 |
| Playwright Tamara Kissane |
In Kissane’s domestic drama, co-produced by William Peace University, a family of social activists are about to get an unwelcome reality check when their daughter, who’s just reached voting age, tells them she is not going to vote. Worse news for us? Her friends at school have made the same decision.
I spoke with the creator and host of the ARTIST SOAPBOX podcast by phone on August 14, 2020, for a overview article on the festival in the Aug. 19 issue of INDY Week. Edited highlights from our 99-minute conversation begin, after the jump.
Byron Woods: “How did you get involved in a new project” is a routine first question in arts journalism. But with an endeavor like The 19th Amendment Project, I’m a lot more interested in your thought processes after you received the invitation: how you decided you would do it, and how ideas started sprouting after that.
Tamara Kissane: One of the things that is very exciting to me about this project is that it’s not a single play written by a single person, but rather 14 plays written by 14 different people – because I think the size of this topic needs as many perspectives and voices as possible.
Personally, what interests me most is the contemporary moment: how we interpret history based on our present, lived experience. Rather than looking at and trying to reinterpret something that happened 200 years ago, I'm interested in how we take what happened 100 years ago and talk about it, in this moment, today.
That made for a difficult piece to write, due to the speed at which things change when you're writing about 2020 in 2020. I wrote the first draft in March. At that point, we were still in the primary process, I was still hoping that Elizabeth Warren would receive the Democratic presidential nomination and things were really still in flux. We hadn’t even locked down here in this area [due to the COVID-19 pandemic – ed.].
So I was forecasting in March what things would look like in November. I updated the draft at the beginning of July; adding masks and something about mail-in absentee ballots. But even now, a month later, the piece is already in some ways outdated.
So much of the time in playwriting development, it can take years to bring a piece in front of an audience, and when it does, sometimes a work feels less relevant then than in the moment of writing. The great challenge for me was trying to keep it accurate – and relevant – even though things are changing on a day-to-day basis.
If I had known at the beginning of this year that 2020 was going to be 2020 – the kind of grisly moving dumpster fire that it is – I might have set it at a different time. But it seemed like if you're going to commemorate the 100-year anniversary it should be set in 2020, so that is what I tried to do.
A playwright has to freeze the work at some point so the actors can have a stable script, but it’s so tempting to keep editing and adding material. I made that mistake in the first version of my first solo show and I paid for it. Anna Deavere Smith did the same in House Arrest, her documentary theater work based on the Clinton White House at Arena Stage.
I did freeze my work with that last draft in July, so I will be curious to see what the folks at William Peace University do with that. It was written to be a play and not anything virtual or filmed, so I'm also really curious to see how that translates because we know that, you know, they're not the same type of mediums.
"I have a 12-year old daughter, and I think a lot about when it is her time to vote, how that world will look, and what a vote will mean to her. That is where I really started with this idea of what a vote means to each individual, how we value it, what it means."
I made a list of all of the different things that a vote could mean. A vote can be a burden, especially to this youngest voting generation: the 18-to-29-year-olds who can have a huge impact on the way the election goes.
I'm Gen X, and the Gen X’ers and Boomers and even the Millennials hope this youngest generation will be engaged. We desperately need them to be engaged.
But in some ways, our older generations have set them up to fail. Through our own choices we have created a world that is is so difficult for them: politically, financially and culturally. I have nothing but sympathy and empathy for that generation, especially in this dire year. I’m trying to work with them, to lift them up and help them feel engaged.
I've been thinking voting is about engagement. A willingness to vote is a willingness to be engaged; it is to feel engaged. I am interested in exploring the reasons why people might not feel engaged, especially against the backdrop of the story we tell about the fight for women's right to vote – how women were beaten, imprisoned and in some cases died in the struggle to vote – juxtaposing that with this moment when there are many people who choose not to vote.
"It's very complicated, right? We are told a story about women's getting the vote, and it's a lot of rah-rah-rah: 'this is something we should celebrate.' But it was really kind of a mess, and it was a mess afterwards, because not all women were actually given the right to vote. A lot of white women weaponized their vote against people of color, and against themselves – ourselves, I should say – by voting against our own interests in many cases. The 19th Amendment is a very complicated legacy for us as a nation."
I think my instinct as a parent, is to try and up the quotient: “Let's celebrate this! This is a victory! Let's all go vote and make a difference!”
But that doesn't tell the complete story of both the historical and contemporary situation, wherein in both cases we had people actively working against the public good.
Part of what I wanted to do in Thunderclap was show a young woman who is really conflicted – who sees and understands how valuable and important her vote is – and at the same time questions whether or not it makes any difference, and questions the entire system which is really broken, and feels sadness because of that.
Even 100 years later, we're still facing enormous numbers – even in the play, I included them - examples of misogyny, examples of marginalization of many populations in our country. It's really hard to get excited about voting in this year.
One thing I'm proud of in the current version of this script is that you really did not take the easy way out. Thunderclap is no victory lap. That wouldn't have been as challenging, as necessary – or as useful. It really is a work of interrogation; it’s asking some very pointed questions of the present moment.
You take us to the cliff's edge and leave us there – which you have every right to do, because weren't we really there already? The Latin phrase in medias res refers to being in the middle of things. It’s where we always are, and just now, the times feel a lot more contingent than perhaps they usually do.
In Thunderclap, we're watching a family in a moment of crisis that mirrors in some ways a nation in a moment of crisis – one where we could potentially be witnessing the suddenly accelerating death of hope: a political system or society that might be hearing its death warrant being read.
In life, more than one thing can be true at the same time, and part of growing up is being able to accept that more than one thing can be true at the same time. In the friction this family feels, the reality that they want to be in place, and the reality that is in place, are in conflict. The love they have for each other and the disappointment they feel in each other, those are all true at the same time.
Unfortunately for Alice, the young woman in this piece, that's part of growing up. It’s being able to make the best choice that you can, when the understanding is that there is no best choice, and often the situation that you're presented with is complicated and sometimes contradictory within itself.
The reason these things are so complicated is because we're dealing with humans, who are very complicated. They don't act logically or reasonably, and they sometimes don't care in the right way for each other or don’t take care of each other.
We have left these younger people this world that is broken, because of the self-interests that the older generations have had. We've all had our heads up our asses. We just have been thinking about ourselves. The self-interest, it is so damaging, and it's very difficult to pull out of that.
One of the things I've tried to show in this piece is that force is the ultimate trump card the parents pull: "you will go and vote, if I have to drag you; you live in my house." Force is what we all turn to, ultimately, as a way of getting what we want. That choice needs to be reexamined.
"I don't know for sure, because I'm not 18. But my guess is if we want to engage one another, engage the younger folks and collectively imagine a new future together, we need to empathize, we need to apologize, and we need to strategize – with them, not at them."
I didn't do any of that in my play, but I hope I raised some questions at least.
The present state of the planet and our society – yes, it clearly constitutes generational child abuse. We've placed this planet and this social structure here, and the kids are pretty much stuck with it.
When Alice calls her parents on it, and says her generation is not going to bail us out, Thunderclap reminds us that there is no magic wand of engagement.
The youngest generation is not obliged to give a damn; they're not obliged to save our bacon. And when you put that much weight on a leg like that – you know, you’ve got to hope that leg is going to hold it: that it was engineered, developed, given the proper nutrients and resilience to bear that much weight. We're in the process of finding out now whether it is, and an awful lot is riding on that proposition.
In the present moment we are making these demands on a group of people that, in one sense, we haven't been prepared to make on ourselves. You have to ask, how wise is it to do something like that? And what is reasonable to expect when you place someone else in that circumstance?
Something I have written about in almost all of my recent work is our willingness to sacrifice our own children. The perfect example of that is how we are reacting during COVID, with the schools.
As a country, we had the choice to lock down. We could open schools or open bars – and we chose the bars. So now, we've got all these kids in precarious situations, and by extension, their families in precarious situations.
Essentially what we are doing is trying to get them back into school where either they can get sick and become very ill, or they can get their family members sick, bear the responsibility for that, and experience that trauma.
We've traumatized them by keeping them isolated; some kids are in various unsafe situations; some are not getting the nutrition and socialization they need. This was something that we decided to do, as a society, as other countries made different choices.
And this is a choice that we make, over and over again, as a country: to prioritize the grown-ups over taking care of the vulnerable, including the children, the elderly, the immunocompromised, and people who are poor or unemployed. We discard them; we put our vulnerable populations in more jeopardy rather than choosing to help shore them up.
I find it astonishing because the children now will one day be adults. We are all responsible for helping to raise them up.
"All of it ultimately leads to the question: Can we do things differently? This is time to be asking that. In every area of our lives, we now have the opportunity to ask the question, can we do this differently moving forward?"
When Alice says “Me and the other kids from school -- we’ve decided. This stops with our generation. We will no longer enable this bullshit,” -- she sounds very…parental. That should send a chill down everyone’s spine. It reminds me of the lines from Leonard Cohen’s song, “The Future.” “Your servant here, he has been told / to say it clear, to say it cold: / It's over. It ain't going any further.” It also recalls a verse from the Torah: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a thankless child.”
Thunderclap clearly seems more than a one-scene, one-act play, and I'm more than usually interested in where you and your characters might take us. It’s mapping out a very dangerous road, but one that needs to be traveled – because we as a country seem to be on it.
Instead of being able to grow up and experience their youth, we are forcing young people into an adulthood that has this sort of dystopian cloud cover or forecast. A lot of young activists are refusing to continue along this treacherous road that we have tied them to.
Our generation and the older generations just need to take responsibility, instead of abandoning them to their own devices, right?
We're so proud of this of this thing we invented: this manner of representation that’s looking increasingly like a Rube Goldberg machine. But what happens when an entire generation says, “I have no confidence in this thing you have made, and I choose not to use it”?
And not only do we set them up with a machine that doesn't work and they say, “Oh, the machine is broken. I have no confidence in this.” We also don't give them the power to change it, or at least a straightforward way to change it.
Years ago, it occurred to me that if anyone in the U.S. at this point attempted to enact for themselves the principle enshrined in our Declaration of Independence – “When in the course of human events” people sometimes need to dissolve their present political ties and system and choose another – it would not go well for them. As Wendell Berry has put it, what we are and what we were once are now far estranged.
But if there’s no way for a younger generation to enact significant, systemic change – because if they do, they’re branded as socialists, anarchists, antifa – if you block off any avenue of resolution or exit, you cannot imagine you’re going to wind up in a healthy place.
I have hope.
It would be foolish of us to think we know the answers to problems we have not yet been able to solve. I am hopeful that other people will come up with solutions we could never imagine.
I'm also hopeful that the events of 2020 have conspired to place us all in a situation where we will be forced to just do things differently, and maybe that will result in lasting change.
I'm cautiously optimistic because I want to believe that things can get better. History gives us many examples of change taking time. The 19th Amendment was at least 70 years in the making; some of the people who started it did not see it pass.
"Being able to pull back and use history as an example, change can come – it just doesn't come at the speed at which we want it to. That gives me hope for my children and for their children, if we survive that long."
There is some hope in a late rapprochement between Alice and her mom, but you leave the matter unresolved; their situation, like ours, is still up in the air. The road remains treacherous, but not all of the common ground has given way around them – or, hopefully, us.
I think they, you, and we are all striving: to persevere, to keep hope alive. That’s probably a struggle for all of us, in this culture, in this moment.
Thunderclap situates us in a society where the phrase “in order to form a more perfect union” has gone from a fervent goal to an acid mockery in a Patti Smith babelogue. And the supposed long-term American project, the road-trip to Utopia: at the current moment we're nowhere near the place, and the roadmaps that have taken us here seem useless. It's a very easy moment to question the path we've been on and, in Joni Mitchell’s words, the place we’ve lately gotten to.
"I don’t want to imply that I’m not grateful for the 19th Amendment. Even as a young girl, I was excited by the stories of the suffragettes; I’ve always been a proud feminist.
I also feel that at this moment, we really need to be focusing not on what was, but “now what?” And it needs to be done with honesty, transparency, and love—along with the acknowledgment that it is painful to be an American."
Now, yes.
"Now, and probably always. We need to be real about that."
No comments:
Post a Comment