Student Blog: Honoring Specificity First

Welcome to the third part of my profile series on UC San Diego’s MFA playwrights! For today’s edition, I got to chat with the incredible Katie Đỗ, a first year student who brings an unparalleled volume of deeply personal stories to our theatrical community. 

After earning a BFA in acting from Rutgers University, she spent a few years working and auditioning in New York City, where she found a great distance between herself and the characters she was reading for. She then took it upon herself to start writing the roles she wished existed, helping to craft a New York theatrical landscape that looked more like the people comprising it. Eventually, she began to identify more as a writer than an actor, picking up several jobs, notably including one as a staff writer on Netflix's Partner Track. She later arrived at the decision that a master's program for playwriting would be the best way to invest in herself. 

Portraying the experiences of Vietnamese-American women onstage has undoubtedly become her major dramatic interest. Inspired by Ocean Vuong, she finds ways to critique the idea of universality in her writing since “we have such varied experiences, not only as ethnicities and cultures but as individuals within those cultures.” The western definition of universality often leads to an erasure of the specificity that the writer intended, and so Đỗ seeks to honor it first and foremost. She finds so much depth to “the greater scheme of what it means to be Asian-American and how to honor the specificity of our journies."

Such intricacy comes to the forefront in her first fully produced piece at UCSD: Dirty Martini. Two women seek to rebuild their bond after a bitter separation and relearn what it takes to be a friend. She aims to paint a picture of a friendship where “they are trying to put something back together that once was, that can never be the same again.” Key to putting this show together is the rule that these two characters would be women of color. The majority of slice-of-life shows set in New York (a la Friends or Sex and the City) are centered around white friend groups, which Đỗ saw as an opportunity for reinvention. She feels that they shouldn’t “be beholden to only doing plays about their own identity” because she “[wants] them to be able to experience the breadth of humanity and have this be specifically for them.” 

Đỗ mixed up Dirty Martini as a response to the first-year playwrights’ prompt for the Wagner New Play Festival: a two-person play that takes place in one setting. What intrigued her the most was to create the duo dynamic from the remnants of a three-person friend group. The close collaboration with division heads Naomi Iizuka and Deborah Stein has been simply “everything [she] wanted” when assessing graduate programs. 

Another enormously fulfilling aspect of her curriculum is teaching. MFA playwrights at UCSD each take on a couple class sections per year in which they lead introductory or intermediate playwriting. The former ends up being populated by a lot of non-theater students trying to get an arts credit, and she values the opportunity to teach them just as much as the theater students. She’s found that “it’s so amazing getting to see people who don’t typically experience theater [start to] write it, and being there for them during that process is so rewarding.” There’s so much to be gained from your early experiences with theatermaking, and every artist will tell you how indebted they are to the person who opened that first door. Đỗ derives immense joy from igniting the creative spark in students who never knew they had it in them. 

Her biggest pointer to any readers who might be interested in pursuing art in higher education is to “find a way to support yourself through your dreams.” Part of this comes from promising to— say it with me now!— never pay for an MFA, but it also comes from building yourself a support system financially and emotionally. As it currently stands, the United States is a place that makes an artist’s life harder by the day, so it’s crucial to find a sustainable path forward. UCSD has been able to help her on her way to achieving this since the program is fully funded, allowing her the privilege of the time and space to write. It has also granted her a circle of "people who validate [her] voice and encourage it instead of trying to change it," which she hopes everyone can find for themselves as well.

Thank you very much to Katie for her insightful words, and to you for reading! Stick around for part four, where I'll be chatting with our other new recruit from this year: Quentin Nguyen-Duy!