Which basic elements of creativity did your family teach you?
When you can do X, do Y. How to fix a car engine with a piece of aluminum foil from a candy bar. And how to fling open the curtains in the morning to see the light.
How did you get the idea for writing your latest play?
From a woman I met in 2005 who tries to do the impossible. I have her in my cell phone under “action hero.”
Do you have a favorite playwright?
Too many to name. They’re all on my mind. Of those who are no longer physically with us: Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, Garcia Lorca ...
Are you ever afraid you will run out of inspiration and creativity in your job?
That is not one of my fears.
What is the most difficult thing in your job? I embody it.
What is the most fun part of your job? When you see collaborators rolling up their sleeves, figuratively speaking — I rarely see people actually rolling up their sleeves when they get to work, do you? — to dive into the structure of your play. The designers hunkering down to build it. News of sheep sightings for a very important sheep in my play Dog and Wolf. I remember once we were looking for a live sheep around New York City so we could videotape the sheep. And once during Lemkin’s House, an actor forgot to bring Lemkin’s Law onstage, which was the whole basis for play. But another actor, Lemkin’s mother, managed to smuggle the law with a piece of challah-bread that she carried onstage. So the law came out with the bread. When the director says that she or he understood something you thought you were going to have to cut even though you loved it so much. When you finally cut something enormous that has to go, and you see that you made the right choice, and you actually never miss it. A costume designer who knows how to transform characters instantly so it’s poetry.
Once a very important state official was supposed to give a speech before one of my shows. And this official requested a red carpet, two armchairs for him and his wife, and a podium with flowers onstage. He arrived with bodyguards and photographers who flocked the stage. I heard later that the stage manager said on the headset: “I can see smoke coming out of Cat’s ears.” It
was because of the state official’s allegiances that I felt very uncomfortable. Also the show’s curtain time was postponed for a long time as the performers waited offstage due to the pomp and circumstance. The first day of rehearsal.
In Eyes of the Heart, actor Eunice Wong created a rice field where a young Cambodian woman works in the labor camp during the Khmer Rouge genocide, and then morphed back to a young teenager in Long Beach, California. I watched her work with the director Kay Matschullat to create this transformation with nothing onstage but herself, the actor. It is the specificity of Eunice’s physical talent onstage in which she can portray emotion and poetry and then switch to a whole different contemporary language through words. It is the specificity of her choices that influences my belief that non-linear storytelling, in which we move between time to reveal the theme of “memory,” is very theatrical and viable onstage.
Do you expect your way of creating plays to change in the future?
Yes. It will always change.
Do you embrace the changes in the playwright industry regarding social media and technology influences?
Currently in the U.S. Actors’ Equity Association (AEA), the union does not allow changes in this regard. These rules for disseminating visual representations of theater performances are different in the U.S. than they are elsewhere. I believe that in other countries it is easier to show images of performances. The rules at AEA are available to peruse.
Do you like art? Do you have any preferences for an artist and/or for creators of artistic work?
Édouard Vuillard, the painter; Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet; Peter Sellars’ productions of Ajax and Nixon in China; the memoir Crossing Three Wildernesses by U Sam Oeur; the theatrical work of Morm Sokly and Chhon Sina; and Antonín Dvorák’s Nocturne for Strings, Op. 40.
“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.”