BWW Exclusive Interview: VANESSA GARCIA On Playwriting, Searching for Your Voice
By: Trevor Durham Oct. 14, 2017
I first saw Vanessa Garcia sitting behind me in a master class. She was the only person in the audience whose pen flitted across the page as furiously as possible, stealing ideas and thoughts and hopes of the teacher. She ducked out quickly, but we began an email correspondence as I prepared to see her writing teach. This week, I sat in on an early workshop and reading of a play she has been developing since the election cycle of last year, one worked in various cities and audiences. The characters were blinking, breathing, questioning her around the table, as her pen stole across her notebook. Her eyes shone when her characters rebelled against her, both from the page and from the performers' silences. Her journey as an author, of plays and shorts and poems and novels and essays, is not one that has an end destination, but rather, appreciates these pit-stops and inquisitive moments.
Having looked through her impressive oeuvre, one made up of many locales and narratives and worlds I hope the public will soon be able to access, I slated an interview with her to commence after 1000 Miles was given its newest reading. The developmental stage done for her, she took each question and spun it backwards, something her characters are ought to do with each difficulty and challenge, so that they, like Garcia, can create beauty out of darkness.
BWW: You're a rare breed of creator who balances educational growth with your creative growth- you've been in school until you got your PhD two years ago, but you've still amassed a CV touting journalism, screenplays, scripts, non-fiction essays, and a well-received novel. How do you manage what is the bane of so many writer's existence- learning while creating?
Vanessa Garcia: This question has two answers, which are equally true. The first is that I don't see them as separate, learning and creating. Especially with something like theatre, you really learn as you interact with the actors and director, you learn about your piece through audiences as well. The process is everything, and process is learning and creating at the same time. Revision is the same, when it comes to novels and other genres.
The second thing is that getting stipends and money from universities (fellowships, grants, etc.) to get a Masters and PhD allowed me to survive, while writing. It's hard to make money at the beginning, as an artist, and for me, those stipends were a way to do what I wanted to do, keep making art, while expanding my world or my base of knowledge.
BWW: At what point in a developmental process do you select the medium you're going to have the piece exist in? You've worked in so many written forms, from copy to ten-minute plays to poetry and everything in between, but when does your voice decide on its vehicle?
VG: That comes pretty early. I've never been halfway through something and thought, "Oops, wrong media." I mean there are instances when you can see multiple versions of something you're writing. Like, for instance, with 1000 Miles, I can easily see writing novels with the characters' backstories. Mostly because I wrote up so much of their world before writing the play. I can easily see a world in which I write a book about Solis and Viola's escape. About what happened to Peter and Mark's parents. About Maria and her father. But, I wanted to write this as a play first because, for me, the world of 1000 Miles is about confluence. The world of 1000 Miles came in visuals to me - in movement, in stars, in things I wanted to see in front of me, instead of in interior monologue or anything else. You can argue film for this too, but theatre really lets you play and cross borders, which is why I love it. For some people, theatre might seem limiting, but you can do anything in theatre. You're still allowed to suspend disbelief in theatre. The audience's Imagination still exists as a character on the stage.
So the short of it is that it depends on what I'm seeing or hearing at the beginning. If I'm listening to people talk, it's a play. If I'm seeing images, just one after another, it's a play. If I'm following a character, just one character, constantly, through places, thoughts, action, and experiences, discovery - usually that's a novel.
BWW: Your works all hold a vibrant world within them, as you toy with form and structure. What artists inspired this form of expression in you - whether it be the authors you read or visual artists you immerse in?
VG: I've been obsessed with structure - always. I mean always. For me, the best way to deal with something is to explode the structure of it, even if you have to put it back together again. Because putting it back together again, you realize: Oh there's a different way to put it back together, not just that old way. I'm always pissed off at how much some "gatekeepers" distrust their audiences, how stupid they think audiences are. The audience isn't stupid. And, in fact, I think they really like to see different ways of seeing on stage and in books, in art. Because, the reality is, we've been looking at one way because there has been one kind of editor, one kind of mindset or point of view, one kind of producer for a very long time. We've been changing that, little by little, especially in the last several years, there's been a real push to include different voices into theatre, and by different, I mean "diverse" voices - as a result, we're going to get different ways of seeing, different structure. We're still not there, we are constantly having to fight a particular kind of mindset regarding what theatre is. What "American theatre" is. We'll get there, and hopefully the American stage (which itself will change, the space of it) will actually include all the variety of Americans that exist. That's going to translate into form.
When I was a teenager, I was reading Reinaldo Arenas and Borges, and Kundera, and people like that. I was also reading experimental novelists like Gilbert Sorrentino. So when people said to me: "You can't get a PhD; that makes you an academic, not a creative writer," I wanted to scream. People live in boxes other people create for them. Why? So many writers have been thinkers, always, so many writers have deconstructed and constructed at the same time. Separating worlds (whether they be by disciplines or cultures) is pretty silly - they all feed into each other, talk to each other. When we start to look down at something, it's because we don't understand it. Better to start trying to understand it than remain a fool. The world is a tapestry, not just a bunch of hanging strings.
BWW: When someone reads any of your works, they'll recognize themes of cultures transported, impenetrable barriers or walls, and the endless supply of dreams or desires. Your play, The Cuban Spring, deals with this in perhaps the most direct way, with the pregnant Siomora trapped between cultures. When imbuing your characters with this conflict, is it your way of exploring your personal cages, or a way of showing your audience how they can live with their own?
VG: For me, it's all about optimism. I know this last play (1000 Miles) seems hopeless, but it isn't. It isn't because we're sitting here, watching it, we're sitting her watching other people's cages, and, hopefully, that will help us stop making them, collectively.
BWW: Of all your many works that take place on a stage, which are the ones you most hope audiences can see? The pieces whose voice is the loudest, most relevant, or most captivating?
VG: Of all my plays, which is the loudest... I'm basically obsessed with whichever play I'm working on at the time. I enter that world, I try to build it up as specifically as possible and then I want to share it. And something that happens to me is that I can easily re-enter a world I've created and continue to build. Which is great for theatre, because theatre gets re-seen and re-made by different directors, casts and audiences. I LOVE that.
BWW: As anybody who has read your letter to yourself can tell, you have a sustainable optimism that your artistic path is towards freedom. You have optimism hidden in any of your works, as Theatre Lab audiences saw in Solis. How do you apply this hopeful outlook to the many impenetrable challenges you write about - sexism, democracy, our post-truth era?
VG: I don't think there is a way to move forward without optimism. Without optimism there isn't a next step, there isn't the building of a new path, there isn't a new door you can make to break the wall you're facing.
BWW: In a play-reading such as yours, much of the audience is made up of women. A master class on playwriting often is, as well. Yet, of the many theatres on Broadway, there is not a single play written by a female playwright currently open. How can you encourage the ferocious and hard-working playwrights who have challenges such as this ahead of them?
VG: The truth is this: Women have to work harder. I have worked very, very hard. Looking back it's hard not to get tired, even just thinking about it. I still work very hard, every single day, to get my pieces where they need to be. It makes the work better. At least there's that. The trick is helping each other, helping each other when no one else will. I'm absolutely against competition on the creative plane. We all have something to say, and those things are different, you are not competing with someone else because you have something very different to say. The idea is to work for a world in which we all get to say it, explore it. So I guess what I would say is: be prepared to work, break the structures that exist, erase jealousy, and strive to make the best work possible.
BWW: When you imagine not only yourself, but other colleagues you admire, and the challenges you had at a younger age, what would be your words of wisdom to push an artist of any field to endure the difficulties ahead?
VG: Oof. I think you have to know that it's a long and winding road. That it's hard. Put on your best hiking boots (really your best ones; invest in these), and if you don't like blisters, maybe this isn't the road for you. That said, one of the reasons it's a long and winding road, is that you're making the road as you walk it, searching for your own way. Sometimes it's hard to figure out where to go, but it's yours. And that's a beautiful thing - you can shape and it and make it however you wish. And then you can invite other people to walk on it. Share it.
It's often painful, I'm not going to lie. Sometimes you sit down in the bush and you see a deep thicket of wilderness ahead and you think: dear god, do I really have to cut all that down to keep going? And you're hungry and thirsty and you just want to lie down and look up or find an easy path, with set milestones, and answers. Sometimes you're down there with the wilderness all around you for a while, and you get stung by fierce little critters and you get sick when it rains, because you have nowhere to dry off. But then you get back up eventually, and you cut down some more of those branches and, just at the other end of what you've had to cut away, there's something magnificent.
Vanessa Garcia will be teaching a master class on writing at Theatre Lab, October 15th at 10:00am. Tickets can be purchased online or at the door.
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