Inquiries on Realism
From Shayok Misha Chowdhury, Jenny Koons, abigail jean-baptiste, Dominique Fawn Hill, and John J. Caswell, Jr.
In 2023, Associate Artistic Director Natasha Sinha asked five remarkable artists to share their reflections on realism in theater. Their brilliant, expansive, and varied responses — previously published in our print Almanac — are below.
A SIDE EFFECT of the theater industry’s much-needed racial reckoning is that many artists from historically oppressed communities have less opportunity to talk about the art itself – to share how they wrestle with the nuance and expanse of theatrical form through their individual perspective. And beyond broadening how many stories are told and how many communities of storytellers are represented, what about the range of potential shapes and behaviors and styles of a play’s storytelling? What about aesthetics, personal taste, how a story is told?
With this in mind, I asked a dreamy set of five extraordinary artists to consider realism and the array of what it might mean in theater, prompted by an excerpt from Phillip Howze’s essay “Inquiry” (which appeared in Volume 48 of Theater). In contrast to today’s often-flattened conversations about the craft of theater, its generous, soulful, and generative questions about storytelling and self-expression are striking.
A sort of slow-motion roundtable discussion happened, in writing. The first respondent had a few days to write (as inspired by Phillip’s piece), then the second had a few days to write (as inspired by both Phillip and the first respondent), and so on. What developed is an act of intertextuality by various kinds of theatermakers, built slowly and chronologically, allowing for gray space and contradiction and specificity. At the end of only five thoughtful responses lies a deep well of ideas, reflecting some of the possibilities for how to think about style and form in theater.
– Natasha Sinha
Is making a play equivalent to making your mother and the authorities proud of you? Is this why in the theater at-large, a so-called realism — which is to say art that reaffirms a digestible history and a relatable politics — that art on stage, at-large, is more easily embraced than work that asks troubling, or meandering or unanswerable questions?
Is a play a palliative? Is the theater about feeling safe — is this what realism reminds us of, the womb?
Does the world seem safe to you right now? What do you imagine I, a young Black person, feel about my level of safety in America? How do you think I feel about power and dominance? Is realism a distinction that allows Blackness to fit safely inside of an explicable black box? Is the American theater prepared to express how the plethora of young writers of color see the world today? Or will these writers be forced to retrofit their work into safety mechanisms for the would-be sated?
Which leads me to wonder: is realism an analog for white America? Is that why realism is so dominant in the American theater?
Historically speaking, people who looked like me were forced to serve and service most of our time-honored American institutions (the academy, industry, the domestic household), not the other way around, right?
Exactly, he said, and isn’t therein the argument to be made in favor of realism? Couldn’t it be considered a form of self-preservation, relevant precisely because it provides a kind of reparation to groups of people who for centuries have had to remix, borrow, adapt, and remake culture in order to outrun their bodies and bodies of work being stolen? What in the world is a play to a world of folks who have been disenfranchised, disembodied — whose histories have been forcefully appropriated or stereotyped or parodied for so long? How are we forged under the threat of extinction?
Aren’t you interested in this conversation?
– an excerpt from Phillip Howze’s “Inquiry”
My mother never wears make-up. Rarely, at a wedding, she’ll put on a little lipstick, and folks will gasp, astonished, “বুলবুল দি তোোমোকে তোো তোেনো ই যোকছে নো!”: we hardly recognize you! My parents are physicists. Academics. That’s kind of their gender, honestly. Academic. In our home, the ethos was always: why would you spend your precious time talking about “শোদ়ি গয়নো” — sarees, jewelry — when you could instead be discussing books, movies, the life of the mind?
I grew up watching Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, filmmakers who were “pushing against the like…low-brow, song-and-dancey vibes of mainstream Bollywood cinema.” That’s how Choton, the main character in my play Public Obscenities, describes Bengali neorealism. In contrast to pop, campy Bollywood, these Bengali auteurs of the 50s were out to capture an unadorned India. No make-up. No choreographed musical sequences. This was a Marxist cinema, emerging just after Independence: real people, real problems. Ray’s Pather Panchali is my favorite. It doesn’t feel like a film. It feels like the rhythms of real life.
Bengali theater, on the other hand, especially here in the diaspora, was too melodramatic for me. Why are they talking like that? That’s not how people talk. I still feel that way when I watch most theater, tbh. But on rare occasions, when I see someone present on stage, by which I mean in the moment, stripped of artifice, risking something real, I feel like I’m seeing a dragon.
Some who saw Public Obscenities described it as theater vérité. I kind of like that. I wanted to tell a story about my culture with granular, documentary-like precision. By my culture I mean a class of Bengali intelligentsia and their emigrant children. It’s a culture that values education above all else. In the play, Shou, a genderqueer character, tells Choton, “My mother always says to me, ‘Why you are putting such gaudy dress? Instead of calling attention to yourself, why don’t you focus on your studies?’”
In seventh grade, I started parting my hair in the middle and wearing my shirt untucked to school. It felt risqué somehow to look in the mirror and make these small, deliberate choices. To consider myself aesthetically. My academic, gently socialist parents sometimes wondered aloud whether school uniforms weren’t more conducive to learning. I am deeply grateful for the values they instilled in me. And sometimes, in the bathroom mirror, I underline my eyes with kajol like an old-school Bollywood heroine.
– Shayok Misha Chowdhury
Whose imagination is onstage?
The magic of theater is the shared imaginative space. Even verbatim theater, rooted in so-called realism, requires imagination and a leap of faith. A belief that for a moment we collectively release from that which is “real” and share active space with each other’s imaginations.
I don’t believe realism equals accuracy. Anything put on stage has a point of view and interpretation and lens. Anything put in front of another is witnessed through their unique lens and experience.
Is Theater not a form of collage and counterpoint?
Is Theater not a collision between disciplines?
Is Theater not rooted in interpretation and in-accuracy?
So what then for artists in a moment when our collective imaginations are exhausted? In three years we’ve re-imagined how we live, how we gather, and the futures we dreamt for ourselves before March 2020.
What now is the collective imagining we are doing together?
An exercise in imagining.
What if when we witnessed work in this moment we asked:
What are these artists’ imaginations revealing to me about this moment? What are the limits to my imagination? How is this stretching my imaginative limits?
What if we wondered:
Who inspires bigger dreams? Who invites me into expansion? Who invites me into a new shared imagination?
I don’t care how you define what it IS or what it ISN’T.
I care that it IS.
Something WASN’T and then it WAS.
Right in front of me, in shared space, imagination becomes actualized. I am witnessing imagined dreams and sorrows, speculative fictions of what may be, and imagined projections of what once was. And in that collective imagining, we strengthen our imaginative muscles, stretching what we thought was possible.
This moment calls for wise and deep imaginations, ones that will lead us from what has been, to what might be, to what will be.
The theater is a place for this collective practice, invaluable to actualizing the futures we dream of, and the futures we have yet to imagine.
– Jenny Koons
if we are talking in terms of categorizable aesthetics, i guess you could say i’m an absurdist, mulling over questions like, what is “real” anyway?
how do the various ways humans perform (behaviors/opinions/identities/roles) in our daily lives further complicate notions of what performance is?
is play making not real life?
is what happens in theatrical space “imaginary”?
i believe that which occurs in the space of theatrical performance is sacred and embodied. it really happens. the ritual onstage is happening in “real life” whether or not it looks like your life outside of the theatrical space.
making a play is never easy
& it’s foolery to think it could make anyone “proud”in my dreams the collaborative process of creating theater feels as comfortable and nurturing as the womb. but that’s unlikely under this capitalist police state whether you’re dealing with realism or not. plus, the plays i read and watch that remind me of the womb, certainly are not ones of realism.
if realism is theater about real people and real problems, how is it different than the news? when should it just be a documentary film? or (my personal favorite) reality tv?
if realism does not equal accuracy, what is it? or, as Jenny offers, does it even matter? if realism is an analog for white America, how would it possibly preserve and repair anyone else?
i want to know more about Phillip, Misha, and Jenny’s definitions of realism because the very notion of what a play of realism even looks like in a contemporary context is messy to me.
“R E A L I S M,” as coined by Europeans, does not feel like refuge… no verse or poetic stylings no supernatural presences no songs no sense of time other than linear this “realism” has nothing to do with my “day-to-day, ordinary scenarios,” so the entire basis it was defined upon falls apart.
i want the remixings, borrowings, adaptings, and remakings that Phillip posits might be a burden when realism – which receives widespread attention, support, and embrace – seems an easeful counterpoint to occupy.
my life is absurd and nonsensical, but then, the conversation around realism becomes a trap for me. because a play aligned with the “realism” of my life would look like the abstract and expressionist and absurd theater i believe must be energetically and financially supported in the American Theater. so, is therein the argument to be made in favor of realism?
– abigail jean-baptiste
We are going straight for the heart chakra I see!
Indeed, the magic of theater is the shared imagination, a playful space in which past versions of us dress up in the mirror, and those reflective divas just so happen to become full-fledged theatre professionals, with dreams.
Inevitably, recognition – whether it’s from a parent or an institution – is a part of the process.
I like to believe that humans feel more human when met with reflections/affirmations of themselves; not only to solidify an artistic community, but also to navigate the everlasting paradox of love and grief. When my parents passed away at a young age, I found solace within theater, and for that I will be forever thankful.
Live art will always be a nourishing-marvel, simply because it shows us how imperfectly perfect our inner child could be, once grounded with a safe and playful environment to thrive.
***
Theater is about protecting the right to memory
To wonder
To magic
For all
To recall something in however fashion you want is the luxury, and to make it with people that you admire and adore, is the gift.
There will be an inevitable healing in this.
(This I am learning to be true, on my journey.)
Realism makes you aware of the cards that you have been dealt, while ironically the womb protects you from knowing.
When both worlds collide, you tend to find yourself at first preview, trying to refine the age-old recipe by asking yourself, more salt or more sugar?
***
Safety?
I think the most jarring question we need to ask ourselves is, why are there levels to safety?
Do we not all deserve to be safe just on a Basic Human Package level?
I do know one thing; it is a radical act to be Black in America.
And to be Black and an artist, come on there is no hiding in that, even if you wanted to hide, your void would be heard/felt for eons, because hunty healing has no octave.
***
Realism allows rules to form, but how can one piece together the rules when they’re always wondering about their safety.
Artistic realism is not a reparation gumball machine prize, it is access to knowing all the shards of the mosaic, before disruption.
I mean it is realer-than-real to know.
Black Artists are still seeking their pieces and what their peace-is.
***
Like Jenny, I ask “what if we wondered?” About a bigger kind of imagination?
I wonder what if Black people rejected the notion of what “Blackness” should look like to others, and reinvented what it should feel like for ourselves?
I mean really paint a narrative that no longer seeks institutional edits, but rather combines radical-unapologetic self-love with first love.
Then and only then shall we see new galaxies emerge.
I like to believe.
Art must always have an abundant phoenix energy to it, this is me, this is you, this is the carousel that will only change songs, once we realize that imposter syndrome is a lie, and that the title page has always been intertwined between our fingertips and source.
*Blinking vertical line stares back at you/me/we
I type: “Live Wild, Pray Quiet, Dream Fake, and Love Real.“
P.S. and always aim to add more sugar when knowing the options.
*Period
End of Play
– Dominique Fawn Hill
Write a New Realism
I was raised in an unreality, or it felt that way.
Coming of age in Arizona without the internet meant creatively challenging my unreal-ness. To become real I read gay erotica in the corner of a chain bookstore. I improvised an unreal language with my cousin in an effort to speak real Spanish like our grandparents and become real Mexicans. I recorded on VHS eating disorder episodes of Full House and Beverly Hills 90210 hoping to find a language for the thing I was doing to myself that felt so unreal. I looked for the real me everywhere. No luck so I wrote.
I stumbled early upon the destabilizing work of Richard Foreman and The Wooster Group. The avant-garde makers had a vocabulary most aligned with my own experience of reality, one that is fractured and shifting and unknowable, a reality that overlaps with a liminal place of deep subconscious processing. I learned I could bend time and space on stage to match the way reality felt, which is often more real to me than my memory of actual events.
I gravitated toward a more esoteric writing because it was difficult to feel welcomed by a realism which had evolved into a sort of supremacy machine, elevating most-often white, heteronormative, cisgendered, able-bodied-and-minded perspectives on an American reality. But when some of us tried to pick up their realism and focus our experiences through its narrow aperture, it only obscured the parts of us we thought were beautiful.
Zooming in on reality and staying there doesn’t track with my experience of life. I always depart, not necessarily toward something unrealistic, but toward a state of expression that feels closer to a visceral verisimilitude rather than temporal one. I trust my gut more than my eyes and I’m guided most by not knowing in life, so why would I not do the same with my work?
Artists of color, artists of queerness, we’re starting to stir, boil, awaken in a way that makes me quite excited. And we are trying something in our own key, in our own voice. Inevitably, that will make some folks angry. But no matter what they say, this anger isn’t coming from some profound respect for the movement of realism or the American theater as a whole. No, they’re angry about a disruption to the dominant mode and what that means for future playgoing experiences within the institutions they largely consider their own. It’s an anger driven by prejudices they’d likely deny but are ingrained deeply.
Please. Do not write the kind of plays these people pay $200 to fall asleep to. I’m begging you.
– John J. Caswell, Jr.
Shayok Misha Chowdhury is a many-tentacled writer and director. His debut, Public Obscenities, was a Pulitzer Finalist and earned Misha an Obie and a Whiting Award. His play Rheology, a collaboration with his physicist mother, was a Drama Desk and Drama League nominee and awarded an Obie for Performance. Other recent directing: Prince Faggot; The Ziegfeld Files; The Gospel at Colonus.
Jenny Koons. The Whitney Album (Soho Rep), Regretfully, So the Birds Are (Playwrights Horizons), Head Over Heels (Pasadena Playhouse w/ Sam Pinkleton), Hurricane Diane (Huntington), Men on Boats (Baltimore Center Stage), Speechless (Blue Man Group North American Tour), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (The Public Theater Mobile Unit), Burn All Night (American Repertory Theatre), A Sucker Emcee (National Black Theatre, LAByrinth), The Odyssey Project.
abigail jean-baptiste (any/all pronouns) is a theater maker, director, and writer born & based in New York with familial roots in Haiti and the American South. Guided by questions around blackness, femininity and kinship, her work uses fragmented language, repeatable gestures, and tactile objects in search of unconventional and nonsensical ways of being.
Dominique Fawn Hill is a Tony Award-nominated and Obie Award-winning costume designer for Broadway and Film. Broadway: Fat Ham (Tony Award nomination); Off-Broadway: Tambo & Bones (Playwrights Horizons – Lucille Lortel nomination); Fat Ham (Obie Award); Where the Mountain Meets the Sea (Manhattan Theatre Club); The Dark Girl Chronicles (The Shed); 125th & FREEdom (National Black Theatre). Dominique earned her M.F.A., University of California San Diego and you can find her work at www.dominiquefhill.com.
John J. Caswell, Jr. is the writer of Jerome, Wet Brain (Playwrights Horizons), Scene Partners (Vineyard Theatre), and Man Cave (Page 73 Productions). He is the recipient of the Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, the Rita and Burton Goldberg Playwriting Prize, and the Jean Kennedy Smith Playwriting Award. His work has been recognized by The Drama League, the Outer Critics Circle, the Relentless Award, and the Obie and Lucille Lortel Awards. He was a recent fellow at Juilliard’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program after receiving an MFA from CUNY's Hunter College.