Jaisey Bates is the kind of playwright that, once you meet/work with her, you kind of just want to invent more reasons to get a chance to work with her again. Not only are her words achingly beautiful, but her personality is so engaging and honest that I find myself awed by even her emails.
Which is why I am so totally thrilled to announce that Jaisey will be participating in our 2nd Heal the Divide online residency! I’ll be sharing Jaisey’s first Heal the Divide play next week, but you don’t have to wait that long to get to know more about this talented and creative human. Check out my interview with Jaisey below.
What about our Heal the Divide project captured your interested/why did you decide to participate in this initiative? What questions, as a playwright, are you most drawn to explore in your work?
A ‘Fermat’s Last Theorem’
short scene answer attempt
(to save time so folks might
spare a few moments more
for perusing Protest Play PDFs),
re: why
/ from whence these
/ my words.
At Rise:
A woman
reads
the (mortally?) wounded
world around her.
It does not
compute.
She studies
the Story Math
of History:
“Who lives, who dies,
who tells [the] story”
called History.
The Subtractors
/ Silencers.
The Subtracted
/ Silenced.
Specifically:
The Indigenous
Silenced.
She receives
via internet
an invitation to
add three gatherings
of words to the
Healing
the Divide
equation.
She decides
to write
three letters
To History
/ To Whom
It May
Concern.
To the
Gates
keepers.
From
Allies
of the
Indigenous
‘Gates
Kept’.
She writes.
She writes.
She writes.
What areas of concern in your community do you find yourself curious about or interested in considering for this project?
I currently live in LA which has the largest urban population of Natives in the U.S. Most of my words speak from an Indigenous perspective.
There have been a lot of discussions lately about what artists can do to “make a difference” in light of our current political spectrum. What do you think we can (or should) do?
Dear Artists.
Hearts
forward.
Heads
high.
Courage, my
friends,
as we try
to help
write
a more just
and tolerant
world worthy
of our children’s
bright promise.
And of theirs.
And hope.
Always, forever
remember: Hope.
My words and I
stand this ground
beside you.
May we
find ways
to walk
together
in Beauty
this
belovèd
ground.
XoXo,
Planet Nine
Are you engaged in any other organizations fighting for change or progress that you want to give a shout out to?
Some hashtags for movements of interest and action, mostly through writing and staging plays:
#AfterOrlandoPlays
#BlackLivesMatter
#ClimateChangeTheatreAction
#ICantBreathe
#InsteadofRedface
#NoDAPL
#StandingRock
#WaterIsLife
What did you take away from reading the plays from our first residency?
Intriguing range of perspectives and approaches from the resident playwrights. Also fascinating: the college Heal the Divide on Campus initiative. I hope we online folks might have the chance to read some of the students’ efforts.
More About Jaisey:
Jaisey Bates, a misplaced Maine-iac in LA, writes and performs with her nomadic multicultural theater company, The Peoplehood. LA and NYC venues for her words have included the Agüeybaná Book Store, Art/Works, Eclectic, EST/LA, Lounge, Naked Angels, Native Voices at the Autry, Open Fist, Performance Loft, Playwrights’ Center Stage, Samuel French Bookshop, Studio/Stage, Unknown and Victory theaters. Her words have enjoyed road trips to several states and teleportation to Canada and the UK. Her full-length plays include The Day We Were Born, RUN, This Radiant Wasteland, and Variations in the Key of White. Real Time, her fancydance variation on Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, is The Peoplehood’s Menu of Performance Possibilities, an ever-evolving multitude of mix-and-match short plays and spoken word pieces. Her motto is “Have Words. Many Words. Many, many Words. Will travel.” Her education includes Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, American University in Cairo (Fulbright/Johns Hopkins SAIS) and Loyola Marymount (MA in English). She wrote a blog, “Native communities and climate change, center stage”, for the HowlRound’s ‘Theater in the Age of Climate Change’ series. She tends to speak of herself in the 3rd person. She also answers to the name Planet Nine. She is very grateful to Brilliant Words Warrior Woman Tiffany Antone for this chance to work toward Healing the Divide. She hopes with all her heart that we will learn to walk in beauty this beloved ground.
The ending of DACA, and the lack of response to Puerto Rico, made me want to dig deeper into stories of the immigrant community. I recently met a woman, a beautiful Mexican woman who is a jazz singer, who shared with me heartbreaking stories of how she had been treated as a Mexican in America. How her humanity was questioned because she worked minimum wage or under the table jobs. I had another friend who recently saw her daughters fiancé off to basic training. He assumed that of course he would be naturalized, because he was willing to die for his adopted country. He had been singled out by recruiters because he was a poor undocumented Latino. I put the stories together, and it became a short story of a mother saying goodbye to her child.
It took me several drafts to get to the play below. The image of boxes fighting for space came to me after Charlottesville. I had also been reading Jeremiah Moss’s Vanishing New York about the gentrification of New York City in the twenty-first century.
I wrote this piece because I wanted to continue on with the trend of breaking the barriers of stereotypes in my community. A huge one that included myself, was that there aren’t many positive male figures in the stereotyped black home. I feel that this was a sensitive area for me and the men in my community. I actually didn’t have a strong relationship with my dad until I was much older and I grew to understand and appreciate him, however a lot of families aren’t that lucky. I hope that this piece will inspire black men to see that there definitely needs to be a change in the way we see ourselves and how others see us.
In this piece — which, yes, I wrote while in London (today) — I wanted to step back from everything and look at conversation, that lost art I so often miss in political discourse. I started out thinking about the weather and ended up with some sort of neo-Socratic dialogue, which wasn’t my aim, but that’s the great thing about writing: Being surprised.
Joe Arpaio has been a fixture in my life for many years, since I have been a long time resident of Arizona. I grew up in the state. I can’t recall a time he wasn’t Sherriff of Maricopa County. I agonized over this man in many ways over the years as he pinged from headline to headline like some bionic tiddlywink game piece alight with self-importance and profound malice. I was sitting at the kitchen table having coffee when I heard that Trump was getting ready to pardon Arpaio for his slap-on-the-wrist conviction (hard won though, as I am sure it was). I remember laughing aloud. I was sure the comment was in jest. I waited for the part of the statement that would confirm that a joke was unfolding a la’ SNL. Nope. And here we are.
The tragedy in Charlottesville served to open a scar in America. The white supremacist movement has come out of their hidden corners and darkened basements, helped along by their leader in Washington. This in and of itself is frightening, but I hold out hope. There is also a strong and vocal resistance movement who have put their bodies on the line to defy those who would take this country into the dark ages. There has been loss, and likely will be more, but their defiance will serve as a beacon for others to come and stand against the darkness.
I sail and race sailboats out of Marina del Rey. Sometimes, when we’re a mile out, I look back at the coast and think ten million people live there, but I don’t see them. However, all those humans cannot be denied.
“I was inspired to write this piece from observing a problem that effected my childhood neighborhood that I grew up in. We faced a lot of problems with healthcare, domestic violence, and drug use. I focused on this because there are too many voices assuming what the black community goes through and shunning us when we speak out about it. I want this play to show that these are real things that the black community goes through and also to send a message to the black community that we must do better and work two times harder in this world.”