Family Making Theatre About Family in Pearls for Spurs

In the summer of 2024, Monk Parrots produced Pearls for Spurs, a new play by Gates Leonard about a dysfunctional Texas family severing ties after moving to a trailer park in Florida. Drawing on her own experiences, Gates wrote and acted in the premiere production in New York City, which was directed by her father, Luke Landric Leonard. Jennifer Skura Boutell, a longtime friend, colleague, and cast member of Pearls for Spurs, interviewed the father-daughter duo about what it’s like making theatre as a family and the discoveries that surprised them.

Jennifer Skura Boutell: Thank you for meeting with me today. Why don't you introduce yourselves and tell us where you are?

Gates Leonard: Thank you for having us. I'm Gates Leonard. I'm in Bennington, Vermont at Bennington College, and I'm the playwright of Pearls for Spurs.

Luke Landric Leonard: And I'm Gates's father. I'm Luke Landric Leonard. I'm the artistic director of Monk Parrots, and I was the director and set designer for Pearls for Spurs. Oh, and I'm in South Korea where I teach experimental media and performance in the MFA program at Seoul Institute of the Arts.

Jennifer: What time is it for you right now, Luke?

Luke: It’s 6:52 a.m. right now. And it's a beautiful morning,

Jennifer: For Gates and I, It is 5:52 in the evening, and I am asking y'all these questions from Atlanta, Georgia. So Gates and Luke, how long have you and your family been making theatre together? And based on Monk Parrots' mission, how did you decide to make Pearls for Spurs this latest project?

Gates: Well, that depends because you and mom have been making theatre longer than I've been around.

Luke: As a family, let's see. I moved to New York in 1995, and the first play that Natalie, Gates's mom, and I did together in New York was actually in 1996, while I was still an undergrad at Brooklyn College. That was the very first play that I ever wrote. It was called Desiderata. It was directed by Gates's godfather, Andrea Paciotto, who is also on faculty here at Seoul Arts.

We played angels that had fallen from the sky and fallen to earth, and it was a verse play, and it had some music in it. So we have decades of working together as a family. Then Gates was born in 2003. She started acting at two years old when we put her into a film we were making. But I think the three of us began making theatre when we came back from Austin, Texas. I did my MFA in directing at the University of Texas at Austin. That was 2010 when we came back to New York, and then we went and did a crazy performance art piece at Dixon Place called The Art of Depicting Nature as it is Seen by Toads. That was basically an hour-long Meisner exercise we put the audience through. Gates had a small role in Toads, so she started performing in Monk Parrots shows when she was seven years old. Then we made Gay Rodeo By-Laws in 2011, which you were in, Jen, and designed a lot for that show as well. And we still have many of those set pieces. Here I Go at 59E59 Theaters, Bum Phillips at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, and Love Fail, among other things. So…fourteen years as the family of Monk Parrots. Soon to be fifteen.

Jennifer: That's back when it was called DTX.

Luke: That's right. DUMBO Theater eXchange in Brooklyn. Well, that started in 1999. I think 1998 was the first DUMBO arts festival that we participated in. DUMBO was our home, and we wanted our own theatre space because we've always produced new material, things that weren't mainstream. We're always following our instincts and our energy when we're making theatre. So we had to produce our own work and we eventually found a space and we started a theatre. We turned a garage into a theatre. What is that? Thirty years ago?

Jennifer: Yeah, almost thirty years ago.

Luke: What is happening? How is time flying this fast?

Jennifer: Monk Parrots only does original work?

Luke: We mostly do original work. In 2018, we did the New York premiere of Gabriel Jason Dean's Terminus at Next Door at the New York Theatre Workshop, but oftentimes we are just starting from scratch.

Jennifer: Gates, tell us about Pearls for Spurs. This was a premiere that was written and made like a more traditional play, whereas Monk Parrots typically does a lot of devising. You approached it in a more traditional way. Where did the idea come from?

Gates: I was surprised that Dad decided to approach this play more traditionally. The whole time I was like, "Oh, so this is going to be another Luke Leonard production." It was very different and exciting for me to see my dad do something a little more traditional, I guess.

Luke: One of the funny things is that from a dramaturgical perspective I feel like I got to flex my muscles a little bit more. While Gates was writing it, I didn't know I was going to be directing it at the time, and I said, "Why don't you add an impossible stage direction for a director?" So she's like, "What are you talking about?" I said, "Well, how about two live alligators come on stage and fight?"

Gates: And I was like, "Okay, I guess, yeah, I'll add that."

Luke: So the play has these abstract elements in it that I love and Gates loves, and that was one of them. But then I got stuck with having to figure out how to do that with no money. Shot myself in the foot there.

Jennifer: Gates, why did you start writing this play? What inspired your story?

Gates: I started writing it sophomore year of high school during my computer science class because I didn't want to be doing computer science. I started with one of the last scenes in the play because in my acting class we were working on stretch character scenes, doing something that you wouldn't be typically cast in. I wanted to write for my classmates, so I wrote a ten-minute scene between the characters Danny and Missy, who are just sisters fighting. The story evolved from there. I think I was mostly influenced by my friend Enza, because she had told me about a visit she had with some of her family in a Florida trailer park, and it made me think of my family that lives in a trailer park in Texas, and all of the characters that she described just felt perfect for the stage. So that was the biggest push to keep going because I knew who I was writing about. I'd already met these people, heard their stories.

Jennifer: There are themes of ancestral trauma and systemic, patriarchal conditioning in this play that you may not even have realized at the time that you were writing. But as we were discovering it and rehearsing, we were really seeing just how deep these family systems went. How did you decide to address this as a family, as father, daughter, playwright, director, and as independent artists and family members working on such personal material?

I was discovering a lot of things while we were working on this. I thought this was a comedy when I wrote it. I didn't think it was as traumatic as it is.

Gates: Well, I was discovering a lot of things while we were working on this. I thought this was a comedy when I wrote it. I didn't think it was as traumatic as it is. So I was having a lot of conversations about the things I was understanding about my life that had seeped into the play. And just realizing that…it wasn't that funny.

Jennifer: What are some things that you thought were funny? And how did you realize it wasn't after all?

Gates: Well, one of the biggest things that I thought was funny was the character Dude. I had written him to be like one of the adults in Charlie Brown, to just have a "wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah" until he assaults someone.

Luke: That was part of the dramaturgy also. We wanted to give him more to do. He was really just a bobblehead at first. Just a voice.

Gates: So now he talks more, but originally he was just supposed to be motorcycle sounds. And I was like, "This character is so hilarious. I mean, he's just some guy. And then he gets crazy." After reading the script again and actually experiencing people like that, I thought, "I don't know how I wrote this character at sixteen and thought it was hilarious. What was going on in my head to be so desensitized?"

Luke: It also helped that we had an actor, Kailer Scopacasa, who was so invested, and even though it was a small role, he was so hungry to dig deep and find the humanity. I think he really originated the part in a successful way for you as a playwright and me as a director. That was very helpful.

Jennifer: As a playwright developing this story, you were using a nameless, faceless antagonist to push your protagonist along. And years later, Monk Parrots produces the show, you get it cast, and in the rehearsal room, you suddenly realize just what this antagonizing character is capable of. Gulp.

Gates: I realized with all of the characters in the play that they were so much more complicated than I realized they were when I was creating them. And I think it makes sense because they literally are my family, just my family made into absurd caricatures.

Luke: Going back to your question about how we approached this as a family, I don't think we were looking at it from the lens of dark humor and laughing about it and saying it's all fine. But once we got into the rehearsal room, we started discovering that this is really sensitive material and we need help. And then Jen steps in, acting like an intimacy coordinator and therapist.

Gates: We just didn't recognize it as something strange because that's what me and my dad are used to. It's just things that are close to what happened in our family.

Luke: This just had this deeper human level too at the end. We had brought a new family into the room with us. I do remember a very specific moment for Gates and I during the assault scene. Even just thinking about it now, it makes me a little emotional. That wasn't something that we had prepared for. And then we're in the moment, we're in the room, and we have to do it. It was difficult on one hand as a father watching his daughter reenacting that and having to direct it. But it was even more difficult, I think, for Gates. But thankfully we were able to look at it this way.

Gates: Because it was so early in the rehearsal process, it was hard to know how to voice what I was feeling. Especially since I didn't fully understand what I was feeling while working on that scene. That was just a good jumping off point to figuring out how to communicate throughout the rest of the rehearsal process.

Jennifer: That's a good point: that you both had to address this scene as close family members and as really well-rounded artists, the both of you. It was a lot to unpack, and you had a lot of tools in order to do that. Also, the adolescent queerness becomes a tender and joyful throughline in the story, especially in contrast to the grown-ups and their trauma. Can you talk a little bit about how you brought this into the play and how it felt when you saw it on the stage?

Gates: You mean between Bean and Kill?

Jennifer: Yeah.

Gates: In writing all this other stuff that's so big, it was nice to have something fun, some fun dialogue where there's just two people enjoying each other against all of the bickering and everything else.

Love is friendship, but also it can lead to obsession, bondage, servitude, escape, anxiety, and ultimately hope.

Luke: Also, it feels like you were meditating on love as a multifaceted subject. So everybody in the play is going through different versions of love, and you really captured them all—love is friendship, but also it can lead to obsession, bondage, servitude, escape, anxiety, and ultimately hope. At the end, there's a glimmer of hope, but also, you can't choose your family. One of the questions in the play is, "can you choose who you love?" So I think Bean and Kill came out of that meditation on love, just looking at it from all the different angles.

Gates: Also, at the time in my life when I was writing the two of them, I was questioning a lot about my sexuality, and I'd been thinking about it since middle school. But I repressed it a lot because I didn't feel like that was... I didn't feel like I was that kind of person. I couldn't possibly be gay. So it was an interesting way for me to put myself in that kind of experience. It was like a fantasy, I think, creating them. I identify as queer now.

Jennifer: Pride.

Gates: Pride.

Jennifer: So, tell me what's going on next for both of you and for Monk Parrots?

Luke: We plan to remount Gates' Pearls for Spurs, for a longer run soon, and I've been collaborating with Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig and Michael Roth on a new opera about Mother Jones. Also, work with our Australian partner, Australian Contemporary Opera Company. We've been talking for many years about a new take on a classic story, but it's artistic director Linda Thompson's idea and she wants to write a new libretto with a contemporary spin.

Jennifer: And you, Gates?

Gates: I'm in my senior year and I'm looking forward to graduating. My thesis project is an animated musical about how we handle depression. I hope to finish the first part soon.