harshness about my identity—that I have to defend it. So I actively have to build for myself a flexibility that maybe the industry itself won’t necessarily permit. Maybe my experience and my nationality and my passport don’t endow me with an automatic authority to speak on everything that relates to my identity. I don’t want that for myself. There would have been a time where I would’ve felt ashamed of the distance that I’m acquiring from the culture that spawned me. But I don’t live there; I live here. There’s no shame about that. That’s just what it is. 

ARUN: A lot of the stuff that I’ve written is a period piece, now that Sri Lanka has a democratically elected, left-leaning socialist government. An extraordinary thing has happened in our lifetime, and only a few months ago. Finally! So I’m very conscious of the idea of becoming a diaspora writer who is constantly trapped in a vision of a country that you left rather than what that country is now. I’ve had moments back home where we thought we were in a better place, and the work did become sort of irrelevant, and then, five years later, it became relevant again. It is constantly moving, and your work is constantly shifting to both place and time. I think you can’t really escape that.

[Anura Kumara Dissanayake (b. 1968) was inaugurated on 23 September 2024 as the tenth President of Sri Lanka. He is the leader of the National People’s Power, a coalition of left-wing and progressive parties. Dissanayake, however, is, himself, a Marxist.]

KHRISTIÁN: I do think we have this capacity or this privilege or curse of trying to make sense of a thing without having to live it every day by virtue of being outsiders. Some of the environmental issues that are now happening in the U.S. have happened in my country for a long time. My family hasn’t had steady water in northern Guatemala City for over 10 years. I’m able to be here in the U.S. and take a break from not having steady water and write a play about it, which is for sure privilege. It’s also a way to reflect things back to these communities that we come from, and there’s pride in this. The NGO that I was working with to write my latest play, they were like, “Oh my God, you’re in New York, and you want to write a play about the forest fires in Guatemala?” It puts this expectation on the work. I just want to name that transnational tension and privilege and joy too, because it’s kind of cool that the work also gets to serve that.

[Guatemala experienced an alarming number of forest fires in April 2024 and a "state of calamity" was declared. By May, when the start of the rainy season extinguished most of the fires, over 157.5 square miles of land were affected.]

I’m thinking more lately about the use of theatre and performance in terms of writing place, and how that sense of place lives spatially in theatre; it unfolds and exists physically and in real time. How do you write non-American places into American theatre spaces, knowing that translation or mistranslation—cultural, linguistic, temporal—is inevitable?

STEFANI: When I picture plays in my head, it’s just a vacuum. And then I see things, and those things are usually influenced by where I’ve been. So a lot of plays are set in Hong Kong or Taiwan. They are murky, specific places, but a lot of it is influenced by how time is working with the landscape. I don’t really write linear plays, and I think that’s because I grew up watching and reading so much Taiwanese and Chinese stuff that is very nonlinear, very circular. I was reading this book about the colonization of time that talks a lot about how we think of colonialism as mostly a spatial thing. But it’s also a time thing. It’s not just about land; it’s also about how we perceive and experience time. Even the 24-hour clock or the calendar year are very superimposed Western things. That’s not to say it’s American. But I often feel that tension in how I think about storytelling relative to being in America; it almost feels like I’m trying to bring in a different experience of time into how we experience time in the U.S.

BAZEED: Surveillance is in almost every conversation I have these days. I think being strategic is part of this moment. Right now, I’m interested in erasure and allegory as form. What gets left out becomes part of the argument, not just the aesthetic. I think about Sheikh Imam’s protest songs from Egypt with all these veiled allegories like “They’re taking the milk from the cow” to talk about how the British were stealing our resources.

[Sheikk Imam, aka: El Sheikh Emam (1918-95) was a famous Egyptian composer and singer, known for his political songs in favor of the poor and the working classes. Britain controlled Egypt in one form or another from 1882 until 1956.]

STEFANI: I don’t identify as Asian American. I feel like I’m an Asian in America, but I didn’t grow up here. I have a different experience with language and storytelling. I find it really fascinating that so many playwrights try to use English in place of their native language, because I’m not interested in doing that at all. If the play is in Cantonese, I will be writing in Cantonese, or if the play is in Cantonese and English, then we’ll do half-and-half and you can read subtitles. I understand why people use English for access, but for me it feels like hearing the language is a huge part of experiencing the culture—just the environment of being in that language, what it brings out in people. Because people behave differently when they speak different languages.

ARUN: For me, the hardest thing about language is, like, a Sri Lankan sentence in English sort of has too many words in it for an American mouth. There’s a process I can see of an American actor getting used to it and finding their way into it, which is lovely. But the moment there’s a person who’s grown up in Sri Lanka in the room, and they read the lines—it’s like, Boom! Oh, right, I’ve forgotten what the ease was like.

FRANCISCO: Translation is not just about finding equivalents, but rather thinking, approaching a view of the world from a different perspective. Right? With theatre, in some ways it’s always a translation. I wrote something, and the people who are going to put it up will translate it to that time, to that moment, to who they are, to the resources that they have at hand, to the audience that they’re playing to. When we make a play from one country in another country—even a production that’s been transferred—none of us can have the same experience. There isn’t a complete encapsulation of the theatrical experience that can survive place and time. It’s just going to be completely different.

[Lyndsey Bourne is a Canadian writer, teacher, and doula (born and raised in North Vancouver and Penticton, British Columbia, in Canada’s far west) working with The Doula Project. Her plays include The Second Body (2020), Mabel’s Mine (2025), and I Was Unbecoming Then (2020).  She teaches playwriting at Playwrights Horizons Theater School (New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts).

Pulitzer Playwrights in Dialogue

 

[In the introduction to his interview with the winner and two finalists for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama (note the link below), American Theatre editor Rob Weinert-Kendt observed that “whenever I need encouragement about the present and future of the U.S. theatre, my mind turns to the state of playwriting . . . .”  He went on to say that it’s “freshly heartening” to “see few signs of its vitality, immediacy, or unbiddable boldness flagging in the years I’ve been on the beat . . . .”

[That 2022 interview, apparently, was seen as the start of a tradition, and Weinert-Kendt followed up in 2023 with a similar session with the top three dramatists of that year’s Pulitzer competition, which I’m reposting below.  (There didn’t seem to be interviews for the 2024 or, so far, the 2025 winner and runners-up.)] 

“SANAZ TOOSSI, ALESHEA HARRIS, LLOYD SUH:
FINDING FORM AND WHO THEIR PLAYS ARE FOR”
by Rob Weinert-Kendt 

[The transcript of Weinert-Kendt’s interview ran in the Fall 2023 issue (“A New Era”) of American Theatre (40.1) as "Language and Belonging."  As a section labeled “Interviews,” the conversation was entitled as above and posted on the AT website on 27 July 2023.]

The Pulitzer-winning author of ‘English’ and the Pulitzer finalists for ‘On Sugarland’ and ‘The Far Country’ gather to talk craft, language, expectation, and optimism.

I’ve hosted a number of conversations among theatre folks that might fairly be described as lovefests, with praise gushing as freely as wine at a hosted bar and appreciative nods and laughter from all sides (including my own). But my chat with this year’s finalists [i.e., 2023] and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama set a new bar for fellow feeling. Following a tradition we started last year with James Ijames, Sylvia Khoury, and Kristina Wong, we recently convened Sanaz Toossi [b. 1992 in Orange County, California; of Iranian descent], whose play English won this year’s Pulitzer, with Aleshea Harris [b. 1981 in Germany in a military family; lived in many places but was predominantly raised in the South] and Lloyd Suh [b. 1975 in Detroit, Michigan; of Korean heritage], whose On Sugarland and The Far Country, respectively, were Pulitzer finalists. These are three very different plays, stylistically and thematically, but based on our conversation, their authors could form a mutual admiration society (and I would consider joining as an honorary member). I’ve trimmed many of the compliments from the following transcript, but this trio’s sincere affinity still shines through.

A brief word on each: In addition to English, which follows the class and linguistic struggles within an English class in Tehran during the tumultuous year of 2008, Toossi has written Wish You Were Here and was recently named Manhattan Theatre Club’s Judith Champion Playwriting Fellow. Harris is the acclaimed author of Relentless Award winner Is God Is and the popular ritual theatre piece What to Send Up When It Goes Down; in On Sugarland she follows a fractious, multigenerational Black extended family in an unnamed Southern cul-de-sac where the dead from a long-raging war are commemorated. Suh is the author of the much-produced The Chinese Lady, as well as Charles Francis Chan Jr’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery, Franklinland, and The Wong Kids in the Secret of the Space Chupacabra; in The Far Country he traces the complicated, often devastating journey of a Chinese family from rural Taishan through California’s Angel Island through several decades after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

[Toossi’s English had its première in 2022 at the Linda Gross Theater of New York City’s Atlantic Theatre Company in a co-production with the Roundabout Theatre Company. Wish You Were Here premièred in 2020 as an audio performance on Audible by the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Williamstown, Massachusetts; its stage début was at Playwrights Horizons in New York City in 2022. The Relentless Award is given in honor of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman (1967-2014) by the American Playwriting Foundation for works that are challenging, exhibit fearlessness, exude passion, and are relentlessly truthful.

[Harris wrote and first directed her performance art piece What to Send Up When it Goes Down in 2016 at Occidental College in Los Angeles. In 2018, What to Send Up When It Goes Down was produced off-Broadway by the Movement Theatre Company in New York City. On Sugarland was produced by the New York Theatre Workshop in 2022. Franklinland débuted at Chicago’s Jackalope Theatre in 2018.

[The première of The Chinese Lady, in a commissioned co-production with New York’s Ma-Yi Theater Company, took place at Barrington Stage Company’s St. Germain Stage in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 2018. Suh’s Charles Francis Chan Jr.'s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery had its world première by the National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO) at New York City’s Walkerspace in Lower Manhattan in 2015. The Wong Kids premièred in 2013 in a commissioned co-production, first at the Children’s Theater Company in Minneapolis, then by the Ma-Yi Theater Company at La MaMa in New York. The Far Country had its first performance at New York’s Atlantic Theater Company in 2022.

[Angel Island is an island in San Francisco Bay and is entirely within Angel Island State Park. Angel Island Immigration Station, where immigrants entering the United States were detained and interrogated, operated from 1910 to 1940. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was a U.S. federal law prohibiting all immigration of Chinese laborers for 10 years. The law was repealed in 1943.]

The following conversation has been edited for clarity and concision.

---

ROB WEINERT-KENDT: Congratulations to you all. I want to start by asking you how each play began.

SANAZ TOOSSI: I started writing English pretty soon after Trump’s travel ban, also known as the Muslim ban [January 2017]. I was in grad school [at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts]. It was a very strange time to think about one’s own artistry and one’s own responsibility and who I was going to be entering the theatre. I had to write something very quickly—and I actually would like to put that restraint on myself now, again, because I actually think it’s the only way I can create.

I had always thought about language, and I’ve always been so insecure about my English-speaking abilities. I grew up bilingual, speaking Farsi and English. I think I say this every time I talk about this play: I am sort of mortified when I speak—like, I never feel like I can find the right words or that I’m able to express what I really want to say. I do feel confident when I write. I think that’s kind of how I became a writer. But I knew I could write about that really quickly. I’d always wanted to write about an English class. So I think having not a lot of time to turn out a draft, feeling rage and grief and sorrow, but mostly rage, about the vilification of Middle Easterners and Muslims—I would say, especially as an Iranian and a first generation American, I just needed to scream a little. So I screamed and English was born.

[Toossi has said that she spoke Persian in her home and English outside it when she was growing up.]

Aleshea, your piece could be described as epic, would that be fair to say?

ALESHEA HARRIS: It is an epic piece, and it was born of a great deal of frustration. I too started it way back when I was in grad school [MFA, California Institute of the Arts], trying to adapt Philoctetes [409 BCE; Sophocles (ca. 497/496-406/405 BCE)]. I started out trying to find my analogous versions of each of those figures and it just didn’t work—it didn’t make sense as a play. I wasn’t writing from my gut. I was writing what I thought an adaptation of a Greek play was supposed to feel like. It wasn’t until after Is God Is and What to Send Up that I felt liberated to really change the assignment from trying to adapt that play and being very loyal to that source material, to writing the play I wanted to write having read that play. I just had to filter it through my own sensibilities and interests.

My mother was in the Army, and I’m first generation on my mom’s side—she is an immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago. And the Army figured so prominently in my life as a youngster; there were things that are so strange when I look at them now, like everyone having to pause and honor the flag [this is Retreat and To the Colors, bugle calls at the end of the day when the flag is lowered]. I really needed to come to understanding some things and articulating some frustrations about what it means to be a Black person who serves the country—a country that has targeted Black soldiers specifically. I mean, just reading harrowing accounts of soldiers being chased and lynched because they were such an affront to white supremacy by just being a Black person in uniform, and my mom’s stories of being ridiculed for her accent, and being a dark-skinned Black woman in the U.S. Army surrounded by, you can probably imagine, a certain kind of energy. I found the play by interviewing my mom. I remember asking her, “What is it that you want us to know, my brothers and I, about your service?” And she said, “I want you to know that I’m all right. I’m fine.”

[On an army post, Retreat is the bugle call signaling the end of the official duty day and the lowering of the flag. It’s blown around sunset and is immediately followed by To the Colors, blown while the flag is lowered. During these bugle calls, vehicles should come to a stop, military personnel in uniform should face the flag (or the direction of the music) and salute until the end of To the Colors, and civilians and military personnel in civilian clothes should face the flag, stand at attention, and place their hands over their hearts until the end of To the Color.  This is probably what Harris was describing.]

Lloyd, you’ve written a number of plays about Chinese American history. How did this particular one come into being?

LLOYD SUH: It came by accident, this historical impulse. I was writing a play almost 10 years ago, and doing research about the history of where a lot of the stereotypes of Asian Americans come from, and I came across all these stories—there’s so much more scholarship around Asian American history than when I was in school, and I kept coming across the stories that just stuck with me, that almost haunted me. I felt like I needed to wrestle with them somehow. So a number of different plays prior to The Far Country were my attempts at wrestling with these stories that were lost or forgotten. The stories did kind of circle the Chinese Exclusion Act era—it felt like that was the fulcrum where so much of this comes from, so many of the stereotypes, and where the legislative history of the Asian American experiences was established. It was something that felt daunting to me for a long time, and then at the Atlantic Theatre Company, Neil Pepe [b. 1963; artistic director of ATC] and Annie McCray [possibly Annie MacRae, Associate Artistic Director at ATC since October 2014] said, “You can write anything you want,” and I said, “Okay, I’m gonna write about the Exclusion Act.” Once I committed to that, it became a process of research and spending a little time on Angel Island and spending time talking to people, and reading as much as possible. I slowly began to come up with these themes of the way history is erased, the way history is lost, and what that does not just to a person but to a community, to feel the absence of a lost history. And what does that mean for those of us here in the future? How do I process that?

These are three distinct plays, but I saw some common threads. Lloyd and Sanaz, your plays both include elements of translation, where multilingual scenes are rendered for English-speaking audiences with a convention where we hear thick-accented, “broken” diction when the characters are speaking English, their second language, which is contrasted with fluent, eloquent speech when they’re speaking their first language, Chinese or Farsi, respectively.

LLOYD: Most of those craft choices came out of practical necessity, of how you convey both of those vernaculars. Part of the fun for me was that the first scene is a performance, but we don’t know it yet; he is telling them what they want to hear, showing them what they want to see. The other thing—and Sanaz, your play does this so beautifully—is the difference between how one articulates themself in one language vs. another, and just allowing both versions of this character to exist. One who is out of his depth and awkward and kind of flailing and desperate, and one who can be incredibly poetic and forthright, and letting both of those exist, but letting language be part of the thing that makes it possible or impossible.

SANAZ: That’s so beautifully said. It’s funny, I get asked a lot, what made you think of this conceit? It was really practicality; like, there was no other way to tell the story. Language is something I come up against again and again whenever I write about Iranians in Iran, or when I write my never finished American family drama. My household was bilingual, but what is that going to look like onstage? I’ve had that big question: When we see people onstage speaking in broken English, do we fully see them as human? Do we understand intrinsically that they are as complex and interesting as any of us are? For this play, we can only know them through language, and we will only understand what they lose if we know exactly how they express themselves, and we know that in this migration that will be left in the home country.

LLOYD: There’s a sequence of lines in your play about how “a French accent is beautiful, an English accent is beautiful, but not yours.” I know there’s a long tradition with [Asian American Pacific Islander] performers in particular of saying, “I don’t want to do an accent,” and that comes from an understanding of what an accent has signified historically on an American stage, and what it means when somebody asks you to do that accent. But it’s complicated, because my parents have an accent, and I don’t feel shame about that. On the surface, this is not shameful, so how is it that we have internalized the shame, in terms of what that signifies?

SANAZ: I’m nodding my head so hard, I’m about to fall off my chair. It’s not shameful, but to be totally frank, on the first day of rehearsal, I had such intense guilt about making my actors do accents—even though the whole point of the play is that there is nothing shameful in an accent! My parents have accents. They are heroes, you know. I have an accent when I go to Iran and speak Farsi. It is so hard! But, as with everything we put onstage, all of us are coming up against histories and ways of expression that have been harmful to our communities, and we have to balance that with our own artistry and our own truths. Aleshea, you have this incredible note at the top of your play about meta-theatricality, and you address this expectation that readers might have about your play being in the style of realism or naturalism. You confront and disrupt this expectation so beautifully in your play, and in all your work. When I think of your play, it’s like a clarion call for joy in the pursuit to honor one’s own artistry. So I feel like we’re all kind of grappling with this.

ALESHEA: Thank you for that. Obviously, my play is not an immigrant play. I won’t pretend that it is; it is from my mother’s immigrant experience, but it is not an immigrant play. I hope that I am brave enough to write that play someday. But I was really struck by the throughline of figures having to prove belonging in each of our plays, in different ways. There’s something about these pieces that is all about a person trying to come into personhood, or an idea of full personhood, by way of conforming.

One parallel I noticed between On Sugarland and English is the prominence of offstage characters or elements. In the case of On Sugarland, it’s the unseen government that is sending folks to war, which is not named, nor is the place they’re being sent to fight; also, there is the dead mother, Iola, whose spirit remains very present. In the case of English, which takes place in 2008, in the midst of mounting political censorship in Iran ahead of the Green Movement, that context is not referred to directly. I wondered how these absences or this indirection informed the way you wrote these plays.

[The Iranian Green Movement was a political movement that arose in Iran following the disputed 2009 presidential election. It was characterized by widespread protests, primarily focused on demanding the annulment of what protesters believed was a fraudulent election and the removal of then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (b. 1956; President of Iran: 2005-13).]

SANAZ: I was really insistent that I call my play a comedy. Whether it is a comedy or not is up for debate. But I insist on the comedy of this play—I insist to a fault. I will say, this is not any more a political play than a play by a white American writer. Like, The Flick [play by Annie Baker (b. 1981) that received the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; premièred Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 2013] is as much a political play as English is. When writing for myself, I feel these tripwires around me. Sometimes I feel tempted to explain the politics outside the classroom to this audience—but in all my work, I’m not going to explain what’s happening outside more than I need to. I will not explain the Iranian revolution [1978-79] to you. To keep the play comedic, to keep the characters real—you know, Iranians are not going to come into the classroom and read you the day’s headlines. That just wouldn’t happen. So I feel really insistent that we’re not going to talk about it. We don’t need to; it would not be artful to do so. And I wonder, Aleshea, if there are maybe, in similar ways, expectations upon Black playwrights about explaining and educating.

ALESHEA: I have many feelings about that. I don’t think about On Sugarland as a race play necessarily. We don’t even speak specifically about an incident of racism until the very end of the play. I know that people politicize Sanaz’s and my work in that way. So I had a reaction to some of the reviews, because I was like: Oh, you’ve decided who Aleshea Harris is and what my stories are about, in just the same way people tie themselves into knots, even with Is God Is—“This is about a race war,” some reviewer wrote recently about a production somewhere. I feel excited to liberate myself as a dramatist. Suzan-Lori Parks [b. 1963] wrote about this years ago in an essay, and so many folks have spoken about this—this idea that we can’t exist onstage as a person of the global majority unless the context is that we’re fighting against white supremacy. Sure, it’s there—it informed my mother’s decision to join the Army—but when my mother and I are talking to one another, we’re not talking about white supremacy, or very rarely, you know what I mean? There are so many relationships inside of On Sugarland that are just not primarily about white supremacy in the way I think people want them to be. There’s a lens that folks apply, and I think that’s problematic. It’s like cutting off dreams. I can go on and on. That’s one of my rants! Lloyd, I’d love to hear your take on these matters.

[Re: Suzan-Lori Parks, see “How America Eats: Food and Eating Habits in the Plays of Suzan-Lori Parks” by Kirk Woodward (5 October 2009), “A Playwright of Importance” by Kirk Woodward (31 January 2011), “The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World” (1 December 2016), “Venus” (7 June 2017), “The Red Letter Plays: In the Blood” (12 October 2017), “The Red Letter Plays: Fucking A” (17 October 2017), “The Red Letter Plays, Continued” by Kirk Woodward (1 November 2017), “Suzan-Lori Parks on the Covid Pandemic” (17 May 2023).]

LLOYD: I think about this a lot. Maybe the best way I can articulate it is, it’s like trying to figure out how to modulate who it’s for. It feels different to be like, “I have to tell white people about this thing,” vs., “I have to tell my kids about this thing.” So it’s a question of, how do you modulate your stuff, and who do you modulate it for? I’ve had experiences in theatres where I’ve been like, “Oh, they don’t get this,” and then being like, “Do I care? How much do I care if they don’t get it? Who do I want to get it?” And Aleshea, it’s so interesting—I’d be curious to hear your take on this. I think about ritual and the way you use ritual, not just in this play, but in What to Send Up, and that question of who is what for? I had a teacher say that the writer’s job is to unify the audience. You want them all to have the same realizations at the same time, to gasp at the same time, to appreciate—Aleshea, you’re already shaking your head. But for a long time, I thought this was true! Then I had this moment where I was working on a play for young audiences, and there’s an interesting tension between the stuff that kids are laughing at that the parents think is juvenile, while the parents are laughing at stuff that’s completely over the kids’ heads. And I thought, that’s so interesting—the ways in which an audience can be divided in a way that creates an interesting theatrical tension. I feel like I don’t have a sophisticated take on that yet. I don’t know how to read that with an audience when I’m watching them. I feel like you might.

ALESHEA: Lloyd, thank you, but I sort of have let that go. Now I am like: I don’t know what you came with, so I don’t know what is going to be a realization for you. I feel like when it comes to anti-Blackness, I’m on page 2023 and there are some people on page 10. So I don’t think, “This portion, these people will get.” I try to make with Black people in mind first, and just asking, “What do you need, Aleshea?” And whoever can get on this train is going to get on this train. To add another metaphor, I think of a play as like a cake, a multilayered, dense cake, right? Some people are just gonna get the icing. And then some people understand like the signification of a cul-de-sac and the way that configuration of homes goes back to the continent of Africa. And it’s okay; I can’t try to serve the white mind or the white lens. Like, I come to writing to get free, so I can’t come here and be trying to serve you. I’ve tried that. It doesn’t work and it hurts. It’s really traumatizing. I really just have to write from my gut. 

Sometimes when you’re speaking with a theatre, you can tell they don’t get it. One of the problems I don’t think we talk about enough, that can affect a writer of the global majority’s bottom line, is that white people not getting your shit will fuck with you—it will mean you not getting a production, so that’s real, it’s a terrible bind to be in. Like, “Oh, they don’t get it, should I . . .?” I’m not mad at the playwright who’s like, “I’m gonna write this and make sure there’s exposition in here to make sure the white people get it.” I’m not mad at them, because they’re trying to stay alive. It’s ironic and awful, but it’s there.

SANAZ: I also think that some people are gifted educators, you know, and some people really know how to do that masterfully in their work. I do not, and I resent the implication that I should. I think about this with Middle Eastern work a lot. We have not had enough opportunities to create a large body of work—I mean, we do have a large body of work, but not one that an audience can pull from necessarily so it’s like, I don’t need to say this, everyone gets it. So the expectations of the world are put on one piece of work, and that’s just bad. That’s going to be the worst play in the world. I always have asked myself, do I want an audience to get it? Of course we want our audiences to breathe together and have those moments of unity. But at the end of the day, when I’m not coming from a place of fear, I wonder who I write for. And for me, it’s my mom. I wonder for you guys if there’s somebody or some group of people that comes to mind? Or if you’d like to disagree with the question, that’s great too.

ALESHEA: Thank you. That’s provoking, in the best way. Sanaz, I write for myself first. I really think that if I’m excited, if I’m juiced—I remember with Is God Is, I was like, “I’m gonna write the hell out of this!” I had no idea it would be produced. Same with What to Send Up and this play: I just really come from a space of, What do I want to see? What have I not seen? What’s sexy to me? I have to trust that there are other people on the planet who get something useful out of this piece. I have to serve my sensibilities as a writer; I have to go, Aleshea, what are you into? Writing is so hard, so that’s the fuel for me, asking myself: Girl, what do you want to see on a stage? And what are you ready to fight for? It’s always a fight.

LLOYD: For me it varies in different pieces. There’s something that happened to me while writing so much about the past. I’ve spent a lot of time living in and thinking about and dwelling on really painful cultural history, and it’s kind of weird to do that. The only reason, and the only way to make that palatable, is to have faith that there’s going to be something redemptive on the other side—that it’s going to matter somehow. And the way that has mattered to me is that I imagine some kind of future. Sometimes this manifests very directly as, I’m writing this for my children. Some days it manifests as, I’m writing this for an unknowable, undefined, almost speculative future person. That’s one of the things I love about writing for theatre. You know, some people think that film and television, something recorded, is more permanent. But I think that’s wrong. I think that when something is recorded, it becomes a moment, and it’s locked in the year it was made. But with a play, you can imagine somebody doing it 100 years from now. That might sound high-falutin’. But why not aspire? Why not imagine that maybe it can be transformative? That’s what I’ve been doing most of the time.

ALESHEA: I wrote this in the notes for On Sugarland: I think about plays as medicine. Do you all think about your plays in that way, as a balm?

LLOYD: Yes, I’ve thought about it in exactly those terms. I would say that with my play The Chinese Lady, writing that was simultaneously diagnosing and trying to heal a wound. I felt this pain, then I had to diagnose it. Then, once I was able to locate a sense of what it was, then I tried to somehow patch it up.

SANAZ: That’s so beautifully said. I’ve never asked myself or been asked that question. I don’t know. My first instinct is to say no, and to say that sometimes my plays have felt more like an exorcism. But I wonder if those two things are not so different. I don’t know. I’m gonna email you later.

Each of your plays has at least one character we just adore the second they come onstage. In On Sugarland, there is Evelyn, the ageless diva, whose every line is quotable. In English, Elham is the kind of free-wheeling audience magnet who says whatever is on her mind. And in Far Country, Gee’s wife, Yuen, enters late in the show and just completely pivots the whole play.

ALESHEA: All of them women, I’m just gonna say.

I’m not a playwright, but I can just imagine that characters like these are both a joy and a temptation—that once they walk into your play, you can have a blast writing them but you have to make sure they don’t walk away with the whole thing. Unless, as with Yuen, that’s what she’s there to do.

LLOYD: One of the things I always knew was that this is a play where we were following this young man as he made his way to Angel Island, lived on Angel Island, then made his way out. But I also always knew I wanted it to begin and end without him, to show what precedes and what is to follow. So there was a point where I knew that something would take over the play, and I needed that to be the thing that takes it to the next place. And that next place was always intended to be a place of hope. So yeah, it’s a good day when you realize that the thing you have to do with your play is to let hope take it over, and you get to write a character where that’s their job. That’s always a fun day.

SANAZ: Elham has always been in the play. She’s always been exactly the same. What was kind of funny was, when my friends came to see the play, they were like, “Oh, that’s you.” She’s the hero of the play. We realize she’s right; she’s been right all along. She gets totally shit on, she gets humiliated, but that last scene is hers. The play is about two women who have totally different ideas about what it means to survive, but it had to be Elham’s play, because it was born out of anger, and she has a really righteous anger. I just love her. She’s so many women I know. I think a lot of us write the people we love as a way of honoring them in a world that maybe kind of refuses to do that. The actor who played her at the Atlantic, Tala Ashe, brought her to life for me. I think the trick with playing Elham is, she’s not a buffoon, and you cannot play her like one.

LLOYD: I’m so curious about those friends who said that Elham was you. Is that something you were ever conscious of?

SANAZ: No, I didn’t really know. I guess, since I love her, I must kind of like myself—I’m not writing my self-hatred in my plays. And I was like, Oh, I must really value my anger. Isn’t that a wonderful thing? I mean, Elham is a total nightmare in the classroom. She bulldozes through that classroom, and I love it. I love that in women, and I love seeing that onstage. To me that is the defining characteristic of so many women. I love their anger.

ALESHEA: I love a rowdy woman! I’m all about it. As for Evelyn, I think part of it was, I did not want an elder who was like in a rocking chair on a porch. I found her because I had this impulse to not write toward an expectation. I wanted a beautiful woman who was in her body and in her sexiness at that age, and who was wise but not like a boring kind of wise, and judgmental and flawed. And I knew the gowns would be cute, so I had a great time. I didn’t have a hard time writing her, though it’s true—she could have her own play. All these women could.

I just want to close by asking, do you feel hopeful about the theatre field, and your place in it?

LLOYD: I feel more hopeful than I’ve ever felt. I’m constantly amazed at the work of my peers, and it’s an honor to call them my peers. There was a time I remember asking myself this question when I was young: How do I take what I want to say and put it in this form? And I see so often writers, like the two of you, that seem to start with the question, How can I create a form that can possibly contain what I have to say? I love that. It’s just so endlessly exciting. I feel like I’ve seen more creativity and theatrical imagination in terms of how to answer that question on stages over the past few years than I did in the 20 years previous. I feel incredibly hopeful, not just for this moment, but for how this work might live in the future.

SANAZ: I think all our plays end on the cusp of possibility. And also this question of, what will I do with all that I was given, the good and the bad? I’m very optimistic. I can’t speak eloquently on the material and structural obstacles that we face right now. But I can say the work is incredible. I trust playwrights more than any other artists with how we’re going to imagine our futures and how we’re going to push our form forward, as evidenced by you two. There’s something about this medium that calls to us. I love it because it’s ancient and simple. I feel incredibly optimistic, and I don’t know if that’s foolish—I’m gonna say it’s not foolish, because if Lloyd thinks that, then I’m not an idiot.

LLOYD: We might both be idiots!

SANAZ: It’s very possible. We shouldn’t rule that out.

ALESHEA: Neither of you are idiots. I don’t know; I’m a fairly cynical person. But I remain hopeful, because if I consider that the future of the theatre has everything to do with the state of myself, then it’s like, okay, Aleshea, what are you doing to push things in a direction you think they ought to go? I take pretty seriously the responsibility of pointing the way to other folks who haven’t come yet. There’s a lot of noise in our field—a lot of stuff that’s not about the simple act of creating a narrative that is meaningful in some way to somebody. And so, through the noise, so much is possible. So much can be beautiful. It’s hard to be here on this plane, but it’s also wonderful, and we can do good things for each other. I think we are doing that. And I think that we will continue to do that.

[Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is an arts journalist and the editor-in-chief of American Theatre.  He was the founding editor-in-chief of Back Stage West and writes about theater for the New York Times, Time Out New York, and the Los Angeles Times.  He studied film at the University of Southern California and is a composer member of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop.

[Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is / What to Send Up When It Goes Down was published by TCG Books in 2022, and Lloyd Suh’s The Chinese Lady was released in 2024.  Sanaz Toossi’s play English is available from Concord Theatricals in a Samuel French acting edition and was published, with Wish You Were Here, by TCG in 2024.]

Jules Feiffer, Part 2

 

[This is the second of two Jules Feiffer interviews from The Dramatist, the official journal of the Dramatists Guild of America, the professional organization of playwrights, composers, lyricists, and librettists.  Like the first interview, posted as Part 1 of the short series on 16 June, this conversation with dramatist, songwriter, journalist, and theater historian Jeffrey Sweet, was dated 1 March 2025 and ran in the Spring 2025 issue (vol. 27, no. 2), under the heading “Tributes.”

[As usual, I recommend reading Part 1, Christopher Durang’s interview with Feiffer, before reading Jeffrey Sweet’s.  There’s a lot of information in the first conversation that crops up again below, and there’s also some commentary from me that I won’t repeat here.

[And a word or two about the editing—not mine, but The Dramatist’s: the editor(s) have made a fair number of insertions here for some reason, and they’re marked with brackets.  But, then, so are mine—and you may not be able to distinguish them.  Sorry about that, but I don’t know a way around that.] 

“THE NEXT PART OF THE PUZZLE:
JULES FEIFFER INTERVIEWED BY JEFFREY SWEET”
by Jules Feiffer and Jeffrey Sweet 

The following interview, conducted in 2014, is excerpted from Jeffrey Sweet’s What Playwrights Talk About When They Talk About Writing (Yale University Press [2017]).

FEIFFER: The only class I taught in playwriting was [at Yale]. [Robert] Brustein called me up and he said, “Jerzy Kosinski was supposed to teach a class in playwriting and Jerzy tells me he’s going blind and he can’t teach. We have to find a replacement. You and I have talked about you teaching. Will you take over the class?” And I started laughing about Jerzy Kosinski going blind; I didn’t believe a word of it. I can’t remember if it was known by that time that he hadn’t written his books, but I don’t think it was out yet. He was somebody I knew and been entertained by and I liked him enormously. But I almost never believed a word out of his mouth. And so I didn’t take his going blind seriously. But I thought, “My friends are always telling me I should teach, and so why not try.” 

[Brustein (1927-2023) was then the dean of the Yale School of Drama and the artistic director of Yale Repertory Theatre. In 1979, he left Yale after 13 years and established the American Repertory Theater (ART) at Harvard University. Feiffer taught a playwriting class at Yale in 1973-74, despite having no formal training. (He attended the Pratt Institute, an art and design college based in Brooklyn, and the Art Students League of New York in Manhattan.) He drew upon his own experience and improvisation to help his students.

[Kosinski (1933-91), a best-selling Polish-Jewish novelist who had survived the Holocaust, allegedly produced some of his books through a combination of plagiarism and ghost writers. There is no concrete evidence to confirm that, in conjunction with the health issues he faced near the end of his life, Kosinski was going blind before his death by suicide. (nb: These remarks were originally footnotes, which except for one recent post, I don’t use on Rick On Theater. I’ve amended the notes slightly. ~Rick)]

I asked for [plays by the students] in advance to see some of their work and figure out what to do. And one of them was this kid named [Christopher] Durang [1949-2024; see the interview in Part 1]. He sent me a play called Titanic. And I thought, “What the fuck do I teach him?” And there was also a kid named [Albert] Innaurato [1947-2017] and so on. Just an amazing group of young people. But Chris was the one I fell in love with, more than any other. And something I said in class about Titanic he put in a play collection. He quoted me: “A prepubescent temper tantrum.” 

[Durang’s Titanic should not be confused for the 1997 Broadway musical of the same title, with which it has no connection aside from the title and setting (i.e., the ill-fated ship). Durang’s play is a one-act described as an “outrageous tale of sex and seduction aboard the titular ship” in The Facts on File Companion to American Drama (Jackson R. Bryer and Mary C. Hartig, eds.; Infobase Publishing, 2010).

[Titanic was presented in a workshop at New York City’s American Place Theatre in 1973 and was then performed at the Yale Experimental Theatre at YSD (now the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University) in May 1974. It had its professional première at the Off-Off-Broadway Direct Theatre in New York City’s Theatre District in February 1976 and then transferred Off-Broadway to the Vandam Theater (in SoHo) from 10 to 16 May 1976.]

SWEET: When you came to the class, did you have any theories about how to teach playwriting? You didn’t go through formal training yourself. 

FEIFFER: Not ‘til this minute. 

SWEET: But obviously you figured out a course of study for yourself somewhere along the line? Or is that too formal a phrase for it?

FEIFFER: Yes. What course, what study? 

SWEET: The first time your work was put onstage was as a special project in 1961 in Chicago by Second City [improvisational comedy troupe initially founded in Chicago in 1959].

FEIFFER: What made Second City such a natural for me to fall in love with and work with was that I had always improvised on paper. My basic thought process to this moment is making it all up as I go along. After it’s made up, I then start organizing it and try to give it form if the form has not emerged. Often, the form will take care of itself. If you’ve got the right story to tell, the form invents itself as you’re doing it without thinking about the form. But I’ve always been an improviser, you know, without even thinking that that’s what I was doing. 

[Second City director] Paul Sills [1927-2008; director and teacher of improvisational techniques, applying the techniques of his mother, Viola Spolin (1906-94), author of the first book on improvisation techniques, Improvisation for the Theater (Northwestern University Press, 1963)] wanted to put on the cartoons, and that became the show called The Explainers [1960], which later became Feiffer’s People [1969]. The second act included longer pieces like “Passionella” [1957] and “George’s Moon” [1962]. I thought Paul was a wonderful director for Second City—traffic guiding these guys. But for cartoon characters that were written on paper, he had very little to add or seemed to want to add. Mike [Nichols] [1931-2014] came out to see it and said he wanted to bring it to New York, but he wanted to do another version of it. I happily handed the whole thing over to him to do whatever he wanted. Mike was directing for the first time. Lewis Allen [1905-2000] was the producer. He put up the money to try it out at the Hunterdon Hills Playhouse [Clinton, New Jersey, July 1962; summer stock revue] and to bring it to New York [according to Sondheim, it didn’t get there]. Mike got Steve Sondheim [1930-2021] to write some songs for “Passionella” that were going to be part of the show. Steve had not yet done A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum [first try-out, New Haven, Connecticut: March 1962]. He wrote a couple of songs that were just extraordinary. And Mike put together a company of actors; some of them were wonderful, some of them were so-so, but mostly they were good. Ronny Graham [1919-99] and Dorothy Loudon [1925-2003]. Dorothy Loudon was so brilliant in everything that she did. She was loud, she was noisy, she was funny. I loved her. 

I was getting an education. At Second City, I understood these cartoons don’t belong on stage because they’re cartoons and they have no life. In rehearsal, what we were now calling The World of Jules Feiffer, I thought this is great stuff, but I don’t belong on the same bill with Mike and Steve. They’re too good for this. Everything they’re doing seemed to be upgrading material that was not up to their own level. I didn’t feel that I belonged in that room. I felt embarrassed. I didn’t want my first play on Broadway to be carried by Nichols and Sondheim. If I was going to write for the theatre, I wanted to be a legitimate playwright, and not to become a hit because of the favors of my friends.

SWEET: But along the way you did learn.

FEIFFER: For me it all comes out of having something to say. Politics and my anger. And my determination to say something about America that wasn’t being said. All that starts with—not the need to be funny or to write a play—but a need to blow everything up. “Look, you fuckers, don’t you know what’s going on out here? Pay attention!” And figuring out a theatrical or fictional way of saying it and inventing characters to go along with it, who then would take off in their own directions. I knew that if I expressed my rage and anger as much as I felt, there’d be no audience. I had to learn sleight-of-hand. Pretend that this was pure entertainment, and make it very funny, but deliver this impassioned, anti-authoritarian, anti-military argument. [See Part 1 for some coverage of this topic.]

I first started thinking playwriting in terms of TV writing, because of Paddy Chayefsky [1923-81] and his kitchen sink dramas [e.g.: teleplays – Marty, 1953; The Bachelor Party, 1953]. Paddy was a friend.

SWEET: And he went through a kind of metamorphosis into a satiric vein himself after the kitchen sink stuff.

FEIFFER: And for all I know I might have been an influence on that. He was in a rage, but he was always in a rage about everything, and it showed. 

SWEET: You were talking about the starting point for your plays is some kind of rage that you have to transform into a form.

FEIFFER: By the time I was 50, the rage had somewhat dissipated, but it took all that time. [See discussion of Feiffer’s Grown Ups in Part 1 for some insight on this.]

SWEET: Was there a moment when you said, “Oh, I know how to do this”?

FEIFFER: At the end of the first day’s work on Little Murders, I knew I could do this. I had never known it before, but I did the first day’s work. I was having such a good time, and I knew I could make the characters do pretty much any goddamn thing I wanted to, and I didn’t suffer over it, and I had an easy time, a fun time, writing it. I thought, “I’m a playwright.” Now, the two or almost three years to write my novel, Harry, the Rat with Women, I never for a moment thought I was a novelist. The more I worked on it, the more I realized that I was just determined to get it done, but I was not a novelist. 

SWEET: Did that lead you to think about the differences between writing novels and plays? Why one was a good fit and the other wasn’t?

FEIFFER: This is odd for somebody who does what I had always done for a living. I’ve never been very observant. I don’t see things. I see people and expressions and how they move and how they sit, and I can draw any person in any pose that they get into from my imagination. I don’t need anybody posing for me. But I don’t know what this table looks like. I don’t know what this house I live in looks like. I don’t see inanimate objects. Until [I wrote my graphic novel], Kill My Mother [Liveright Publishing, 2014], I never drew a car in my life. I could not draw cars. The first airplane I’ve ever drawn is in that book, and I had to Google “airplanes.” All the backgrounds that are rich in that book were things I didn’t know how to draw. I just don’t see these things.

I love the naturalist writers. I love the evocative writers. [Leo] Tolstoy [Russian; 1828-1910] when he writes about nature. [John] Steinbeck [1902-68] writes about scorpions crawling across the railroad and the names of trees. The only way I can name a tree is to make up the name for it, because I don’t know what any of those trees are. I don’t know the name for anything in nature. A novelist has to have that, some minimum level of equipment, where he knows what’s around him. And I don’t. 

But what I do know is how people talk. What’s always interested me, and [what] remained one of the mainstays of my comic strip, was people speaking in code. How you say one thing when you mean another. That’s basically what my work has always been about. That helping to decipher the codes in which, from childhood on, we are taught exist, and yet when you expose the code everybody denies that there is one. 

SWEET: Someone talking about acting would call that subtext.

FEIFFER: Of course, there’s subtext when a good actor goes to work with a good director. The [Mike] Nichols production of Angels in America for TV [HBO miniseries, 2003]. Al Pacino [b. 1940], who plays Roy Cohn [1927-86; lawyer and prosecutor; chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-57; U.S. Senator from Wisconsin: 1947-57)], listening to this kid who is worried about his marriage. Pacino/Roy is very sympathetic and very close to him and trying to be very helpful and fatherly, and you can see him making the moves on him, just very subtly, nothing sexy, but a touch here and touch there. I sat there and I held my breath. I could not believe what he was doing, because it was so gorgeous, and it was so clear. That to me is subtext at its finest.

But [what I’m talking about is] beyond subtext. It’s telling us what really is true as opposed to what appears to be happening. Now sometimes that involves subtext, other times not. 

What I loved about playwriting was—up ’til then I had to figure out how to do all that stuff in six panels or eight panels. How far can you go [in that space]? You couldn’t expose [code] in a real relationship, with two people or three people talking. That requires a scene which a comic strip isn’t going to allow you (unless it’s a graphic novel which wasn’t being done at the time and I wouldn’t have been interested in at that time). But the chance to create for myself, theatrically, the equivalent of what I saw onstage in [Eugene] O'Neill [1888-1953] and in [Arthur] Miller [1915-2005] in Death of a Salesman [1949], the Biff-Willy [Willy Loman is the lead character in Salesman; Biff is his elder son, 34] confrontation scene—where] you slowly reveal—or a character comes to reveal—a truth. The difference between Miller and me that I’ve discovered over the years is that he thought, as in the Biff-Willy scene, that you arrive at the climax and you know what the truth is. And I decided years later that you never know what the truth is, and the characters never know what the truth is. Because if you do a confrontation scene, which is supposed to lead to a climax, which was act three in those years. But in life, act three is followed by act four, act five, act six. . . [.] That confrontation is followed by other confrontations. There is no such thing as discovering the truth. It’s all the facets, all the different angles.

SWEET: And participants have their own version of what happened, and they were both right.

FEIFFER: Someone may be more right than the other, or the playwright may favor one of the people, but you have to give everyone his argument. [Except, what] Arthur would do—there’s always the lawyer character or the architect—some middle class guy with a degree that Miller never got—and you know that’s the good guy. What I determined, from the beginning, was that there weren’t going to be good guys. Nobody was going to represent my point of view. My point of view would be in everybody. All the characters, together, if I do the job right. If there’s an argument to be made here, the argument comes in putting together all the contradictory things that everybody says, as opposed to one single character speaking the truth and a light bulb flashing.

SWEET: Your cartoon work consistently depicted the corruption of logic. Frequently you have somebody start off with a statement and then there’s a modification to the statement so that in the last panel they’re saying exactly the opposite of what the first statement was. This carried over into your play The White House Murder Case [Circle in the Square Theatre, 1970], which of course came out before Watergate [political scandal of the Nixon reelection campaign and administration. 1972-74].

FEIFFER: Yes.

SWEET: Which is essentially Watergate but that people in your play spoke better than [Richard M.] Nixon [1913-94; 37th President of the United States: 1969-74; resignation, 9 August 1974] and his gang did.

FEIFFER: Well, [in that play] I had a liberal president. Not Nixon, but a good guy who wanted to do what was best. His wife gets murdered, and by the end the “best thing” to do is cover up his wife’s murder in the White House because otherwise he would not get re-elected and those other guys who were a lot worse would be in charge of the country. So, your own wife is murdered and you end up participating in the cover-up. What mattered was policy. And what really mattered was their retention of power. Basically that’s all that counted. 

SWEET: I always wanted somebody to run that in rep with my favorite underestimated [William] Shakespeare [1564-1616], King John [believed to have been written around 1594-96; published, 1623], which predicts Richard Nixon.

FEIFFER: [A] Broadway producer called me up at the time of [the] Gore-Bush [election]. He wanted to put that play on just before the election. So we had a reading of the play. And he got a wonderful cast including Alan Alda [b. 1936] and Tony Roberts [1939-2025] and invited an audience that was made up of potential backers. It played like gangbusters. It was incredible. Alan was wonderful, everybody was wonderful. And we all went out afterwards to celebrate and drink. And then it became clear that the backers didn’t want anything to do with it. No reason was given, but clearly it scared the shit out of them. This was some 25 years after the play’s premiere, and it was still too hot. There was a message in there that was still too hot for Broadway.

[Gore-Bush (2000 U.S. presidential election): Incumbent Vice President Al Gore (b. 1948; 45th Vice President of the United States: 1993-2001) was the Democratic nominee running against George W. Bush (b. 1946; Governor of Texas: 1995-2000) as the Republican nominee. Their running mates for Vice President were, respectively, Joe Lieberman (1942-2024; Senator from Connecticut: 1989-2013) and Dick Cheney (b. 1941; Secretary of Defense: 1989-93). Considered one of the closest presidential elections in U.S. history, with long-standing controversy about the result.

[On election night, 7 November 2000, Florida’s electoral tally showed that Bush had won by such a close margin that state law required a recount, so it wasn’t clear who’d won the presidency. After a series of legal battles, a highly controversial 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore ended the recount with Bush winning Florida. This resulted in a major post-election controversy which was only concluded when, in a televised address on 13 December, Gore publicly conceded the election to Bush following the SCOTUS decision.

[Gore emphasized that while he disagreed with the Court’s decision, he accepted the finality of the outcome and urged his supporters to unite behind the next president. While the election conclusion led to some questioning Bush’s legitimacy, Gore’s concession helped to solidify the outcome and promote a peaceful transition of power. Bush and Cheney went on to be reelected narrowly—though less so than in 2000—in 2004 for a second term.]

SWEET: I imagine that you know that there are certain plays that are related to certain periods in your time, and certain experiences, and certain plays that you wrote earlier that if you wrote them now, you would write them differently because you’re a different writer.

FEIFFER: I’m a different human. There was a celebration of Mike [Nichols] at MOMA [Mike Nichols, Museum of Modern Art in New York City, 14 April-1 May 2009], and after they screened Carnal Knowledge [1971], I said to him, “I wouldn’t know how to write that anymore.” And he said, “I wouldn’t know how to direct it.”

SWEET: You seem to be one of the few people who is able to start from theme and make a persuasive play. I find usually when people start from theme, some life goes out of the play.

FEIFFER: I’ve always thought that, too. I thought White House would be my last theme play. I loved writing White House and Little Murders, but I thought, “I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to start with the characters and have the characters tell me what the play is about. And not really be all that sure where I’m going until the characters lead me there.” So pretty much, that’s what I’ve done since.

It was perhaps beginning with Carnal Knowledge that I was thinking [for] the first time of not leaving any fingerprints. I didn’t want to sound like playwriting or dialogue. And I remember years later I stopped in to see the movie, after not seeing it for years. Watching one of the college campus scenes, I sat there thinking, “They’re making this up, I didn’t write this.” And it thrilled me, because there’s not a thing they said that I hadn’t written. But it sounded improvised to me. And I loved that, I loved that. I love it coming out of the characters and not out of the writer.

I swore after Elliott Loves [sic: see note below] that I would never do another play. I said to Mike during rehearsals of Elliott, “This is the best I have in me. if this doesn’t work, I’m out of the business.” (And he said, “Me, too.” And I knew he was lying.) But if all this work that I did out of pure love was going to continue to be critically rejected, I was no longer making money that could allow me to be a playwright by avocation. With young children in my life, I needed to find ways of making money. At one point I could get a movie a year, to write a screenplay which they never made, and that would give me a couple of hundred thousand dollars and that would be fine. But that stopped happening when they caught on to me. For two or three months, I’d write something that I actually liked but I knew they wouldn’t make it and they never did. 

[The Dramatist’s spelling of the title of this play is incorrect: it’s Elliot Loves (with one t). The press of the time used both spellings; in at least one instance, in the same article. (I read one article in which it was spelled “Elliott” in the headline and immediately below, it was spelled “Elliot” in the column’s first sentence.) The clincher, however, is the show’s poster, which clearly says it’s Elliot Loves. (nb: I have not corrected the error in the transcription here.)

[The première was at the Goodman Theatre Studio, Chicago, on 23 April-13 May 1990. It débuted in New York at the Promenade Theatre on the Upper West Side on 7 June-15 July 1990.  Mike Nichols directed both productions.]

SWEET: You must have had a strong sense of the difference between writing for film and writing for stage. 

FEIFFER: Yes. Writing for stage is for yourself and writing for film is for money. Only with Nichols did it really work [for me in film]. Because he and I were working so closely together, and I knew that he was totally on my side.

SWEET: And he also had the power to exercise on behalf of the script.

FEIFFER: I knew also that when he found something wrong with something, it wasn’t because it was Hollywood bullshit. Even when I disagreed with him, I had to seriously consider what he was saying. Playwriting was always fun. Screenwriting became fun as a secondary enterprise. But, other than Carnal Knowledge, I never took it that seriously. It was mainly for the payday. Then I would try to get involved and I would try to do work that I thought would make a good movie. But I understood that I wouldn’t be doing this at all if I wasn’t getting a lot of money for it to pay the rent.

SWEET: One of the things that I’ve been bringing up is the contrast between American and British playwrights. In England they are often allowed to tell big stories. We in America are not allowed to tell big stories anymore. John Guare [b. 1938] had that one huge play at Lincoln Center, Free Man of Color [Vivian Beaumont Theater, 18 November 2010-9 January 2011; cast of 26]. And the other exception is Robert Schenkkan [b. 1953] and All the Way [Neil Simon Theatre (on Broadway), 6 March-29 June 2014; cast of 20]. It surprised everybody by actually breaking even and making a couple of bucks. But American playwrights think we can’t do more than ten people or we’ll never get it on.

FEIFFER: Ten people is a mob! Jesus Christ! Four or five at the tops.

SWEET: One of the reasons nobody revives Sidney Kingsley [1906-95] is today you can’t afford to have 35 people on stage. You can’t hire an actor to come on and do five lines.

FEIFFER: I liked Kingsley. I liked Detective Story [Hudson Theatre and Broadhurst Theatre, 23 March 1949-12 August 1950; cast of 34].

SWEET: Detective Story is a hell of a play. It may be old fashioned but once you give in to it . . . it takes you to the end.

FEIFFER: Those old guys were terrific. When I first came on the Dramatists Guild Council, these guys were on the Council with me. Marc Connelly [1890-1980], was a sweetheart. He was deafer than I am now, and he was the warmest and most ingratiating. As deaf as he was, I’d see him at off-Broadway plays in the front row thinking he could hear. There I was, a little Jewish cartoonist pretending to be a playwright and I was on the Council with Connelly and Kingsley and Paddy Chayefsky. How’d that ever happen? I could not believe it. I could not believe I was in the company of these extraordinary people.

SWEET: Back to teaching at Yale . . . [.] When you were working with young Chris Durang, aside from encouraging him and telling him he wasn’t deluded and that he was doing something valuable . . .

FEIFFER: I didn’t know how to teach at all. I didn’t go to college. But I had them bring in their plays, I cast the plays among the students, we read the plays, and we sat around and talked about what worked and what didn’t work and what could have been strengthened, where the story went. [I would read the plays we were going to talk about] on the train up to New Haven. To figure out how I was going to be smart about them and what I would have to say. And also, I’d have an essay point or two in my mind to make in relation to the play and theatre in general. While we had these plays to talk about, that went very well. There was some good stuff being done. 

[The practice Feiffer describes above for his ’70s Yale playwriting class sounds very much like the way George Pierce Baker (1866-1935) worked in his famous 47 Workshop at Harvard in the 1900s.  See my friend Kirk Woodward’s discussion of this program, the first such course in a U.S. university, in “Shakespeare's Development as a Dramatist (Part 1)” (27 February 2025) and “Part 2” (2 March 2025).]

And then we ran out of plays. And [then] there was a lot of complaining going on about the School and the way they were being treated. And there was a lot to complain about. To get a play on, you had to find a director in the director program to do the play. Or you would not get a play on. And I thought that was outrageous. I thought that was inexcusable.

SWEET: So the directors were deciding what did and didn’t get on.

FEIFFER: I heard enough of this and finally I went to Howard Stein [1922-2012; supervisor of the Playwriting Program at Yale; playwright, essayist, and editor], who was running things while Brustein was in London, and I said to him, “This is bullshit. These guys are here to see their work done and the only way they can learn is to see their work on stage.” And he said, “No, they are going to have to work in the professional theatre and this is a way of teaching them about the real world . . . [.]” Howard, who never had a job outside of the academy in his life, was telling me, who had never worked in the academy, what the real world was like, and he had not a clue. I lost all respect for the whole operation. 

SWEET: So you did it one year?

FEIFFER: One semester. 

And in addition, because I was too busy being their friend, I couldn’t get these guys to write assignments.

They would bring in nothing. Because I was too busy being their buddy, I didn’t have the wherewithal to lay down the law and say: either get this in by next week or you guys are flunking. The next time I taught, which was at Northwestern [University; Evanston, Illinois], I thought, “How do I do this differently?” And the first thing was: don’t be their friend. I’m their teacher, not their friend. That means I can be a nice guy and I can be helpful when I can, but I can’t be good old Jules. Because they will take advantage of it just as your children take advantage. That was an important lesson to learn. Be as helpful as you know how to be, be as friendly as you know how to be, but make it clear: this is what you do, and if you don’t do it, you have no business being in this class.

SWEET: What was the official title of the Northwestern class?

FEIFFER: It was a humor writing class, which involved them writing a one-act play, just as I do now at Stony Brook Southampton [a campus of Stony Brook University in Southampton, Long Island, New York; part of the State University of New York (SUNY)]. At the end of the semester, I have them write a one act play, but up until then I have humor pieces, which are based on whatever idea I come up with. I want them to get outside the voice they normally wrote in. [A voice] is a good thing to have, but it also becomes a trap because you think it’s the only way you know how to write or can write. You become secure in that, and therefore, instead of it being an advantage, it can easily become a disadvantage because it leaves you terrified of doing anything else. 

So, the first thing I have them do, because it’s humor writing and humor is often about victimization . . . [.] Somebody has done something you take great umbrage at—not anything major—but you are very pissed off about it. Write about that, either in the first or third person, but write about that. And then we read it in class and talk about it. And I say, “For the next assignment, you’re the other person. And you write from the point of view of the person who did something to you.” It turns them topsyturvy and they have to have another argument and another voice, and they have to start thinking in a different way.

SWEET: Can you talk about specific responses that interested you?

FEIFFER: The students I used to have in the first six or seven years of the class [in Southampton] were often the beaten-up dregs of society who had gone into self-exile in Southampton. They were broken by drugs or marriage or divorce, some had been in jail, and they all had stories. And they all had a level of motivation and determination about them. But they all had stories. And I helped them tell their stories and put perspective on their stories by giving them humor. I really felt as if I was making a contribution. I really felt as I never felt doing a comic strip. Readers [would say] “how much you’ve helped me” and I never believed any of it. But I could see the results here. I could see the difference in how somebody wrote in a month or so, and it had to do with what I was doing. I thought, “For one of the few times in my life, I’m doing some good here.” And I loved it. 

But after a while the students became more the middle class: nice twenty-year-olds from middle class homes who had gone to NYU [New York University] or the New School [university in New York’s Greenwich Village; formerly the New School for Social Research] or Columbia [University[ or Hunter [College; part of the City University of New York (CUNY)], hadn’t had that much happen to them, and who didn’t have stories, and weren’t that interesting. And I couldn’t alter that much, and I ended up not caring that much about them. So that’s why I stopped after this year doing that class and starting a graphic novel class. We’ll see how that goes.

[Feiffer doesn’t say when this change occurred, but he seems to have started at Southampton in 1997, when the school was part of Long Island University.  In 2006, a year after LIU had closed the campus, it was purchased by the State University of New York, which served a different segment of the population, both national and statewide.  (LIU’s student body comes largely from the New York metropolitan area, including New York City and Long Island. One of its two main campuses, the original college, is in Brooklyn, which is at the western end of Long Island; the other is in Brookville, Long Island, in Nassau County.)  I wonder if this was partly responsible for the shift in student type Feiffer was seeing in his classes.]

Being a writer comes out of need. I need to write. I need to write because I need to put things down because I need, even if I don’t understand what it is, to say whatever it is that’s making me do this. Or I need to paint, or [make other] art. I need to get this out of me. I’m not even sure what it is I’ve got to get out. In those early students, I found that need. In the later ones, it’s more an exercise in a writing class would be run [sic; ‘fun’?], let’s see what it’s like.

I had one 55-year-old Irish woman from Queens in the class who was the oldest one there, who had a checkered family background. She was writing everything from what she knew. She could be very funny and very crazy and overwrought, and she was a pain in the ass. She’d get mad at me and she and I would get into fights in front of the class. But she was a real writer and she had things that she had to get out. And I loved her. She was wonderful.

[The New York City borough of Queens (also a county with the same name) is on Long Island between Brooklyn (Kings County) and Nassau County. Both Southampton and Stony Brook are in Suffolk County, the easternmost division of Long Island.]

Look, anybody with a brain knows, “There’s so much that I don’t know, that I have to figure out.” If you’re an artist, you’re obsessed with finding a way through, not to the answer—although you may fool yourself into thinking that there is one—but to something that completes the puzzle a little bit. At least enough to stop haunting you for a couple of minutes before you go on to the next part of the puzzle. And that’s what artists do. That’s what painters do. That’s what composers do. That’s what writers do. And if there’s not that need to do that, I don’t know why you’re doing it. 

[Jules Feiffer (1929-2025) was a cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, and once the most widely-read satirist in the country.  The author of over 35 books, plays, and screenplays, Feiffer established his career in the 1950s as a staff cartoonist for The Village Voice.  His wit and diversity of talent earned him an Academy Award for his animated short film Munro (1961), the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, a place in the Comic Book Hall of Fame, and the Dramatists Guild’s own Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023.  He joined the Dramatists Guild in 1966 and was elected to the Guild’s Council in 1970.

[Jeffrey Sweet was a resident writer at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater, where they produced more than a dozen of his plays, winning Chicago’s Jeff Award, two Harold and Mimi Steinberg/ATCA New Play Awards (American Theatre Critics Association), and the Audelco Award.  Jeff directed his play The Value of Names in London (Hint of Lime Productions in association with ANDTheatre Company, White Bear Theatre, 11 February-1 March 2025), and his play A Change of Position débuted at New Jersey Rep (New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch, New Jersey; 11 December 2023). His book The Dramatist’s Toolkit (Heinemann, 1993) is in use as a text in a number of playwriting programs.]