AMERICAN THEATRE | A Safe Room for Bold Plays

At Second Stage’s Judith Champion Reading Series in March, music stands took over the set of The Apiary and transformed it into the Garden of Eden, Gettysburg, and a pop star’s world tour. The reading series is a component of Second Stage’s first Next Stage Festival, a new-works festival that highlighted three new plays, a new musical, and a world premiere production. The reading series is designed to offer early-career playwrights a workshop and public reading of a new play in the theatre’s iconic orange Off-Broadway house (which they’re leaving at the end of 2024, alas).

While there was no curatorial theme for this year’s festival, featured playwrights D.A. Mindell, Sarah Mantell, and Kaela Mei-Shing Garvin all seemed to be grappling with creation in one form or another—the generation of life, the re-creation of war, and the writing of music—and all their plays forefronted unapologetic queerness in both form and content.

Mindell’s On the Evolutionary Function of Shame follows Adam 1 and Eve 1 as they experience the consequences of eating fruit from the tree of knowledge, all while Adam 2 and Eve 2 (identical twins in modern-day Georgia) navigate Adam’s pregnancy and prenatal care as a trans man. While taking responsibility for Adam 2’s prenatal care, Eve 2 discovers the gene related to gender dysmorphia, causing Adam to reassess his relationship to his loved ones, to himself, and his hopes for his child.

In Mantell’s The Good Guys, a band of misfits go on a quest to reenact the Battle of Gettysburg with unprecedented historical accuracy, combined with what some of the reenactors would call “historically inaccurate” queer romance. An investigation into the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and history, the play probes how far people are willing to go to consider themselves the “good guy,” and how to remember and perhaps grieve the bad guys in our lives. 

Garvin’s Tiger Beat begins with a song performed in a mall by a (fictional) rising pop girl group, Girl Next Door, and follows the journey of songwriter Tess as she navigates tokenization and fetishization in the music industry as an Asian American teenager. When the group is invited to open for the pop prince of the day, JP, Tess and her bandmates go on a journey of self-discovery. Meanwhile, an onstage playwright tries to make sense of a mountain of notes from the theatre industry’s gatekeepers.

Each Monday for three weeks straight, audiences laughed and gasped at these stories, told from music stands with robust direction from Jess McLeod, Mei Ann Teo, and Annie Tippe, respectively, with casts assembled by the Telsey Office.

At the conclusion of the reading series, the playwrights reunited over Zoom to discuss what they’d learned from the readings and their hopes for the American theatre. Our group spent the beginning portion of the meeting enjoying the fact that every box on our Zoom was filled with a queer, trans/non-binary theatremaker. Throughout our call were moments of laughter, cross-talk, and productive tangents that reflected on the difficulties of forging a playwriting career in the face of discriminatory legislation, pandemics, and capitalism. At one point, playwright D.A. Mindell moved his laptop to the kitchen to “do things related to a discounted corn beef,” and proceeded to peel carrots with a cheese slicer because he does not currently own a veggie peeler.

The following are excerpts from our conversation.

ESMÉ MARIA NG: As a viewer, it was so wonderful to see pieces that showcased queerness in places we don’t get to see it. Was exploring that one of your goals while writing?

SARAH MANTELL: Yeah, 100 percent. At the time I wrote this play, I had just written a play called Everything That Never Happened, where I got really mad at Shakespeare about The Merchant of Venice, and so I fixed it. In the process of writing that play I was like: “Oh, I have internalized antisemitism, and I also definitely have internalized gender stuff and race stuff. There’s probably also internalized homophobia—maybe I should look at that.” So I just started reading only gay shit for about a year, and slid myself across the spectrum. And I started trying to create a play that grappled with race and gender and queerness, as many things as I could pull together, instead of trying to tackle one thing at a time. I was trying to Tetris them together, in a way similar to how the shape of white supremacy hurts people. The more I wrote it, the gayer it got. We have really parallel journeys, me and this play. But I absolutely wanted some very hot queer romance. I was very happy that my actors landed that part.

KAELA MEI-SHING GARVIN: I’m obsessed with that. Similarly,  I think the longer my play has been in existence, the queerer it gets. There’s an essay that Suzan-Lori Parks wrote, I think it was Elements of Style, where she talks about how recreating things is enacting them, and putting things on stage is making them real. When I was writing this play in my last years of grad school, I was really seriously considering those ideas—how putting something onstage does make it concrete in some way. Given that I was writing about the period 2003, I was doing a lot of research about the racism and misogyny and homophobia, all of the isms that were going on at the time. I was trying to write to that, and I just kept thinking, I don’t wanna see that; I don’t wanna see things the way they actually were. I don’t really wanna sit through, or make my actors go through, the types of prejudices that were allowed to be rampant 20 years ago—which are also still obviously rampant today. Essentially I was involved in the act of reimagining the past in the present and putting it onstage. That’s an act of trying to queer these events that have happened in real life, and the events that exist in the imagination. All this is to say that Tiger Beat has also gotten gayer and gayer since inception, and I hope it continues to move in that direction.

D.A. MINDELL: I think that I was working from, not necessarily the opposite direction, but there wasn’t so much intention for me to be like, “I’m going to write a queer story,” as it was, “Well, this is the story that I’m writing.” The queerness is just so fundamental to the conceit of the play. I think that that ends up happening for a lot of things in my work. One day I brought in this silly piece about a divorce court where they’re creating a split custody agreement over the human being they keep locked in their basement and harvest flesh from to eat; it’s called Di-Vore Court . I was talking about it with my classmates and asking, “Is this a trans play? Is this a trans metaphor? Or am I reading too much into it and being ridiculous?” I have a phenomenal classmate named Mo Holmes, and Mo just goes, “It’s a trans play because you’re writing it.” That’s been true of a lot of my work, that no matter whether I’m explicitly putting queer or trans themes into the text—which I am often, because that’s the experience I write from and have the most to say about—regardless, it’s going to have some relationship to that community because I’m a trans writer and I’m writing plays.

What was the most surprising thing about this workshop and reading process for you?

KAELA: I think I felt a little more done with the play than I actually was. I felt like I was further along in development, but there were moments where I thought, I can do better, the play can do better—it can be more itself. I think that was the biggest surprise, just finding that there’s always work to be done, and always ways in which the play can be deepened and internal connections can be stronger, jokes can be sharpened. Some jokes, if you wrote them two years ago, they just don’t hit anymore.

D.A.: I think about the way that my work is going to be received a lot. I second guess myself a lot. I am a young person going into a creative profession; I am second guessing everything all the time. I was very pleasantly surprised by putting my play in front of such a diverse audience. I had previously put this play in front of my friends, in front of my classmates, but I had never really put it out into the world. Our phenomenal casting director, Charlie Hano, said to me at one point on the train home, “You’ve accomplished something really interesting in that the old cis white people in the audience really loved it and enjoyed it, and so did the young queer people, and not in a way that compromised the play.” 

SARAH: I’m still trying to figure out what my answer to that is. I’m gonna also shout out to Charlie Hano, and also my director Mei Ann Teo, who were just casting geniuses. There were pieces of the play I wasn’t sure were gonna work, but the second we got that excellent casting, it worked so instantly. It was kind of amazing to see the play work on the level I wanted it to, and then immediately get to start deepening into the roles. I feel like everybody came into focus for me, each of the characters, in a way that I’ve been waiting for them to for years. Until you get to road test it or play in that way, you’re just relying on faith that you’ve gotten it close enough. It’s really my favorite part of workshopping a new play: the moment when you sort of give it away and it belongs to the people on the stage, and you get to just experience it. And I was surprised by what I experienced! Which I wouldn’t have thought would be possible after so many years.

My understanding is that this reading series is specifically for emerging playwrights. How would you define “emerging” playwright, and how do you define this moment in your lives and careers? 

SARAH: Oh, please.

KAELA: [sarcastic] It means young, obviously.

SARAH: I’m young-passing.

D.A.: I have a delightful friend, Lee Mallilo, who’s one of the lead producers of Personal Pizza Party, this incubator for early-career playwrights, and I asked them, do I still qualify for that? And they told me, “I don’t think I can justify letting you be a part of this. You just had a reading at Second Stage, I don’t think you count anymore.” I don’t necessarily know that I’m becoming mid-career, but I think this marks my transition to early mid-career. I like to think of it as a movie, like how Act Two is supposed to be the biggest act of the movie. Early career is Act One—you’re setting up everything that you need, you’re giving all the circumstances, you’re putting everything together, and then you can progress and do the thing.

SARAH: I’m not sure that we, as a field, have figured out the term “emerging” or “early career.” If you count me by productions, I am absolutely early-career. My second and third professional productions got canceled by the pandemic, so I’ve had one professional production, in a 99-seat theatre outside of New York. If you count me by the fact that I won the Blackburn Prize last year, then I am not an emerging writer. I think I will officially hit “not emerging” as I do have productions coming up this year—I think that’s where I officially leave. But I have felt like I’ve been both. Melissa Crespo put me on a panel with Paula Vogel about the future of new plays and I was like, “Do I have a future in new plays? Somebody tell me! What am I supposed to say?” I feel like I’ve been very much playing both sides of that coin for a little while.

KAELA: I definitely feel like I’ve been under the label “early career” or “emerging” for the last 10 years. I self-produced in New York for about five years before I went to grad school; I have had a couple of professional productions and I have had commissions, and I’ve had work done at universities here and in other countries, and I still feel like I’m very much under the label of early-career/emerging because I haven’t had a production here in New York. My two productions were at regional theatres outside New York—and they were amazing, by the way, some of my favorite places to work in the world. I do feel that the industry is obsessed with New York and obsessed with all theatre being here, and thinks that it’s the only good theatre in the country. It’s absolutely not. I think it’s a racket. It’s silly. If it were up to me, would I describe myself as early-career or emerging? They’re words that would not occur to me to be a part of my identity. So I do feel like we’re put upon to self-describe that way, and we’re described that way, both by and to institutions. I think it’s a little odd that we have to truncate our careers and our lives into these segments when it’s all about whose perspective you are looking from.

In your utopia, what does the American theatre do to support emerging playwrights such as yourselves? 

D.A.: Oh my God. I rant about this all the time. Columbia University invites a bunch of people to come in and talk to us. And it’s great—we get a bunch of amazing learning opportunities from all of these mid- or late-career professionals. But with all of them, we ask, “How did you get started?” and they essentially say that they had this development opportunity that doesn’t exist anymore. And we, the students, are all sitting there like, “What the fuck are we supposed to do? How are any of us supposed to have a career if the things that incubate new plays don’t exist anymore?” It’s like when you ask your parents how they bought their house, and they say, “I bought it for $20,000 in 1973 when I was working as a public school teacher.” And I’m like, “Great! I’m never going to own a home, I guess.” The best ways to support emerging playwrights are to bring back the things that support emerging playwrights. Which is not to say that there should be no new development opportunities—but we had a system where people could go through these development opportunities. We can modernize our perspective on these opportunities, and create more opportunities, but, why are we shutting down the things we know work? Why take these opportunities off the table when you know that they produce incredible playwrights? It’s really frustrating to be a young person in the world watching everybody have these fabulous careers that were in part incubated by opportunities that don’t exist anymore. And then having the theatre world tell us, “You can do that, the infrastructure just doesn’t exist anymore.” Bring back The Lark. Bring back everything. Please. Come on, man.

SARAH: I’ll speak to one particular piece of it, but first I want to shout out Breaking the Binary, where I had my first experience of really being asked what I needed in order to realize the play. I was really amazed when George Strus (BTB founding artistic director) came to me and had already budgeted for two collaborators beyond actors, director, and stage manager. It was only the second time I’ve had a company understand why I needed a fight choreographer in the early stages of a process. That play takes place entirely in fight calls—you need a fight choreographer! I think opportunities where the artists are asked what will make it possible for us to create the thing we’re trying to create are absolutely invaluable. Too often we are plugged into a slot that says, “This is how you’re going to develop the work.” And if we’re breaking bounds in terms of the kind of work we’re putting forward, then we need new kinds of collaborators and new kinds of structures in order to do that. I think that the opportunities where that flexibility is built into the structure are everything. 

KAELA: I think those are always really helpful, when the writer has some kind of say in the structure of the development process or the needs of the play, instead of working within a one-size-fits-all development opportunity. I was just talking about how when I went through my process I thought, “Oh, surprise! There’s more work to be done.” But I also feel that there’s a world in which plays can be overdeveloped, go through too many processes, and then you get stuck on them. I think there’s a world in which, we, the theatre industry, can say yes to more things. It doesn’t have to be perfect. I always think about how King Lear is upheld as one of the greatest plays ever, and it’s a play where characters just disappear in the middle, and some of it just straight up doesn’t make sense, but it’s still one of our great works. So I do think that there can be some loose ends. Not every bow has to be tied in order for something to be producible. I think that we should continue to have way more development opportunities, but I also think there’s room for more things to move to production without spending 10 years in the machine of development. That said, I also love discovering new things about my plays, and I never think that a development process that I’ve had has been detrimental to a play.

What are you hoping happens next for these plays? 

D.A.: My biggest dream for this, and a lot of my plays, is—while maintaining the safety of the cast and crew—for it to happen in the most trans-hostile environments I can have this play in. I want this play in Florida. I want this play in the U.K. I want this play in places where it is extremely difficult to be trans right now. I just had another trans play of mine developed at Florida Atlantic University, and we were able to have a young trans actor who told me that he had been very dejected about the state of opportunities for trans actors, and the state of theatre for trans actors, and the play was a cool, new, refreshing thing that kind of gave him hope for his career. And I think part of that is because of the place that it was in—because in the place where he’s doing his work, it’s really difficult to be a trans person. So I want my work in the places that don’t want it. I’m under no illusions that I am changing the world, but maybe I can change people’s minds, and that is fabulous—as long as my cast and crew are safe and able to legally use the bathroom.

SARAH: I’d like to see some beautiful productions. I know that this play and my other plays all sing when the power structure of the room is the opposite of the problematic things I’m trying to describe. So that’s always the thing I’m navigating: How do I talk about what goes wrong, and then create a space where it doesn’t? I want beautiful, brilliant, hilarious, trauma-informed collaborators to bring this to life.

KAELA: I love what you’re saying, Sarah, about the environment of the room. I think that’s so important. I would love to continue to work on this play in the ways that continue to feel good. 

SARAH: I’m ambitious for big opportunities. But more than that, I’m ambitious for opportunities that everybody walks out of feeling on fire, with a sense of joy and community. That’s what’s really important to me. And I think you can feel it on the stage when we get it right. That’s the thing I’m most ambitious for.

Esmé Maria Ng is a writer/dramaturg/arts worker who loves heartbreak, new plays, and laughing through the pain. They have worked with Manhattan Theatre Club, Ma-Yi Theater Company, Breaking the Binary Theatre, Classic Stage Company, and Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. Esmé’s plays have earned honors as a 2023 Lambda Literary Playwriting Fellow and a two-time Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference semi-finalist. Esmé is currently a Tank Producing Cohort Fellow, a 2024 CIPA Fellow, and a freelance producer/dramaturg in New York City. esmemariang.com

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