 Hi, welcome. First of all, welcome. Playwrights, actors, designers, and assorted other random people who happen to be here for lunch. My name is Andrea Lange, and I'm a faculty member in the English and Humanities Departments at Metro Community College, and it is my pleasure to converse this afternoon with our honored playwright, Kia Corthruyne. So welcome. Thank you. I have a bunch of questions. I told Kia, I said I like tend to be kind of an overachiever when I do these things. And so I like write excessive amounts of questions. And then I have to sort of dial it back. So I will be dialing it back to allow you to ask your own questions. So but I will get I will get this started. And and then I'll open it up in a little bit here. OK, so Kia, the first thing is just and I'm just kind of starting here and then I think maybe we'll work backwards. But so you won the 2014 Wyndham Campbell Literature Prize, which was kind of awesome. You know, I you make your living primarily as a playwright, right? So I mean solely that way, not no extra other sort of gig. So what what what does winning something like that that particular kind of prize? What kind of impact does it have on your life like personally and professionally? Huge because because it was a in my case, it was well, it was a it's a huge monetary award. And in my case, yes, I I have made my living primarily as a playwright, which has meant the last couple of years, particularly has been kind of in poverty. So so I mean, like, seriously, I've been like living on savings from previous years. So it actually is a huge impact that I won't have to worry about homelessness for a while. That's that's always good. That's about homelessness. Do you do you think that that it has become I was going to ask this question later, but seems like a good place now, do you think it's become harder for playwrights to make a living in theater? Like in the last few years, I don't know. I I do feel that I feel like careers go through different periods. And so I I don't know that it's definitely been hard for me. I don't know that all playwrights would say that. But sure, if it's getting harder or if some it feels like there are less agents, I think there are, actually. And that seems to indicate that there are less opportunities. I don't know. That's it. Maybe some of you will speak to that when we open it up, see what your experience of it. So I know that you identify yourself as a political playwright. And start with an issue. And I've been immersing myself in your in all things Kia lately. So here. So I so I made like this kind of like short list of themes that I that I saw in your work. Because I do that because I'm a teacher and that's what I do. So OK, so here's a few of them. So one. So and I'll I won't give you the long list. But I was like, well, obviously, racial inequality, the one that interested me. I mean, they all interested me was environmental racism. And I don't know. I think that interested me in particular because I teach at an urban community college campus. And a lot of the issues that I've seen in your plays are things that I hear about from my students. So and I and like when I'm you know, like lead poisoning, for example, that is an issue that has come up multiple times. Medication of poor children to keep them in line definitely has come up. Infant mortality, all of those, I think, of sort of environmental racism. Some of the other things income income inequality. I think casual attitudes towards violence, domestic violence, violence in general. Certainly the perils of poverty, all of these things are tied together. I'm just kind of separating them for and I also thought about economic policies that hurt the poor, I saw a lot. And even those are sometimes well-meaning policies that ultimately end up sort of not working and ties to history. Like what are the repercussions of history and in effect, ineffectual rehabilitation efforts. So those are just some of the things I saw. I'm sure that I just, you know, I'm going vague because I'm thinking which play is that and I can't remember if you said the play would be able to be clearer about it. Well, God, I don't even know if I could do that at this point. I've read so many things, I think they're all I was just like kind of taking notes like this is my cheat sheet notes. And veterans and I mean all kinds of things. So so my question was, did you start out since you start out with this issue, you know, there's like always like a political issue. And then it involves, I always think, when I was reading your plays into something larger, you know, more about just humanity in general. But did you start out with a conscious goal of being, you know, a political playwright or did that just kind of evolve from your interests and experiences? Yeah, it's more of the second. I mean, my very first play that I wrote in college, which is one of the X plays, which had to do with a Vietnam soldier, you know, took place years before and him coming home from the war and his relationship with his sister. And I remember actually I went to grad school at Columbia and the head of the program there once he was just sort of talking to the whole group. And he and he was just sort of yack, yack, talking of Versailles. And he said, and Kia is the political artist. And then he was just sort of saying that he went on and was talking about other students. And I remember that was the first time I realized that I was any anomaly because I guess I mean, it's not that the other students were writing political. I just thought, oh, these are their practice plays before they write the political place because for me, that's because it's so charges me in in what I read. It's the the impetus, the start of everything that I guess I just assumed that was for everybody. And so and so it wasn't a conscious thing. It's just that's that's where my drive comes from. When do you think that that I mean, do you feel like you were always aware of of sort of what's going on in the world and about politics and about issues that are often controversial when you're growing up? Or do you think you just develop it since you're clearly, you know, that's what, you know, that's what drives your work. That's what feeds it. What do you feel like you that started earlier in your life or did or was it just as you went to when you left Maryland and or left your small town that you were in and then went to college? Yeah, I mean, you know, growing up black and female, it's there. And whether you're conscious of it or not, I mean, it's just so much about oppression is so much there. And so it's something you live with and are I don't that you're aware of it in any sort of intellectual, sociopolitical way, but you're aware of that's the way the world is. And then. And you're also aware that there's something wrong with it. But but then when you grow up, you can sort of more so clarify and actually not even grown up, you know, along the way, what exactly that is and what can be done at least towards addressing it. Does that answer that question? Yeah, yeah, actually. So OK, so that was that actually leads beautifully to a question I had about about a couple of two related questions. First of all, do you think that it is considered? Do you think that there is a stigma attached to being a political writer? First of all, and also in second, and I don't know if it's it's a related question in my mind, it is. But like how how do audiences react? What do you what do you want audiences to get out of the work that you do? What are you hoping happens as a result of that? The first question, I mean, I think there definitely is, which is why I always say I'm a political artist. I mean, it's important for me to own that. You know, it's it's kind of that artist for art's sake thing, which is, you know, just just about the art and not about anything. And then the idea that the true art transcends the political and I see what she bae, you know, the Nigerian writer who thinks he's fall apart. Apparently it's attributed a quote to him. Art for art's sake is just another piece of deodorized dog shit, which is. But. I kind of love that. But yeah, I mean, and it's funny because I always say what I write is not adjit prop. And I don't say that as. As any sort of disparaging remark about agitation propaganda, I actually many years ago was briefly with this group of artists. They were mostly this visual artists and the group is called art slash work. And it was about artists, activists, and they would do things like they'd gone to different parts of the world, like some of them were older, sort of during the issues in Latin America. I'm sorry, Central America, Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 80s. And the and also other, you know, Guatemala, and they would do things like just go there and paint signs and just inciting workers to to strike. And and that stuff is really it as art, you know, and that's in an art piece. And that stuff is really immediate and really important. It just doesn't happen to be what I do, which is I think rather than going on a completely heady way, which is this is what we must do is that it comes in more of an emotional place and connecting with the characters. You know, as I say, more through your heart than through your head. Which isn't to say there isn't head stuff because I'm always having like lots of information. I do lots of research for every play, but the connection should be more emotional and I it's a big thing for me that I do not stand on the fence. So I also for me anyway, I don't think I think there are certain people that they will they feel it's important to just balance both sides. For me, what's important is the truth and and sometimes which means that if you bring up both sides, one of them may come to the top. And also, I do have opinions, so political opinions. So a play of mine called Life by Asphyxiation, which takes place on death row. I never ever say in it there should be no death penalty. But if the audience leaves the theater and doesn't know that's what I thought, then then I failed because there's it's in that case, it's a man who's been on death row for 31 years. He's about to be killed. And this teenage girl who was the the person he raped and murdered, the reason why he's in there keeps coming back to haunt him, whether she's a ghost or in his head, that's for the audience to decide. It was important to me, first of all, to make it a heinous crime because I think it's easy to be anti death penalty for the innocent. Of course, you know, but but what about when it's somebody guilty? So it was important for me to go to that place. He isn't the same person he was then, but he did it at that time. And and there's a part where she says to him towards the end when she's talking about the fact that he's about to die, murder. Once it happens, once it happens to you, you don't wish it on nobody else. And so that's, you know, through her. And I should say, when I when I wrote that, I'm going too much on one question. No, you're fine. It's I also always wanted to write a play with with Nat Turner and Crazy Horse. So I had this character on death row, but also Nat Turner was in the other cell and Crazy Horse and another. And then I had and they were all in death row and I had it was then I had to do it. There were different reasons for that. I had to make it a shorter, shorter version. And so so Crazy Horse got cut, but then he came back later in a longer version. But but then I realized I mean, I was running it pretty quickly. And at that time, I also wanted to address the death penalty. So I just combined them in the same play. And and then it occurred to me that something was missing. And I realized it was the victim's point of view. And so by it, she's so important. And it was actually in bringing her into the play. And really having her express, I mean, it is not like boo, who she's actually a very tough girl, she was a basketball jock and stuff. And she likes to taunt him and I sort of make it in a weird, playful way that it's almost like because he feels terribly guilty that it's like he's the kid that she can always do whatever she wants to with. And then there are moments when her pain comes through. But but by doing that and showing that other side, I came to a truth which again, whether or not you leave the theater feeling differently, you certainly will know where I came from. And the second answer, the second answer, the second question. I'm so glad that you picked up that thread. The second one is much shorter because I have a pat answer because I always say because you said what I would like the audience to leave is I always say that if at least one person leaves the theater feeling a little differently than they came in and thinking a little differently than I feel that I've been successful. And I should say that a zillion years ago I read I read because it just came up Theater of the Oppressed and how I mean what it was billion years ago. And I don't remember much of it, but the one thing that really stayed. I mean, it really affected me at the time. I just don't remember for good so long ago. But one thing that really stayed with me was the idea that with political theater, if what you write is so devastating that at the end, all the audience can do was just leave and throw up their hands and despair. Then you haven't really done anything because then people will say, well, there's nothing to be done. This is just too terrible. And the whole point is to hopefully to get that person who might do something. I'll say one really quick thing besides that. Which is which is I I got this commission grant years ago. The Guthrie Theater picked nine American playwrights. They got this big fat grant and you could go wherever you wanted in your world in the world and write a play inspired by the experience. So I went to Liberia as they were transitioning out of their civil war. So I was I mean, there was no running water. There were bullet holes everywhere. It was but for the people there, it was I mean, there was still some stuff going on because with no electricity, nobody in the bush knew that the war was supposed to be over that the UN came in. So there was some activity still going on. But for the most part, people felt that it was over. But for the most part, people were also very depressed because there was no money. There should have been and that's a US issue. But I won't go on that beat right now. But because of stuff that we owe them and that's a whole other thing. But so the whole country, the whole infrastructure is completely destroyed and there's empty pockets all around. So there was this. Depression, I mean, relief that there were guns everywhere anymore, but depression at the same time. So the thing is about that the giving that I say about giving hope. Yes, I always have to give up the thing about with that because it cannot be forced. It can't be a forced happy ending. It has to be truthful. It has to be true. And I felt this might be the one time I can't do it. Even though I promised myself after in the end of the press, I would always have this hope that I may not be able to do it. And I wasn't going to lie. So so I wrote it and I wrote it and it started back in the 19th century with. You know, it's a whole long story, but US Americans, Black Americans colonizing. It started out with a white group. It's a whole other thing, but free blacks colonizing Liberia. And it goes the couple of the 19th century. And then it comes to the present with the combatants and a whole other thing and how that goes down anyway, going through that whole history. And I kind of wrote the first draft in order. And I didn't know what was going to happen where it was going to go. It actually is probably the end is probably the most hopeful inspiring ending I've ever written because it just sort of going through that history of black people from Africa who came to here and then went back and back to people who'd always been Africa and how that somehow the survival of that it actually became really inspiring. This huge, I don't know if I would call it a happy, but you know, a very, very, very inspiring ending. It was happy. I'm glad you brought that up. That was actually one of my questions, and I read Splash Hatch and Breath Boom, which I loved, well, I loved both of them. And I was thinking about Pree's, like the finals. I don't want to be all spoiler alert on you if you haven't read it, by the way, but Pree's journey at the end, you know, like that we're on this journey. And you talked about the tough characters, and I think a lot of the characters, especially the women in your play, seem to be very, they're very tough people, they're survivors. And I was thinking, you know, it's hard to read Hope in there, but yeah, you can see it. But there was something else about that play that I wanted to talk about besides the hope, the kind of glimmer that you get at the end. And sometimes that's all, it seems like it's just a glimmer. It's a glimmer, and it can go either way, but it leaves the door open. It's the very last word. Yeah, but one of the things that struck me when I was reading that play is that idea of magic and about how, and not just in that play, though, but how, for Pree, that is her dreaming about designing and, you know, fireworks, right? And for time when I read Splash Hatch, it seemed like magic for her was the knowledge that she got out of books about how dangerous and toxic the world, our physical world, can be, right? So there, and that those were like different kinds of magic that kind of sustained the characters in these very difficult situations. So my question is, what is your magic, would you say? I love fireworks, too, but I've never designed them. Do you mean my inspiration? Yeah, well, it could be anything, you know, what do you think is, for you, what is, what would you consider magic? I mean, besides fireworks, I mean, who doesn't really? Yeah, fireworks. I know, that's what I think. Right? I didn't, you know, it's interesting, this is a cultural thing. But that actually partly is because I love fireworks. And and in New York, the Fourth of July, it's like millions of people. I mean, like two million or something seed. It's like, you have to be there early for hours. And, you know, when I look at my sister, she's like, no, not again, because nobody wants to have to sit out there with me for all those hours waiting for the fireworks. But but and that's why I gave it to her because I wanted her to have something joyful and that's what was joyful to me. But this is a little beside the point, but I was first done in London and I had to teach them to like the cast of like the fireworks because this is an interesting thing. They're their association. They were talking about, oh, it's so cold. And I was like, cold. And it's because with them, it's Guy Fawkes Day, which is in November when they have it and their fireworks all over. And so it's funny because that was one of the cultural things I am that I had to teach them. Can I can I say an interesting anecdote? Another cultural thing there's a part. This is yeah, there's a part in the play because it's about the leader of a girl's gang and other girls and gangs. And and it takes place. I mean, I wrote it in the 90s. It's sort of the the height of the the crack explosion. And and there's a part in prison. The girls prison when they're having this counseling session and there's a girl who is from Texas and talks about or was originally from Texas, her family moved there. But she talks about because there are in certain places, usually in certain cities like New York and L.A. Girl gang members can be unspeakably violent in other smaller cities and often more sort of Midwest cities. The violence perpetrated on them by the boys gangs is unspeakable because it's sort of they're they're boy toys. And in this case, she says this whole game. She talks about when her sister loved to play games and she loved to get boxcars double sixes because it was lucky. And blah, blah, blah, she could always win. And but when she had to be initiated into the boys gang, I mean, I'm starting to the gang, but it was through the boys that she was initiated into it. She said she threw boxcars. But this time it wasn't so lucky. Biggest boy was engine smallest boy caboose. So I so gang rape was the was the initiation. I when I did it in Lund, which was the first one, and I remember the first production and the actress did it so beautifully because it all comes clear depending on how much the actress puts into the pain of it. And I remember both the director and the and the actress, they just didn't think the audience would get it. I was like, they're totally gonna get it because she's doing it so beautifully. So the director sort of went off was doing something else. And I was through it by myself a second. And then I said, wait a minute, do you have the term pulling a train for a gang rape? And they never heard of that. And I realized I wasn't even conscious of that, but that's part of our culture that you need that reference for that to make any sense. And so I had to write it very literally for that case and then brought it back to that language when I brought it back to the U.S. All right, so I'm okay. It's like you're reading my mind here with this question. So one of my questions was, and again, when I was reading is you have a really unique voice. Like your language is very, and if you're not familiar with the work, you'll see that tonight, but that it's really unique. It's almost like there's a, I don't know. Well, I thought of it as kind of like a music almost. There's like a rhythm to it. And where did that come from? Like where did that idea originate for that? I mean, and also is what are the challenges with actors with that? Does there any rules or anything you tell them when they're learning that language? Because it is very unique. They tend to inherently get it on audition or they don't. It's kind of in there. And part of it is I just play around with language because I mean from scene to scene and moment to moment and word to word, I just want to surprise the audience. I don't want them to know what's coming. So I play that way. Part of it I think is I've lived in New York, mostly Harlem since 1988, but I grew up in this hick small town in the Maryland and the valley of the Appalachians. You could walk to us Virginia. So part of it I think is like Kia. It's a half-hick and half really urban and sort of all comes together or something. It does. It was just interesting the way it was punctuated too. Like that was, you know. Yeah, it's the way I hear it. Yeah, it was really, really cool. All right, well I, and again, I have like so frighteningly many questions, but I know that you would like to answer, ask some questions as well. So I'm gonna open it up to the audience. I would like to think that always happens unless it's completely solved because I mean, and I don't know how much it's a conscious thing because it is true that once I've written about something, I mean it is interesting because I wrote a novel and they're four main characters a couple of years ago and one of them is a lawyer and it so happens I've written two full length play since then and both of them have lawyers in them. So I think there's something about that information that really stayed with me. I tend to keep coming back to characters in prison. So I think there's something about that that draws me, not consciously, but I tend to keep coming back to that whether it's women's prison or men's prison or this was teenagers in Breath Boom and so I've written a couple of plays that dealt with the environment splash hatch on the E going down was one and another is a cool dip in the Baron Saharan Crick which is about water issues and so it is the environment but in a different way so yeah, I guess there are certain things that I come back to but not in a conscious way. I feel like I'm done with it for now. I'll come back in a different way sometimes later if it hasn't been fixed, which is unfortunately usually true. Questions? You're so quiet. We're just covering so much ground. Anybody? Nothing? Oh, there we go. There was a couple. Amy? Well, yeah, I always do start with a lot of research and then I come up with the characters and actually what I'm trying to think is maybe if I can go through a specific process. Okay, my play that's the newest play which is called Sling Shot and deals with tort law which is lawsuits and which, so you know my point of view from the very beginning is that it is one of the few places left where a little person can be against a big corporation and if all things, right, they should be on an even level. There's been this whole thing of tort law reform which is really about corporations trying to act as if these little people, so these big corporations are really just, they're the greedy evil ones, right? So the play, because there has been reforms in the play is addressing how important it is that we need to get that back because it's originally in the Constitution that we should have that right. And so there, it's actually one of my corkier plays. Some of it, and some of it is kind of very riddly real. So I have, I went through a lot of cases. I came up with a case that was interesting to me of a person who was in this lift. He was a, I forgot what his job was, but he was a working class person. I think it was a painter in a building and there was supposed to be something propped to lock it into place, but they did not have that with the machinery, I mean, the mechanism, so he fell. He did not, he did survive, but I sort of went from there because it wasn't necessarily that I wanted to take the, I wanted to be inspired by the case, but I didn't have to go through all those, all the details. So for example, then I made decisions that actually, it would be, I think much more horrible if he didn't die, but that if he was, I have, he's 22 and that he was this very strong athletic boy, and now he's in a wheelchair and can barely speak, but I actually thought that's more powerful. So that was a decision I made. Then I made a decision that the lawyer, who's a woman, is actually usually a corporate lawyer, but she's doing this pro bono, and she thinks what she does, which is basically gentrifying neighborhoods, has nothing to do with this and how this sort of comes together, so that's her journey. The other person's actually the father of the boys, sort of the two of them, but then it gets, I have like these quirky things. I was, I went online and I was looking for just some corporate lawyer stuff, and I found this show, it's like a local cable access show out of Brooklyn, and it's got this black man, and it's all about urban professionals, and it had this lawyer on there, this black lawyer, and it's to encourage people that are upwardly, upscale black people, right? And it had this lawyer, and he really was, I mean, this is actually what inspired that I had her be this gentrification lawyer, because it was really interesting watching him, because he was very tense, but the guy who was the host of the show was just happy to have these professionals on, and I remember he would say things, which were really like inciting, which the guy never questioned. Like, you know, he sort of said, well, sometimes when there's a place, I have it written down all the technical language, I forget it all, but that can be, that's, gotta kick it the words right, that he was saying something about, basically this neighborhood can be moved for a shopping center or an upscale building, that sometimes it's good if the people there that may have to move, that if the person coming to talk to them kind of looks like them. So it's like, it was like this completely inside, which they never, so I wrote these kind of weirdly quirky things with this guy, and the show I made was called Urban Upward, and so it becomes this humorous thing that keeps coming back, but it's actually the way the lawyer is sort of dealing with these questions, and the thing is that he's never challenging her, but it may strangely makes her challenge herself, because she starts to really think about what she's saying, and then I had this other weird thing where it's actually a commercial, which is much like the reform commercials where it's sort of, like they do these things like, like fire fighters who say, if only they didn't sue us, we'd be able to come and put out those fires, but we're just, they literally had these commercials, so I threw in a commercial, but did that answer it at all, Amy? I mean, it was just, it was my most recent place, I just thought I was kind of fresh on my process on that. Yeah, and the end is, you know, when you get to the end, it's not so funny, but the, but I think sometimes it actually becomes richer that way because it becomes ludicrous, and then suddenly it's not at all, and where it goes with that, so. Connie. Hey, Connie. You have a sister who's also a little late. Yes. But I have just two children who are both playwrights, so I just want to hear a little bit about her siblings. Yeah, that's sweet. Well, I have one sister, I have two sisters. One is Kim, who was 15 months older than I, and Kara, the playwright who was 16 years younger than I, by the same parents, and this was in Western Maryland, my parents are no longer living, and my father worked in a paper mill, he planned the shipments for them, and because it was very much, well it was kind of a booming factory town and like the paper mill and that, by the time I came along, it was a depressed town, and that's one of the few places where people could work. I actually didn't really think about how much they overworked him, and my father actually went to college at, oh God, I can't believe I'm going blank, it's in Baltimore, it begins within AM, at that time it was like an all black college, and because things were still segregated then, and he didn't finish, he married my mother when he was three years, after three years, so he didn't finish, and for that reason actually, which I didn't know until after he died, suddenly, of an aneurysm, that for that reason, because he hadn't gone that last year, he worked all those years, and all these white men, he would train them and then they would become his boss, and he would do their work when they were on vacation, but they said, well, you don't have the degree, and so my mother was a, she was a homemaker, actually when I was very little, she was a nurse's aide, and I think before then, she had done, worked as a maid in like hotels and things like that. She was a very good sketch artist, but she just became a mom, so she never really pursued that, and my older sister had a bunch of kids and stayed there, and we're not very close at all, and my baby sister grew up and became a playwright. And yeah, it was a small town, you could walk to West Virginia, you'd let the West Virginia cousins, and actually tonight, there will be, I'm reading like three pieces, the last one I will bring in my Cumberland dialect, you'll hear the way I talk to growing up. It's kind of hard to do now, but I'll be able to do that. Okay, so we're about out of time, I wanted to ask you one final question, so we have a lot of young and emerging playwrights in the audience, and what advice can you leave them with today? And one of the tenants of the conference is that when we give feedback, we know we don't allow anybody to rewrite your play, we know that, but what other kind of advice could you give them, or something hopeful? We have to end on a hopeful note. I guess I mean to keep writing what you're passionate about, and to stay with that, and not to get drawn away from it, despite whether you're getting the productions, or if you're getting this commission, or that to keep with it, because that's going to be the best work that you'll be doing, and eventually, it'll, in one way or the other, it's going to pay off to be writing for your heart, and not for anybody else. Kia, thank you so much for talking to us today. Come see our work tonight, and the work of some many fine artists in the North Omaha community.