Fellows Spotlight is our blog series that invites you to take a behind-the-scenes look at our Fellows program.

We’ll be hearing from all our 2018-2019 Fellows: Jay Adana, Rae Binstock, Zeniba Britt, Erika Dickerson-Despenza, Mathilde Dratwa, Aryanna Garber, Charles Gershman, Nambi E. Kelley, Melissa Li, Benjamin Velez, Kit Yan, and Zack Zadek.

Each of the Fellows/teams were asked the same 5 questions, exploring where these writers have been, are now, and are journeying towards. Our Fellows took this gentle structure and ran, each submitting responses as unique and creative as they are.

We are thrilled to present Charles Gershman!

What was your first experience with theater?

When I was young, my parents regularly took me and my siblings to The Muny, a huge open-air theater in Forest Park, the big city park in St. Louis. I remember seeing Peter Pan, Gypsy, and South Pacific. It was so exciting seeing Peter Pan fly! And I can still vividly see Gypsy Rose Lee’s boobs being lit up with electric lights and it felt so naughty and wrong and great, and I think that was the closest I’ve ever come to being straight.

When did you decide to become a writer? Is there a writer, show, or piece of writing that was particularly influential on your path?

A few years ago Tina Howe invited me to join her MFA playwriting class at Hunter College. She had us read Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Facesand Carl Jung’s autobiography and Diana Son’s extraordinary Stop Kiss. She took us to see plays and introduced us to people like John Patrick Shanley and Chuck Mee. I remember sitting alone with her in her apartment going over a new first draft I’d written. She told me to rewrite almost the whole thing. I was keeping my characters on too tight a leash. “Write in bold primary colors!” I finished that year understanding that being a playwright would take a lot of work and commitment. It’s because of her that I made the commitment.

How do you describe your work overall? What sets your work apart?

A number of my plays are queer-themed. I wrote a play last year called Free & Proud, which is a spare two-hander that captures the entirety of a relationship between two men, a white American and a black Nigerian. It was published by Oberon Books in concert with a UK production, and it recently won the Chesley/Bumbalo Playwriting Award. But my work varies a lot. I’m also working on a monologue-based solo piece called IvankaPlay, which imagines Ivanka Trump breaking the pattern and acting on her better impulses, and exploring what it would take for her to actually become heroic.

Can you tell us a little bit about the work you’ve been developing as a Fellow?

I’ve been working on a play called Stopover, about a gay married couple who take in a foster teen. The two dads come from different backgrounds and parenting cultures, and the play looks at why we become parents and what we’re really in it for. I wrote this play because I am terrified atthe idea of being a parent and wanted to explore that fear. It’s been a challenging and gratifying play to write.

What do you find most rewarding about your work as a writer?

There are some really rewarding solitary moments—when you suddenly break through some wall in the story that’s been a source of agony, or when some new thrilling idea hits you and it feels like a flash of brilliance and you can only see the good in it. But the most rewarding moments are when the work speaks to people—and they tell me so. That says to me that there’s maybe something universal in the story, that it’s many people’s story, that maybe it has a good reason for being told.

Fellows Spotlight is our blog series that invites you to take a behind-the-scenes look at our Fellows program.

We’ll be hearing from all our 2018-2019 Fellows: Jay Adana, Rae Binstock, Zeniba Britt, Erika Dickerson-Despenza, Mathilde Dratwa, Aryanna Garber, Charles Gershman, Nambi E. Kelley, Melissa Li, Benjamin Velez, Kit Yan, and Zack Zadek.

Each of the Fellows/teams were asked the same 5 questions, exploring where these writers have been, are now, and are journeying towards. Our Fellows took this gentle structure and ran, each submitting responses as unique and creative as they are.

This week, meet Erika Dickerson-Despenza!

What was your first experience with theater?

I cannot remember exactly, if we’re talking about theater in the traditional sense. The most accurate answer, however, is my Black Baptist church on the westside of Chicago, five blocks from Fred Hampton’s home (where he was murdered by CPD). This was the sociopolitical backdrop of the folk sermons emphatically delivered behind the sacred pulpit-turned-stage. I was enthralled by the deeply rooted Black liturgies, the stained-glass windows, holy ghost choreography and pentecostal breathing–the theatricality of that which was holy ground. 

The first time I remember seeing Black people in a professional production was sophomore year of high school at Goodman Theater’s production of Radio Gold by August Wilson. My American Literature class took a field trip to see the production after reading the play. I remember being amazed and wanting more of Mame Wilks, because Black women’s stories were more complex and under-explored, even then. 

When did you decide to become a writer? Is there a writer, show, or piece of writing that was particularly influential on your path?

I was always a writer. Language was the most natural and challenging way to undermine systems of oppression. I was trying to understand the world I was in and write my way into something else, something freer. In middle school, I encountered Nikki Giovanni’s poem “Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why)” and was enthralled by the speaker’s brash celebration of herself. I went to the library and checked out every book Giovanni had published at the time. I read them from cover to cover, but found myself most drawn to Black Feeling, Black Talk/ Black Judgement. Giovanni was unapologetically Black and female, fierce in her language and her critique of our political landscape. If Giovanni could do that just with words, I wanted to wield, wound and revive words like that. Then I was introduced to my literary mother, Ntozake Shange, and I quickly learned the importance of rupturing language and bending it to my will. I was a poet first. I studied Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Nikky Finney, Patricia Smith, Elizabeth Alexander, Krista Franklin and way too many white women poets (whom I won’t name because their names are overstated and I want to give deliberate space to the Black women who are the reason I am possible). And when poems proved too small a form for the stories I wanted to tell, I (re)turned to the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Toni Cade Bambara, Saidiya Hartman and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. But I wanted to create experiences about Black women with audiences in a live environment. So I looked back to Shange, early Suzan-Lori Parks and Katori Hall. Because my people’s work & resistance have never been safely historical, theatre serves as a literary and live documentation of how Blk womyn practice sci-fi living. t’s is intimate, unflinchingly honest (when done right), and real time immediacy calls us to create a moment together; to witness and be witnessed.

How do you describe your work overall? What sets your work apart?

As an interdisciplinary theatremaker, my work converges literary, visual and musical worlds. I investigate, dismantle, critique and reconstruct mass media images of iconic, commonplace and invisibilized figures within the African Diaspora. My thematic obsessions deliberately center Black women’s land legacies, stored body knowledge of ancestral memory, girlhood trauma, maternal bonds, ritual, religion and distinct experiences of environmental racism. These themes point toward my central fixation: Black women’s literal and figurative dismemberment and corporeal restitution as a means of belonging–to ourselves, our families, dominant culture and our world. Afrosurrealism, magic realism, narrative re/memory and emergent strategy are conceptual preoccupations of my work. Through my artistic practice, I aim to resist Black feminine erasure and endeavor to re/imagine a world where a kaleidoscope of Black womanhood is lavishly welcomed and affirmed. Currently, the body of work I’m creating requires casts exclusively Black women and Black women directors. 

Can you tell us a little bit about the work you’ve been developing as a Fellow?

During my time as DGF Fellow, I’ve been working on shadow/land and [hieroglyph]. These plays are the first two works in my 10-play Katrina Cycle, focused on the effects of Hurricane Katrina & its state-sanctioned man-made disaster. Taking up epic space, these plays traverse the Black Katrina diaspora in an examination of the ongoing effects of displacement rippling in & beyond New Orleans. Together, the ten works underscore colonialism, environmental racism & the erasure of Black land legacies through the distress of disaster, evacuation, displacement & urban renewal.

What do you find most rewarding about your work as a writer?

I am most grateful for how my writing operates as cultural work. I get to practice the notion of sci-fi living: using my radical imagination to do what has never been done before in theatre as a means of advancing a more just and compassionate world and write toward a future in which Black people exist and are free. 

Fellows Spotlight is our blog series that invites you to take a behind-the-scenes look at our Fellows program.

In recent weeks, we’ve introduced you to Rae Binstock, Kit Yan and Melissa Li, Mathilde Dratwa, Zeniba Britt, Jay Adana, and Nambi E Kelley.

We’ll be hearing from all our 2018-2019 Fellows: Jay Adana, Rae Binstock, Zeniba Britt, Erika Dickerson-Despenza, Mathilde Dratwa, Aryanna Garber, Charles Gershman, Nambi E. Kelley, Melissa Li, Benjamin Velez, Kit Yan, and Zack Zadek.

Each of the Fellows/teams were asked the same 5 questions, exploring where these writers have been, are now, and are journeying towards. Our Fellows took this gentle structure and ran, each submitting responses as unique and creative as they are.

This week we are proud to introduce Benjamin Velez.

What was your first experience with theater?

My mother forced me to audition for a local community theater production of Oliver when I was six years old. The director was only seeing kids aged nine and up, but my mom lied to get me in and I eventually got cast as Oliver! It was a magical experience where I caught the theater bug and it’s never let up since.

When did you decide to become a writer? Is there a writer, show, or piece of writing that was particularly influential on your path?

The first CD I ever bought was John Williams’ movie score for Spielberg’s Hook. It was a transcendent moment that led me down the path of a film score obsession and a love affair with musical storytelling. 

How do you describe your work overall? What sets your work apart?

I’ve always found it hard to describe my work, mostly because the music I write is a fusion of a lot of different styles, similar to my influences. I don’t believe any of us are singular in how we exist; every character is a mixture of experiences, upbringings, flaws, and passions, and the music I write reflects that. Pop, funk, folk, rock, blues, blended together with a cinematic scope of world building to make the audience feel like they aren’t just hearing a collection of songs, but that they are entering another world. This cinematic approach to genre and musical storytelling is drives my work.

Can you tell us a little bit about the work you’ve been developing as a Fellow?

[Aryanna Garber and I are] working on a musical called Borderline about Anna, a girl who gets diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and struggles to understand what that diagnosis means for every aspect of her life. [We] are trying to navigate both the light and dark side of mental illness in a way that both challenges and invites our audience to understand a full nuanced picture of something often portrayed in the extreme. The fellows program has helped us hone in on the story we want to tell in terms of stakes and character so that we can create the most compelling story possible.

What do you find most rewarding about your work as a writer

I love the ability to connect with stories and experiences other than my own through the language of music. In my mind, the human experience is all about empathy and understanding, and as a writer I try to find the most creative and effective ways to help others do just that. If something I write can help humanize a person usually seen as “other”, or add shades to how someone thinks about previously immutable beliefs, that is the most rewarding feeling. It means I get to use my very specific toolbox to bring empathy to our ever increasingly polarized world.  

Fellows Spotlight is our blog series that invites you to take a behind-the-scenes look at our Fellows program.

In recent weeks, we’ve introduced you to Rae Binstock, Kit Yan and Melissa Li, Mathilde Dratwa, Zeniba Britt, and Nambi E Kelley.

We’ll be hearing from all our 2018-2019 Fellows: Jay Adana, Rae Binstock, Zeniba Britt, Erika Dickerson-Despenza, Mathilde Dratwa, Aryanna Garber, Charles Gershman, Nambi E. Kelley, Melissa Li, Benjamin Velez, Kit Yan, and Zack Zadek.

Each of the Fellows/teams were asked the same 5 questions, exploring where these writers have been, are now, and are journeying towards. Our Fellows took this gentle structure and ran, each submitting responses as unique and creative as they are.

This week we invite you to this conversation with Jay Adana.

What was your first experience with theater?

I played Becky in a production of “Gold Dust or Bust” (I’m sure you’ve heard of it) in 4th grade. I was the comic relief and it was the easiest audience I’ll ever get. I got hooked.

When did you decide to become a writer? Is there a writer, show, or piece of writing that was particularly influential on your path?

I set out to be an actor. My mom showed me a copy of “Into The Woods” (of course bow down to the mighty Sondheim) on VHS and when Bernadette Peters followed an imaginary bug on the floor, stomped it, twisted her foot and said “squooosh” I said that’s what I’m doing. I became a writer by accident. I was doing a show with a couple of friends from acting school where the story was told with movement and puppets. We were having trouble communicating what was happening in a more complicated section of the plot so I ducked into the bathroom (we were rehearsing in my living room) and wrote a song to explain what was happening. I loved that process and just kept doing it. That show was called “The Woodsman”.

How do you describe your work overall? What sets your work apart?

I like to blend old sounds with new. I’m most interested when you can take a little bit of both. For example I made a trap beat out of pieces of “The Battlecry of Freedom” or I’ll use rap rhythms on a folk song. 

Can you tell us a little bit about the work you’ve been developing as a Fellow?

My writing partner Zeniba Britt and I have been developing a musical alternative history of the American Civil War with a dash of magic. Our protagonist is Polly, a brilliant black biracial mapmaker hiding just outside Atlanta.

What do you find most rewarding about your work as a writer?

There’s the moment when something clicks and it’s just exactly right and I’m not sure how I got there and it feels like I have a line dialed straight into the cosmos. That’s magic. 

Fellows Spotlight is our summer blog series that invites you to take a behind-the-scenes look at our Fellows program.

In recent weeks, we’ve introduced you to Rae Binstock, Kit Yan and Melissa Li, and Mathilde Dratwa.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be hearing from all our 2018-2019 Fellows: Jay Adana, Rae Binstock, Zeniba Britt, Erika Dickerson-Despenza, Mathilde Dratwa, Aryanna Garber, Charles Gershman, Nambi E. Kelley, Melissa Li, Benjamin Velez, Kit Yan, and Zack Zadek.

Each of the Fellows/teams were asked the same 5 questions, exploring where these writers have been, are now, and are journeying towards. Our Fellows took this gentle structure and ran, each submitting responses as unique and creative as they are.

Allow us to introduce you to Zeniba Britt:

What was your first experience with theater?

We did theatre in preschool at The YMCA in Culver City. I recall immigrants, turkeys, and indigenous peoples, it was alternate history called The First Thanksgiving. 

When did you decide to become a writer? 

I don’t recall ever making a decision, it is something I just do, cyclically. Suddenly a character or situation is talking to me and I can’t hear the person I’m with anymore. 

Is there a writer, show, or piece of writing that was particularly influential on your path?

Passing Strange was one of those shows that said don’t give up, there is space for you here. 

How do you describe your work overall? 

Absurd, esoteric, and funny. 

What sets your work apart?

I think it’s me, my experiences and my unique place in society. 

Can you tell us a little bit about the work you’ve been developing as a Fellow?

Yes, I’ve been working on an epic adventure musical called The Loophole with Jay Adana, it’s an alternate history of the civil war about revolution and love centered around a Black Regiment of The Union Army and an integrated house in rural Georgia. We use rap, verse, folk, rock, body percussion, and magic to tell the story. 

What do you find most rewarding about your work as a writer?

Employing actors, hands down. 

Fellows Spotlight is our summer blog series that invites you to take a behind-the-scenes look at our Fellows program.

In recent weeks, we’ve introduced you to Rae Binstock, Kit Yan and Melissa Li, and Mathilde Dratwa.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be hearing from all our 2018-2019 Fellows: Jay Adana, Rae Binstock, Zeniba Britt, Erika Dickerson-Despenza, Mathilde Dratwa, Aryanna Garber, Charles Gershman, Nambi E. Kelley, Melissa Li, Benjamin Velez, Kit Yan, and Zack Zadek.

Each of the Fellows/teams were asked the same 5 questions, exploring where these writers have been, are now, and are journeying towards. Our Fellows took this gentle structure and ran, each submitting responses as unique and creative as they are.

This week, we invite you to get to know Nambi E. Kelley:

What was your first experience with theater?

My first experience in the theatre was being in a production of The Mouse That Roared in high school. I played the secretary. I wanted to play the general. I understood completely why they cast a boy in that part, and I was mad as hell about it. 

When did you decide to become a writer? Is there a writer, show, or piece of writing that was particularly influential on your path?

I became a writer when I was about 8 years old. I spent half my childhood in places where children were not valued. I wrote to understand the world around me because it was never explained to me why things were so hard for some people. 

How do you describe your work overall? What sets your work apart?

My work stages a character’s interior thoughts. Other writers do that through subtext or immediate action. I am fascinated with seeing how someone arrives at a thought and staging that.

Can you tell us a little bit about the work you’ve been developing as a Fellow?

The fellowship play I’m developing is an adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Jazz.  I have chosen to structure the play like Rashomon, so it is structured into 5 different perspectives based on a singular event of a young girl being murdered in 1920s Harlem by her lover. 

What do you find most rewarding about your work as a writer?

I saw a lot of suffering as a young person.  What’s most rewarding for me as a writer is to be able to illuminate those dark spaces for others who may be in similar spaces. If I am not writing to make someone’s world better, or at least for someone to see a piece of their own experience in a character and provide perspective and context on their sufferings, I am not in a space of joy around creating work. My goal is to tell as many truths as I can, it helps me to know the suffering I’ve endured in my life was not in vain, but in service of others. And that gives me great peace. 

Fellows Spotlight is our summer blog series that invites you to take a behind-the-scenes look at our Fellows program.

In recent weeks, we’ve introduced you to Rae Binstock, Kit Yan and Melissa Li.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be hearing from all our 2018-2019 Fellows: Jay Adana, Rae Binstock, Zeniba Britt, Erika Dickerson-Despenza, Mathilde Dratwa, Aryanna Garber, Charles Gershman, Nambi E. Kelley, Melissa Li, Benjamin Velez, Kit Yan, and Zack Zadek.

Each of the Fellows/teams were asked the same 5 questions, exploring where these writers have been, are now, and are journeying towards. Our Fellows took this gentle structure and ran, each submitting responses as unique and creative as they are.

This week, we are thrilled to introduce you to Mathilde Dratwa.

What was your first experience with theater?

When I was a teenager, I was cast as Juliet in the school play. I had to wear an off-white flapper dress – because obviously Juliet wears white. (I now know that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the character: she’s a spunky teenager who makes the first move and can’t wait to get laid! She is thirteen and she is unafraid to lust and she dares to disappoint her parents and she would have had so much to teach me if only I had known then how to listen.)

Anyone who menstruates will tell you that there is no other way; if a director makes you wear a light-colored costume you will inevitably be on your period on performance night, this is a given. So I was on stage wearing a sanitary pad and a tampon beneath the off-white flapper dress, just in case. I remember my mother explaining the anatomy of my body through a closed door earlier in the day: push it back, not straight up, and trying her best to convince me that an applicator would make this whole endeavor so much easier. The good news is that at the end of the play I cried real tears — thank you, teenage hormones.

After the show I remember the curtain call: holding hands with other students in other grades that I would otherwise not know. I did not know to smile; my mother, watching anxiously from the audience, was worried that something was wrong. But nothing was wrong; this all felt wonderfully Serious and Important. People were clapping! For us! (“For me,” I remember thinking, because I was young and self-centered and also a little bit correct, and because the world hadn’t yet taught me that a woman – a girl! – shouldn’t think that way. In the car, on the way home, horror of horrors, I think I said it aloud, to my mother, with glee: “everyone clapped – for me!” and I think I remember that my mother nodded, because she was, indeed, clapping for me.)

When did you decide to become a writer? Is there a writer, show, or piece of writing that was particularly influential on your path?

I tried really hard not to become a writer. I tried really hard to become an actress. I didn’t write, because I knew, deep down, that I’d be better at writing than I was at acting; I feared that once I started, writing would become my focus. But one day, I met the wonderful Mary Bacon, who invited me to join a group she’d created with Heidi Armbruster: Dorset Theater Festival’s Women Artists Writing group. It consists of female-identifying actresses who also write. That was my gateway drug; I felt like I could write among actresses… Pretty soon, I was hooked, and I haven’t looked back (or auditioned) since. 

How do you describe your work overall? What sets your work apart?

Irreverence and theatricality. 

Can you tell us a little bit about the show you’ve been developing as a Fellow?

A Play about David Mamet Writing a Play about Harvey Weinstein. It’s basically what it sounds like. And also, not at all.

Francesca, a playwright, has several Reasons to be Pretty… Angry. Among them: David Mamet has actually, in real life, written a play about Harvey Weinstein. Francesca thinks that’s bonkers. So this is her play about David Mamet. He’s in it, and so are a bunch of other dudes named David who definitely shouldn’t even think about writing a play about Harvey Weinstein.

It’s really a play about women. About Francesca. About Francine, who can do it all (parent, act, sing, fly, castrate, kill)… until she can’t. About Zoe, who shows up to audition and can’t stop talking.

Turns out there’s a lot to say.

What do you find most rewarding about your work as a writer?

I like writing roles that I think my actor friends would love to play. And making people laugh despite themselves. 

Fellows Spotlight is our summer blog series that invites you to take a behind-the-scenes look at our Fellows program.

Last week we introduced the series with a spotlight on Kit Yan and Melissa Li.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be hearing from all our 2018-2019 Fellows: Jay Adana, Rae Binstock, Zeniba Britt, Erika Dickerson-Despenza, Mathilde Dratwa, Aryanna Garber, Charles Gershman, Nambi E. Kelley, Melissa Li, Benjamin Velez, Kit Yan, and Zack Zadek.

Each of the Fellows/teams were asked the same 5 questions, exploring where these writers have been, are now, and are journeying towards. Our Fellows took this gentle structure and ran, each submitting responses as unique and creative as they are.

This week, we are thrilled to introduce you to Rae Binstock.

What was your first experience with theater?

This is the experience that immediately comes to mind, though it was far from my first. Growing up in Cambridge, MA, my parents started taking me to shows at the American Repertory Theater when I was very very young. (Potentially too young, but I’d say it all worked out.) One of those plays was The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter. I was around 10 years old. I had never seen Pinter before, and my father didn’t give me any context before the show started (he never did). I just remember the feeling in my stomach while I watched that play, like the first drop on a rollercoaster stretched out over two hours. I understood so little of it but I was transported by the sheer theatricality. It was that moment of realization that theater is nothing like anything else. It’s not movies, it’s not TV, it’s not reading, it’s not an exciting conversation. It’s an alchemical reaction in real time that happens to and with you, and as a child I remember being utterly obsessed with the how and why of that experience. 

When did you decide to become a writer? Is there a writer, show, or piece of writing that was particularly influential on your path?

My father is a novelist. He raised my sister and I to love first reading and then writing. I must have started at least fifty “novels” as a kid, but I never quite knew how to finish them. I was always so scared of “messing it up.” My mother, on the other hand, works in homeless housing, and she raised my sister and I to value planning and action over easily-exhausted fervor. I knew there was something to writing that made me feel strong and capable, but I couldn’t find it in the density of prose. When I got to high school, I was already a theater kid, but the tipping point was reading Angels in America. You know that feeling when you return to your childhood home as an adult and notice something – a room, a window, even a lamp – that had been there the whole time but never registered in the specifics of what you considered your habitat? That’s what it felt like reading Angels. Everything I knew suddenly appeared a little off, a little sudden and unexpected, because I had been presented with an entirely new way of thinking and talking about them. The language and scope of that play connected me with the power that I had been trying to find in writing since I was a little kid. I’ve never looked back.

How do you describe your work overall? What sets your work apart?

My work is about tension between the identity and the individual. Every society requires the people within to sort themselves into different groups, if only for the sake of organization. That “sorting” is the source of some of humanity’s worst tendencies, but the solidarity within the sorted groups is the source of some of our best tendencies. I have found in my own life that the more people rely on their category, the more strength they derive from it and the more fear they have of any threat to it. My plays explore the inevitable struggle that everyone faces when forced to confront their “sorting.” Race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, education – we are all eager to be defined in some way, but we are also borne out of molds with infinitely undefined shape. I write to try and, if not solve, then make peace with some of that contradiction.

Can you tell us a little bit about the work you’ve been developing as a Fellow?

That Heaven’s Vault Should Crack is a cycle of five short plays that reimagine stories from the Bible and the Qu’ran in terms of modern-day climate change. Each play transports a narrative like Noah’s Ark or the Crucifixion to the present day and overlays the moral lessons and strictures onto our seemingly more complicated modern system. I find myself fascinated by how resistant the human race is to the idea of climate change, despite how readily and deeply most of us ascribe to the idea of divine forces governing our reality. I think the two of them have to have something in common, and that we can only handle one of them at the time.

What do you find most rewarding about your work as a writer?

I talk a lot. My plays have a lot of words. Beyond anything, I treasure the moments I can create in a play where silence makes more of an impact than words ever will.

Fellows Spotlight is our summer blog series that invites you to take a behind-the-scenes look at our Fellows program.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be hearing from all our 2018-2019 Fellows: Jay Adana, Rae Binstock, Zeniba Britt, Erika Dickerson-Despenza, Mathilde Dratwa, Aryanna Garber, Charles Gershman, Nambi E. Kelley, Melissa Li, Benjamin Velez, Kit Yan, and Zack Zadek.

Each of the Fellows/teams were asked the same 5 questions, exploring where these writers have been, are now, and are journeying towards. Our Fellows took this gentle structure and ran, each submitting responses as unique and creative as they are.

To kick off this series, we are pleased to present Kit Yan and Melissa Li.

(responses submitted by Kit Yan on behalf of the team)

What was your first experience with theater?

We became friends while performing at a Queer Asian cabaret at a divey drag bar in Boston called Jacque’s. Although Melissa had been writing and performing Queer theater with the support of The Theater Offensive, and Kit was already winning awards performing as a slam poet, we’ll never forget the first time we shared the stage together at that cabaret and how important it was to have a space that allowed us to tell our stories on our own terms.

When did you decide to become a writer? Is there a writer, show, or piece of writing that was particularly influential on your path?

Both of us were writers at a young age, whether we were writing songs, poetry, plays, or movies. We always felt the need to share stories and pour our feelings out on the page. But it was at Jacques that we witnessed a kind of theater that was a new experience for us — the art was bold, messy, risky, and unafraid, as were the artists that created it. Today, we try to keep the essence of these formative experiences in our work together.

How do you describe your work overall? What sets your work apart?

As Queer Chinese-American immigrants with very different but rich histories and identities, our work constantly investigates and explores gender, sexuality, and race. Stylistically, because of our artistic backgrounds, we like to break rules and blend style and form. Our work is often peppered with poetry, sugary pop earworms, experimental percussive soundscapes, and other motifs. We use familiar tools, and tools we discover, to tell stories that reflect our experiences.

Can you tell us a little bit about the work you’ve been developing as a Fellow?

We’ve been working on Interstate, a new musical that is semi-based on our own experience, and is very personal to us. It’s about two best friends — a transgender spoken word artist and a lesbian singer-songwriter — going on tour together for the first time, and the ways in which their journey changes the life of one South Asian trans teenager living in Kentucky. The show sounds stylistically similar to the work we used to perform together way back at Jacque’s, and is a love letter to our friendship and our community.

What do you find most rewarding about your work as a writer?

Being writers is powerful because we get to dream about the worlds to which we want to contribute. We get to bring together communities of people who ache to see themselves represented on stage. We get to ask tough questions, be accountable to each other, center friendship and love, and keep hope alive in a world that systematically erases so many of us. It is rewarding work — to be able to write our futures into existence.

Thanks to @melsaboo and @KitYanPoet for sharing! And be sure to follow @DGFound on Instagram and Twitter for more from Fellows Spotlight!