While the academic year draws to a close, student theater is continuing at full force, with two notable productions opening in the coming weeks: “Nothing Comes to Mim” by Will Blumberg ’22 and “The Book of Chrysanthemum” by Laia Comas ’22. As both of these shows explore themes of religion, queerness, and identity, and their performances happen to be going up on the same weekend, the two playwrights have been talking to each other about the intersections between their works.
On Friday, April 15, Blumberg and Comas sat down with Archivist and Publicity Coordinator for “The Book of Chrysanthemum” Malaika Fernandes ’23 and Publicity Manager for “Nothing Comes to Mim” Sarah Shapiro ’23 in the Albritton Center for an in-depth conversation on their creative processes, the subjects of their plays, and more.
Laia Comas: My play, “The Book of Chrysanthemum,” is set in a world where all the characters work on a farm called “The Farm” where they harvest typewriter parts, which now grow on trees. They then ship off all the typewriter parts on blimps to this mythical location that we never see called “The Academy.” One day a fragment of the Bible falls from one of these passing blimps and the main character finds it. She decides to finish it herself, inadvertently rewriting the Bible, not knowing what it is. No one knows what the Bible is in this world, and shenanigans ensue from there. It’s about bodies in all ways—human bodies, bodies of text, and bodies of knowledge—and how those change over time and can mean multiple things at once.
Will Blumberg: “Nothing Comes to Mim” tells the story of Mim, who, while taking care of a sick friend one day, begins experiencing what I’ll call divine back pain. This leads them down a divisive path between asking questions in their head and asking questions of their body. They end up reliving moments from their childhood and young adolescence trying to understand how they got to the place they are, why they’re now asking these questions of themselves, and don’t want to answer them. It’s a play about identity, it’s a play about tradition, it’s a play about how we can be one singular in a line of many and recognize those behind us, in front of us and ourselves.
What does embodied art mean to you and what is the point of it?
Sarah Shapiro: I’ve learned in college that I focus on doing embodied things and that’s why I think theater is so important to me because I feel very engaged in a way that I don’t feel engaged in other ways. But I feel like embodiment is being present within yourself and actively absorbing, or giving and receiving.
WB: It makes me think about a concept that I hold very near and dear to my heart which is the idea of closing distance between two things. Personally, I find that with just words on a page, there ends up being a lot of distance between myself and whatever it is I’m meant to be getting close to. Embodied action allows the space between me and this question, this answer, this whatever, to get a little bit closer and I find that really helpful when I’m trying to interrogate something.
LC: I’m thinking that I approach the idea of embodiment very differently. My main interest has been the way that bodies in spaces, human bodies and the spaces we inhabit, are controlled, which I’m using as a neutral term in this context, in the same ways and with the same technologies. And then also how bodies (and spaces) mean multiple things at once and mean multiple things to different people. In some ways, that’s what my play is about: what happens when two competing definitions of the same thing exist in the same space at the same time. So to think about embodiment is to think about the process of not just being a body, but also being in a space with other bodies and the negotiation of that. Which means that embodiment is rendered as something that is not specific to the individual body but is a social experience shared by people. Which may be along the line of what you were saying, closing distance.
Malaika Fernandes: I like that idea. I find that when it comes to theater or why I’m drawn to theater is because for me things don’t feel real unless they are embodied, unless they do take place in bodies and not just that, but it happens in the interactions between people.
LC: There’s something about the body, regardless of the actual truth of something, if it is connected to a body, the possibility of believing it increases. Like if I say I’m a cat and don’t do anything, I’m obviously not a cat. But if I say I’m a cat and then pretend to be a cat with my body, maybe the audience will be like, “Maybe Laia thinks she’s a cat, and that’s weird, but maybe she thinks that, maybe there’s truth to that.” I also think that bodies are all we have and the only way we can change the world is with our bodies because they can mean different things, so the systems of power think they’re controlling our bodies but we can empower our bodies in ways that are not recognizable as resistant to the systems of power, thereby undermining them.
WB: Something that we’ve talked about before is trying to push against the insularity of theater on this campus and to show how they can be inherently connected to the communities we’re part of. Both of us are a part of performance communities and there’s amazing people in these communities. It seems smart to bring them together and look at what we’re doing from a wider perspective, and that can also connect to our thematics!
I find that I don’t have all the answers and I shouldn’t have all the answers and no one person can. The reason why I love theater is that people come into the room with their own perspectives and questions and ideas. When I learned that Laia’s play was also thinking about religion and identity, it made sense that if we’re both questioning perhaps overlapping ideas in different ways, why not bring those questions and conversation spaces together so that we can further articulate both what we are individually interested in and their differences, and then complicate the similarities and get to a deeper point of questioning these structures?
LC: Why don’t we sort of retrace our conversations about those similarities and divergences in our thematics?
MF: Over the past couple months that Will and Laia have been working together, there’s been a question of what is similar and what is different, and a Venn diagram was made.
LC: Yes, so the things that we thought we have in common are queerness, religion, gender identity, time lineage, mysticism, and we were thinking about chronic pain. [Blumberg’s] show has this chronic back pain. Mental health is not a conversation that I’m actively engaging in in my show, but it is very much a reflection of my own experience over the last four years and so, in different ways, the characters manifest anxiety and depression and body dysmorphia. Then some of our differences are that [Blumberg’s] show is engaging with Judaism, I’m really engaging with Christianity but also not. [Blumberg has] an emphasis on family or chosen family and queer kinship. My show has a pretty intentional lack of family and lack of kinship as a possibility. I’m really focused on academia and institutions, which aren’t really at play in [Blumberg’s] show. We also talked about queer as content versus queer as form; your show being queer in content, mine being queer in form. But I don’t think that is a binary and I think they’re not mutually exclusive.
WB: Form is something that comes to me in the last stages of my creative process. I really began by thinking about character content relationships and tried to find how those things would bloom on the page, and then once I understood those things, I started to play around with form. I like to print out all my paper, cut it up and paste it back together. So that to me was how I tried to queer form, but if we’re thinking within the canon of formal experimentation of theater, the form of my play is pretty standard.
LC: I feel like my primary preoccupation is form, I’m obsessed with it. To me, form means the structure or the logic that makes this circumstance make sense. In “The Book of Chrysanthemum,” every time someone says something it resets the clock on reality. So in terms of the way it is working on a line level and from moment to moment is where the queering is happening because there is this full embrace of the idea that language does something. I personally believe that language is body, there’s no distinction there. So the language is being used as the embodiment and as such, just like every time an actor takes a step they’re in a new location, every time a word is said we’re in a new linguistic location. So in some sense, the form is constantly changing.
WB: Logic is something I’ve been thinking about recently. I had a design run of “Nothing Comes to Mim” two weeks ago. I watched it and I said, “Where’s the logic? Does there need to be logic?” because some element of the storytelling wasn’t clicking in the way that I thought it should be, and I thought a lot and what I came to is that I think I needed to establish a logic to break it. If there is queerness in the form of this play, it is the setting of rules only to break them as the play goes along.
LC: Yeah, another way we could talk about form is how many characters we have. In a three person show versus a nine person show, what’s possible becomes very different. There’s this constant triangle in my show that’s happening and it’s never not there. I think that this helps shift my thinking about what’s the balancing act that is constantly happening between these characters. What I keep coming back to is saying that this play isn’t psychological, it’s about bodies arranged in space together.
WB: That’s so interesting, I feel like “Nothing Comes to Mim” is so psychological. I say that as a creator. It’s interesting to know that we’re in different places in our creative paths.
SS: Not to push back on what you were saying, but aren’t bodies arranged in space and the way someone responds to that inherently psychological? Because the way someone reacts to how bodies are arranged is because of how they are conditioned and how they know what that means?
LC: Yeah, absolutely, I think it is. It’s not my interest for that to be how I approach the questions, but it totally is, and I think I’m learning that maybe I have to find a way to be interested in that. Because it’s just like everything is an act of translation, including directing.
WB: I think that if you had to boil down what “Nothing Comes to Mim” is trying to do, it is trying to negate the binary that we are discussing that it either starts in the mind or the body. The fact is that you can’t separate them and that your body is so wrapped up in your thoughts and your mind is incredibly affected by your body and the bodies around you.
LC: It’s interesting, again I agree, but I feel a little bit in a trap with what I’m about to say because I don’t mean to weaponize my identity by any means, but as a trans woman, my whole life is about body, overwhelmingly more so than the mind, which is not a truth claim, it’s an experience claim. But again, that’s psychological, isn’t it? It’s psychological that my focus is the body.
“Nothing Comes to Mim” will run from Thursday, April 28 through Saturday, April 30 at 7:30 p.m. in the backyard of 126 Knowles Ave. Tickets can be found through the “Nothing Comes to Mim” Instagram page and through the CFA website.
“The Book of Chrysanthemum” will be shown April 28 and April 29 at 7 p.m., April 30 at 9 p.m., and May 1 at 3 p.m. in the Develin room in the Olin Memorial Library. Tickets can be found through “The Book of Chrysanthemum” Instagram page and on their EventBrite page.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Sabrina Ladiwala can be reached at sladiwala@wesleyan.edu.