Adam Greenfield and Christina Anderson

Adam: I’m always really curious to hear what was a writer’s “lightbulb moment,” the moment or period of time where it came into focus for you that you’re a writer.

Christina: I remember it vividly. Well, I was always writing as a kid, and even before I knew how to write I wasmaking up stories and scribbling stuff on paper and making my mother sit down and listen to what I had written. I was really into fiction, so I was reading, like, Ramona Quimby, Age Eight, and I remember being really shaken up when Dr. Seuss died, because for some ludicrous reason I thought that he and I were going to collaborate at some point. But then, playwriting: I was doing it as part of this after-school program in high school. And I had never even considered that, you know, there were playwrights. I mean, I was familiar with Shakespeare, and plays. But I just thought it was like this antiquated thing that nobody really did anymore.

Did you see plays?

I did see plays. But it never clicked that there was, like, one person who had written all of that. (Laughs) Because when I had done theater in Junior High it was more like improv and collaborative stuff. I grew up with Boyz in the Hood and Menace II Society , so I knew you could write a screenplay, that you could be the one who had written it, but it never occurred to me that a stage play had the same kind of captain, you know? So, I had gotten started in this after-school program, and at first it was just a way to stay out of the house, but then I just fell in love with it. And people encouraged me, and then I got into –The Playwrights Center used have this Young Playwrights Summer Conference, like this two-week thing...

The Playwrights Center in Minneapolis?

Yes. They had this two-week conference, and I got in one year. And I went. And it was crazy because, like, Bridget Carpenter was my RA, and Sarah Ruhl was an RA. And Naomi Iizuka, she taught a class. And, you know, I had no idea who these people were, but they were really cool and I was sixteen and like, “This is awesome!” And I remember working on a play, and we were living in these dormitories, and I started taping pieces of paper to the wall and I would write the play on the wall. And I remember I was writing this scene, and I don’t know what happened, but I just stepped back and I was like, “You know, I’m having a really good time doing this. And I want to keep doing this. I really want to put in the effort to do it.” I was in a really fertile environment, around all these really wonderful artists. And from what I could... Frommy perspective, they really treatedme like an artist. And yeah, I knew I wanted to dedicate myself to getting better at it. So, I was sixteen.

What was that play like? The one you wrote there, with the notes taped to your wall. Do remember anything about that play?

Yeah, it was sort of a Bald Soprano knock-off. It was about this rich family, and the husband was in a wheel chair, and the wife was a big old slut, and it was this mad-cap, kind of, “Is she sleeping with the butler? Is she sleeping with this person?” And then he had a pink elephant that he kept in his basement…

So it sort of is the collaboration you might have had with Dr. Seuss…

Yes! Absolutely.

And when you’d read what you wrote for your mom, was she excited about you as a writer? Or did you feel like you were introducing an alien into the family?

Well, she definitely encouraged me to read, and she was always buying me books, and she would listen to the little stories I had. But I remember in 7th grade when I was starting to write a lot of poems and stuff, she was like, “You know, I just want to let you know that writers don’t make money.” And she swears she didn’t tell me this, but I remember. And she was like, “You know, you’re going to be poor.” But, I come from a family of storytellers, even though they wouldn’t admit to that. My aunt is very good at telling stories, and like, just painting a picture of what she’s been in, and coming back and telling stories about it. So, I grew up around a lot of family reunions and parties where people could hold the center and tell a story and be all the characters in the story. So, I don’t think this is a foreign thing in my family, I think my family are artists in different ways. It’s just I’m sort of using a different channel to do the same thing.

Didn’t you start by writing some spoken-word type things...?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

When did your writing start to make its way onto paper? Did that feel like a natural step for you? Or did you have to make yourself...

…write plays? Um, yeah. I had to make myself write plays. ‘Cause even when I decided I wanted to be a playwright, I was still writing spoken-word-kind-of pieces. And the characters would still have these big rhythmic monologues. I think it helped me with rhythm and musicality ‘cause it became, like, if I put this word next to this one it sounds different, the melody of saying those two words sounds different than if I put another word there. So, it made me hip to just how words sound next to each other and the poetics of someone speaking. But then at the same time, to still keep it in the vernacular of the community.

Well, that much is clear, I think, even just from reading your plays. Because when you write, you put your words in columns...

Yeah.

... and you use symbols. Like the famous “chicken-feet” symbol. [which, dear readers, denotes an un-vocalized communication between two characters, and looks like this: =.= ]

Yeah, I’ve got to come up with a better name for that!

Do you lay it down on paper this way because that’s just how the ideas come out of you? Or are you notating the musicality of the language?

It’s a little bit of both. I’m still trying to force myself to figure out how to use punctuation in the way that I hear the text come out. ‘Cause I do think that there are line breaks in how a character speaks. And it’s interesting, because even with the actors in Inked Baby, they were kind of self-conscious about when the line breaks happened. I told them they didn’t have to be ‘cause the lines would just flow like that. But I started with that ‘cause I felt like a comma didn’t do it for me enough. I mean, I still use commas and periods and semi-colons, but the line breaks really help get the rhythm.

You went to Brown University and studied with Paula Vogel. Is that when you’d say your formal playwriting training began?

Yeah, I think it was my freshman year at Brown undergrad, when I started taking playwriting classes. And I hadn’t really read plays beyond, you know, Ntozake’s For Colored Girls… at that point. And I started reading Mac Wellman, who was actually teaching there that year. I remember I went to Sarah Ruhl’s birthday party (‘cause she was a first- or second-year at Brown in the MFA program there), and MacWellman was there, and I had just read 7 Blowjobs, and I was like, “Oh! You know, I really loved your play, I thought it was really awesome, and I wanna be a playwright, I’m gonna do all this theater stuff!” And then he said to me, “What year are you?” And I was like, “I just started four weeks ago, and I’m so excited!” And then he’s like, “You know, you have your whole life to be a playwright. You should really just learn as much as you can.” And I took that to heart, and started reading all kinds of sociology and history — and I was still reading plays and taking these workshops and figuring out how to take what I was reading about and put it on stage, but also to keep the theatricality and the storytelling alive. But I think I became superaware of structure when I was a sophomore. I was studying with Nilo Cruz, and I took a class with Sarah, and also Elmo Terry-Morgan, and I think that was the first time I really, like, looked at form. I wrote a two act play that year, which was—if there’s ever a book of my plays published they’ll be like, “This one’s Christina attempting to be Lorraine Hansberry.” I really forced myself to think about plot and structure and tracking characters to see what their journey was, and I became super-aware of structure that year. And then in my senior year of college, Paula invited me to sit in on a workshop with the MFA students, Jordan [Harrison] and Quiara [Alegria Hudes] and Sally Oswald. And that just blew my mind. ‘Cause they were all just writing – you know, particularly Quiara — she was writing these really wonderful plays that dealt with issues of Latino culture, but were these wonderful theatrical events. I mean, that just blew my mind. So then I started saying, “Okay, well, if I have these black characters and these issues, how can I tell the story so it can only exist on a stage?” I mean, I definitely had the intention of conquering form.

And then you set about dismantling it?

Well, I wrote this play my senior year that was called Revelations: The Out-takes, and it was a multi-media three-person play. I was really interested in what the body could do on stage. I’d just seen Topdog/Underdog, and there’s a scene where the brother comes in and pees, and I was like, “You never see women peeing onstage.” So then, at the top of the first scene in my play, the lead character comes out and she pees onstage. She squats, you know? And yeah, I think Revelations was when I became really aware of what physical movement could do, and how that could be as much a part of the storytelling as anything else. And I was also just thinking about how to open up the world and have scenes set in uncomfortable and unfamiliar places.

Well, that’s clearly a huge part of Inked Baby. I mean, the title itself is about the body — it’s an immediately disturbing and unfamiliar image. How did you arrive at the title?

Titles have always been tricky for me. When I was realizing what the driving engines of the play were I felt like the title should capture that. So, for me, it was the tattoo, and Gloria getting the tattoo. And the play’s about history and legacy and being marked. So, I just thought of “Inked.”

Do you have tattoos?

I just have one. I want to get more, but I have one on the back of my neck. I found this button, in this Socialist or Communist bookstore in Chelsea. It was the kind of place you don’t want to use your creditcard at, you know, ‘cause it might come back to you? (Laughter) And the tattoo’s of this little button—it’s the women’s symbol with a black fist in the middle of it.

It strikes me that there’s two different kinds of tattoos in Inked Baby: Gloria gets her tattoo, but then you also have a baby who is marked by the legacy of what we’ve seen happening to this community. We understand what the inked baby means after we’ve processed the events leading us there. What do you think of the tattoo Gloria gets?

Oh. Well, you know I think it’s a silly tattoo. I do. I think it’s just a very silly tattoo. But I think it’s also wonderful too, ‘cause she’s claiming her body. She sees Odlum, who’s made his body a work of art, like a story, and claimed his body in that sense. So, when she meets him, obviously there’s physical attraction there, but there’s also a freedom to decide to turn your body into a piece of art. So, I think it’s really wonderful for Gloria. Throughout the play she’s struggling, trying to negotiate why she can’t have kids, and she decides to get this tattoo. So, I mean the actual tattoo is silly, but what it means for her isn’t.

When did you begin writing this play?

September of... not this past September, the September before. When

I went back to Brown for grad school.

And what was the first thing you knew about the play?

Well, a lot of the characters came from other little mini-plays, and I knew about the first scene of the play, with Lena and Greer. But I didn’t know what their relationship was to each other, and I didn’t know why they were sitting on the bed. And then I just kept asking questions, like “How do they know each other? Are they married? Well, no they’re not married. But, I think Greer’s married. OK, so Lena’s not married? So who’s Lena?” You know? So that it was just like, continuously asking questions.

So you were discovering it as you wrote. With each line, the play was informing itself?

Yeah, cause I had pages due in workshop. (Laughter) So I was really just trying to answer questions quickly. But then also, I have a tendency to write really short bursts of scenes; so when I set out to start the play initially, I wanted to push myself to see how far I could go into a scene.

So it sounds like you started with the people, maybe a more traditional start. Can you remember the moment where you felt like the world of the play became a little bit less recognizable, a bit less like our world?

Yeah, well in the past couple plays I’ve written, I’ve really made a strong effort to figure out what kind of storytelling can come out through physicality, or what kind of valuable information can come out with no dialogue. Like, how can the body tell stories too? So, as I was piecing this story together, I found out that Lena and Greer were brother-and-sister-in-law, and then I found out that Gloria is Lena’s sister, and then it was like, “Well, Gloria can’t have kids. Well, why can’t she have kids? And then I was starting to look at infertility and things like that, and I came across the environment, and then the topic “environmental racism.” So then I was like, “OK, so that’s how I’m going to make this physical.” And that’s when it started getting more theatrical. Because it’s about the body, which we know, but it’s foreign what happens. Which makes it exciting to watch. At least for me. So, yeah. That’s how it came. I knew I wanted to deal with the body, and I figured that the environmental racism track was how.

And when you came upon the topic of environmental racism, what did you find in what you read that ignited the idea and opened it up for you? Were there any particular cases in the back of your head as you were writing?

I was thinking a little bit about the Tuskegee incident [1932-1972]. Where, you know, African-American men were given syphilis unbeknownst to them to sort of see what the disease did to the body, and to look at kinds of treatment. And so, some of them were given treatment, some of them were given placebos, and some of them were given nothing. But then they would give it to their partners, and their wives would give birth, and you know, so...

Who was giving them syphilis?

Oh, it was a government office—was it the Department of Health?

So some of them were being tested without them knowing it.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And the doctors were, you know, I mean the doctors were white. But the residents were black. That play Miss Evers’ Boys is about this. And I was really interested in the concept of home. And legacy. And with the Tuskegee incident, I was thinking about, well, you know, these men just wanted to have a family, and be able to take care of them, and have sons and daughters, and so I think that’s where some it of it came from.

You mention that you’re interested in writing about home. I know three of your plays: Inked Baby, Drip and Revelations. In all of these plays it strikes me that there’s this really distinctly different, but decidedly present sense of home. Revelations is about a character’s homecoming. In Drip, there’s somebody who’s pretty literally tied to their home. And in Inked Baby people are kind of turning, their bodiesare kind of turning into their home. Is “home” a conscious theme on your part? Or do you feel like you just keep coming back to it? …or did I just spoil it for you forever by asking?

… yeah, ‘cause now the next one’s going to be about a gas station. Great, thanks, Adam! The Gas Station Plays! (Laughter) But yeah, I don’t know. It just keeps coming back for me. I mean, you know, sometimes I... I feel like I’m writing the plays for my thirteen-year-old self. Because, I mean, I was really invested in my community and my neighborhood... and you know, you can’t really write about what you’re immediately dealing with. Like, it’s usually a few years later that you can write about the dead puppy or whatever. So I think home became an interesting concept to me once I left it to go to school, and once I was living in New York and New Haven.

Where is home for you?

Kansas City, Kansas.

As opposed to Missouri?

Yes. Yes. (Laughter)

And, some of your plays specifically take place in Kansas City.

Revelations does. Yeah, and then Drip does too.

But Inked Baby is not specifically Kansas City, right? Was Kansas City in the back of your head anywhere when you were writing it?

A little bit. But I was really interested in how it could happen anywhere. So, I don’t really give specifics in the play. I just know it’s somewhere between New York and California. ‘Cause in the stuff I was reading and the research I was doing, it really does happen all over... I mean it even happens in New York, like with the bus depots up in Harlem. So, I think I really wanted to make sure that, you know, you can’t sit in safety when you’re watching the play, because it’s in the mountains or it’s in a little black community in Texas. I really wanted to keep it open, ‘cause it’s something — and, you know, documentation proves — that it’s something that can happen anywhere.

Do you still feel like Kansas City is home?

It’s a part of me. Which is also I think a theme in a lot of my plays: being a part of something, even though you’re not there. I mean I definitely think it’s a part of me, and I cannot get rid of this accent to save my life. (Laughter) So, yeah, I do. I do feel like it is a part of me. The musicality and the rhythm and just how I grew up and the things I grew up around – I think they exist in different ways in all of my work.

At one point you mentioned, I think it might have been in our Subscriber Bulletin, that you wanted to write with “unbridled control.”

Yeah.

I wonder if you could unpack that phrase for me.

Oh, well, like, when I was constructing Inked Baby, you know, I was trying to push myself to open things up, and never settle into what I immediately came up with. There were a couple of drafts where I was making choices that were easy. You know? And I was really constructing the world of the play to be this very, sort of, like “scene one,” “scene two,” “scene three.” And it still has that structure but now people get pulled out of scenes and pushed into them, and there’s a lot of pivoting that happens where people are sort of forced to face what they’re dealing with immediately. So that started happening as I was writing it, and then I just kind of went with it. But like, at the same time I had to keep track of arcs and plots and what the characters wanted. So I think that’s what “unbridled control” is for me. It’s about being open enough and pushing myself to think one step outside of the box, or like several steps outside of the box. But then also being able to tell a good story. I guess the way to describe it is: I want to stay tethered to Aristotle, but to go out as far as I can. To tell good stories, but still be able to bring in interesting and different ways of talking about things.

And who to your mind are the other writers you look to, who are doing that? Whose plays do you keep under your pillow?

Well, you know, obviously Quiara is one. And Paula’s plays do that a lot. And then I think for the interesting tension and the sparseness of language, I hold on to Harold Pinter. And for, like, the rhythm and the musicality I hold on to Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni.

I think Pinter seems really apt. There’s a real sparseness that you’ve mastered as well, and a real control of the information that you convey. You mentioned Mac Wellman earlier and 7 Blowjobs, which was a light-bulb for me about your writing. It’s incredibly important that we never see the pictures of the blowjobs in that play, we only hear about them, and our imagination fills in all the details for us. Similarly it seems like in Inked Baby, like we don’t know for a long time what’s going on in this town, and why these people are pulling soil from themselves. But not knowing allows us to jump into all the possibilities of what might be happening.

Yeah. It’s been really interesting watching audiences at the previews, or talking with audiences about this play because, you know, a lot people think the baby’s going to be a pile of soil, and... I mean, it’s kind of fun watching them not know, and watching them really have to lean forward and look for the information. “Okay, they said this thing about the ZIP code. Well, what does that mean?” I feel like we’re a generation of “Law and Order” and “CSI” and just a lot of these crimesort- of-solve-y kind of shows. And that gives me an advantage, and a lot of lee-way to write a story that sustains that kind of intrigue and suspense, without it being so heavily rooted in fact. I feel like this play, the theatricality of it, could be hard. But because we’re this “CSI” generation of, you know, “She was decapitated, and now she has a cabbage for a head!” I think people are more generous about what can actually happen in a story. You know, as long as you give them something to hang their hat on, they’re willing to go with you anywhere.

Yeah, it seems like a real balance beam that the play has to walk between how much information we get and how much we don’t get. What’s the positive space and the negative space of the play?

Yeah, yeah.

And it changes so much from audience to audience.

I know, it’s kind of crazy!

Okay, so, I’ ve been reading your blog.

Oh, OK! (Laughter)

I really love it. And I’ve noticed that on it you write about shoes, about the latest designs in shoes.

Yes. Sneakers.

What’s up with that?

Well, when I was growing up, around the fourth grade, the first Jordans came out and sneakers were a big deal. But then people were getting shot for shoes and killed and stuff, and beat up. So I could never have any sneakers—mymother wouldn’t buyme sneakers, you know? But then in New York, I used to work as a paralegal so I was making money. And when I had money (now that I’m in grad school I have no money) but when I had money, I started buying sneakers -- it was like my thirteen-year-old self was saying, “Oooh, we can afford these, and your mama’s nowhere around!” But I mean, I guess I just, I still enjoy them. Because I think it really is starting to become an art, how the colors work. And when you have limited edition sneakers like the [Puma] Bespoke, that you can go in and custom order. I mean, it’s fascinating to take such a limited and traditional form, and to see how it shifts and changes, and to see what kind of new materials are used, and the details and the intricacy of it. I’ve watched some videos where people custom-make these sneakers, and they sew them by hand... which I guess, just to bring it back, in some cheesy way... like, my plays are sort of the same. I kind of figure out who’s in the play and what the issues are, and then I put it together. But then every play has a different color. Like, every play has different material. But it’s still a play.

Each one is a new sneaker model?

Yes. Every one is a new sneaker.

So, what’s the next sneaker model?

Oh, well, I’m starting a new play – it’s a little slow-going ‘cause I’m still doing rewrites on Inked Baby, but the next play is going to be about childhood obesity, particularly in the black community. I’m doing research and stuff on it now, like on nutrition and stuff like that. So, it’s another body play.

Yeah.

I feel like it’s going to be the Body Series.

The Body Trilogy.

Yeah, and then after that, it’ll be the Gas Station Plays. (Laughter)