Do you have a favorite company or exciting other creator with whom you would like to work?
If so, why is that? What special quality do you like in their work or personalities?
Vuillard reminds me of Guéret, one of my family’s homelands, in the intimacy of the foyer (the home). The strange aesthetic of fabric, plants, faces, furniture, light and darkness. I am drawn to the emotional depiction of people in this work. Rilke’s words about love and solitude touch me. Sellars’ are productions that explode with ambition, joy and humanity.Some people have lives that are unfathomable and magical: U Sam Oeur is one of these people. I wish you could hear him chant his poetry, and Morm Sokly chants exquisitely as well. She is a master of the Yiké theater form in Cambodia.Chhon Sina is a playwright who dares in a country where that’s very difficult. Dvorák’s Nocturne is for me a shared and exquisite experience of love.
In which way do you think writing, art and design are different and/or similar?
They speak to the power of imagination, to freedom, and to the hope that creation belongs on Earth and in our hands, flesh, bones and heart. They can sometimes liberate us from pain and heal us.
Do you aspire to collaborate in your creations with an artist from another artistic discipline?
I would like to collaborate with leaders such as Chivy Sok, as well as government leaders, through my most recent play, Action Hero, to imagine change through theater. This change involves a new way of thinking, in a movement toward hope, transcending boundaries.
I hope to work with Peter Sellars and with the Serbian artists Snezana Bogdanovic and Uliks Fehmiu.
Do you follow any philosophical or psychological approach in producing your play?
All my plays have an American entry point. I think no discussion about genocide, for example, can exist without my acknowledgment of the Native American genocide. I grew up going to school in Toulon, France, and my fellow students would say to me as they passed me in the hall: “Vous avez tué les indiens.” And I would say to myself in shock and embarrassment: “I killed the Indians?”
All my plays are about my own complicity: that of being from the United States. Rather than being some kind of punishment toward myself (or my country), I believe this work is the most hopeful, optimistic way I can find as a theater artist to fight repression and abuse — and to fight violence against women.
What would be your ideal home?
I dreamed when I was young that there would be a home where all my loved ones could be gathered. In that dream, unity of time and place was readily available, factors that are often at the core of plays.
Do you have any dreams for the future?
A performance of one of my plays at a small natural “Greek theater,” which is located at “Flat Rock” on the Pacific Ocean at Torrey Pines State Park in San Diego, California.