By Melissa

Can we make art that we are passionate about, nurture that art to the public eye, and live balanced, sane lives while we do it? That is the grand life experiment that Kate and I embarked on when we decided to usher our first documentary piece Big Work into the world. It hasn’t always been easy.

If you have been following us on social media or the blog, you probably noticed that we rescheduled our workshop reading of Big Work from November 2015 to March 5, 6, and 7, 2016. Plays are postponed all the time, usually because of something negative – a major casting issue, a challenge finding rehearsal and performance space, or a problem with funding. Fortunately, our decision wasn’t driven by anything negative; we were simply having too much fun to be rushed or to allow this play to become something on a checklist in our “busy” lives.

Really? Too much fun working on a script? How can that be possible? Aren’t artists supposed to thrive on the pain of producing work? And we’re talking about having too much pleasure to want to rush?

When we founded The Perpetual Visitors Theatre Company, we spent a lot of our time talking through not only the kind of theatre we wanted to make, but also the way that we wanted to make theatre. Although we don’t elaborate too much about this belief on our website, these values drove not only our decision to postpone, but pretty much everything we do.

1.    We wish to dismantle the belief that artists need to be tortured and the creative process needs to be painful. Regardless of whether you are a musician, actor, writer, or creative of any kind, we can all agree that somewhere in our collective history, we decided that to be a “serious artist” meant you have to suffer for your art. Yes, the creative process has its ups and downs, and of course, there are challenges to be met along the way. But in the end, isn’t it vital to derive pleasure from whatever glorious, beautiful thing you are making? We think so, and we’re not afraid to let everyone know that crafting this play has been one of the great pleasures of our recent lives. We are daring to love our play and our process, and we are daring to savor it.

2.    We believe that the way we make art is just as important as the art we make. As human beings and as artists, Kate and I have had countless conversations about how process is equally important as product when it comes to creating. Often when we make something, there is a gap between what we say we value and what we do in action. It has been our goal from the start to be very mindful of this during our process. For example, if you are working on writing a book about health, balance, and spiritual awakening, but allow the creation process to deprive you of sleep, joy and peace of mind, aren’t you defeating your own purpose? Similarly, we are striving to create a play that explores our relationship to our jobs and the rest of our lives in a balanced and meaningful way. So wouldn’t it be nonsensical for the play itself to be the very thing that deprives us of balance and peace of mind in our own lives?

3.     Art isn’t made in a vacuum, and we have to change when life changes.  We’re all familiar with the saying “The best laid plans….” We cannot control the timing of many opportunities that come our way, but we do have control over how we choose to engage with these opportunities. Big Work was originally slated to premiere next month, and at the time we made that decision, both our fall schedules were virtually wide open. Then Kate was invited to teach a course at a local university and I was asked to teach a documentary theatre workshop out of state. Our personal calendars began to fill up as well with things we wanted to be a part of,  and during an incredibly honest and thoughtful conversation, we decided that the universe seemed to have a different idea for our timeframe.

Could we have taught our classes, stuck to our personal commitments AND produced the premiere of Big Work? Of course. Would we have enjoyed any of it? Probably not. And the only reason we could think to push forward on that timeline was because of the tape that runs in our heads that says we should be able to do everything at the same time, perfectly, and never sweat.

Kate and I have always agreed that perfectionism is an ugly master, but we are taught to strive for it and to be silent about the constant sense of failure and deprivation that breeds. We don’t want any part of that anymore. For us, the most important question became: After deriving so much pleasure from the playmaking process so far, would we be willing to push through and sacrifice the joy we are finding in writing this play for the end product of simply producing it quickly? Absolutely not.

Our fall is now devoted to the luxurious wide open expanse of exploring the landscape of our play even further and for that we are very grateful. We hope that when March comes around and the play is premiered, that those of you in the audience will be able to not only witness the incredible debates amongst the characters about work and life, but sense our own conversations about how we choose to live and create as artists.

*A note to all of the amazing and generous souls who supported our Indiegogo Campaign: our venue transferred our full deposit from fall to spring, and rest assured that every dollar you donated is still going exactly where we said it would – just in March instead of November. We couldn’t be doing any of this without you, and we are forever grateful.

By Kate

Ask any writer and they will tell you they become attached to their characters. But documentary work adds another layer to it. When you’ve sat across the table from someone who has opened up to you about their lives, choosing not to include what they’ve told you in the piece you’re writing feels like you are somehow saying her story is less important than someone else’s story.

Transforming the 138,097 words from our interview transcripts into Big Work, a 16,000 word dramatic piece, has led to incredibly tough choices about what material to use and what to let go of. Essentially, we could use only 10 percent of the stories we collected in our final piece. Sometimes this meant letting go of a moment or observation we love; other times it has meant not including whole interviewees as characters. And while Melissa and I know having too much good material is a much better problem than not having enough, the cuts have been surprisingly painful.

But we can’t ask an audience to sit through a 12-hour play, and the piece as a whole needed direction and cohesion in addition to containing great individual stories. Here is how Melissa and I went about choosing what to include.

1. We asked ourselves, “What is each interviewee’s core struggle with work?”

Before we started writing the script, we spent several weeks just reading and re-reading every transcript. While each interviewee shared complex feelings about their jobs in relationship to their lives and their identities, each person seemed to have one thing they were wrestling with above all else. We challenged ourselves to try and name the struggle for each interviewee in one word.

When Melissa and I met to discuss the words we had chosen, we discovered that some of the themes we initially set out to examine in relationship to our work – gender, age, immigration status – were too narrow. Instead we saw people, regardless of those labels, struggling with one of four things: to overcome expectations, to realize self-determination, to find balance, or to define their legacy.

Naming these struggles not only helped us to understand who our characters are, they also provided the structure for our piece. These themes became the scenes of our play.

2. We eliminated everything that wasn’t directly related to a character’s core struggle or essential biography.

There was a man I interviewed from Nigeria who told me so many fascinating stories about what it is like to be an immigrant working in the United States, and particularly the ways he feels an immigrant approaches college differently than American-born students. I loved these passages, and was reluctant to let go of them. But when I started asking myself about what he was really concerned with, it was clearly his legacy. When given the chance to direct the conversation, he spoke about trying to find work that is meaningful and that leaves something behind. He had only spoken about being an immigrant because I had asked him directly about it multiple times. I’m working on a play that asks people how they identity themselves, but I was labeling him and asking him questions that weren’t particularly relevant to his journey.

By keeping only what was at the heart of each person’s struggle, we eliminated a lot of anecdotes. But more importantly, we have clearer, richer characters engaged in more meaningful discussions with one another.

3. We looked for characters who offered similar stories.

There was no way to include meaningful characters based on all 40 people we interviewed without this being a series and not a single piece (which we considered). After we re-read the transcripts, we found that several characters were wrestling with the same things, had similar biographies, or articulated similar frustrations and triumphs. Melissa and I look at each of those stories and see their value. We see the individuality of the person who told it, and we took a lot away from having heard each one. But for the sake of drama, our global story didn’t need two characters saying the same thing. So we eliminated duplicates, and included stories from only 26 of our interviewees (which admittedly is still a lot).

It can be a struggle for Melissa and me as we continue to tighten and hone our play because we know everything that didn’t make it into the final script. There are moments and stories we love that just didn’t have a home here, and we will always know they aren’t there. Hopefully, if we’ve done our jobs, audiences won’t feel those gaps. We’ve had to remind ourselves many times that we can use these interviews to create other pieces, maybe even a couple of 10-minute plays.

But while these choices have been difficult, what has surprised us most of all is that we actually found the voice of this piece – really our voices – from the struggle to let go. It made us examine characters in more depth, ask tougher questions, and debate the themes that arose against our original hypotheses of what we would find. Shaping these interviews into a larger story about work and life in America has been an extraordinary journey, and one I wouldn’t trade for anything. We can’t wait for the next phase when we get to have these conversations with our actors, and then with you.

By Kate

“HOW CAN I EXPLAIN TO THEM THAT IN THIS WAR, I AM DEFINED BY MY NATIONALITY, AND BY IT ALONE?...THE TROUBLE WITH NATIONHOOD, HOWEVER, IS THAT WHEREAS BEFORE, I WAS DEFINED BY MY EDUCATION, MY JOB, MY IDEAS, MY CHARACTER -- AND, YES, MY NATIONALITY TOO -- NOW I FEEL STRIPPED OF ALL THAT.”
– SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ, THE BALKAN EXPRESS

Reading the diary Slavenka Drakulić kept during the Yugoslav Wars made me want to study nationalism. She captured beautifully and painfully how quickly our identity can be sacrificed to circumstance. Granted war is perhaps the most extreme example, but in small ways every day, our desire to define ourselves is in conflict with a world trying to tell us who we are.

Religion was not a big part of my life as a child, but I grew up with an extended family that was deeply Catholic and in a town where almost everyone I knew was too. I remember being uncomfortable attending Mass during family reunions, and being told by one relative that I was probably going to Hell. I vividly remember a friend telling me she really struggled with my not being Catholic because “I feel like you are a really good person,” as if being Catholic and being a good person were mutually exclusive ideas. At many moments in my childhood, before I was anything else, I was “not Catholic.” The significance of the label was the otherness implied by those who spoke it. Religion was never a conversation about what I believed; it was one about what I didn’t. In many ways, it wasn’t a conversation about religion at all, and it certainly never extended to what was important to me.

Now as a 31-year old woman, I find that the world is quick to label me in other ways – particularly that I am “not a wife” and “not a mother.” The questions I’m asked when I meet new people or get re-acquainted with others are repetitive and unimaginative. Sometimes, it goes further and people assign meaning to why I’m single and don’t have kids. They say I am career-oriented or that I’m selfish and trying not to grow up. Others offer pity or to try to comfort me, clearly ignoring the fact that I’ve expressed no sadness on the subject.  Recently, I ran into an old classmate who asked me what was new. I talked animatedly for five minutes about dancing and the play I’m writing. When I finished, he said, “Cool. What else?” I shared a little bit about a recent vacation with friends. He nodded, paused and said, “Anything else?” And then I got it; it was just a less direct way of asking the same questions about a spouse and kids.

The funny thing is that these labels – not Catholic, single, childless – don’t relate in any way to how I see myself or how I wish others saw me. To me those things are true, but largely irrelevant to my story. I am a writer – that is how I enter this world. I am a friend nestled in an extraordinary tribe. I am a tanguera. And I am a human inextricably linked to the lives of others.

What Slavenka Drakulić was mourning in her journal was the loss of her individuality, of ceasing to be seen for the things that were important to her and instead being reduced to the sum total of what was happening around her. I don’t equate my experiences with hers, but I also haven’t met anyone who can’t identify on some level with that struggle. We measure each other against the way things have been and the way we are told things are supposed to be. We measure each other against the things that we fear and what we hope for ourselves. None of us are innocent of this instinct.  But beyond all the real world dangers this can sometimes present, not allowing someone to share how they identify themselves deprives us all of connection.

My favorite question we asked during the interviews for our American Dream piece was, “What question do you wish people would ask you?” Some people wanted to tell us about their children, others spoke of their jobs. Some people wanted to expound on a hobby or the trip they recently took. Some wished for an honest conversation about where they are from and how they got here. But by far, most people wanted to be asked, “What are you most proud of?”

I’ve thought a lot about it, and the truth is there isn’t a perfect question I wish people would ask me, and I know there isn’t a single question that we’d all universally like to be asked. But my wish is that when someone asks me a question, she does it without a pre-determined idea of what the answer should be. That if she asks about my job or religion or family, she asks because she genuinely wants to know something about me, and not where I fit into her neat schematic of the world.

By Melissa

"What do you do?"

How many times have you been asked that question? How many times have you asked it of others? When greeting an old friend, when meeting someone for the first time – it seems to be the go to question when we don’t know what else to say.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this question, but something about it has always bothered me. It seems so…narrow. It is almost always answered with a short, simple response.

"I'm an accountant."
"I'm a lawyer."
"I'm a teacher."
"I'm a waitress."

It starts to feel like all we are. Whenever I hear myself start to say "I'm an administrative assistant", I try to catch myself and edit my response. "I work as an administrative assistant." Somehow tweaking a few words in my response seems like a good place to start. But after that?  How do we dig deeper into who we really are, especially with someone we may have just met?

Kate and I started to talk about this with our friends, and it was like we hit a nerve. Everyone had a story to tell – about feeling like their job was all they were and about struggling to find the words to express who they really are. One question that also came up was "If I don't ask people what they do for a living, what other questions could I ask?" In a way, exploring this question is like inventing a new language. If our own circles were so eager to talk about this, we figured others would be too.

At the end of February, we started researching and interviewing people for a play about “The American Dream,” our relationships to our jobs and how it affects the rest of our lives. We’ve spoken to over two dozen people across the country already, and feel very struck by how eager each person has been to try and get past the "What do you do?" question. Each person we've talked to, regardless of their job, has had different ideas about how they'd like to connect with other people in their lives, and many of those ideas are independent from what they do for work. The more people we talk to, the more we hear the desire to break free of our "work identity" and re-imagine the way we connect with the people in our lives. It feels like charting a new course on a map we have always used.

We are still interviewing, still unpacking all the things we are hearing. But we know this: people are ready to continue this conversation about changing how we identify ourselves and how we connect with our community. It's a challenge but it's exciting. Change is in the air. It's time.

Leave a comment below and tell us: What do you say when people ask "What do you do?"