Student Blog: Finding the Stage, Not Just the Page

Welcome back! I’m delighted to be returning to my miniseries of profiles about UC San Diego’s MFA playwrights with a thrilling conversation with in-house genius Mylan Gray. He’s a bold, incendiary writer who tells historically rooted stories of hope and possibility through the lens of the Black experience both in the United States and worldwide. 

Playwriting became their fascination after many years of competing nationally in speech & debate. They discovered that debating is the skill of “telling the facts of a story in a way that’ll get you what you want most,” and bridged the gap towards theater by asking “what would it be like to not bend the facts, but to make the facts?” A playwright is responsible for the rules of their world no matter how big or small, and the intrigue of building these realities through theatrical storytelling opened the door towards playwriting that they followed from a BA at Stanford University all the way to the final year of their MFA here at UCSD. 

As a monumental thesis production to cap off their three-year tenure here, they are getting ready to present Motherloss, a sociopolitical odyssey he describes as a “fantastical journey play.” A boy named Dwayne sees his deceased mother in a dream and chases her back in time through 1500’s Gold Coast and Ghana, and along this path, “he learns from each character what it means to make a home in someone and to find community.” Gray has had a longtime interest in creating a journey play exploring the African diaspora’s ties to Brazil and the US, and so this story was conceived about a year ago. It became their choice to crown their thesis after exploring these layers and utilizing heightened theatricality to include dance elements that will make for an unforgettable night of theater. 

Motherloss is Gray’s culminating piece after the triumphs of Boxed and 809 Almond in spring 2023 and 2024 respectively. These two might be totally incomparable at first glance— even admittedly by the writer himself— but finds a link between their worlds in the ways that their Black protagonists must navigate systems of power that stack the cards against them at sharp, unforgiving socioeconomic angles. They are about characters who find the courage to break the rules, just like the writer who created them. 

Via a grant from the Black Studies Project, they were able to take a research trip to Brazil last summer, which ended up being pivotal in this early phase of the creative process. Examining several historical sites, such as slave-run gold mines, set the dramaturgical elements of Motherloss into motion. He describes himself as “a conceptual, associative writer who finds form last” so the feedback from playwriting professors Naomi Iizuma and Deborah Stein helped condense these huge ideas into scenes. 

Iizuka in particular was a major stylistic inspiration. Gray finds her work to possess “this magical, poetic yet embodied writing style” which made them feel like a playwriting program led by her would be the perfect fit. These three years have brought about quite a fruitful collaboration between the two as “she helped [them] bring the wilds of [their] mind into physical, tangible things.” Not to mention the tiny class sizes making such a collaboration a dream come true since such significant blocks of time could be dedicated to their works. As things currently stand, UCSD only will accept 1-2 playwrights a year, making for a closely focused, individualized writing program.

Through the Wagner New Play Festival production process, they’ve learned a lot about themself as a writer and about how characters are brought to life with actors’ voices. Once rehearsals began for 809 Almond, they were surprised to find out new things about the character Jonathan (originated by Layth Haddad.) He is an antagonistic force in the story, yet Gray recalls that “he wanted to carve out and focus on his humanity in a way that made him sort of likeable, which both changed how I wanted to write the character and what I imagined the play to be.” Working on a script for months and months will make you intimately acquainted with its world and characters, yet bringing it to life in a full-scale production is like meeting it for the first time all over again. And that process of discovery and rediscovery would not be possible without the “pressure cooker of development” that is the WNPF.

As parting advice, aside from promising never to pay for an MFA, they implore any readers to become the best student of what you love. Diving headfirst into your passions and bolstering your knowledge and understanding of their inner workings will only foster more opportunities down the line. Gray says it better than I ever could: "the depth of your studies informs the deft of your craft."

Thank you Mylan for such a wonderful chat! And thank you for reading. I hope you're gleaning some wisdom from these interviews, because I know I sure am. Come back next time to meet first-year MFA writer Katie Đỗ!