Talking With... Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig

Playwright of LIDLESS

Conducted by Rebecca Wright, InterAct's Literary Director & Dramaturg,
                        and Emma Bedor, Literary Intern

InterAct: You once described this play as “an adult fairy-tale, in a world similar to this one, but where Gitmo is now a Disneyland-like resort.” Can you talk about the decision to enlist fantasy or fairy tale in approaching such weighty subject matter?

Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig : I used elements of fable to place the play in a world that is similar to this one, but different. I don’t know what 2019 will look like, I don’t know how people will dress, speak or act, but that’s irrelevant for the world of this play. The only ‘fantasy’ elements are that Gitmo has become a resort, and the pills Alice, the army interrogator, took in Gitmo, beta blockers that the Army does in fact provide its soldiers, have had the additional side effect of making her forget her Gitmo service completely. This gives Alice an active journey through the play (starting from a point of not recognizing Bashir, the detainee she interrogated), and suggests a metaphor for how a national amnesia can happen once we are distanced from unpleasant memories.

InterAct:  What drew you to Guantanamo as a subject matter?

Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig: I started writing this play after reading a series of articles in The Economist about female interrogators in Guantanamo, and how the threat of the female body (lingerie, menstrual blood, lap dances ) were being used as interrogation strategies – weapons, in the war on terrorism, because people in the Department of Defense believed that this would humiliate the Muslim detainees, make them unable to pray, and more likely to “confess.”

InterAct:  What was your initial response to those articles? How did you get from that first seed to liver disease, beta blockers, and LIDLESS?

Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig: I was surprised, interested and horrified. I had read DEATH AND THE MAIDEN, by Ariel Dorfman, and seen The Night Porter, a film directed by Liliana Cavani, both of which delve into reunion scenarios between torturer and victim. In both these works, however, the male is the torturer and the female is the victim. The articles I was reading in The Economist suggested a different configuration, as the victims of this violence were Muslim men, and the perpetrators women (mostly white.)

I arrived at the idea of liver disease because I wanted a concrete reason for Bashir's return. Not just abstract "revenge" or "longing," but something more tangible. I had just seen a reading of BETWEEN THIS BREATH AND YOU, a short play in Naomi Wallace's FEVER CHART trilogy which was the story of an Israeli nurse who receives the lungs of a Palestinian man, and watched 21 Grams in which a woman asks the man who has received her dead husband's heart to avenge his death. So I was interested in the idea of an organ transplant, and started researching different organs and medical issues surrounding Guantanamo, to see if I could find anything appropriate.

When I learned that a living person can give another person half their liver and that both of those half-livers will regenerate into whole livers, I begun to research diseases of the liver, and found reports about hepatitis outbreaks at Gitmo happening among the detainees. Since hepatitis, when left untreated can lead to end-stage liver disease, I decided that the liver was in fact the perfect organ to use in this story.

InterAct: Typically, the stories we get from settings like Guantanamo favor one “side” or the other - we are asked to sympathize with either the detainees or the soldiers. How did you tackle the process of representing both with such compassion?

Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig: From the very beginning I knew that in order to write the play I wanted to write, I needed to feel complete empathy and compassion for every character. They were all caught up and players in something much bigger than them, something none could fully comprehend. I read memoirs from as many perspectives as I could, all by people who had some experience at Guantanamo - detainees, lawyers, interrogators, military police, trying to understand what was going on from as many perspectives as possible.

InterAct: Do you consider yourself a political playwright?

Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig: I am a playwright who is interested in how people’s actions are informed by trauma. I am always interested in how people’s present actions are defined or influenced by trauma and what they experienced or did in the past. I don’t start thinking I want to write a political play. I start with questions and situations I find interesting and complex, that I am willing to spend several years researching, thinking and writing about.

InterAct:  I’m curious about the title—why LIDLESS?

Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig: Lidless is the title of a poem my younger brother Patrick wrote shortly before hanging himself in 2004, when he was 17. In the poem, a person’s eyelids have been ripped off, and he is forced to always see, and never look away. I liked this idea of being forced to see the consequences of your actions. This is one of Bashir’s roles in the play – he forces other characters to see the consequences of some of their actions.

InterAct:  I’m so sorry about your brother. Your play 410[GONE] (which was part of PlayPenn in 2009) tells the story of a brother’s suicide. Is this subject matter you find yourself returning to often in your work?

Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig: I am interested in trauma and the consequences of trauma, on the individual, on the family, and how trauma can be transferred intergenerationally. It is THE question of most of my plays – usually the big traumas have happened before the play begins, or right at the beginning, and the question for the characters is how to live in its wake. A psychiatrists I interviewed while researching LIDLESS introduced me to the idea of “cognitive reframing” as a way to think about the consequences of war and trauma on the individual, and that really opened my thinking about the situation Alice, the former interrogator, and Bashir, the former detainee, might find themselves in post-Gitmo. I started thinking not only about the violent, gruesome parts of torture and imprisonment, but also about the gray areas, where experiences might also be sensual, visceral, even erotic.

InterAct: Geography and expatriation play really interesting roles in this piece. All the characters, with the exception of Rhiannon, live far away from their region-of-origin. How is this significant to you? What does displacement have to do with the other issues you engage?

Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig: I spent my life being displaced, as the daughter of a diplomat, and also the product of people raised in different faiths in different countries – my dad coming from a Boston-Irish Catholic background in suburban Massachusetts and my mother from a Daoist family in rural Taiwan. The longest I have ever lived anywhere was in Beijing for five years as a teenager, yet it is mostly unrecognizable post-2008 Olympics. I understand how geography and expatriation can inform world views, and am interested in how conflict can come out of colliding systems of meaning. Christopher Chen is a playwright I like who is about the same age as me, a similar racial mix, yet has lived in one place, San Francisco, for his whole life. So the questions he is most interested in are interior, and have to do with stasis. I, on the other hand, having always been nomadic and displaced, am interested in motion, and change. So perhaps much of content just comes out of the situations we have been raised in.

InterAct: What are you working on now? What’s next for you?

Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig: I am working on three new plays at the moment, all in different stages of completion. I am writing a play called PAX AMERICANA, my take on the American Family Play genre, which features three generations of a multi-racial Okinawan/Irish American family who come together seventy years after an Irish American army chaplain saved an eight-year-old girl from killing herself on the last day of the Battle of Okinawa. I am also working on a play called 72 TRANSFORMATIONS that has been commissioned by South Coast Rep, which is about the struggles and adventures of a 19-year-old Chinese migrant worker named Sunny. The third play is called EMERALD CITY, and is a commission from Seattle Rep, and looks at the lives of people who, by choice or consequence live off-the-grid.

InterAct: Thanks for taking the time to chat with us.

THE 2010/2011 SEASON

Introduction

Silverhill

Lidless

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About The Play

Running Time

Production Sponsor

The Playwright

Playwright Interview

The Director

The Cast

Special Performances

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