Victimized by men: Several actors in the all-women cast of "Sweet," a play by Schatzie Schaefers recently performed at Out North.

(Part 2, continued from yesterday)

Peter Porco—How did the various social concerns surrounding the play affect your writing of the script? Did you ever feel you had to use your play as a vehicle for showcasing programs for those caught up in this problem? Did such concerns hamstring you or, just the opposite, give you some wings, or did they have no effect like that at all?
 
Schatzie Schaefers—Certainly that was a factor, but my personal goal from the beginning was simply to listen to what the women had to say in our weekly meetings, pay attention to what surfaced in the improv exercises, and use it as inspiration for a play. As far as “showcasing the programs for those caught up in a problem,” that wasn’t really my job. That was a goal of the project, but obviously the play itself in no way showcases how one can get help. It was more interesting to me to write about people in the midst of their addictions, and to explore why they got there in the first place.
 
When we first started these weekly meetings in March of 2008, one woman in particular really caught my attention. Her life was quite the epic story and she was not shy about telling me about it. I found myself following her outside on smoke breaks, asking questions about things she revealed in the improvs. Soon, we began meeting for coffee separately from the group meetings. For hours, she would fill me in on the chapters of her life story while I furiously scribbled it all down. She even brought me a copy of her arrest file to help me with the timeline. From this, I came up with Jackie’s story.

Here’s where it got scary. I told her from the beginning that if she saw anything in the script that bothered her, I would delete it. And though it was extremely painful for her to hear the details of her life read aloud, to see it in front of her, she never asked me to change anything. On preview night, she told me that the play pushed her to the next level of recovery—one of acceptance. This was quite rewarding.
 
There were times, however, when I started to question the ethics of what I was doing. I happened to watch the movie Capote right in the middle of the writing process, and the guilt hit me like a sledgehammer. Am I like Truman Capote, exploiting this woman’s living nightmare for my own gain?  I had to remind myself that she shared her story with me for a reason. This wasn’t all my doing. She was my largest source of inspiration because she chose to be.
 
P—Why did you write Sweet for an all-woman cast? although it must be said there are several men characters who are not seen.
 
S—The project involved only women by design. The fact is that the women would not have felt so free to open up and talk about their pasts had men been part of the group. These women all have a history of having been victimized by men. Many were molested in childhood, beaten by boyfriends, abused by pimps and dealers. This is well-known in the recovery world.
 
I’ve seen this dynamic in action. Out North has an ongoing program with McLaughlin [Youth Center]. We send our visiting and local artists there on a regular basis to do performance workshops. Last summer I assisted some visiting artists in one of these workshops. Leilani Chan and I took a group of McLaughlin girls outside and we worked with them to create a brief performance art piece. Meanwhile, Leilani’s husband, Ova Saopeng, took a group of boys into the library and they did the same thing.

The girls came up with this really interesting non-verbal piece about violence and racism. But Leilani and Ova didn’t have experience working with incarcerated youth, so they had this great idea to have the boys perform their piece for the girls and vice versa. Oops. The boys did just fine. But when the girls got up to do their piece, they fell apart. Became terribly self-conscious and could barely perform. And it didn’t help that the boys were shouting lewd remarks at them the whole time. They instantly turned them into sex objects. “You don’t even know who your baby’s daddy is” was shouted at a pregnant girl who might have been 15 years old. It was horrifying to watch. A teacher stood there, shaking her head. She took me aside and explained that the boys and girls simply cannot work together in situations like this. “Nearly every girl in here has been molested,” she explained.

P—About 40 percent of the show is Jackie's dream sequence, the castle scenes. To be honest, it took me a while to get my bearings in that sequence, perhaps because it seemed a parody of an adolescent girl's fantasy. The dreams make sense in light of what we later learn about Jackie's life and concerns, but it seems you took a risk in putting so much of the show into that other world. Do you plan to keep this part of the show pretty much as is? If you will change it, how so?
 
S—For the most part I am happier with the castle scenes than I am with the trailer scenes. I have given some thought, however, to trimming the first castle scene a bit in order to get to Jackie's world sooner. There is even an argument for starting in the trailer instead. But I think I'll wait until after the hoped-for reading in Valdez to make that decision. [NOTE: Schatzie has told us know that Sweet has been accepted for the conference Play Lab and will receive a staged reading in Valdez in June.--P.P., 03.07.09]
 
P—What did you think of the reactions to Sweet?
 
S—There was an interesting dynamic in the audience that I hadn't anticipated. Because we had such a large demographic of "recovery" people for this one, many of whom do not regularly attend theatre, the reactions to the play seemed to be split down the middle. It became easy to pick out the people from the recovery community because they were quickly picking up on the references to addiction, intervention, procrastination, enabling, justification and familiar excuses tucked into the dialogue in the castle scenes. The more middle-class, intellectual regular theatre-going crowd, however, seemed to resent not being in on the joke. "Why were those people laughing?" was something I heard a few times in the lobby.
 
So I'm left with these questions: Who am I writing for? If the play managed to reach so many people in recovery, is it really a failure if the message was lost on those who related less to the topic? Should I tailor my play more to the traditional theatre audience, so that I am more likely to have this play produced elsewhere? Or should I make efforts to have the play produced in places that have drama programs for incarcerated women, such as Pat Graney Dance Company's offshoot Women in Prison project in Seattle?
 
My plan at this point is to have a nice long phone conversation with [San Francisco dramaturg] Jayne Wenger, who caught the show when she was up here working with Arlitia [Jones, author of Make Good the Fires, opening at Cyrano’s on Friday, March 13] and Bostin [Christopher, its director]. She helped me sort out my ideas for the play over a lunch meeting at last summer's Valdez conference, and I'm looking forward to her feedback.

Jayne is also a colleague of Rhodessa Jones, a performance artist who works almost exclusively with prisoners and who has performed at Out North in the past. I'd like to seek Rhodessa's advice as well. Mike [Huelsman, Out North Work Group executive director] and I have talked about bringing Rhodessa back to Alaska to do a theatre program at Hiland Mountain Correctional, but she is in high demand so it may take us a while to get her up here.