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Q&A: On Writing Across Genres

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 16:11:09 GMT

Dana Formby takes a detour through prose and discovers a stronger voice

CD: As a long-time dramatist who is now writing short stories and other prose, what have you learned in the process and what surprised you?

Dana : The most profound difference is the intimacy I can create with a single audience member in prose compared to a large group in theatre. Prose carries a sense of secrecy that allows me to speak directly to the reader as if we are close friends or lovers. That level of intimacy isn’t possible when presenting to a crowd. Put in metaphor, if narrative is a vehicle, then a dramatist drives a bus, while a prose writer zips around in a sports car.

The freedom to move so openly through narrative was surprising. It let me go places a bus simply cannot go. At first the process was slow going, but the more I practiced, the freer I became. Dramatists are restricted by their main building block. Removing that reliance on dialogue let me see beneath a character’s skin and truly understand what makes them tick. The more I allowed myself to play, the easier it became. That sense of play has been an incredible gift. By not worrying about the outcome, I found my voice was louder in prose. I also know I would not enjoy this freedom I found in prose, if I had not been driving a bus for the last twenty years. Crossing genre has made me a stronger writer and more articulate about my work.

CD: Do you think there is value—for any writer, every writer—in writing across genres?

Dana : YES! I used to be terrified of writing anything outside of plays, let alone prose or poetry, because of my dyslexia. As an actor, I allowed myself to write plays since people do not talk with perfect grammar. With prose, I discovered grammar isn’t the wall I once thought it was. Of course, it’s important, but it doesn’t need to hold me back. Now I don’t worry about boundaries. I feel free to write the stories I want to tell, and I’m learning to recognize which stories belong in which form. Some things only work in the intimacy of a car; others require the witnesses found only on a bus.

CD: Are there important differences in each genre that a writer should recognize?

Dana : I hesitate to draw strict lines, because boxes and rules can hinder creativity. Still, the way time functions in prose, poetry, and drama gives concepts like grief, hate, or love different shapes. That’s what excites me. I love seeing how the same idea transforms depending on the form.

CD: Have you found that your mastery of theatrical concepts informs your prose writing?

Dana : Aristotle’s focus on beginning, middle, and end remains essential in all forms of storytelling. Without them, whether it’s a reader curled up in a nook, a poem on the page, or a packed theatre, the work collapses. Without a beginning, middle, and end, the book is set aside, the poem forgotten, and the theatre audience shifts uncomfortably in their seats, desperate to escape.

Q&A: Not So Jolly England

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 16:09:22 GMT

Catherine Yu probes religious persecution in the time of Shakespeare

CD: Your Saturday Series reading will bring intrigue and poetic language to the stage, and we're excited! Can you tell us about the genesis of "Off with Her Head?" What about the period intrigued you?

Cate : I was reading a biography about Queen Elizabeth I and I was struck by the persecution of Catholics during her reign. I think we romanticize the Elizabethan era because the arts flourished so heavily during that time and because of Shakespeare. But religion was heavily politicized. Everyone was required to attend Protestant services. If you did not, you were fined. Also, there were random searches of the homes of Catholic families. If a priest was discovered, he was hung. I thought about the persecution of different groups today and felt like there were parallels I wanted to explore.

CD: How would you describe OWHH within the body of your work as a writer? Is this an extension? A departure?

Cate : In some ways, it is a departure. In the past, I have written period pieces where the language is faithful to the times. You’ll see that the language in OWHH is more contemporary. I decided to experiment with that based off of contemporary period TV shows. I thought it would make it easier to see the relevance to our current times.

CD: I’m struck by the breadth of your work and career. You write plays, librettos, screenplays, novels and poems. You've been a university lecturer, a tutor for federal inmates and a grant writer. Do all these talents and disciplines co-exist and build on each other, or have they been sequential endeavors?

Cate : I would say curiosity and dedication is key to being a writer or educator. The federal inmates were some of the best students I ever had. They had not been encouraged in academics when they were younger. When I was teaching them, they simply needed the care and support in nurturing their abilities in math and reading. They needed a judgment free zone.

CD: We are all about judgment free zones! Is that part of what you found when you were a MacDowell Fellow in 2017? You worked in the Star Studio, built in 1911-12, where other artists like Joan Acocella, Gish Jen, Galway Kinnell and Basil Twist have also worked. Did the building’s legacy imbue your work somehow or lend you a sense of freedom?

Cate : I did feel a historic sense while at Star Studio. Young Jean Lee had been there about a year or two before me. We sign our names on plaques in the room and I saw hers. I feel a historic sense when I walk into the Russ Tutterow theater too. I did not get to meet him, he was before my time, but having heard everyone at CD speak about him—he sounds like an incredible soul.

CD: As you work across mediums, do you have an established daily writing practice? Or does your work happen in bursts or stolen minutes as you find them?

Cate : While I think there’s a way to work on plays for long periods in the day at a time, novel writing needs to be broken into a daily habit, where each day is a step in a direction. There’s only so much prose you can generate in a day. So, when I’m working on a novel, I write every day at 6 AM. When I’m working on a first draft of a play, I write five pages a day for a month or two. When I work on rewrites, I work in bursts in intervals I’ve blocked out for rewriting.

CD: Your opening lines in "Off with Her Head," “O/I come from Rheims/And before that,/Rome,...” launch us into a journey and land us in England “the snake pit for Catholics like me,” so we know we are already in deep trouble! What are you excited for audiences to experience and what do you hope they take away from the play?

Cate : I’m excited to see what people make of the Elizabethan England underbelly I navigate in the play, and whether they come away with new thoughts on political and religious persecution or find a character they really connect to.

Q&A: On Characters that Bleed

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 16:01:14 GMT

Dana Lynn Formby is back to shine a light on grief, structure and the onstage manifestation

CD: Dana, I am thrilled to welcome you back to teaching at Chicago Dramatists! What have you been doing, and how has it informed your approach to teaching?

Dana : I have been grieving, honestly. Both my mother and father passed away within a month of each other, and I just adored them. They were my heroes, my reason for writing, and it has been tough readjusting. Grief pulled me inward, as I am sure it does for many, so I started writing prose and have had an absolute blast. My short story Orion’s Belt was published in the Saturday Evening Post. It came in fourth in their Great American Fiction Contest.

CD: Congratulations! It’s a haunting and beautiful story. In it, you continue your investigation into the lives of blue-collar people. I think they remain underrepresented in American storytelling. Am I just unaware of a vast body of work? Or is there a failure of representation?

Dana : I think a good number of early and midlevel career playwrights, no matter the themes they write, all fight to be heard. There are only so many venues and so many slots, and we compete against a lot of dead guys. My writing, be it in Orion’s Belt , where two young girls discover the finality of death at too young an age; or my play American Beauty Shop , which shows the collapse of the American Dream; or my current novel, Just Another Trailer Park Fairy Tale, in which a young girl discovers the horror created by unchecked wealth and power, tells the struggle of people who live on the short end of Capitalism’s stick.

CD: I think of you as the Queen of Structure and just brilliant as using structure to diagnose dead air in plays. But the class you are teaching this quarter is all about Character and your students are going to build a full-length play outline by starting with the character. How do you meld structure and character?

Dana : Aristotle explains how character is at the center of plot through the concepts of peripeteia and hamartia. Peripeteia is the reversal a character goes through. Some would call it change. I call it a perception shift. Hamartia is the flaw we often hear about in character development. Often, the flaw leads to the perception shift. With that context in mind, it is impossible not to meld structure and character together.

Also, for me, the craft of playwriting is rooted in my love of acting. Stanislavski, the early 1900s Russian acting theorist and practitioner, blew my mind wide open when I first read An Actor Prepares. The book is written as a student’s diary of an acting class. One moment in particular has stayed with me ever since. The teacher tells the students that they have a light on their heads, and wherever they put their focus is what the audience will see. Many students light the audience, and the actors cannot be seen. But one successful student lights their scene partner, because that is where their focus should be. That image of a student with a light on their head is something I use to ground myself in the world of my characters. It keeps me from shining exposition on the audience and leaving my characters bored, onstage, and in the dark.

CD: One of the features of your class is that students will have a reading of their work by professional actors. What's the value of that?

Dana : Plays are meant to be heard, not read. They should not exist solely on the page. Actors are trained to read plays and can pick up on subtext that novice readers often miss. Many times, the conflict of a play only becomes clear through performance. Giving playwrights actors to work with allows them to see whether the three-dimensional aspects of their text are coming through. It helps them understand what is landing and what is not.

CD: You mentioned how deeply the loss of your parents has affected you. And I know that your mother also had a profound effect on your teaching. What did you learn from her?

Dana : When I began teaching my mother, a janitor at a nursing home, writing concepts from my MFA writing program, she showed me that stories belong to everyone and that writing isn’t about credentials, it’s about connection. She had a particular insight into the concept of Onstage Manifestation, or OSM, which is key to how I understand sculpting a moment on stage. An OSM is an object that represents an intangible idea or something off stage— more about this “off stage” use later. The OSM can be traded between characters, which gives a play movement and allows characters to transform.

With all that in mind, my mother and I were watching the movie Ghost with Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze over Christmas break during my first year of graduate school. It is one of our favorite films, so of course, we both have it memorized. The first time Patrick Swayze says “ditto” in response to “I love you,' my mother yelled, “That’s an OSM. It means love.” I told her, “Sort of, but it’s not an object.” She argued back, “Yes, it is, because it changes hands when she says ‘ditto,’ which is what he usually says to her, ‘I love you,’ the saying changes hands. Plus, when he says ‘I love you,’ it’s his perception shift. He never said ‘I love you’ before." She went on to say, “All OSM is a metaphor for big feelings exchanged between characters.” She was right. That is how I learned OSMs can be words. And that is how I learned to listen to my students, as they are the best teachers.

Now, about that “something off stage.” I was teaching a class at Chicago Dramatists, and one of my students mentioned how they had started tracking off-stage manifestations. I asked what that meant. He explained it referred to ideas that are spoken about but never come on stage. In that moment, I realized OSMs were even more powerful than I thought. For instance, in Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet holds a rose in her hand and talks about Romeo’s name, he is off stage. Shakespeare uses the rose as an OSM to bring Romeo onto the stage through metaphor. This became an incredibly valuable tool for me as a writer. If there is something off stage in my writing, I ask myself how to bring it onstage in the form of an object (sorry Mom, sometimes words are not enough, but in the case of Ghost, you were correct) so it can easily be traded between characters.

Q&A: Finding the Funny

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 15:58:04 GMT

Joe Janes on where to find humor and how to get it into your writing

CD: Joe, it's awful out there! Help us: how can we find the funny in our world?

Joe : Michael Gelman--who I’ve had the pleasure of working with at Second City--and I were once discussing making people laugh in areas where we assume people don’t have much to find funny. He said, “Where there’s laughter, there’s hope.” A laugh is a moment of communal enlightenment. I also believe “Joy is a form of resistance.” People in power don’t want you to have a good time, especially at their expense. But your question was how can we find the funny? That’s simple. People in power are usually idiots .

CD: So, there should be a lot of material out there. But how do we get that humor into our work? Can you teach people to be funny?

Joe : Some of the funniest people I know are not very funny in person. They’re funny when they improvise or when they write because (tip alert!) they are being honest and speaking truth. The laughter doesn’t come from snappy dialogue; it comes from relatable human behavior. In my decades of experience teaching at Columbia College and The Second City, I have seen people go from being “not funny” to “funny.” Typically, they stumble upon a laugh while improvising or discover a serious line they wrote for a scene is hilarious. It opens a world for them. They may not be the class clown, but they start creatively playing with the notion that they might actually be funny.

CD : This picture of you makes me laugh out loud. Why are "off-center" things so inherently funny?

Joe : Charlie Chaplin once did an experiment. He took two photos of himself sitting with a bamboo cane. Virtually identical. People were asked which picture they thought was funny and they always picked the same one without being able to point to what the difference was. In the funny photo, the bamboo cane was slightly bowed. My picture is significantly less subtle, but it’s the minor alteration that is unexpected . It’s also an excuse to compare myself with Charlie Chaplin. I’m also taller and would never wear a Hitler mustache.

CD. You've said, "Especially when it comes to using or injecting humor into writing, people tend to wait for a good idea, like they are waiting to be struck by lightning." How do you help people stop waiting for a good idea and, as you say, "go find it."

Joe : Improvisers don’t wait to have something to say before they get up on stage and improvise. Writing is the same. It’s an improvisational act on paper (or screen). I’m a big fan of brainstorming and writing prompts. I can also sit down and write a scene or 10-minute play with a one-word suggestion or title. Thomas Edison said, “Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% (other people’s) perspiration.” I added “other people.” Yes, I have so far compared myself to Charlie Chaplin and Thomas Edison. Mother Teresa is coming up.

CD: When did you know you were funny? How did you turn that into a career?

Joe : I watched a lot of comedies and comedians on TV growing up, and I was fascinated by the mechanics of saying something and then people laughing. In the fourth grade, our teacher let me put up a short sketch comedy show I wrote. It went well and we got laughs! Jump ahead to college, where I started a comedy/improv group and started doing stand-up at a local comedy club. The folks I met at the comedy club convinced me to go on the road, which I did for five years before settling in Chicago and getting back into theater and starting to teach.

CD. You've written several 10-minute plays and many full-length plays. You've also written for SNL's "Weekend Update," and for the video game series "You Don't Know Jack." How do you bring the breadth of what you've learned to benefit classrooms that might be filled with writers working in different mediums?

Joe : What I have learned through all the media I have worked in is that “Brevity is the soul of wit.” What! Shakespeare? I’m shameless in my name-dropping. Fun fact, that Shakes quote is from Hamlet which, when done in its entirety, is four hours long! As a playwright, I overwrite and always need to chop things for clarity, which also strengthens the material, usually making it funnier. Hamlet would have been a great comedy if it were shorter.

CD: I expect your students will spend a lot of time laughing. Should they take Finding the Funny just so they can laugh for three hours a week? Will they actually have to do any writing?

Joe : Both things are true! Class will be a soul-nourishing break from the madness of the world. You’ll hang out with some like-minded creative folk who make the planet a better place just by being around. And, yes, we will write in this writing class. As Mother Teresa once said, “Quit yer b*tching and get writing!”

Q&A: Haunting Me Over The Window

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 15:55:29 GMT

Ruth Margraff on the writing of “Locket Arias”

CD: What initially attracted you to this particular group of women?

Ruth Margraff: The winter rolled into Minneapolis when I was doing a Jerome fellowship. I had cracked my window because the apartment was overheated. And there were icicles in my eyelashes when I went outdoors! Kristin Marting at Here Arts Center had commissioned me to write these six courtesans for moments of tableaux vivant. So, I got a stack of books and these courtesans came haunting me over the window sill. And I haven't gotten rid of them since!

CD: Why are we still so fascinated with the lives of courtesans? Is it because there are so few stories of women in the past who wielded personal agency within the nexus of beauty, money and power?

Ruth Margraff: Well, I've always suspected that I come from another century so I am drawn to antique women and design. I like how Ionesco said, "Every time needs something out of time to be introduced into something that is of the time." But I've come to think of these courtesans as early feminists. They didn't have access to education, really, or careers. So, they inspired the men around them who were running countries, making famous art and writing their stories into operas. You can see them as homewreckers, but some had children and families of their own. I've given them stealth, depth, stature which might be far-fetched, but why not? I think they are more like less visible women who dare to not fit in and secretly inspire other women to resist. I realized working on this reading that courtesans were muses in the 1850s and yet they are also muses for me still. They inspire me to daydream in a scale that is larger than life-sized which is what opera does to me as well.

CD: How has this work developed/changed since you conceived it? Was it always an opera? How has music shaped the script?

Ruth Margraff: Originally the arias were spoken by actors in still moments between waltzes and quadrilles. I liked them, so I broke them out of the devised larger piece and staged them as "Locket Arias" for a Mac Wellman festival. Years later I mentioned them in passing to composer Phil Fried at a McKnight alumni event and he asked me to send them to him. He composed them in this Rossini opera buffa way almost instantly. We have been trying to finish and record them now for use as audition material or for singers to develop and expand their vocal arts.

CD: What are the questions you're hoping to address through the Saturday Series reading? What are you particularly excited for the audience to experience?

Ruth Margraff : I hope to bring up these very questions, so you have read my mind! But also, to look at the arc of each courtesan in terms of cost and labor. What does "passion" do to her health, reputation and estate? I'm especially focused on La Paiva who did not die in arrears of rent, avoided the coughing and cholera, and seems to end up in a paradise of triumphs.

Q&A: On the Dramatic Conflict

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 15:51:40 GMT

Reginald Edmund shares the formula

CD: One of the hallmarks of Chicago Dramatists is that our teachers are successful playwrights. Your play, "Southbridge," was runner up for the Kennedy Center’s Lorraine Hansberry and Rosa Parks National Playwriting Awards, and most recently won the Southern Playwrights’ Competition, the Black Theatre Alliance Award for Best New Play and the Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award. What have you learned through the development of this play that informs your teaching?

Reggie : Developing Southbridge, a play rooted in a real 1881 lynching in Athens, Ohio, was a deeply transformative journey, one that taught me lessons I carry into every classroom I enter.

First, I learned that the stage is not just a space for entertainment but a sacred vessel for communal healing. Southbridge was not an easy play to write or develop. Its themes: racial violence, trauma, love, and the longing to be seen, demanded rigorous honesty and emotional vulnerability. Through the development process, I had to listen, not just to my characters, but to the echoes of history and the present moment. That act of deep listening is something I try to instill in my students: that writing is not only about crafting dialogue but about creating space for voices that have long been silenced .

Second, I learned that the development process is where theory meets fire. Workshops, rewrites, rehearsals that’s where I discovered the real work: how to shape moments for maximum emotional impact, how silence on stage can speak louder than words, and how every character—no matter how small—holds a piece of the play’s moral architecture. These insights don’t come from textbooks; they come from the doing. And that experiential wisdom is what I bring to my students not just how to write plays, but how to build them, scene by scene, beat by beat, with purpose and soul.

Finally, Southbridge taught me that storytelling is an act of radical visibility. The character Christopher C. Davis wrongfully accused, longing to be seen as fully human mirrors a struggle that I feel many of my students’ face: how to write themselves into a world that often overlooks them. I believe that my job as a teacher is to help them do just that. To help them be heard, and more importantly, to be seen.

That’s the most valuable thing I’ve learned from making plays, not just how to write, but why we must write. Because somewhere, someone is still standing on that proverbial tree stump, crying out, “Can you see me?” And theatre, when done right, our job is to answer back: Yes. We see you.

CD: Plays in Progress was taught--by you-- at Chicago Dramatists for the first time last quarter. Arlene and I developed the concept because we felt that writers who were already launched on a project would appreciate the space, structure and feedback to advance their work week-by-week. Were we right? Did the concept work? How did you take that concept and shape it to fit your pedagogy?

Reggie : Yes, you were absolutely right! The Plays in Progress concept resonated deeply with the writers. The space, structure, and regular feedback provided exactly the kind of grounding and momentum that writers crave once they've committed to a new project but still need guidance to carry it through. In shaping the class, I leaned heavily on my own creative philosophy: that storytelling is both ritual and acts of revolution. We interrogated the emotional logic of characters, the structure of scenes, and the deeper cultural roots of each story. I found that writers responded powerfully to this, especially those working on stories that were personal, political, or spiritually driven.

CD: Years ago, a teacher asked me an insightful question about one of my plays. It pointed to a problem I needed to address. But I just couldn't resolve it, and I froze. What advice or techniques do you share with students when they confront a challenge they can't seem to think or write their way out of?

Reggie : I always return to the formula: Goal plus Obstacle times Lack of Compromise equals Conflict. That equation has been a compass for me, especially when I am stuck in the weeds of a play and cannot see the path forward. When students, and yes even when I myself, hit a wall and cannot think or write their way out of it, I tell them: Go back to the root.

Ask yourself:

What does my protagonist want more than anything in the world?
What is in their way both internally and externally?
And most importantly: Why won’t they compromise?

Because that refusal to bend is where drama lives . When writers cannot move forward, it is often because they have not answered one or more of those questions clearly. They may know what happens, but not why it matters. Or they have built a beautiful world but no engine for their shiny car to drive through it, or they load the car up with so many things it struggles to move.

CD: You've said you believe "playwriting is a potent tool for social commentary and fostering empathy." I think we're in a time with plenty of social commentary but maybe not enough empathy. Do you have exercises or techniques you offer playwrights who want to evoke empathy?

Reggie : I tell students: You don’t have to agree with your characters. But you do have to love them enough to understand them. Empathy in playwriting is not about absolution. It is about illumination. It is about showing people not as heroes or villains, but as human we're all messy, contradictory, hungry for something. That’s what our audience connects to. That is what causes them to talk about your play when they leave the theatre and not about where did they park the car.

CD: Students in your class get more than instruction in playwriting and feedback on their work, you also offer advice on the "practical considerations of getting a play produced, such as working with directors and actors, submitting to festivals and competitions, and navigating the publishing process." I think there's a real need for such information because many of our CD members express that, once they've written and rewritten and rewritten their work, they aren't sure what to do to launch it into the world. Can you give us three pieces of advice for what comes next?

Reggie : It’s true. I believe teaching playwriting doesn’t stop at the final draft. For many writers, the scariest part is not writing the play but what comes after. So, in my class, I treat the page and the process with equal importance. Here are three essentials I always share with my students for taking that next step:

The Artistic Statement :
This is your why. Why you write, what stories you are called to tell, and how your work fits into the wider theatrical landscape. This is your foundation. When the industry asks who you are as a writer, you want to have a clear, grounded answer.
The Cover Letter and Letter of Inquiry :
A good letter shows not just that you wrote a play, but that you’re submitting it intentionally to the right opportunity. Your letter of inquiry should introduce your project if you’re reaching out to a director, producer, or theatre with whom you want to build a relationship.
The Production Bible :A production bible is a document (or folder) you build as you write and develop your play. It includes your logline, synopsis, cast list with descriptions, development history, your bio, a high-res photo of you, and any notes on tone, music, or visual world. Think of it as your play’s resume. When someone expresses interest, you’re ready and not scrambling.

Q&A: On Politics and Plays

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 15:46:58 GMT

Toccara Castleman and Stefan Brün share insights on plays that go “Pow!”

CD: A question for both of you: we're so inundated with politics now, how do you reach audiences who might be thinking "Enough!"

Toccara : On the surface, my play, Maybe a Mexican, is about a man who decides to run for President because he feels ignored by the political system. But the greater throughline is the topic of visibility, which is a facet of our everyday lives that exists beyond politics. And if you take a deeper dive into the narrative, audiences will be delighted (I hope) to discover that it's also a story that uses humor to explore the themes of identity, friendship, community and belonging. We're all just trying to find our places within the world, which is something we can all connect on. So instead of "Enough!" I'm hoping audiences will walk away thinking "More!...I want more of that."

Stefan : I think the primary challenges for making political plays, at this time, lie with shedding old categorizations or constraints that no longer work toward evoking forthright truth in the room. This extends from how we write (thinking more of a collective act from multiple viewpoints, than of a singular genius at their desk) to how we work, creating two-way dialogues with the practitioners of the many discrete crafts theater is made up of, thinking about who gets to work representing what and under which conditions....I could go on, that's why I’m teaching a class!

CD: Political plays can have a “ripped from the headlines” energy that’s powerful, but as artists we want our work to remain relevant long after the crisis-of-the-day resolves. Toccara, how has the passage of time informed the development of your play and, Stefan, how can Brechtian theatre techniques continue to enliven work today?

Toccara : I was inspired to write this play after Obama's second Presidential win. I was reading a lot of commentary about what he owed the country and specifically Black America. I was coming across different pieces of editorial that were theorizing who should be next after Obama-- a woman? An Indigenous person? I started to wonder what it would look like if someone else from an unexpected community sat in the Oval Office. What would that person owe themselves and what would be expected of them because of their cultural background? I wanted to use politics as a gateway to answer these questions, while also exploring how simply being in one's body as a Black, Latinx, Indigenous or Asian person becomes inherently political.

Stefan : I strongly feel that Brecht--and also Augusto Boal, Caryl Churchill, Anne Bogart, Tina Landau-- contributed to that lively force of upheaval, renewal and stripping away of antiquated pretentiousness and coy concealment to make a theater that people continue to want to gather with each other to work on and to attend. So, for instance, in class, we use examination of the group-writing, gestic, estrangement, montage, use of song, use of image, use of visual text, provocative and humoristic techniques Brecht practiced, in quite varying forms, throughout his tragically shortened career. I also have particular interest in his theories about character building, for instance, the big selfish characters who are of 'more use' to others than the virtuous small characters, and about how Brechtian theater advanced the image of women and emotional labor in society.

CD: One of the best benefits CD offers is the opportunity to learn from peers. So, Stefan, what would you like to learn from Toccara?

Stefan : When writing about characters who are trying to make an artistic life within our modern society, as artists from non-dominating, non-white, identities, Toccara, how do you find the distance from such familiar experiences, to approach them with humor, with compassion and so escape the pitfalls of confessional authenticity?

Toccara : I know, trust, and believe that marginalized people--and Black people in particular-- are more than our traumas. Bad things happen, sad things happen, atrocities happen but then there is also joy, and laughter and understanding. We are fully dimensional people who wrestle with the same aspects of everyday life from the mundane to the magical-- just like everyone else. And because I know this on a visceral level as my own lived experience - that I am **not** a sad story. My people are **not** a sad story. Some degree of lightness and levity is always present within my work-- because I don't know any other way to create.

CD: Toccara, it’s your turn. Stefan has a long and varied history as an artist and teacher. How can his experience inform yours?

Toccara: I’d like to know the exact moment Stefan decided that he wanted or needed to be an artist. Stefan, after this discovery, who was the first person you told that art would be at the forefront of your life? Yourself? Your parents? Your first audience?

Stefan: Honestly, I minced about endlessly. I thought of myself as a technician, a translator, a mediator, an organizer, a protestor, an assistant - all to avoid the immeasurable Rubrik of being an artist. I think as late as 30, when I was getting together with Jenny, partner in child and marriage, I still doubted if being an artist was real. She has a much less complicated approach, around the concept of being a maker. Today I do think of myself as an artistic maker. And I’m nearly 66 years old.

CD: OK, last question for both of you: What are you most excited for people to experience or learn from attending your show or class?

Toccara: I truly hope people enjoy the story and are inspired to think more critically about the communities they belong to and who and what they pledge their allegiances to. I always write for and with Black people in mind because I want to make sure that Black people always feel welcomed and visible. And beyond this, I hope the piece will spark some productive conversations about identity, and the notion that "people of color" exist as a monolith.

Stefan: Frankly, I’m excited by the progress writers will make in their own work or the inspiration they’ll gain to launch their next big project. I grew up in the Paolo Friere tradition of education, in which the foremost value is to throw away the image of knowledge being shoved down a funnel into passive student heads. Instead, I am excited about participants bringing their points of view to each other's work in a structured and consensual manner.

I also want to mention, in 2024 a highlight of my year was meeting Toccara Castleman, being blown to smithereens by her delightful "I Don't Want To Play Myself" in the Fillet of Solo Festival at Lifeline Theatre and telling her that in my mind this was a refreshing blast of current Brechtian theater.