L recently wrote to us about some of their current projects, how being a circus artist plays a role in their writing, where they like to write, and so much more.
L will be workshopping their Venturous play Another Kind of Silence at Playwrights’ Center in March of 2025. Stay tuned for news about its triple premiere at City Theatre Company (Pittsburgh), Curious Theatre Company (Denver), and The VORTEX (Austin). Up next, their play S P A C E (workshopped at the Center in March 2024) will be presented at Central Square Theater in Cambridge, MA January 30 – February 23, 2025.
Read on for more!
What can you share about Another Kind of Silence, the play for which you received the Venturous Playwright Fellowship?
Oh gosh, so many things. Here’s what, today, is leaping to mind:
- I started writing the first iteration of it during my second year of grad school, waaaaaay back when I was still in my mid-20s. Nearly a decade later, a colleague asked me if they could work on it. When I pulled it out of the metaphorical drawer, I realized that all the major life and love and partnership questions I had been asking in the first version of the play had, by now, drastically evolved. While I still wanted to tell the story of the play’s four characters, the play itself now needed a heart-transplant – because all the hard, raw, gnarled, tender questions at the core of the original story had to change, now that I had. So I not just rewrote, but gutted and re-envisioned a whole new version of the play. That re-souled version is the one that we’ll be producing through the Venturous Fellowship production support – because the play is a pretty massive theatrical venture.
- Now in my mid-40s, my experiences continue to evolve, of course, and I find myself surprised that (over the past 20 years) my romantic life has at some point aligned with each character. This play has witnessed me through multiple relationships, break-ups, solitudes, and commitments. And my loyalty to different characters seems to shift each time.
- This play’s bilingualism, biculturalism, and theatrical dramaturgy is the epic result of over 50 different collaborators, over the past 20 years, from actors to directors to lit managers to dramaturgs to audience members to consultants to DASLs [Directors of Artistic Sign Language] to fellow playwrights, and more. And the play is still evolving even now – and will continue to, collaboratively – over the course of its three-production premiere (at City, at Curious, and at VORTEX).
- Quite frankly, I’m astounded, daunted, and (overwhelmingly) grateful to be part of bringing this piece to life. I had given up hope that it would ever live and breathe and (most importantly) move. Off and on over the past two decades, I’ve changed the play as I’ve changed within my life… and now I’m so curious and humbled to see how the play will change me as it changes in ITS OWN life.
We know you as a playwright, but you are also a circus artist, yes? Can you tell us more about that? Does it ever play any role in your writing?
Oh all the time! Though it’s hard to describe how.
I used to put theater into my circus work. These days, I’m putting circus into my theater work. (Both literally and figuratively.) Now that I’m not performing duo-trapeze anymore, I miss it and yearn for that part of myself – that voice of my body, that half of my artistry, that chunk of my soul. So I’ve just started writing A Trilogy of Circus Plays – about the experiences of being a circus artist: from conservatory training to professional touring to coaching and middle-aging to injury and rehab to seniority and ancestry. (Not that they necessarily happen in this order.) I’m trying to write it all down, capture it, share it, honor and grieve it, while I still remember it with extreme and exquisite viscerality.
But even my non-circus plays are embodied, athletic, dynamic. I write in the language of space and touch and movement. I’m interested not just in what we say aloud, but in what we don’t say aloud, what our bodies say – alone or in the presence of others’. I’m interested in physical expressivity, and the articulations of space and distance.
What comes first for you – form or dialogue? Or something else entirely? Where does a play start for you?
It almost always begins with a hot, tangled, complex, tender question or experience that clutches some part of me – heart, head, gut, groin, soul.
Or it starts with me reading, seeing, hearing, or learning something that ignites me – usually with some combination of grief, rage, and curiosity.
For me, the form usually grows out of that living breathing fiery tender question that seeds the play.
Ideally, though, it would all start with a commission. 🙂
Where is your favorite place to create?
My bedroom-office. I dream of a day when those are two separate rooms, but until then: I bounce from desk chair to sofa chair, to Theraball to bed wall, to floor to futon. I take handstand breaks and coffee breaks and dance breaks, and then stare at my screen while I eat leftover soup (tiny spoon, huge pot), and I DJ my soundscape with nature recordings or some instrumentals – or silence except for my own reading voice. And I look out the window over my desk at the sparrows. And I light a candle that I only light when I’m writing each new play. On the best days, I get to spend six to eight hours like that. On teaching days, it’s more like an hour or two.
What do you look for most in collaborators?
Actors who teach me about choices and impulses and depths and humor that make the play shimmer far beyond what I’d imagined it could do.
Directors who intuit what the heart of the play is for me, and who also feel the play thumping in their own heart in their own vital way.
Directors who love and value a collaborative, communicative, enriching relationship with living playwrights.
Dramaturgs who are honest and kind and clear and specific and stoked about the project.
Folks who, in addition to the language of the DIALOGUE, are also reading the play’s use of FORM, ENSEMBLE, POWER, IMAGE, SPACE, STYLE, TIME, RHYTHM, TOUCH, EMBODIMENT, KINETICISM, THEATRICALITY, POETRY, IMPOSSIBILITY, COMMUNITY, and TRANSCENDENCE. Because these too are languages, and they’re all harmonizing to make a symphony. (I write epic, ambitious, dynamic, multivalent theater.)
Being a professional playwright can often feel like a constant hustle of writing, applying, workshopping, and juggling multiple projects at once. How do you like to rest? What fills your cup when it’s time to recharge?
Woods walks. Friend talks. Handstand playdates with circus buddies. Swimming. Stretching. Laughing. Being with folks who remind me where joy lives – and that pleasure matters. Cooking. Eating. Sipping a really herby cocktail. Bonfires, rituals, and reflective conversations. Community. Other forms of art. Music. Pema Chodron. Podcasts. Learning something new. Watching animals move. Reading anything the folks I most trust tell me to read. FaceTime dates with my fam. Shabbat dinner with my housemates. Being held by someone I love. Watching really fabulous drag and cabaret. Other people’s remarkable art (of any kind). Working with my circus students. Cleaning my homespace. Nesting. Letting myself go quiet. Being an introvert. Staring at a wall. Browsing a bookstore. Leaving rambly, contemplative, 20-minute voice notes to faraway friends. Listening to theirs. Sleeping for an admirable amount of time.
