Interview: Sharifa Yasmin of CLOSE TO HOME at Bay Area Playwrights Festival Creates Queer and Arab Characters in Their Full Complexity

One thing the renowned playwrights Sam Shepard, Paula Vogel, Annie Baker, David Henry Hwang, and Lauren Gunderson all have in common is that their work received early readings at Playwrights Foundation, the San Francisco-based launchpad for exciting new works. From July 29 to August 7, Playwrights Foundation is once again inviting audiences to peer into the future of the American Theatre with their annual Bay Area Playwrights Festival (BAPF), spotlighting five powerful plays by five exciting new voices in public readings and workshops. Building on the success of the previous two online festivals, Playwrights Foundation is employing a hybrid structure for the 2022 BAPF, including virtual and in-person reading presentations. The festival is welcoming in-person audiences over two weekends at Potrero Stage in San Francisco and offering live stream readings online during its second weekend only, allowing audiences around the globe to experience exhilarating new work by emerging theatre artists.

Focusing on the power of human connection, the incredibly diverse lineup of plays includes an intimate drama of personal revolution between siblings; a taut, biting comedy about a Black female screenwriter facing plagiarism claims from a White male author; a poetic exploration of love, caregiving, and illness in a community of lesbian elders; a witty deep dive into resilience, belonging, and the yearning for second chances among a trio of strangers in the American South; and a bilingual family drama about a millennial healthcare worker and three generations of unbreakable bonds. The five playwrights represented are HBO and Shondaland screenwriter/playwright Inda Craig-Galván, award-winning novelist Elana Dykewomon who is writing her first play in her 70s, acclaimed Bay Area performer and playwright Denmo Ibrahim, multitalented writer/director/actor Iraisa Ann Reilly, and award-winning trans Egyptian-American director/playwright Sharifa Yasmin.

As a playwright, Yasmin's work focuses on the intersection of Queer and Arab identities. Her play in the Festival, Close to Home, is a deeply felt comic drama about three southerners exploring whether the second chances they are desperately seeking might be found with one another. When the paths of resilient teenage trans femme Zara, rough-edged builder Colt, and protective Muslim immigrant Kaysar intertwine, new possibilities emerge for what the trio might mean to each other. Yasmin is also increasingly in demand as a director, having completed fellowships with The Drama League, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Manhattan Theatre Club, Geva Theatre, and she is a Eugene O'Neill national directing fellow.

I spoke with Ms. Yasmin last week by phone to learn more about how she came to write the play and talk about her burgeoning career as a theatre artist. In conversation, she is upbeat and down-to-earth, even as she acknowledges the struggles she's had to find her voice as an artist and carve out a place for herself in the theatre world. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What originally prompted you to write Close to Home?

It was a multitude of things. I was living in New York freelancing and then when the pandemic happened I lost all my jobs, so I ended up moving back home to Charleston, South Carolina. It's a very interesting relationship with my home state. I have so much love for it, but I also have a lot of critiques, and I remember driving down and seeing the southern live oaks and the sun and it was warm and it just was really healing after living in post-apocalyptic New York City.

Another play of mine, The Devils Between Us was in the process of being published and it very much centers on trans and Middle Eastern characters dealing with a lot of past trauma. I was working with a dramaturg, and we started a conversation about how trauma from marginalized people tends to be the stories that are prioritized in theatre. I think it's important that they are prioritized, but stories of joy and mundaneness and every other story should be just as valued.

So I was sitting here in South Carolina and I have my window open and I'm looking out at the gorgeous southern live oak tree, and I just saw the image of this queer couple at this tree. And what sort of happened was the desire to write a love letter to my high school self, who never got to see herself in any fashion. I wanted a queer, Southern, funny, Muslim, Middle Eastern love story about found family. I just needed a heap of joy, and I remember talking to a good friend of mine and saying, "I don't know why I'm writing this play, because it doesn't feel real." And she said to me, "You're writing what you want the world to be." And that was really powerful.

Not to deny all the scary things happening in the world right now, but I would love to see stories of trans folks where I'm not afraid for them the whole time, just waiting for bad things to happen.

Yeah, and to get to see them outside of the identities that inform their experiences but are not the only thing that's a part of them. There's a reason why we don't mention the word "gay" or other things like that in the play, because there's no need to. There was never a part in this process that I wanted to explain anything to my audience - What does it mean to be trans? What does it mean to be queer? What does it mean to be a Muslim? What does it mean to be an immigrant? That was never interesting to me. I wrote this play for people who have never gotten to see themselves in this way, at the intersection of so many different identities. And everyone else is invited into a story that I think they can relate to because it's human.

How did the play come to the attention of the Playwrights Foundation?

The previous year, I had sent The Devils Between Us to the festival, and it was a finalist and an honorable mention. When they opened up for the next season, it was to finalists from previous years, and I had just finished a couple of workshops of Close to Home. I did a workshop of it at Amphibian Stage in Ft. Worth Texas, which is an amazing little theater. They're incredible and the people there are so filled with heart and determination. And I was like "I think this play is ready for something big." So I sent it off.

This is a hybrid festival with in-person and online viewing options. In what format will Close to Home be available?

We are doing a fully digital format, and this was for a multitude of reasons. It was really important to me that people who share the identities of these characters, specifically queer MENA [Middle Eastern & North African] folk - were the ones who are part of telling the story. That meant broadening our access, so we are able to work with a team that is almost fully of those identities. I don't know if that would have been possible in a localized production. I know we all have complaints about Zoom theater, but one of the great things it's provided is accessibility, because you don't necessarily need to be in the same location.

What do you personally hope to get out of this run at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival?

I hope to get a finished play! Can that even happen? Is that even allowed? [laughs] We've had two workshops and I see this as the opportunity to take all the information we've gotten from them - what the story needs to be, what's lacking, what are the challenges, what are the successes - and put it all into practice and truly find the play and its structure. We're really trying to experiment and throw everything at the wall so that we find the absolute best version of this play.

I also have a few questions about your career -

I've got some questions, too! [laughs]

Theatre is not exactly the easiest career to pursue. What originally drew you to it?

I actually got into theatre in high school. I based the high school that Zara goes to in the play off of the high school that I went to in Johns Island, South Carolina. I had just transferred there when I was in 7th grade. I was bullied a lot as a queer Muslim youth, and my mom wanted to send us to a private school so that there was more control over what my experiences were. The day that I got there you could audition for the spring play, an adaptation of The Island of Lost Kids written by our theater director, a lovely man named Randy Neale. I grew up in a very religious home, my father is a very devout Muslim man. I was trying really hard to be a boy, and it's just not something I really am, and I always felt like I was "improv-ing" this character that I wanted to be. And there was something so freeing about having everything memorized and I didn't have to think or strategize or anything.

And then in college, two things happened. I had a mentor who saw that I was not connecting to, you know, your standard theatre institutional education of Chekhov and Shakespeare. Those are incredible writers, but I was never someone who you imagine when you read those plays. I just had a disconnect, and I didn't necessarily know why. I just knew I didn't like the plays we were studying. I had a professor who saw this, and she handed me two plays - Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar and In the Heart of America by Naomi Wallace. It was the first time I'd ever seen Muslim characters, queer characters, queer Muslim characters, Middle Eastern characters and it was revolutionary for me.

At the same time, there was a man, Faisal Alam, who ran this incredible organization called Hidden Voices which is all about queer Muslims. He had come to my campus and everyone kept telling me about him because I was the only queer Muslim person there. I went to hear him speak, and it was just the most cathartic experience, to see someone holding identities that I didn't know how to hold together. I was in tears. And so those two things sort of happened at once for me, and I really realized the power of being whole and telling stories that were meaningful to me.

That's why I wanted to be a director - so I had autonomy over the stories being told, and who got to tell them. How I got into playwrighting was that, as much as I loved telling their [other playwrights'] stories, I still wasn't telling my own. And one day I got the idea "Okay, what if I write it?" And here I am now.

As a trans person of Muslim heritage, how did you get past those messages out there, spoken and unspoken, of "You're not really welcome here."?

Yeah, that's something I've been confronting in in my career, especially as a director. A lot of times I get contacted for specifically Middle Eastern work, Muslim work, trans work, which I love, but sometimes it feels like my only credential is my identity. And that's why it was really important to me in this play that it was clear that their identities are informing their experience, but it is not the only thing about them. They are complex humans who hold skills and talents that people would not necessarily expect from them because they're not usually allowed to have the same level of complexity as their peers. There is a major difference between people whose worth is assumed and people whose worth has to be proven.

You're still pretty early on in your career. What kind of career do you ultimately hope to have?

Well, I just turned 30. I have for a very long time wanted to be a regional theater director. I didn't want to go into artistic leadership because I've just seen how exhausting, draining and traumatic it has been for BIPOC directors, directors of marginalized identities, to be brought into problematic, broken institutions, to fix them. I mean, we're seeing that right now with Victory Gardens [Theater of Chicago where the Resident Artists recently resigned as a group]. I love to travel, to see new faces, to meet new communities and direct regional theater, and then also direct at universities, because I love empowering students in the way that my mentor empowered me by giving those plays.

But I think there's a part of me now who is starting to think about how can I prevent the harm that I am experiencing as a guest artist who is being brought into these regional theaters. I always want to direct and write, but there is a part of me that is really starting to think about institutional leadership and how I can further effect the change that I want to see.

You've done several directing fellowships at some pretty elite institutions, so you certainly have first-hand knowledge of them.

Yeah, very much so. One of the reasons I've had so many fellowships is because directing is a career in which you can't necessarily apply for jobs. It's almost all word of mouth and networking, and the one physical thing I could do was apply to these fellowships. I'm so grateful that that was the path I was on because it did give me those experiences firsthand. I was at Actors Theatre of Louisville when they didn't have an artistic director, and they were interviewing for the next artistic director, and I remember seeing their current one, Robert Barry Fleming, at a town hall he was hosting about why you should be the next one.

I've gotten to have some really incredible experiences that I don't know a lot of young artists my age have been able to have. I'm extremely grateful for them, and they have certainly informed how I operate within my practice. I've learned about incredible directing from incredible directors, and I've learned a lot about what not to do. I hold all of those experiences and am informed by them.

Do you currently have any other projects in the pipeline?

Yes, I have a number of them. I don't know if this has been announced yet, but I will be directing Ayad Akhtar's Disgraced next year, which I'm very excited about because I think it's a controversial play and it has a very specific place with a lot of Muslim artists because it was really the first big Muslim play that was done regionally. But I think it has been handled in such an inauthentic way that has led to a lot of the controversies, so I'm excited to approach the play with the complexity I don't know it's been given previously.

I'm also still continuing my MFA at Brown. I will be going into my second year, so I will have a second-year project, but I don't know what play it's gonna be yet. And then I have a few developmental projects.

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The 45th Annual Bay Area Playwrights Festival will be presented as a hybrid (in-person and streamed) festival July 29 - August 7, 2022. For tickets to attend or stream the readings, visit playwrightsfoundation.org or call 415-626-2176.

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