Playwriting As Open-Heart Surgery

Playwriting As Open-Heart Surgery
By Anna Renée Hansen

I wrote a play about Haiti in 2008 because no one was talking about Haiti. A family friend traveled there with a humanitarian aid organization. In spring 2008 she got stuck in the riots over rising food prices under Préval’s (the president at the time) leadership. The protests continued into 2009 and I think the only substantial news coverage I saw about it was on Democracy Now! hosted by Amy Goodman. Now that I’m in Boston I’m aware of the discrepancy of coverage on Haiti; California is not home to a large number of Haitians, but Boston is. Even with this in mind, I still think it took the devastating earthquake of 2010 before people really started thinking about Haiti and how important it is that we help in whatever way we can. I noticed a surge in Haitian plays and literature, pieces set in Haiti or with a Haitian character. In the back of my mind I thought I wanted to revisit my 2008 play.

So, guess what? The New Voices @ New Rep Playwriting Fellows opportunity is providing me a way to do that, and I am deeply grateful. I feel that for this play to work, it will need to come out of a more collaborative process. With New Rep’s program, I not only have the beneficial feedback of my peers to draw from, but also an insightful dramaturg, actors, and other design collaborators when I am at a stage in the process where that would be appropriate.

The first step was re-reading the script (and the subsequent comments I made to myself like, “Wow, that was a terrible play”). I had about 10 storylines and maybe as many characters. I decided to take some elements from a couple of the more coherent and interesting storylines and about 2 characters that I wanted to spend quality time hanging out with, and basically scrapped the rest. For one thing, it was written pre-earthquake, and you can’t talk to a Haitian without hearing the words, “after the earthquake.” That changed everything, even for Haitian Americans who weren’t in Haiti for the quake. I think a way of looking at it is this: The old play died, but it turns out it was an organ donor, so I surgically removed its strongest organs to implant into something new, young, full of life. I was going to use a less brutal image, like a phoenix rising or something, but I settled on the brutal one for a reason that anyone who has ever had to massively edit themselves will understand.

And yet (Elie Wiesel’s favorite words). It was all for the best because I am charged and enthusiastic about the possibilities with this new venture. I found the heart of the play: Redemption, or the hope of it. And I think now that that is in place, it will pump invigorating blood into the play’s more systematic elements: plot, character, structure. How do we outrun the demons of our past that seek to destroy us? What do we owe our country? Our family? How do we not just overcome loss, but transcend it? Is it possible to transmute that pain, that sorrow, into something noble, something beautiful? Or do we only try because we feel guilty? These are the questions I am interrogating myself and my characters with as I write this play, currently entitled The Loas. “Loas” comes from VooDoo tradition, signifying spirits that have influence over the living—some are good, some are warlike. The world of this play is full of dualities – light and dark, home and foreign, good and evil, mysticism and slice of life and everything in between. I am looking forward to developing it further along this process of discovery and revival.