Time Is Dramatic

Good morning, everyone. It really is such a pleasure to be with you all this morning, bright and early and bleary-eyed. I am not a morning person, but when Under the Radar calls, I answer the call. A huge thanks to everyone at the festival for organizing this symposium and for having me.

You know, there was a time when I used to get really excited about opportunities like these: opportunities to say something. Because I felt like I had some thing to say—some solid, significant thing. There was a kind of giddiness I used to get from saying things, like if I raised my hand in class and said something smart. Or at a family gathering, if I managed to throw my voice into the chaos of the debate. I remember the feeling of listening to a conversation, but what I was listening for was an opportunity to speak, like: I was sitting there preparing my take in my head and then waiting for a gap in the flow that I could slip through. And oftentimes, I didn’t even know exactly what I was going to say before I was saying it, but then somehow, in the saying of it, the speaking itself sort of congealed into an idea, into a kind of conviction. And suddenly I was saying something forcefully, and I believed what I was saying, and there was a kind of pleasure in that. And if people nodded or they laughed, this kind of buzzy adrenaline would course through me, like I’d scored a point or something. And it was addictive. I used to really value my ability to inspire through speaking.

And clearly there’s a part of me that still values that, because here I am, speaking to you, but I do feel less…sure of myself now. I feel less certain of what I want to say. I think we get very good at telling coherent stories about ourselves, to make it in this field. We get very good at self-narrating, like: What does this moment want from me? What should I be making in this political climate? What do I have to say? And being able to wield words in response to questions like those was valuable currency I had in an economy that delights in and trades in the good stories we tell about ourselves. But a teacher of mine always used to say: “That’s the good story. What’s the real story?”

So, I thought what I would attempt to do is tell you a real story about me trying to make something. Here we go:

So, before the pandemic, I was applying to everything I could possibly apply for. And in 2019, I applied to HARP, HERE Arts Center’s Residency Program, pitching a collaboration between me and my mom. And my mom is a physicist who studies the physics of sand. Both of my parents are physicists, they’re academics, which is probably a big part of why I became so fluent in writing grant proposals and applications. Anyway, here are two sentences from my application to HARP:

“RHEOLOGY”—which is what I was calling the project—“is an attempt at interdisciplinary, intergenerational translation. In it, I am reaching toward the continuity between human and geological time: the quick, drastic brushstrokes of life bleeding into the slow canvas of erosion and sedimentation.”

Now, what I was really reaching toward was not nearly as grand as “the continuity between human and geological time.” What I was reaching toward was…that residency. Because the residency promised a production, and I had never had a show that ran for more than just a few nights, that wasn’t just full of my friends and family, that got reviewed by critics. I had applied to this residency a few times before. And I had a hunch that this idea, this “intergenerational, interdisciplinary” thing with my mom, my physicist mom, might finally be the ticket. And I was right. We got the residency. I interviewed for it on 9 March 2020. Three days later, Broadway shut down, and my partner Kameron and I escaped to my parents’ place in Massachusetts. We ended up living with them for five months. The treadmill of life came grinding to a stop. So my mom and I had endless time to work on this project. And we worked on it exactly…zero times. Because it turns out that, given unlimited time with each other, my mom and I didn’t really want to do a whole lot of interdisciplinary, intergenerational translation. We wanted to drink Mexican martinis and sit on the couch. And it was kind of an amazing time. I loved not doing any work, not making any progress. Because nobody else was making any progress. And I realized everything I’d considered to be ambition in myself was actually just competition. And if the race was paused, if everybody else was on pause, I didn’t feel like I had to do anything. I spent a lot of time sitting on my parents’ heated toilet seat and looking at graphs on Worldometer.

And then this wild thing happened, that fall, when Soho Rep offered eight artists, including—somehow—me, a salary for that whole season, when theatres were still shut down, to work on a project of our choosing. So I started writing a play, and that play ultimately got produced by Soho Rep and National Asian American Theatre Company, and all my dreams came true. But that’s not the point of this story. The point is, that whole time, this thing with my mom wasn’t going anywhere. And if I’m honest, I kind of resented it. It felt like this idea I’d pitched to get a production. But every time I sat down and tried to write it, I wasn’t really interested in what I’d proposed. And I kept trying to get out of it, to put it off. But every time I put it off, I felt this twinge in my gut. At first it was just registering that, if we put it off too long, my mom wouldn’t be able to sing as well in the show. I had just turned forty, which means my mom was seventy-one. And I’d already started to notice that her voice wasn’t as clear as it had been when we first proposed the project. And her skin was starting to get kind of thin and papery like I remember my grandmother’s skin being. And her walk was a little more hunched. And I started to feel this old phobia I’d always had, of my mom’s death, kind of lurking around me. What if my mom died, and I’d never ended up doing this piece with her? Would I regret it forever? And that fear started to infect me. Now there was this urgency. Like: we have to do this, time is running out, and maybe by making this piece, we could push back against the tyranny of the clock and manufacture more time for the two of us to spend together. And that fear, that urgency, started becoming the play’s dramaturgy. The whole time I’d been banging my head up against this good idea I’d pitched, time itself had been at work. And the work it was doing on me, on my mom, was dramatic. The drama that time was authoring was way more compelling than my own “good ideas.” I just had to notice it.

Maybe that’s why I trust the sound of my own voice a little less these days. Because the more life happens to me, the less I feel like listening to myself, and the more I feel like listening to what’s happening around me. That’s why I like making theatre, I think. Because it feels like listening to other voices. It’s not my own voice, it’s this cacophony of voices, and I don’t know who to believe, it’s not me. I’m not trying to make a point, there’s no thesis. So now that I’m making more, I don’t feel like talking as much. Which I recognize is ridiculous because I’ve been talking at you for like ten minutes now, so clearly I still like talking. But I do feel less sure of myself. And who knows, maybe that doubt, that not-knowing is somehow making space for something else, something unimaginable to occur. What I love about Under the Radar is that it welcomes the unknown. So what I wanted to offer all of us this morning, as we step into this day, this month, this new year of conversating and connecting and making vital things, is simply some of that useful uncertainty that I find myself sitting in. I can’t wait to see what lies in store.