Playwright Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu Is Done Suffering for Her Art
S1: This ad free podcast is part of your Slate plus membership. Heedlessness, I just wanted to give you a heads up that there’s a little more swearing than usual in this week’s episode, but this is working, so it’s really creative swearing. OK, and with the show.
S2: You novelist with your with your with your Gadzhiev, you just tell us what people are thinking. Theater is so stupid. Not only do I just have dialogue, I then have to give that dialogue to a different human right. Jesus Christ. It’s an art form built on trust. It’s terrible.
S1: Welcome back to Working, I’m your host, June Thomas,
S3: and I am your other host, Isaac Butler
S1: Isaac, whose refreshingly frank and undeniably satirical opinion did we here at the top of the show
S3: put a good way of describing it? That was the voice of the very talented and incredibly funny and incredibly smart playwright Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu. Her play, Passover, is about to open on Broadway. It’s in part a reworking of Waiting for Godot that tells the story of two young black men who are trying to get off their street corner and the various problems, both realistic and not that they face as they do so well.
S1: I confess that I have become aware of Antoinette work only recently because Passover is going to be the first play to open on Broadway since everything was interrupted by the pandemic. And I’ve already heard your conversation with her. It was fascinating, but I’m glad to have a chance to ask you about some of the things and the people that you got into. So are you ready to decode some theatre talk for us?
S3: Yes, yes. You have to imagine you’ve sent away the requisite number of box tops. And I am your decoder ring. I have arrived.
S1: Excuse me. All right. I’ve never seen one, so I can’t further the analogy. But OK, first, Antoinette is going to mention some names. Who are those people and what do we need to know about them?
S3: OK, so I assume you’re talking about Duniya Taymor and John Michael Hill here. So Donna Taymor is the director of Passover. She’s been with the show for a very long time and seen it through many different incarnations. And John Michael Hill is an actor who has played one of the two leading roles in most of those versions. They’re both a very talented artist. This is Daniel Taymor as Broadway debut. John Michael Hill is familiar to some Broadway audiences who would have seen him a few years back in Tracy. Let’s play Superior Donuts. He’s also like a big deal in Chicago. And my hope is that this show will help make his reputation even more in New York because he’s really wonderful to watch.
S1: So you also get into the different versions of the play that’s currently in previews on Broadway. And whereas, like a writer of novels might get feedback by emailing a document to some friends playwrights, the only way they can really get a full response to their work is to mount a production. So different versions means different productions. What do listeners need to know about perceivers, production, history, Jewboy?
S3: Yeah, you you have really hit a problem nail right on the head there, which is that, you know, theater requires an audience. And so if you want to test out some material, you actually have to do it. And so like many new plays, Passover has had many different readings, workshops, productions, et cetera, over the years. As you’ll hear in the interview, it started as a 10 minute play is now full length work. So but the three big productions and the ones were kind of circling around and talking about in this conversation are a version of the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, a subsequent production off Broadway at three, which is the new play theater that’s run by Lincoln Center and this new one on Broadway. And the play evolved over the course of those three productions. So the play has four characters. There’s the two young black men named Moses and Kitsch, who are the main characters in the show, and most of the is about them. But their space is intruded upon by two white characters, one named Mister and one named ASIFA. In the Chicago production, Mr. and AC4 were played by two different actors. One actor played each role. Since then, they’ve actually been combined into one part. So it’s one actor who doubles and plays both characters. It sort of draws more thematic resonances between them. There’s been a new ending put into the play for Broadway. There’s been tons of little tweaks throughout, so we’re not talking about minor differences. It’s actually a pretty big changes.
S1: Wow. And there’s mention of a Spike Lee movie. Where does that fit in?
S3: Yes, Spike Lee captured the Steppenwolf production for Amazon Prime. You could actually go stream it right now. It’s quite good. It’s a quite good film. And Spike Lee actually works very hard to make it feel cinematic. So, for example, there’s a Foley editor who worked on it, who put in sound effects so you can hear all the footsteps and stuff, which you normally can’t in a play. So really sounds and feels cinematic.
S1: Interesting. So I can’t wait to hear this great conversation with Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu. But before we do, I also want to mention that Slate plus members will hear a little something extra from your conversation. What will they hear?
S3: Yes, it’s actually one of my favorite parts of our interview. So we talk about how to take care of yourself so that you can make your creative work. And Antoinette and I have a I would say more personal than I usually get on. Show conversation about how therapy has affected both of our work as writers.
S1: Wow, that sounds really interesting and important. Fortunately, it’s very easy to subscribe to Slate. Plus, you can get exclusive members only content, zero ads on any Slate podcast, full access to articles on Slate dotcom without hitting a paywall bonus episodes of shows like Slow Burn and big mouthed Little Mood with Daniel and Laborie. And you’ll be supporting the work we do here on working. It’s only one dollar for the first month to sign up. Go to sleep. Dotcom slash working plus. OK, let’s hear ISIS conversation with Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu.
S3: Thank you so much for joining us today on working.
S2: Thank you for having me.
S3: I know that we’re actually quite lucky to get this recording session even scheduled because you are extremely busy preparing your play. Passover, which is currently in previews and will open on Broadway in September. For our listeners who might not know the show, what is Passover?
S2: Passover is a 90 minute play about two young black men set in the modern day. Who are spiritually and emotionally descendants of Beckett, Tramp’s and Gogo, and also they are descendants of enslaved black Americans from the antebellum South. And if we go even further back, they are descendants of the children of Israel from the biblical exodus story. And so they have all of that DNA very present in their lives. And the play is the story of their friendship and the story of their love, relationship and bond and growth that helps them overcome two sides of patriarchal, hetero normative white oppression.
S3: And do you remember the kind of origin story of the play? Was there a moment we were like, I’m going to do this and the play is going to be this? Or did it grow out of something else? Like like where did the play begin for you?
S2: Yeah, I mean, I feel like with a play this monumental in my career, it’s not one origin story, but like a breadcrumb of origin stories. Like I went back and read every major draft of the plan for the first time since writing them.
S3: Oh, wow, wow. I really was the earliest one.
S2: Twenty, fourteen.
S3: Oh amazing. Amazing.
S2: It was a ten minute twenty fourteen.
S3: And how did you know or what led you to think like oh this ten minute play. There’s something here that needs more time. It needs to be a longer bigger thing.
S2: That’s not my process. I never think about the object itself. It was that I knew I needed to write about what I was feeling surrounding Trayvon Martin’s death. And my relationship with my work is that I think of them like big pots. And I’ve got a lot of big pots in the store room of my mind, and I go into the world and I’m and I gather the ingredients that I need to put into all my pots. And so at that point, it was like, I know I need to write about this, but I’m also feeling kind of lazy because I know I have a lot of pots out because I just been to grad school. So it’s like, let me go back and what I already have. And see if there’s something I can jump start and put these feelings into. Let’s start with that circumstance and start writing monologues into these people.
S3: So that was sort of the one of the first steps of kind of was was creating monologues for the characters.
S2: Yeah, I always start with monologues, just figuring out who this person is and what do they think and what are they saying in the 10 minute play was set in the antebellum South and it was essentially two black men with a dead body who need to get this body from a place where they are slaves but safe to a place where they will be perhaps free or mistaken for free, but not safe. But nothing happened in it. And that was one of the first times, like I said, nothing’s happening in this. Why don’t I make it funny, like, OK, nothing should really happen, and then you just let people talk.
S3: And is that sort of what led you to not that nothing happens and Waiting for Godot? Because actually a lot happens of Waiting for Godot, but is that sort of how Waiting for Godot entered into the picture?
S2: I mean, in the same way that, like, Beckett entered my life, like I didn’t ask him, he just sort of came charging in. Right. I don’t know. I just feel like sometimes when people talk about the creative process, they talk about as though they’re in control of it.
S3: Right? Totally.
S2: I fell in love with Beckett when I was in college. And I know that when I was writing this play, Beckett kept coming up and I had an Beckett and I hadn’t been in community since I got out of college. And then it was just like, oh, I’m you know, I’m sitting there reading the shorts again. I’m like sitting there doing that figure. And I’m like, what the fuck am I thinking about? But I’m trying to do this like I’m trying to, like, write my black slavery play. And then I’m sitting there doing it and it’s like, OK, here’s the list of shit I should be reading. I got to, like, remind myself of the Civil War. That’s fun. But then every time I let myself go. I’m over here with Beckett.
S3: When I was in graduate school for writing, my thesis mostly grew out of the fact that every time I sit down to write something, I wound up writing this other thing that I was not to write. Like I was really actually actively trying not to write it. And then eventually the end of my first year of graduate school, because you have to figure out your thesis very quickly. I was like, well, I can’t escape this thing. I’m trying not to write. So we should just go write that thing.
S2: Exactly. And then you have to have that fulcrum moment where you’re like, OK, this is and this is one of my biggest creative mantras, which is like the seed of your solution lives inside of your problem.
S3: Yeah, I imagine. I mean, you know, do you have projects that you’ve abandoned or things that you’re like? Oh, yeah, actually I’ve reached the dead emptiness.
S2: If I. I mean, if I had been raised. In a suburb and lived in one house my entire life and had enough food to eat and enough money from the time I was zero to 18, I would have written, I’d say, a dozen masterpieces right now because I’m an idea factory. I pity people who do not have ideas. All I have ideas, but the discipline and the like hope and certainty that the work I put into the world will be received, well received and the like. Sense of self that, like everything I put into the world is valuable, then like. I would have fucking been one of your faves already, but I’m not I have to deal with my fucking trauma. I have to deal with this fucking country. I have to deal with fucking class, race, gender, sexuality, blah, blah, blah. So, OK, here we are. I’m emerging and I’m also really fucking up.
S3: How do you kind of reckon with all that stuff when when you’re actually, you know, sitting down to write, when you have the blank page, you know, you’re still living in America and its particular reality, it’s particular president’s particular the horrors of its history. But you’ve also like you got to write a play, you know, do you find ways to kind of channel that or their rituals you do to sort of get into the writing headspace? Or how does that stuff affect you in a kind of day to day writing way?
S2: You know, that’s interesting. I think that question sort of dovetails from me into sort of. My renewed commitment to deep self care. Mm hmm. So I believe that, like from the very beginning of my career or my journey as an artist, whatever the career is, my journey as an artist until about shit, I would say the pandemic, there was some part of my process, less and less and less, but there was some part of my process that could be likened to an actor’s process if they were method, right. Where it’s like if I’m writing about it, I got to feel it. I got to go through it, and so you just know that writing becomes the slugfest with your own trunk. Yeah, totally. I was like, OK, that’s that’s the gag. Like, that’s like a. And then I would say, like the back half of like, you know, the 20 teens, I started going to therapy and giving them the right medication and understanding my own history and like reclaiming my writing time for myself, you know, doing my morning pages for me, like reclaiming my love of just the craft before the fucking capitalism and career and resumes came on. Like, I remember when you used to just write to, like, write.
S3: Right. Not because there’s an award
S2: award money fight total, you know what I mean? Competition. Remember when you used to just like be a kid and just write some shit like, OK, do that. Plus the other self care comes in and it was like, oh, I don’t want to bleed from my work anymore.
S3: Yeah, totally.
S2: Like, I can fully go do something else. Mm hmm.
S3: You know, theater playwrighting, you have such a restricted number of tools, right, in that you can’t like. Then he thought about his childhood, you know, you can’t do
S2: those you can’t write a novel out of that shit, right?
S3: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
S2: You have yeah. You novelist with your with your with your God’s eye view to just tell us what people are thinking.
S3: I know. Yeah. You have just
S2: stupid. You are so stupid. Not only do I just have dialogue, I then have to give that dialogue to a different human right. And the only way you’re going to see my art is this. The meat bag has to say in Jesus Christ, it’s an art form built on trust. Yeah, it’s terrible. It’s terrible. Yeah. Don’t do this.
S3: That’s that’s the lesson of today’s episode of working is do not give in to basically.
S2: Yeah, yeah. If you want to be an artist, look, sit in your fucking house and write a novel. It’s so great you get to make the whole world you get to make the dialogue, you get to be everybody.
S3: I’m interested, though, because, you know, like in terms of how much storytelling and character development pressure there is on every line in a play. You know, and I’m thinking about this because Passover is very economical. It’s structurally tight. I mean, you know,
S2: give
S3: you the Spike Lee film is like 75 minutes, including credits, you know? And I’m just wondering about how you develop that kind of pressurised thing in your dialogue. The playwrights do so well. We’re like every word has to do like six different things. And also someone has to be able to say it in a way that sounds like something a human being would say. And I’m just curious about how you cracked that, how you figured that out, you know, over over the years that you’ve been writing.
S2: Yeah. I mean, the first answer is just time. And that’s the worst answer because nobody wants to wait. The play right now, I just said to Don, and again, I just have to say quickly, I’m not saying go write a novel. I’m being completely like I knew I was being sarcastic, but I love my cast so much. I just want to say I’m working with the best people. I love Donna. I love John. I look in the mirror and they look up and I love everybody else. But those are the best. How did I crack it? OK, so one of the things I knew intuitively and very quickly is like you find out certain truths about the world and then you hold on to them for dear life. And one of them I knew was like, these motherfuckers ain’t got semicolons. They got a house, they got this, they got this. And then I’m starting to look at the page and I’m like, oh, let’s get fun as I taking away their punctuation. No, no, no. Oh, this is poetry, OK? If there’s a punctuation mark, it needs to fight to get in. And that was hard for me because in eighth grade I was named the Grammar Brentwood Private School.
S3: And punctuation is such a way that playwrights indicate rhythm to actors, of course.
S2: So at the very beginning of the project, when I say, oh, these two motherfuckers don’t have anything, what I’m really saying is I am relinquishing control and I have to have actors who know how to act the way that jazz musicians know how to improvise. If you see the play, I have never seen John Namir and Gabe give the same performance. Because one night it’s a question, another night it’s a statement, right, because it’s jazz, right.
S3: And for listeners who may not be aware of this, you know, in theater, the conventional way you approach a performance is to quote unquote, freeze it. Right. So that that while the play appears spontaneous in many ways, the actors are delivering the lines identically night after night after night. It’s the spontaneity is a kind of magic trick we do right for audiences. And what you’re saying is actually it’s doing something completely different, which is the actors are saying the same lines every night, but the interpretation and how they play off each other is in no way fixed.
S2: Well, the bones of the play and the story that we are telling is currently maturing. In a beautiful way, so we are in a pressure cooker situation right now that I have created because now that I’ve worked in TV, I know that this is what I like. So right now, yes, the text is locked. Today’s the sixth. Tomorrow on the seventh, I unlock it for me. On the 10th, it will become unlocked for Donna. I’ll give it to Don. I’ll read it. We’ll talk about it and then we’ll send it to the actors. And at this point, we’re in a place where I told them last night, nothing new. The play has evolved. So if any lines of dialogue or actions or gestures are being added to what we have, we have to find them from within the play.
S1: We’ll be back with more of Isaac’s conversation with Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu. One of the things we’d love to do with this show is help solve your creative problems, whether it’s a question about working with collaborators, how to move from initial idea to a finished product, anything at all, send them to us at working at Slate Dotcom or give us a ring at three or four nine three three w o K.. We have one of those questions later in the episode. And if you’re enjoying this episode, don’t forget to subscribe to working wherever you get your podcasts. Now let’s return to Isaac’s conversation with Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu.
S3: One of the things I definitely want to talk about is the preview process, right, because I don’t think a lot of, you know, as we call them, civilians, people are habitual theatregoers, may not actually be familiar with the preview process and how essentially
S2: to teach them.
S3: Well, just you know, we have this period before a play opens, but where it’s performed by audiences and the union will allow you to continue to make changes and continue to rehearse play, even though you have a paying audience. And there’s a point where you can’t do that anymore. The director is not allowed to give.
S2: So the way that I like to describe it to my family, it’s like, OK, we all know a little bit about Hollywood, right? Right. And we all know that there are these private screenings that producers and studios do, or at least they used to do a lot more to gauge what the show is doing to an audience. And then it’s like, oh, no, nobody left there. Let’s do some reshoots because we got to punch up those jokes, yadda, yadda, yadda. OK, well, in the theater, I don’t have a camera and I need the audience now to teach me. What is working and what is not working? And Donna, this is her first play on Broadway. I mean, this is my first play on Broadway. We talked to a bunch of people and we said, you know what we need? We need Broadway money and an off Broadway preview period. So it is a little bit untraditional. How long are we, period? It’s we got six weeks of previews and yes, on the first night when we started, there’s a big gesture that happens at the end. That didn’t happen the first night. But you know what? It happened last night. And so every day we are building in the tweaks that are going to get us to the loft version that, yes, we have to lock it on September 12th when the show officially opens, because then the press comes. And they tell you what to think about it, because I know you people don’t think for yourselves. Come on, I’m just kidding. Please think for yourselves. Come see the show. Come see the show in previews.
S3: And so you’re giving yourself some time, though, you know, without the pressure of rewrites to kind of like experience and fine tune this version of it. And then you’re kind of.
S2: But that also comes from that self care. Yeah. And not only self care, but also coming into this crazy experience with people that I’ve been working with since twenty seventeen. So I am not holding up the play anymore. We are manifesting this version like we’re at the place now when we go into because, you know, we have rehearsal. So now that we’ve opened, now that we’re in previews is the way that we say it. We only have four hours of rehearsal in the morning, usually from about one to five ish. Yesterday at rehearsal, we’re running this line, started running it again and again, it’s not right, it’s not right. So I figure out, oh shit, this is what we need to change. I’m walking back to Donya and Justin at the sound booth. At the sound table. We’re just in Ellington, our sound designer is, and I hear him explaining to Donna his idea for how to change this moment and what he’s saying is exactly what I was coming to tell them. Amazing as the quote unquote, author of this play. Right. Justin’s been on the place in Chicago, Justin did Chicago, Justin did Amazon, Justin did Lincoln Center, Justin did Broadway. So we are all feeling that I come in and I say, oh, shit, I’ve discovered this, this, this, this, this. Two weeks later, OK, Justin is saying, oh, yeah, we got to tweak this one thing. And I’m like, yeah, that was just beautiful.
S3: And do you experience that as like you’re listening to the play and the play is telling you what it needs? Is that is that like everything
S2: is that went to the play? Yes. Yes. We have all decided this play because, you know, theater because of that interconnectedness and because it is different from a novel in that way, it requires so many people for us to put it to life. The play is like a Frankenstein. You know, it is a monster. And we think our monster is beautiful and it’s its body is moving and work. And I don’t know, there’s a lot of religious stuff happening in this play. And my relationship, not only to prose, but my relationship also to my own spiritual childhood, has been so present in this process. And so I keep thinking I’m like, oh, every night we resurrect the body of the text. Yeah, every night we resurrected a new and new. And right now we are all resurrecting the same body. Thankfully, we all know exactly who we’ve made, what we’ve made.
S3: That’s one of the collaborative lessons I’ve really learned from doing theater, that the thing you’re all working on together, whatever, whether it’s a play or, I don’t know, a PowerPoint presentation or whatever, but it’s like it has its own life. It has its own. Yes. It is not about your ego. It’s actually about this thing. Yes.
S2: And it’s all we have to do is stay in the same room, stay on the same frequency and listen to the fucking play. Right.
S3: And, you know, get
S2: out of its way.
S3: Yeah, totally. Totally to an
S2: artist thing to do.
S3: I wonder about those moments, though, because we’ve all had them, right, when like when something’s not working. Identifying what the actual problem is like, like this moment in the play is whatever the moment is, is it because we actually need a new actor in that part of that or we need we need to, like, really tweak that line reading? Is it that it needs to be a new line of dialogue? Is it actually something really random like the light is too bright, you know, how do you it’s figuring that out like an intuitive process for you or how do you figure out, like, what things need to change?
S2: It’s deeply intuitive. And I could I mean, for any listener whose heart, mind or psyche is open to. A sense of the divine or a sense of like the creative spirit as something that animates us, I would say that we are all the pass over Broadway creative team. We are experiencing something. That, for me at least, is life changing, and I don’t think this is going to make sense, but we’ve developed among us a company mantra, which is just that it comes in threes and we are beginning to build. Once you have a company mantra and you give people who are as creative. And as tapped in and as dedicated and as brilliant. As all of my. Creative team is they know the play, they know the changes, they know my process, we’re experiencing something incredibly divine and incredibly beautiful.
S3: You’ve worked on this production. Many of your collaborators have been with the show for a long time in many versions. Had you worked with any of them before or was this your first time working with Donna or your first time working with John Michael Hill or.
S2: It was my first time working with John. Definitely. He got hired for Chicago because obviously he’s a member of Steppenwolf Company. It was not my first time working with Don. My my sort of the short version of my collaboration with Donna is the very first iteration of Passover was Passover at Cherry Lane mentorship. Donna applied for that job and I gave it to someone else. But we’re at the same agency. And so our our our agent Glazer was like, look, I want to try to make this match happen. So we went to a developmental retreat for another play of mine called Flat Sam back in twenty sixteen. And we were like, look, nobody’s producing this play. But it is a complete play, let’s just work on it to find out if we like each other. And by the end I was like, OK, this is the person I do want to collaborate with. So the next year at Cherry Lane Mentorship, she directed Nathan Yungaburra to play Is This Table, which was also about the deaths of three young black men. And so one of the big questions I have was like, OK, can this white woman direct to my work? Right. So I’ve worked with her on Flat Sam, which is a less thorny racial play, but it does contain race. It’s an interracial relationship. And then I see her brilliantly handle Nathan, younger birds play. And I still go to Steppenwolf and I say, yeah, I want a black woman director. And so I get a black woman director and three weeks before we go up, that black woman director goes and gets a TV job. And then I say, who do I know that won’t abandon me three weeks before Steppenwolf is getting started, who will literally clear a schedule and be a tough fucking bitch? I got a call and Digna told Seth Gold, I can’t assist you on Hamlett or whatever the fuck he was doing in New York at a workshop. I got to go direct. I got to go to Beckett as well as she’s been my ride or die since.
S3: You have been with this play for a long time and made very large changes to it between the major productions of it. Right. Like the Steppenwolf version of the three version are not the same play in the three version and the Broadway version are not the same play. What has driven that process for you in terms of wanting to make those the changes that you’ve made in each of those productions,
S2: a moment in which I happened to be writing. So when I found out that Passover was going to Steppenwolf, it was the twilight of Obama’s era. So at that point, I was like, yeah, there might be an officer character, but I don’t think I even would put that character in. I want it to be ending to be very Beckett in in the Cherry Lane version. You know, Moses and Kitsch don’t die. There’s no AC4 character. It’s just mister. And they just hear sirens and the sirens are sort of like the placeholder that someone could always be coming. But like a doe, he never comes. And then everybody knows what the fuck happened next. Right. And it’s like, how am I supposed to give humans the same art objects when the entire world. Like, I’m sitting here saying, like, are we about to become fucking fascists? You know what I mean? Like, come on now, how am I going to give you, especially in a play, this charged. I can’t say the same old thing, and then that just kept happening. Mm hmm. And so, you know, we were ready with Steppenwolf’s. The summer after he had been elected. We were ready with Lincoln Center during the midterm elections and now this this is the first breath of fresh air. After that regime, which we kind of don’t even talk about because we’re still dealing with covid, right? So now it’s like I have the situation where Matt Ross was like, hey, oh, my God, we’re starting to get vaccinated. You can go to Broadway. But because of the stupid self care that I’m committing to, I’m like, you know what, the one thing I do not want to do after a pandemic and a fucking miscarriage. Is talk about it, my play. That’s a lynching, right? And say, like, oh, my Broadway debut, this play, and I don’t regret the previous versions of the play, but OK, I told that story. Mm hmm. And you know what happened? More black people died. So we’re not going to do that no more. I’m not going to do that to myself anymore. I’m not going to do that to John Hill anymore. I’m not going to do that to Namir anymore. I’m not going to do that to my creative team. If you want Broadway, if you’re going to give me Broadway, I’m going to give you the play that I need now.
S3: And so the ending no longer features one of the two men getting murdered. Right. He gets to, you know, the end of the play. Moses.
S2: Yeah, Liz. I was like, first of all, I don’t want to work on the lynching play. Then I’m sitting there one day and I literally say to myself, and then I called Donna, of course, and I said to her, wait a minute, dramaturge, dramaturge, dramaturge. In the play as it stands. Moses confronts asifa and he is becomes the vessel of this divine power that gives him the right to stop, offers gun, his stick and his words. Right. So how come 20 minutes later when this motherfucker comes up, he doesn’t still have the same power? And Donna goes, oh, shit, and I go, wow, we were so depressed because we were under that regime, nobody, nobody, nobody could ask. A simple dramaturgical question, right? If Superman learns how to fly on Tuesday, that motherfucker can still fly on Wednesday. And then I was like, OK, it started with that feeling and it started with that loyalty to my own self care, and then my mind was able to ask the perfect question. And so then I bring my whole team together and I say, look, we can maybe go to Broadways. Everybody available? Yes, yes, yes. Let’s talk dramaturgy. We sat in the August Wilson Theater. I did the same thing that Donna makes me always do when we start process. I read the play all parts to the cat, to the whole creative team, and I said, I don’t know what the new dialogue is going to be. I don’t know what it’s going to be. But we all know that when mister comes back at the end, Moses is still Moses. He’s powerful. Now, go build us a new set because I know the new set is going to be the Promised Land. I don’t know what the dialogue is going to be, but this is the new story. Superman stays Superman. OK, but let’s build a new set. Let’s go.
S3: It’s also interesting because it seems to me that part of what’s going on during the the previous president and that moment is like not only can you not ask the dramaturgical question, but it’s like, can we actually imagine a different future? Like, you just feel
S2: so that,
S3: you know, you feel so weighed down. It’s like, what is the.
S2: Yes, when I said before that sometimes it feels like writing was like method acting. What I was saying is that by writing the first version of that play, I am admitting to the fact that while I was teaching these young black boys and girls back from twenty eight to twenty sixteen, I taught first as an adjunct, then as a full time adjunct at public speaking. I could not stop imagining these kids deaths. That’s fucked up totally, I don’t want to people like, oh, why aren’t you more in the news? Because I can’t watch a video of a young black man being killed and then go teach young black men how to speak. Well, I’m also underpaid and be trying to be a playwright, whatever the fuck that is. Teaching five classes of public speaking at a public CUNY school where the class is supposed to be capped at thirty two. My classes are always up to forty one because I’ve known as the cool teacher. For eight years, I’m doing this shit right, and then I’m supposed to follow the news of yet another black person being killed and then I try to put it into my art. I’m done, I don’t want that energy anymore if you want to produce the oil play, if you want to watch the old play, if you need the old play, it’s available.
S3: There’s two things that that story sort of unlocks to me that are really wild. One of them is just that. Creating the space to actually have the idea and to have a new idea and to do something interesting, like so much of the creative process is actually just about like, how do you organize your life? So you have that space.
S2: Mm hmm. And listen, the only way that I know how to do that successfully is to borrow from the lessons that I learned when I grew up in an evangelical cult in Los Angeles in the 80s and 90s, which is to treat my relationship with myself as sacred. Hmm. It comes first in the way that I was taught to treat my relationship with God. So much so that I think that my relationship with myself and my relationship with God are actually deeply intertwined. And so in order for me to fully be a steward of the life that I have been given by whom? I don’t know for how long. I don’t know. I need to prioritise myself care, and my job needs to fit into that.
S3: This has been such a great conversation, I learned so much from it, so thank you so much for doing this and really break a leg with the rest of the preview process.
S2: And thank you. Thank you so much. Yes, we are going to finish this play, I promise.
S1: Isaac, I feel like I could go walk on coals like Antoinette has amazing energy, and I loved hearing how seriously she takes her own well-being when she’s figuring out her creative priorities. I also felt like I was eavesdropping on some real theater shoptalk, which I really enjoyed. So thank you for that conversation.
S3: Oh, thank you. Thank you for saying that. That’s very kind.
S1: So there are so many things I want to ask you about. But let me start with the way that Antoinette is using the Broadway preview process. As she puts it, she felt that Passover needed Broadway money and an off Broadway preview period. What did she mean by that? Is the way she’s doing things very different from the norm?
S3: Yes and no. I mean, previews are for every production where the rubber really hits the road, a production often comes together or completely falls apart during the preview period and people will make very intense changes. To just give one example, I worked on an off Broadway musical as an assistant and the creative team were making huge changes to the show. They were changing songs. They were cutting songs. They were putting new songs in. They were redoing choreography. But in previews you have a shortened rehearsal time during the day and then you perform at night. And they didn’t have enough time during any one rehearsal to make all the changes. So for about four days, the actors were rehearsing a new version of the show during the day and then performing the old version of the show at night. Right. So it’s like I actually don’t even know how they did it. But anyway, off Broadway and nonprofit theaters tend to have longer preview times. At Playwrights Horizons, for example, the preview period is often as long as the rehearsal period. That does not happen as often for Broadway unless it’s a musical. And actually, traditionally musicals would start out of town and do runs out of town and make changes on the road. But what will happen now is you’ll have a shorter preview process of a couple or few weeks, particularly if it’s a production that’s been mounted somewhere else. And then away you go. And there are shows that actually closed during their previews because of bad ticket sales and they never open in the first place. So what she’s talking about doing is having a preview process that is a little bit longer, where people are really open to the fact that there might be really big changes made to the show night tonight before it gets on its feet in front of the press.
S1: Wow. Antoinette spoke really bracingly about recognizing the need to prioritise her mental health and the changes she made to do that, including making changes to Passover pretty late in the game. And that feels extra ballsy because Passover is her Broadway debut. Am I right in thinking that the Broadway designations still really matters? I mean, this is a big moment in her career, right?
S3: Yes, absolutely. Broadway is still very important. I mean, we like to be kind of dismissive of it because it’s the commercial theater. Right. And because we think of it as sort of big musicals that run forever and all the audiences from out of town and, you know, like it doesn’t matter artistically or whatever. And there’s a level on which that’s true. But that’s not the whole story. Being on Broadway is still a very big deal. And particularly when you put a new play on Broadway and particularly one of the larger non-profits is involved, it’s a way to signal this is a writer who is important. This is a writer and a work that we believe is worth the culture investing in. And as you can see by the fact that we’re interviewing her, The Times has interviewed her. You know, it draws in a lot of attention. And because it draws in all that attention, it is also an incredibly fraught time. I mean, no one wants to put a play on Broadway and have it be universally panned. That does not feel good, you know, and that’s not not great. But, you know, so it is a vulnerable moment. It’s a moment of real exposure.
S1: So over the course of making episodes of the show, you and I have had many conversations about influence,
S3: talking about influences, my love language.
S1: Good. Well, we’ve been doing that. I was really struck by Antoinette idea of trying to resist thinking about Samuel Beckett really yelling at the guy to get out of her head because she didn’t think that that was what she should be writing about or working on. And then just finally accepting that that was what her creative mind was really vibing on. It sounded like you’ve had that experience, too.
S3: Oh, yeah, totally. And, you know, in part because this connects to the voice mail we’ll be talking about later, you can get really hung up on like, oh, I don’t want to look at this thing because it might influence me or that’s not the influence I want or whatever. But, you know, sometimes your mind is just telling you something you don’t want to hear, but you need to hear it anyway. When I was in graduate school, I really didn’t want to write my thesis or write at all about this very recent difficult time for my family and how it connected to a very difficult time in my childhood. But every time I sat down to write anything for any prompt that my professors were giving me, the stuff about that just kept coming out. So eventually I was like, God dammit, OK, brain, fine, I will fuck. Right this now, and that was the next couple of years of my life, so much of creativity exists beyond our conscious mind and is not subject to conscious control. What we can do is build the space for that stuff, nurture it and listen to it and use it. You know, like we have to control what we can, but we also have to be open to the parts that we can’t control and let them tell us some shit for real.
S1: I absolutely loved Antoinette description of the ideas and the projects that she’s working on, being like a series of pots in the storeroom of her mind. The creative process for her involves bringing together some ingredients, getting the pot working. Some ingredients might be marinating. Sometimes things are on a slow cooker, sometimes things are bubbling. That is a fantastic image.
S3: Yeah, it’s great. I mean, your mind is always working on something, right? And sometimes the thing you’re working on, like what it actually needs, you think what it needs is for you to bang your head against the brick wall some more. But actually, living needs is just some time to simmer away. Right? Just like like let it simmer. The watched pot never boils. Right. And that is very hard to let yourself do because capitalism forces deadlines on us. It forces pressure on us. It makes us think about everything we do is some potential product. But sometimes you just got to set it down, put it in the drawer and walk away. You know, I ask guests on the show about abandoned projects a lot. I asked her about it. But the truth is that an abandoned project is just something that becomes part of your future work. It doesn’t exist in that form. But in some ways, so long as you are doing something creative, none of that time is ever really wasted.
S1: Yeah, another thing that she said that really struck me was her very frank statement that in addition to ideas, creative people need discipline and they need hope, specifically hope that the work that they put out will be well received because to put it in a much blender way than she did, not only is the world a profoundly unjust place, but the world of theater is especially hard to break into because a playwright has to get by and they have to get funding, they have to get a theater, they have to get a team. And only a small number of gatekeepers really have the ability to make that happen. And I’m assuming no, but I’m thinking that those people are typically rich and probably mostly white.
S3: You got it in one June. Yes. The theater in America, which was founded in part to be an engine of democracy itself, a way of connecting us with one another beyond just the raw and crass dictates of the commercial world, it has increasingly become even more of a bubble of the elite. And the people funding it come from that elite. And that poses many, many challenges that are way too numerous to get into. But there has always been people pushing back on that. But some of those funders are pushing back on that. Some of the people in those non-profits are pushing back on that. The artists push back on it. And there’s a lot of people out there who are trying to make theatre and the institutions that make those kinds of decisions walk the, you know, the noble, virtuous stuff that they’re so good at, talking about raising money. And those efforts have greatly increased during the pandemic. And I think you’re starting to see some of that pay off in the programming decisions over the next couple of years. And my hope is that they only gather steam from here.
S1: Yeah, let’s hope. OK, Isaac, we have one of our favorite things. We have a listener question.
S3: Drumroll, please.
S1: And appropriately enough, it’s from a theater person. Let’s hear it.
S4: Hi, working friends. My name is Kate Smith and I am a theater director, actor and creator that works primarily in Ottawa, in Canada on my mother’s show. And listening to it during the pandemic has made me feel less alone because I usually work collaboratively and it’s been kept apart from all of my colleagues for all this time. It’s a question I have for you and for the other creators that tune in is when I have an idea for a show I set about writing it and securing funding, workshopping it, assembling my team and so on. But I tend not to see if anyone else has done something similar. First, do other credence to Internet sleuthing and digging before being swept away by their next big project. Or like me, did they assume it will be unique regardless? Because it’s my voice and my thoughts do. I guess I’m resisting comparison and distraction in a way, but am I crazy for not keeping on my place content first? Thanks.
S1: So is it. What do you think?
S3: Well, first of all, I just want to say to Kate, thank you so much for your kind words about the show. A hearing from our listeners makes me feel less alone. So. So thank you very, very much. Now to your actual question, which is a wonderful one. You asked if we do this in our work and I’m actually. Factionally required to see what else is out there about a subject I want to write about, if I’m writing a book, you know, when you write a non-fiction book and you’re trying to sell it, you have to write a proposal. And one of the things you have to do in that proposal is tell the potential editor what else is out there on the subject and how your own book fits into that existing body of work and would differentiate itself from it. So you actually have to have some idea about that before you start writing a sentence of the book itself. And when I pitched to Slate or anywhere else, I usually have to talk about how the thing I want to write will intervene in an existing conversation. But to the other half of your question, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the way you’re going about it if it works for you. But I want to suggest, just as an experiment, that the next time you have an idea that you’re excited about takes some time to Google, what else might be out there that might be similar, you know, what we call comps. Maybe you even want to read those plays or novels or watch those films as part of your research. You might discover that this is a hugely discouraging exercise that crushes your creativity and makes you feel like you never do anything original and you never want to do it again. That’s fine. Or you might discover that you learn more about the material and how the culture treats it and you find interesting things that you want to respond to and it’s inspiring and generative and gives you new ideas. But either way, you’ll have learned something new about what you need for your process. And since you don’t seem to have any problems coming up with ideas, if one has to be sacrificed to figure this out, I don’t think it’s too much of a loss. What do you think, June?
S1: Yeah, I. I feel that I don’t want to ask Kate to change your habits because it was clear from her voice that her process is, as you say, very generative. And it sounds like it’s really fun for her, like she seems to have a great time when she’s like going off on that and that search and and just like letting the ideas flow. Sounds like it’s a wave of excitement. So I don’t want to spoil that in journalism. The first thing we do is look to see what else has been published on a topic. And, you know, just because something has been written, that doesn’t necessarily mean that a new idea is a dead end. There might still be room for a new approach or a different focus or deeper thinking. It might be doable, but it’s definitely something that you factor in. And it does mean, unfortunately, that a lot of great ideas never become pieces because the topic feels overexposed. That said, you know, Kate, being a theatre professional, I’m pretty sure would know about anything that was big enough to be an absolute project killer.
S3: Yeah. Yeah, totally. Can I can I ask June? You know, Kate has this thing that she says, though, that I do think is worth highlighting. And I was wondering what you think about, which is like isn’t a project inherently on some level different because it flows from the individual who’s writing about it from their perspective and Beckett?
S1: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. On the other hand, we’re not really talking about the work itself. We’re talking about that green light. Right. Like if we were doing things because we love them, well, who cares what else is out there? But there’s I think we all and again, you know, we say almost every show capitalism means that, you know, art is not pure. You know, it’s very hard to get someone to read the third piece on this subject. Right. Well, maybe the third is OK, but the 15th. No. And so that’s it’s actually the capitalist side of it. You have to really be able to show why this is very different from something you’re already familiar with, because we’re all searching for something new. And I actually don’t think that’s unreasonable. I don’t want my time is limited. I don’t want to kind of I don’t want to just keep seeing the same thing over and over. Is that unreasonable?
S3: No, I think that’s reasonable. Although, you know, obviously, as someone who’s on the writing side, not the editing side, I do wish I could send a pitch that was just like, hey, Forrest Wickman, I want to write about this. And I don’t it’s just going to be me, me, me, and be like, yes, of course, that’s perfect. You know who who doesn’t want that? No. But more seriously, you know, when it comes to theatre and stuff like that, you know, you’ll usually find your original spin to put on something. And so, you know, I don’t think you should be afraid of trying to see what else is out there. Yeah, there are so many different plays that are some version of Oedipus. There’s so many different plays that are like for rich people have a holiday that goes awry and their Manhattan apartment, you know, there’s like, you know, like like there are certain durable structures that we see over and over and over again. And so I think that there’s usually room for another version of a similar story in the theater world, which has different needs and incentives than, you know, magazine or website publishing.
S1: Yeah, that’s a very good point. Thanks for sending us your question, Kate. Please let us know. So it goes and listeners send us more questions. We love them.
S3: What we hope you have enjoyed the show, if you have remembered to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, then you’ll never miss an episode. And now you know what we’re going to do. June, the last slate plus membership of the day Slate. Plus, members get benefits like zero ads on any Slate podcast, full access to all the articles on Slate dotcom bonus episodes of shows like Slow Burn and Danny M. Liveries. Big mood, little mood. But I also hope you might like to support the work we do here all morning. It’s only one dollar for the first month. To learn more, go to Slate Dotcom Slash Working.
S1: Plus, thank you to Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu for being our guest this week and as always, enormous thanks to our wonderful producer Karen Hughes. We’ll be back next week with Isaac’s conversation with Christobel Tapia de Vere, who composed the music for White Lotus. Until then, get back to work.
S3: Hazlet plus listeners, thanks, as always, for everything you do to support the work we do right here on working, we have a little extra bonus, hopefully delicious tidbit of the conversation this week’s episode, and we hope you enjoy it. Here you go. I do think, you know, particularly once you’re an adult, pursuing a creative or artistic profession, like learning how to take care of yourself, is such a huge part of the artistic process and one that we don’t talk about that often. Right. Like I mean, I’ve been in therapy for like 20 years. Do you know what I mean? You know, a lot of what we do there is talk about the shit that’s going on in my work so that I don’t feel that stuff while I’m actually completely.
S2: Yeah, yeah. And do you feel like you feel like now that you’ve been in therapy for so long, do you feel like there is any sort of I would call it like a porous boundary between what is therapy and the therapeutic quality of your work?
S3: Oh, well, you know, I mostly work in, like, you know, creative nonfiction and, you know, like cultural history stuff.
S2: So I you know, I completely understand. I’ve read your book, but I’m still saying that, like, even the spirit with which I approach my work. Hmm. Has been cleansed of the need to make my work into my therapy. Oh, yeah. Because I showed an actual self care practice so I can go back to like young Antoinette who was like twenty two or whatever, twenty, twenty four. Like I was going to be OK. This isn’t, this isn’t therapy. This is, this can actually be your career.
S3: Yeah. Yeah. No totally. I mean for me it’s actually been the move away from writing in which I appear that, you know, like the first person pronoun is very rarely in my writing these days. I used to do more memoirist and stuff. So it’s actually my transition to doing cultural history as opposed to like personal essays and stuff like that is largely, I think, a result of the thing you’re talking about
S2: that’s so interesting. Do you do any first person writing personally like like journaling or anything like that?
S3: When I when I do free. Right? Yeah, yeah, I do. I mean, I do that, but it’s like but that’s
S2: still I as private.
S3: Yeah. Yeah. Or the eye is there in style. It’s not that I’m appearing, it’s like, you know, I wrote it because of how it’s written, not because I’m in that as a character or whatever. I mean did you find like a similar. So you felt like a similar transitions happen within your work over the years?
S2: Well, it’s interesting that the reason that I have that huge reaction is because I think literally now with my fucking schedule, like it is my fucking muse, my genius, my Damon is waking me up saying, bitch, we got to go back to writing prose. We’ve been writing drama for so long. I can only think in either drama or tweets, and it’s like maybe you’re right, you need to write some prose, right? So I’m like, oh fuck, do I have to do one of these fucking subsets or something? What am I doing here? So I don’t. So it’s interesting that you’re saying that you want to separate from the eye because I’m like, I think it’s time for me to reinvestigate the public eye.
S3: Yeah, that makes that makes total sense.
S2: You know what I mean, and I’m like, it’s the most illogical thing on my calendar, but in my soul it’s like. I got to start talking to myself in public about everything that’s happening.
S3: When this show is open, when you know you’re not here every day, when you’re able to finally step away from it again, do you have a sort of plan like this is what I’m going to do to take care of myself, and this is to take a day off?
S2: Because it’s interesting, because I think part of what I’m learning is that if I want to lead the life that I want to like I’m reading right now, Mike Nichols is biography. Oh, yeah. The Mark Harris books. Great. Yeah, yes, yes, yes. Because I’m like I need some mentors. I want to be an artist in the world. I don’t want to just make money. What the fuck is that? I want to be an artist in the world. I want to be a healer in the world. I’m trying to look at these luminaries. And it’s like. It’s less about, I think I mean, yes, of course, vacation, of course, yes, yes. But it’s also about how do I structure my day every day? OK, I’m moving. So one of my don’t fuck around, I need this, I need natural light. I need to a space where I can, in natural light, set my morning intentions in front of my altar. I got to do that every morning. So it’s not a vacation, but you’ve got to start the day the right way. You know what I mean? Even stupid shit like water sleep. So and I say all of that because I think this is my first time on Broadway. I don’t I think I’m going to be around. I want to meet people. I want to hopefully, you know, so if I want to be around for the distance, how do I give myself a little vacation throughout the day? How do I get over to Riverside Park for an hour and just decompress? Because, hey, marijuana is now legal and Little Island is open, so you don’t smoke in the park. Still smoke the. But you know what I mean. I do. How do you create little moments where it’s like, no, I’m not going to have oh today’s just a fucking stressed out day and I have to lay in front of Netflix for two hours at night and not feel. And then try to take some Ambien. Come on now. No. No fame and whatever the fuck else this life has to offer, it’s not worth that I want to be able to live a life where I can go to sleep at night. And no shame to anybody on Ambien. I’m not saying shame, but I’m saying. Do I want to work myself to the bone so I can go from a one bedroom to a two bedroom or in that one bedroom? Do I want to be able to sleep at night? Right.
S3: All right, that’s it for this week. Catch you next week on work. So.
