Sarah Rose Leonard:

What led you to create your first solo piece? Why did that feel like the form for you?

Nilaja Sun:

I went to a college called Franklin and Marshall College, and I wound up studying theatre there. In my senior year I took a playwriting course. We had to have actors perform our plays, and all of my characters happened to be either Black or Latino. I went to a predominantly white school so I said, “you know what, I’ll just go ahead and perform all the characters!” Something about that was very true to how I like to tell stories, in that I just like to dive into them and have a good time telling the truth within every soul. And so, even though in the past say 25 years that I’ve been doing solo work I also work on other people’s plays, solo work seems to me to be the closest thing to my childhood. I remember moments of being asked like, what school looked like that day and just diving into everyone’s character and everyone’s voice, and going into them physically as a child. So, when I do perform solo work, it’s like I’m a child again. It makes me feel like the audience is just my parents in the living room on the Lower East Side again.

You’ve acted in various plays and TV shows in between your tour of No Child… and Pike St. I’m curious about how you found your way to creating this new solo show.

Hurricane Sandy happened, and Hurricane Sandy was one of those hurricanes that really devastated some parts of the Northeast, including parts of New York City, including the Lower East Side, this neighborhood in Manhattan that I’m from. I don’t live there anymore, but it still holds a very special place in my heart. In all of the neighborhoods on the small island of Manhattan, the Lower East Side was one of those neighborhoods that just could not recover their electricity and their running water. Having lived there for so long, and having been raised on the twentieth floor of an apartment building, I know many either elderly or disabled folks who can’t walk down twenty flights during a storm, who can’t run to a shelter before Mother Nature goes on the attack, or even afterwards.

After the Lower East Side regained any kind of semblance of what it used to be like and feel like, I felt like, as an artist, wouldn’t it be interesting to create a piece that is fun to watch, and also deep? To create a piece that, when you see it, the next time there is either a Hurricane or some kind of disaster – either  man-made or Mother Nature-made – you think about those who can’t necessarily either run out of their apartment. You think about those who are really in need of services. Or just in need of a knock on the door, of a “hey, how’re you doing? I’m upstairs if you need me.” It’s a kind of neighbor-helping-neighbor culture that I got a chance to witness after Hurricane Sandy. It’s a bit of a love letter to the places where people really help each other out in those dire circumstances. It’s also a warning, in a way: we will continue to have these weather-related situations in America and around the world. And wouldn’t it be great if we could have plans in place for those who are most vulnerable – physically, mentally, emotionally, and economically as well.

How do you move those ideas to the page and then to your feet?

I actually start the opposite way. I don’t start sitting and writing. I’m listening to people talking, I’m listening to family members, friends, strangers on the street, on the subway, at the bodega, and church. In all kinds of situations. And I have been listening for my entire life. So when you watch Pike St., what you’ll find is – I want to say characters – but these are really people who I have known all of my life. Particularly people who you may find, even now in 2018, still living in the Lower East Side. They have been a part of my heart, almost a part of my DNA, for this entire time.

I was commissioned by Epic Theatre Ensemble to write anything I wanted to, and I wanted to write a piece about something related to the hurricane. When I’m writing about something I care about, I go deep into my soul and my cellular level. I think about all of those folks who really touched me, almost to the point where I’m in tears thinking about them –I’m in tears now just thinking about them! – and wanting to honor them by saying words that they have said, or by striking poses that I remember they struck, or walking in the way they walked, or rolling in the way they rolled, or speaking languages that they spoke. If I can do that, 7 show a week, all over the world, then that to me is how I honor them.

I go ahead and kind of, I don’t even want to say the word vomit, but it’s basically all of these words kind of coming out, out, out, out, out. Whether it’s in the mirror or I’m recording it and writing, but I rarely sit down and write. I’m keeping it in my body since I’m such a physical actor. Then the editing process becomes the kind of sedentary, looking through it mathematically, particularly looking at the comedy of it, looking at repetition, and finding the spaces for silence. Then, of course, I find a tremendous director like Ron Russell, who can see outside of me to make sure that it’s clear and that I’m not just talking to myself. And then with lights and sound and tremendous theatres housing this story, it just like all beautifully comes together. In magic! Theatre magic!

This play continuously walks the line between humor and tragedy. How do you calibrate that balance, especially given how personal the piece is? 

I knew that I wanted it to be a day in the life of a Hurricane. Any time you have a natural disaster that is not like a sudden disaster – but you know it’s coming and you’ve got several days warning, and the weather folks are scaring everyone to death – everyone hunkers down with their provisions. It’s always on those days that the oddest beautiful moments happen. Those are the moments that I really record. Even when I am in any kind of crisis mode I am recording for the “odd,” the humor, the moments when everyone wants to strangle each other, the moments when we’re crying and laughing at such inappropriate times. I think that’s what keeps seventy-seven minutes rolling along. Because we’re all breathing and we’re all having these uncomfortable moments where the jokes come out because we’re all stuck in this suffocating situation where we don’t know what may or may not happen, particularly when you don’t have the funds to go to a shelter or don’t have the funds to get in a car and go travelling outside of the weather pattern. I think that’s one of the reasons why there is humor, because I have been, like I mentioned, recording throughout my life these moments where the comedy just comes out. Because truly that’s the humanity of both the people and the situation that’s trying to emerge in that moment.

How did you decide to focus on those who stay at home during a hurricane?

After hurricanes happen and sometimes pass, there is this negative reporting of their lives as if like, “Well they stayed home, and they stayed in their house.” But some people have pets like cats and animals, and some people cannot travel, they just don’t have the means to maybe even want to travel to a shelter because of maybe a million things. I don’t think they should be demonized for choosing to stay in their homes. Especially after they’ve passed, they shouldn’t be demonized for it.

We usually swallow the narrative that this is the consequence of their choices…

Right, the “they didn’t listen to the rules…” Yeah! First of all, the rules are skewed depending on where you live, where you come from. When it comes to the Vega household in Pike St., one of the reasons why Evelyn does not choose to go to a shelter – she is the mother of a child who lives much of her life in a chair that assists her breathing – is simply because they live in a five story tenement. They tried that whole shelter thing before during the last superstorm and there was just so much attention on Candi (that’s her daughter). There was so much negative attention and that’s why she chooses to wait it out. I think we could really stand to have a little more respect for folks who make that choice, and move on from there.

Since you started performing this show in 2015 Hurricane Maria has caused devastation in Puerto Rico. Has the storm changed the way you see Pike St.?

In 2014 when I was writing it and when the Epic Theatre Ensemble first produced it, I thought to myself, okay, folks are watching this and they’re understanding because they had dealt with Hurricane Sandy. But when I travel, like when I travel to Australia and Scotland, will folks get it? Then Maria happened, as well as Rita and Harvey, and it’s almost like folks are like, “wait, when did you write this?”

The weather is not getting any better and we can’t always depend on our government, our state, our local authorities, to always have our backs in those moments. It’s a blessing when they do, but…

Perhaps we need to be thinking now, when we’re blessed to have a calm time, “what is my plan for dot dot dot.” When those conversations happen, I just think “YES! This is exactly why I wrote this!”

My heart broke for Puerto Rico, and it is heart breaking knowing that there are still people in darkness. And at the same time, my goodness, I am so glad that people are finally talking about post-, during, pre-hurricane, what to do. This is definitely a discussion we needed to have many years ago. So I’m ready for it.