About PlayFest 2020

Immerse yourself in the world of new plays as The Basel-Kiene Family joins City Beverages in presenting PlayFest 2020! This year’s new play festival features six groundbreaking new works that will each be presented as a livestreamed virtual reading.

This week, Inda Craig-Galván contemplates our reality and dives into the developmental process of her dark comedy, Welcome to Matteson!

Orlando Shakes: How did you get into playwriting?

Inda: I started exploring stage work through performing and writing sketch comedy in Chicago. I loved the social/political satire that was the aim of Second City’s training. Along with my brother-friend-stage husband Kevin Douglas, I wrote and performed as kevINda for years. Then my actual family moved to Los Angeles and I was without my writing partner. I continued acting, but it wasn’t the creative outlet I needed in order to say things about the world and my community. It wasn’t the performing element I missed; it was the writing. At the time, University Southern California offered a dramatic writing MFA in the dramatic arts school that was primarily playwriting and also allowed candidates to take a good amount of electives in the TV and film school. I applied, hoping during the second stage of my life to have a career as a writer (thus the TV and film classes because… $). I doubted my ability to write more than a 3- to 5-minute sketch. A full-length play seemed unsustainable. Impossible. And my first year, my short plays were decent, but my full lengths kinda sucked. I was trying too hard to be a serious playwright and to write serious plays. But something kicked in just before my second year, and I realized that I had to stop compartmentalizing my sketch comedy experience as ‘the past.’ I needed instead to incorporate the tropes and motifs of impov and sketch into my playwriting. My thesis play – Black Super Hero Magic Mama – was written with that in mind, and I found my artistic voice as a playwright.

Orlando Shakes: When you’re writing, what does an ideal day look like to you?

Inda: If I’m working on a play, I’m happy to sit down and write one scene during that session. I don’t need to do more than that. If I get stuck, I’ll make a list for the character – what’s in their grocery cart? What are five secrets they have right now? What are 10 steps to their morning ritual? etc. – or I’ll write a monologue for a character that may or may not go into the play. But that’s it. One scene. Nature sounds or jazz in the background, cup of tea, bowl of potato chips, a candle burning, one scene.

Orlando Shakes: How do you define your creative process as a playwright?

Inda: I try not to. If I’m aware of what I’m doing to the point that I can define it, then I feel like I’m not fully immersed in doing the thing. One aspect that I am aware of is when the character voices are talking and I’m merely typing. I’m taking dictation. When that’s happening, I’m aware that it’s happening. I can say that it’s happening. Define it as such. But that’s not my process. That’s just a thing that I’m allowed to experience.

I can define the planning. I’ll find a poem to adapt, imagining the subject or speaker as a character, then map out a basic narrative plot for them. Or I’ll use a writing prompt. Or write within specific play parameters (the East West Players playwrights group that I just completed requires at least one Asian or Asian-American character, for example). Or I’ll adapt a foreign-language piece and contextualize it to speak to current issues. I’m currently adapting a Spanish Golden Age play and I previously adapted a Polish play about the French Revolution. I research. I make maps. I create those lists. I write a monologue for one of the characters but at a much younger age than they’ll appear in the play. I read. I watch a lot of television (probably unrelated). I make notes. I clean and organize things in my house. I run errands – very important errands – to procrastinate. And around then is when the creative process that I cannot define kicks in.

Orlando Shakes: What was your initial inspiration for writing this play, and what fueled you throughout the writing process for Welcome to Matteson!?

Inda: I grew up in Chicago and had been living in Los Angeles, seeing the gentrification happening in certain areas here, seeing how sometimes it’s your own people who do you/your community dirty – it all reminded me of what happened back home when the City of Chicago decided to remove the Cabrini Green housing project. The city decided it wanted this valuable land. The city decided where the residents should go. Which ones would get houses, which would get apartments – eventually (those folks won a lawsuit because they were made homeless while the new apartment construction was delayed), and which would get nothing.

While researching, I stumbled across a flier that someone had distributed to Matteson homeowners as a message to keep Matteson great again, basically. A cartoon drawing on the flier depicted a masked bandit sneaking in through a window. I assumed the flier was created by a racist who didn’t want the Black people from Cabrini in their suburb. But it dawned on me that the flier could’ve been made by anyone, and what if it wasn’t the typical perpetrator of this kind of anti-Black sentiment. What if this is a story that focuses only on African-American characters at different phases of their self-love journey. So this isn’t a play about racism – let’s avoid using that word as a descriptor. More appropriately, it’s about the reactiveness that comes with internalizing a lifetime of racism, it’s about our perceptions of class and economics, it’s about Patricia’s inability to see herself in Regina, to see herself in Corey, and to love what she sees when she looks at them. It’s about prejudices and bigotry but – and I cannot stress this enough – it’s not about racism. Whites are not centered in this play. It is about these four Black people dealing, often badly, with the situation they’ve been force into. That flier fueled the writing of this play and helped me to deeper understand the characters’ fears and expectations and hopes for acceptance and a soft place to land and for home.

Orlando Shakes: What playwrights have inspired your body of work?

Inda: The first play I ever saw was Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. So my first experience of theatre was a piece set in the South Side of Chicago, about a Black family, written by a Black woman. I was like, okay I get it. This is what theatre is. Then I learned it isn’t. Then I decided it is. The first time I saw an August Strindberg play, I was riveted and wanted to write anger and love the way he did. The opening image of Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats is glorious and makes me want to create images as theatrical as that. Look it up if you’re not familiar. Rajiv Joseph’s work is a big one for me. Every new play of his feels like he’s learned something about the world and himself and how to use form differently to tell a different story. Yet every play still feels like his voice. And Stephen Adly Guirgis. Can’t nobody write dialogue like this dude. It feels real to me. Scary real and beautiful.

Orlando Shakes: Who are some current playwrights you would recommend to those interested in new plays/playwrights?

Inda: Aleshea Harris – her work is Black and fearless and raw, and the words on the page literally look like emotions as they guide your eye in how to experience the piece.

Dave Harris – his writing is exciting and in your face and, again, Black.

I love both of them because they aren’t playing safe to appease WAT. [Editor’s Note: WAT is short for White American Theater.] They create daring works by/about/for Black people in America.

Orlando Shakes: What questions are preoccupying your mind as a writer at the moment?

Inda Craig-Galván: Does any of this matter? Are we in hell? Seriously, did the rapture happen and we’re who got left behind, because this is a mess. I wonder, how do I write comedy in the face of so much real-life tragedy. How do I write a play that’s meant for the stage, knowing that it may never see the light of day? What’s the point in writing that right now? How do we not write? How do we adapt and find forms to share the work while ensuring that those forms don’t compromise the original intent? Are we all compromised at this point? How do we create art that speaks to this time without making ourselves miserable in the process?

Orlando Shakes: If you are willing to talk about it – what new projects are on your horizon?

Inda: A few things. I have a commission to write a one-act play for Primary Stages’ new season. They awarded me the Jeffry Melnick New Playwright Award last year and provided me with an invaluable developmental workshop for Welcome to Matteson! I’m glad to work with them again to create a new piece, and it’s been a goal to have my work produced in New York. Another commission project is with Greenway Court Theatre in Los Angeles. That’s a filmed exploration of monologues to commemorate their 20th anniversary, trying out a hybrid format to continue creating art. Even though we might be living in hell. Wheeee!

Learn More About the Reading

Be a part of Inda’s creative process and book tickets to Welcome to Matteson! where you’ll be able to provide live feedback after the reading.

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