A Conversation with Playwright Laura Shamas

Mothers, Daughters and the Breakdown of the Hive:
A Conversation with Playwright Laura Shamas
by Tom Pearson

In my interview with playwright Laura Shamas, we talked about her complex characters and use of metaphor in her play Chasing Honey and took a quick look at where she was coming from and where she was going.

Laura: I was born in Oklahoma and I grew up there, and I’ve also lived in Denver and Los Angeles. So, those are the places that I really think I’m from. I grew up in a theatrical family in Oklahoma, and so that’s how I really started being a playwright, because my mom is a writer and director, and her brother, who passed away, had a long career too as an actor and a director. So, it was always in my family that one could do that. I acted a little bit. I did about twenty-five roles before I figured that I wasn’t really that good, but I love the theater, and so I started writing plays when I was, I guess formally you could say, when I started UCLA and was a theater student. I wrote my first full-length play while I was undergrad at UCLA, and I got very lucky with it. It was published, and you know, I thought, “Wow, won’t life be great? This is what life is going to be like in the theater,” and then, you know, it turned out differently than that. But that’s really how I started.

Tom: Tell us a little bit about the themes and issues that pop up for you. Are they the same issues or sets of issues? What are the politics in your work?

Laura: I think that I’ve always written plays that have gender politics involved. That’s something that I’ve cared about for a long time. I think part of that did come out of acting because I was always looking for good roles, and I would always bemoan the kind of roles that I’d get to audition for. I always wanted to find roles that were smarter than I could audition for, and to be fed more, where the female was the protagonist, and the female drove the show, and that kind of thing. So, I started out from a very strong gender-political, I guess, agenda, if you will. But I also love the theater, and so I like to have things that are epic. I always like to tell big stories. I am a very political person. I’m a liberal person, and so, I’m proud to say that I’m politically liberal. I believe that almost everything we write is political, and I find myself writing about a lot of issues that I think some people would label as liberal issues. But to me, it’s part of who I am. It’s what I care about. It’s what I want to make audiences think about. It’s what I want a theater community to think about, and there have been a whole range of issues. This play that I’m very fortunate and blessed to be at the Native Theater Festival with is about Colony Collapse Disorder…

Tom: Among bees?

Laura: Well, among bees, but also taking that metaphor and seeing where it’s going with our whole culture and our society, with Native culture and family. What does it mean to have a breakdown like this with our, with Mother Earth? And what does it do to our whole system, our whole family? And what are we doing about it? What are people planning to do? What are they thinking about with it? I started this play last year, and I was just talking to one of the actors who’d done an initial workshop of it, Cara Gee. She and I were talking about how in the amount of time since I first started work-shopping the play there’s still no solution to these issues. And it’s great that I get to keep working on the play but not great that this is still an issue for our planet and our world.

Tom: As I was reading the play, it seems that there are also some identity issues that are bubbling to the surface in this work, and I wondered, is that common in your other work?

Laura: Identity issues? I’m someone from a multi-cultural background, and I’m very interested in elements of identity and how we align ourselves with identity. What part of culture is identity?

Tom: And what part of race? What part of…

Laura: Yes. Yes. It’s all very interesting to me and so I think I observe, as a person, a lot of people wondering about that question. As an artist, I’m supposed to raise questions. I don’t necessarily think that I need to answer them, but my job is to raise them. There’s an element of: Look at this. What do you think? And let’s get some dialogue about this. I do see people exploring a lot of identity issues.

Tom: It seems to me that your characters would be very rich for an actor to play…

Laura: Oh, thank you.

Tom: … because they appear to be one thing, and then we see the complication of that identity. And I wonder do you use archetypes and/or stereotypes to start a work? Do you start with an idea of who these people are in one dimension or two dimensions and work towards the other elements of character?

Laura: I don’t know that I work formally that way, but you tapped into something I care about deeply. I do like to explode stereotypes, and I also like to look at, what I think is a perception, and then try and go and say, “But look at this side of it,” and then, “It’s really not like that. It’s really like this.” So, you get into a deeper layer, and I think maybe some of that is, some of the things I’ve experienced. Where people will maybe meet me and make a certain assessment about me, and that really isn’t true about my own being. So it’s been an interesting experience to hear some of the things that have been said to me or assumed about me, so I know that it happens to lots of people. That it’s something that I like to work at, like you said, “Let’s go deeper than this assumption.”

Tom: I’m thinking in particular of the mother in the story who seems very paradoxical and operates in two very different spheres and I wondered if you would talk a little bit about that character.

Laura: Well one of the things that you said too, my PhD is in Mythological Studies, and I do work on other projects as a consultant, talking about mythological planes. What I tried to do with the mother, this is a mother who is both speaking to her daughter on the earthly plane, you know, one level of our mythic existence, and then the celestial, the heavenly, the spiritual. So, she’s also working trying to reach her daughter on an upper spiritual level as well. That character that you’re talking about is also in the process of dying in the play. She’s becoming spirit. And she’s trying to teach her daughter in the celestial, heavenly plane as much as she can while she still has a body too. So, I did really try to work with two different levels, very consciously there, and you know, I don’t know if it’s working in the play, but that’s what I’m trying to do.

Tom: Well, I’m very biased. I love it, and it resonates with me, and I’ll just put that out there. The thing I was really struck by is there’s a lot of pain in all of the characters but particularly in this one, I was thinking that this relationship between the mother and the daughter is only good in this sort of higher plane. And it’s really going wrong right here in front of her.

Laura: In a way this play, Chasing Honey, to me, is a major defense of the maternal, and part of that is using Colony Collapse Disorder, too, metaphorically and as an analogy. In Colony Collapse Disorder when the queen bee goes crazy or breaks down or leaves, the whole colony goes. So, the mother really does matter a lot. And what happens to the stress we put on our mothers in these situations when the stress is put on the maternal, what happens to the mother/daughter relationship? And, what tools does the mother then have when they are put through stresses like that? So I’m so glad you saw that, Tom. It’s thrilling to me.

Tom: Well, it’s fun to hear you talk about them too, because there is such complexity and symbolism with the parallel structure of the hive and this family unit that we see breaking down. It’s really fascinating, so I look forward to the reading.

Laura: Thank you. Me too.

Tom: Will you tell us a bit about what you are working on now, I mean other than this, which I know is all-consuming. But what comes next for you?

Laura: I really don’t know. I started a play in April and I would like to get back to it. It’s a gender political play, I’d say, about female decoys. I don’t know that it’s called Trapper Joan, [laughing] and I don’t know if I’ll get to go back to it or not. It’s a completely different kind of piece. But I’m very interested in the idea of decoys and private investigators and what that says about relationships in the twenty-first century that those are on the rise. So, I might get to work on that. I’m also hoping I can write a movie, some screenplays.