Interview: Christopher Chen of THEATREWORKS NEW WORKS FESTIVAL at Montalvo Arts Center Delights in the Element of Surprise

Especially for the more adventurous theatregoers among us, it is wonderful news indeed that TheatreWorks Silicon Valley is presenting the 19th Annual New Works Festival November 6-13, 2022 at Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga. The Tony Award-winning theatre company is partnering with Montalvo Arts Center and its Lucas Artists Residency Program to stage the popular festival that offers audiences an extraordinary opportunity to experience new plays and musicals in their early stages of development and to meet the artists behind them. Between performances of each work, playwrights and composers have the opportunity to revise and refine their shows during the festival, allowing audiences to view the evolution of brand-new pieces of theatre in real time.

The lineup includes readings of three enticingly different works - Jonathan Larson Grant winners Danny Haengil Larsen and Michelle Elliott's new musical Hart Island about unlikely connection in the face of tragedy; The Motion, an incendiary new play exploring values and belief systems by Obie Award-winning Bay Area playwright Christopher Chen; and Words We Believe, a powerful examination of fractured community by Kleban Award winner Rehana Lew Mirza. TheatreWorks' Artistic Associate and Director of New Works Giovanna Sardelli says, "I'm thrilled to return to our first in-person festival since 2019 and to do it in partnership with Montalvo just makes the occasion all that more special." TheatreWorks Artistic Director Tim Bond adds, "Developing new works is in TheatreWorks' DNA. An integral part of our mission is to foster and build community around artists as they create works that will engage theatre audiences of the future."

I caught up with playwright Christopher Chen by phone recently to talk about The Motion. Chen is one of those rare individuals who is an actual San Francisco native, born here and raised in the Noe Valley neighborhood. In a delightfully chatty interview, we discussed how much he's looking forward to getting his play up on its feet at the New Works Festival, how he became a playwright in the first place, and his recent experiences delving into the world of television via a deal with Amazon TV. Chen is known for writing plays that upend the audience's expectations in surprising and very theatrical ways. His career has really gathered steam in recent years, with his work being produced across the country, including at Lincoln Center and right here at home in San Francisco. In fact, The Headlands, a play he describes as his "love letter to San Francisco," will be done at A.C.T. this coming February. Along the way, he has won a slew of awards in addition to his Obie, including a Paula Vogel Playwrighting Award and a Glickman Award. The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

The Motion is being called "an incendiary play exploring values and belief systems." Is that how you would describe it?

I'm not sure how "incendiary" it is [laughs] ... but it starts out as this relatively low-stakes debate on animal rights. I'm not sure if you know the podcast "Intelligence Squared Debates," but there's a moderator and then two sets of experts on two sides of an issue, and they go through this debate where each person in turn does a little monolog, an opening statement, very polite and formal, and then they take questions from the audience and pose questions to each other and give wrap-up arguments. I think it's called "Oxford-style" debating. So it's a very civilized debate, and I just love the podcast. It involves subject matter you never even thought about, and the speakers tend to be experts in [for example] gene-splicing or, you know, school admissions. They're very gifted public speakers, like Malcolm Gladwell might be one of the speakers, or some secretary of state. I've always found those debates fascinating, and also just fun and exciting.

So about half of the play consists of a debate along those lines on animal rights, and hopefully just the debate itself will be very compelling and draw the audience into subject matter maybe they haven't thought much about. And then the play starts to kind of magically, structurally change, and some of the philosophical questions at the core of this argument start to be expressed in much more personal and theatrical ways. I don't want to get into too much about how that happens, but suffice it to say the debate magically starts to transform and the issues at play start to take on different resonances, hopefully in a very exciting way.

One of the hallmarks of your work seems to be the way you play with theatrical form.

Mm-hm, yeah.

When you're writing a play do you intentionally set out to do that?

I do, yes. Because as a viewer myself and also as a writer, I'm just really in love with the element of surprise, and I love the idea of using whatever medium you're in and harnessing all of its effects to the greatest extent. I love to create plays that contain these magical, theatrical surprises in them. Otherwise, it's like why bother going to the theater if you're just gonna see a bunch of people sitting around in a living room discussing an issue? And it's also honoring the subject matter, too. Like let's take these issues and explore them and explode them to the fullest extent possible, to really delve into what the meat of this thing is.

In reviews I've read of your plays, it seems like midway through the critic always basically goes, "I won't really spell out what happens next, but certain assumptions you've had up until that point will be upended."

Yeah, I like to think of my shows at times as magic acts, where you may even come in knowing that there will be surprises, but then you end up being delighted by what the surprise actually is.

There is also I would say more of a philosophical underpinning behind this, and that is that I love to go to the theater to be entertained and surprised, but also to have my mind expanded, and the best plays do all of those things at once. They cause me to think about things in different ways, and so the element of surprise, of the unexpected, for me simulates what I want the audience to be thinking on their own when they look at a certain subject, to be surprised by thinking about something in a different way. It's almost like theatricalizing what I want to have going on internally inside an audience.

You're already a well-established playwright with your work getting produced all over the place. For someone like you, how important are programs like this New Works Festival in your ability to get a new play ready for production?

I've been venturing into TV and film these days, but one of the best things about the theatre process, the playwrighting process, is this development with actors in order to really get the work itself into a good place. It's just such an integral part of the playwrighting process for me. For me now it's just like notes from executives, which kills rather than like stimulates. This is just such a generative, organic way of developing the work, and it really stimulates the creative work on its path to its final form. So I would say it's essential, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

And also it's building a relationship with the theatre company and their community as well. I've been working in Bay Area theatre for about two decades now, and this is my first time ever working at TheatreWorks, so it's kind of a milestone for me in that regard, too.

What do you personally hope to get out of this experience at the New Works Festival?

I just hope to have a really solid version of the play, and to experience the play living and breathing with these amazing local actors, and through that really get a handle on the play. If it gets produced, there will be a lot of theatrical elements added to it at some point, but really, the living and breathing heartbeat of it is just having actors embody it. I feel I have the intellectual core of it down, and so now I think through this I really will understand the beating heart of it a little better, which is next layer in a way. And frankly just being able to develop this work and push it forward with [director] Giovanna [Sardelli] and these local actors is just gonna be a sheer joy. Being in TV Land recently, I've been really relishing and cherishing all these moments to engage with the local theatre community again.

At what point in your life did you first get an inkling that you wanted to be a playwright?

Never! [laughs] I totally stumbled on this. All throughout my childhood I was interested in almost every single artform except for it. I wrote short stories all through elementary school, up through college I was writing poetry, I was doing film, I was even acting, and then I was doing music and music composition. I actually went to UC Berkeley to do music composition as my main area of focus. I was taking film classes and all these other types of artistic classes, and then I joined this Asian American sketch comedy group called Theatre Rice at UC Berkeley. I wrote my first serious play with them just because I wanted something to direct. I was more interested in theatre directing at the time cause that kind of scratched my film directing itch. I took playwrighting classes after that and started gradually falling in love with the medium because it was this kind of union of all these different mediums that I loved. It combined the spectacle of cinema with a musicality, and it also had a literary bent to it. I hadn't studied a lot of playwrights when I started writing plays. And then I went to SF State for my MFA after that.

How did you first get one of your plays produced?

My grad school play, Into the Numbers, was selected for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. One of my playwrighting professors wrote an email to Amy Mueller at the Playwrights Foundation recommending me to the Playwrights Festival and that could have helped me get in. And then Gary Graves at Central Works went to see it and commissioned my first full-length production as part of the Central Works Method. That was a play called The Window Age back in 2009, so that was my first full production ever, and it was so thrilling. So I'm definitely a recipient of a lot of local Bay Area support.

As an observer of the theatre scene, it appears to me that playwrights of Asian descent are having a less difficult time these days getting their work produced. Does it feel that way to you?

Yeah, it does seem like there is kind of a moment happening. You know there's always been a lot of Asian American Playwrights. I was a part of the Asian American Theatre Company, they had this New Works incubator program when I first graduated from college back in 2004 undergrad. So, yeah, there was always a lot of Asian playwrights, but they just weren't getting produced a lot. But it does seem like this pipeline of Asian writers has been developing over the past two decades and are finally having a moment. In fact, there was a New York Times article written about this explosion of Asian American plays right before the pandemic hit, and I was fortunate to be a part of that. So, yes, it seems like nationally we're having a moment as well.

And I suppose the tricky part now is to make sure it isn't only a "moment."

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You currently have a deal with Amazon TV. Are you able to talk about what that entails?

I'm not able to give any specifics of things I'm working on, but suffice it to say it's about developing shows with them, and it's just a very, very amazing opportunity. Basically, you get paid to develop stuff and just kind of be part of the company's family.

As someone coming from the theatre world, was there a big learning curve?

Yes, in the way things work. If you've ever talked to a playwright before who's done TV, I'm sure they'll allude to something similar, but TV is so plot-based and character-arc-based, with a beginning, middle and end. I mean, theatre is too, but TV is much more like that. A playwright friend who was in the TV business once told me when I was talking about "Oh, yeah, there's this dialog and that dialog," she was like "TV people do not care about dialog whatsoever. All they care about is what actions happen, and actions that will surprise the viewer."

So in that sense, the element of surprise, it does come naturally to me to a degree. Another executive said something to me about "Oh, yeah, TV is just a plot beast." Like it will eat up any kind of plot that you have. So you can have ten plot points in a pilot and you can always churn out more. Plot, plot, plot!

In playwrighting, there's a lot more room for subtlety or dialog, which is not the case in TV. You have to be really "on point." If there is any kind of subtlety, you need to explain what that subtlety is for executives and talent to read. They're not like sitting in some armchair with a brandy ruminating on this one line of yours. [laughs] They're just like - zip, zip, zip! Or their assistant is reading it, so they have to understand exactly what's going on.

So, yeah, it's definitely a learning curve, but I think anyone who is a consumer of TV, that's the biggest grad school or tutorial you can have, because it comes naturally.

Taking a page from the Bernard Pivot questionnaire James Lipton always used at the end of his Inside The Actors Studio interviews, what profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

You know ... maybe writing a novel. Novels are the medium that really expanded my world view in high school and sort of set me on this humanities path to begin with.

And the flip side of that: What profession would you not like to do?

Probably ... tax accountant. [laughs] All love to my tax accountant, but to just be thinking about money all the time? I wouldn't have the head for it!

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The TheatreWorks New Works Festival runs November 6-13, 2022 at Montalvo Arts Center, 15400 Montalvo Road, Saratoga. Festival passes and single event tickets can be purchased online at theatreworks.org or by calling (877)-662-8978.

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