Geoffrey Jackson Scott, Literary Manager at NYTW caught up with Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen before rehearsal and asked a few questions.

Tell us a bit about your background and Erik’s and how that relates to the type of theatre you make together.

JESSICA: Well, we're married. Making work together is an extension of that...

ERIK: Or our marriage could be an extension of making art; it works either way.

JESSICA: We’re both actors, writers and directors. We’ve been fortunate enough to split our time pretty evenly between the generative and more immediately active sides of the theater and film worlds. I grew up in a liberal, artsy East Coast household.

ERIK: Jessica's mom is a former modern dancer and is currently a movement educator; her father is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who was drafted into military service in Vietnam. He came back and became an early member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He ran the Vet Centers counseling program for the federal government for twelve years. Many of my family members served, and still serve in the military as well. I grew up in the Midwest (northern Minnesota, to be precise) into a working class family.

JESSICA: Erik's mom's side of the family contains lots of artists, and his dad works in social services, working for the rights of developmentally disabled adults. Despite the difference in our cultural backgrounds, we were both raised with a strong sense of justice and service as well as a background in the arts. We both grew up with a desire to be of service through our work as artists, to work toward a more just world, and to create theater and film that contribute to a larger cultural dialogue.

ERIK: With all the work we've created as a team--from "The Exonerated" to "Aftermath" to our new film adaptation of Jessica’s novel "Almost Home" (about homeless teens in Los Angeles) we try hard to engage with the larger world, to ask our audiences to empathize with individuals with whom they might not ordinarily empathize, and to have a cultural dialogue across ideological and political boundaries. It’s not “political theater.”

JESSICA: Our job as artists isn't to impose our own political ideas on our audiences; it's to use one of the theater’s essential elements—that of empathy—to create connections among individuals normally separated by geography, experience, nationality, ideology; and to tell human stories that both embody and transcend those differences. We believe deeply that narrative—and particularly documentary—theater, when executed effectively, can provide a doorway through which audiences can enter into and empathize with the stories of real individuals whose lives are vastly different from their own.

ERIK: It’s kind of like “Zen and the Art of Archery” --a core notion being that you can’t really forcibly change anyone’s ideas about the world or how they are going to behave in it. You supposed to kind of tend to what you need to tend to with a sense of service and compassion. That’s a core principle for us as artists. Which sucks. Because sometimes you really, really want to change people’s opinions and sometimes you’d rather yell than be compassionate. But you can’t. You can’t set out to “enlighten” or change someone else. You can, however, through practicing this art form--or any other for that matter-- lead them to water. They can sit there and go… “Wow. There’s a lot of junk at the bottom of that lake,” drink from it, walk away from it, take a swim in it, decide to live there forever, drain it… whatever. You’re not telling them how to think or what to do. You’re just telling them a story, and you have enough respect for them to let them come to their own decision about what they’ve been witness to. As long as people are moved… then we’ve done our jobs as storytellers. This is usually the point where I segue into talking about “The Greeks” but I’ll spare the readers.

JESSICA: Thanks for that.

ERIK: No problem. Did we mention that we’re married?

With both the Exonerated (which you made with Erik) and Liberty City (which you made with April Yvette Thomspon), you’ve established a particular style of working which I’ve heard described as “editing by ear.” Can you take us through that process a bit and tell us what for you is the root of this type of verbatim script work or how you wish for an audience to receive it?

ERIK: We both trained as actors first, before sticking our noses into other mediums, and both continue to work as actors in film, TV and theater. In a way, I kind of see our roles as director/co-writer as just another chance to play a character… we put on that hat, and become this thing, and engage in a dialogue with our fellow artists. Just like 2 or 3 characters interacting on stage.

JESSICA: Our approach to writing as a team is very actor-oriented, especially when we're creating documentary theater--we take a very hands-on approach and love trying different writing ideas with actors in the workshop setting. As far as creating theater goes, we tend to be more interested in what happens in the living space of the rehearsal/workshop room than on the page.

ERIK: Once something “works” in the hands of 4 or 5 different actors we can declare it actor-proof and move on. "Actorproof" meaning that an actor would have to go to great lengths to mess it up. Like ridiculous lengths. Like show up nude and singing the line. We’re not always successful; there are lines in "The Exonerated" I'm not happy with. But it's what we strive for. That actor-proof thing is one of the things I love about acting in Shepard and Beckett plays. Or the play I did for Tracey Scott Wilson at The Public last season… If you leave yourself alone, the lines just sing. That’s the bar I’m always trying to jump over as a writer.

JESSICA: When we're creating a documentary piece, we first go out and do interviews with potential subjects. We spend a great deal of time with the people we interview, working to get to know them as human beings as well as learn about the dramatic experiences they have endured. We talk about their hopes, their fears, their humor; their lives, families, professions, loves. Next, we bring raw transcripts in for the actors to read aloud, and make our initial cuts and edits by ear. We then bring back condensed versions of the transcripts to our actors, ask them to read again, and then repeat, using the collaborative space of the workshop room to uncover the dialogue that exists inside the conversation; the play that exists inside the story.

ERIK: Our process is one of crystallization and distillation. People don’t speak like plays; they digress, change subjects mid-stream, go on explaining when they’ve just spoken three perfect sentences that encapsulate the whole story or idea they’re trying to get across. It’s the difference between conversation and dialogue. And there is a VAST difference. Transcripts are rarely engaging all the way through. Part of our work as writers is to re-connect thoughts: to trace the threads of ideas and stories and restructure them so that they will play for an audience. Part of our work is to condense and distill, to identify and isolate and make sing the stories that are at the heart of our interviews. And part of our work is to create a larger structure that juxtaposes individual stories in such a way that a much larger story is told. This is how we created "The Exonerated," as well as "Aftermath."

JESSICA: With "Liberty City," April's and my process was similar, except that the piece wasn't strict documentary: I first interviewed yet another fellow actor/writer, April, about her family stories, and those interviews were transcribed; after we focused together on specific storylines, April then added a fictionalized element. In the rehearsal room, I’d interview April in character (as different family members) about the same stories, and she re-told them, using her considerable acting and writing skill to imagine different family members' points of view. I recorded those sessions, and together she and I "edited by ear" to create "Liberty City."

ERIK: We believe that a central mechanism of narrative theater is empathy—that in large measure, the degree to which audiences are deeply invested and involved in a theatrical experience is dependent on the degree to which they empathize with the characters (flaws and complexities included). That engagement—particularly, as in documentary theater, when the ‘characters’ represent real people and true stories—can create immediate human connection across seemingly insurmountable differences.

JESSICA: The core of our work as playwrights is creating a narrative structure that facilitates this. In a world as fractured and contentious as ours, empathy and identification across differences are precious commodities—and we believe that they are also crucial keys to creating, in some small way, a more humane and compassionate world.

Can you tell us a bit about the Genesis of Aftermath?

ERIK: No. But I can tell you about the aftermath of Genesis. Peter Gabriel was the original singer until he left and Phil Collins took over then in the 80’s a string of #1 hits…

(long pause)

ERIK: I’m being inappropriate again? Is it time for my pill?

JESSICA: Erik is the idea guy in our relationship. I’m the structure person.

ERIK: So structurally that last little section…?

JESSICA: Is cut. Yes.

ERIK: Gotcha.

JESSICA: The original idea for "Aftermath" was born during NYTW's 2007 summer residency at Dartmouth College; I was there working on "Liberty City" and Jim Nicola and I were talking over breakfast about the lack of contemporary theater work about war from civilians' point of view. We had heard (though perhaps not enough) about war from soldiers' points of view, and several works had been created about politicians and the policy decisions that lead to war--but there wasn't much work out there focusing on the experience of war from the point of view of regular human beings who happen to live where wars are taking place.

ERIK: The “collateral damage.” Lemme digress for a second and say what a filthy phrase that is… It’s designed to make violence palatable for us. It turns human beings into integers. Nothing in war is easy and rarely are things palatable. My cousin in the National Guard who dismantled IED’s will attest to that. None of the people we talked to think of themselves as numbers. Neither do American servicemen and women. The reductive act of turning a casualty into a number is infinitely more offensive than a racial invective in my mind.

JESSICA: After the Dartmouth residency, we continued to discuss this idea, focusing in on the stories of Iraqi civilians--BECAUSE they had in fact been presented to the American people for years as numbers. We try to be well-read and media-savvy, but could only think of a few documentaries, some interviews, some newspaper quotes and interviews, no movies that we can think of at the moment about the human stories of civilians in the Iraq war. We researched the region and the ever morphing situation, all the while continuing to talk collaboratively with Jim and Linda about the project. Through our research, we zeroed in on Jordan as the best place to conduct our interviews--travel in Iraq is still unsafe, and the largest concentrations of Iraqi civilian refugees are in Jordan and Syria.

ERIK: NYTW secured a grant from the Ford Foundation and sent us to Jordan to conduct the interviews. In summer 2008, we traveled there for nearly two weeks, along with Marla Keenan, the Associate Director of Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC), an NGO that works to help civilians in war zones around the world. We worked with local translators (as well as CARE International, Doctors Without Borders, and Direct Aid Iraq) to find and interview 37 Iraqi civilian refugees. These crucial relationships helped us adjust to and better understand the culture in which we were immersing ourselves.

JESSICA: Which was kind of amazing. This was a first time trip to that region for us and the experience was all “first time” stuff for us. Our “newness” to the culture and region created an atmosphere of discovery which is an essential energy to this kind of experience.

ERIK: After our return, Iraqi-American translator (and NYU professor, documentary filmmaker and poet) Sinan Antoon listened to the Arabic recordings of our interviews, and translated them precisely, word-for-word. "Aftermath" cast member Fajer Al-Kaisi helped with additional translation. These translations were then transcribed (we love NYTW interns!), and we brought the raw interview transcripts--and five actors---to NYTW's annual Dartmouth residency to begin the process of creating the script.

You’ve mentioned a desire for the audience to have the experience you and Erik did in meeting with the Iraqi refugees profiled in this piece. Can you speak about that experience and how it has manifest through development and how it might manifest in production?

JESSICA: Our experience in Jordan was enormously moving and eye-opening. The simple act of speaking to each other, civilian to civilian, Iraqi to American, was enormously powerful. We met a 19-year-old boy machine-gunned by a militia while on his way to his job doing laundry for KBR; we met an imam who spent well over a year in Abu Ghraib before being declared innocent by Iraqi and Coalition authorities and released. We spoke with a mother shot through the eye when her brother’s car accidentally swerved in traffic behind a U.S. convoy, and a taxi driver who has no other means to support his family besides continuing to ferry passengers on the treacherous, bandit-filled highway between Baghdad and Amman. We interviewed an artist couple whose careers in Iraq ended when some militia drove as many artists as they could out of Iraq. We met these individuals not as facts or statistics but as people, experiencing their humor, their stories of survival, their personalities, their hope, in addition to learning about the extraordinarily horrific events that they have endured.

ERIK: We were really floored by what we learned--firsthand, through individual human stories--about the extent of the chaos in Iraq and the damage that chaos has done to ordinary Iraqi civilians' lives. We were also floored by our interview subjects' willingness to welcome us into their homes and to connect with us, despite all the cultural differences, despite the violence of the events that they have endured, despite all the forces at work pressuring Iraqis and Americans not to relate to each other as human beings.

JESSICA: Our job now is to create a work of theater that extends that experience to our audience; a simple, intimate production where the full power of these stories can be felt.

ERIK: This phenomenon came up during interview process for "The Exonerated" as well: as we prepped for the interviews we kind of expected that all the stories would be heartbreaking and tragic, and many were, but yet again once we were there hearing these stories where the human spirit broke through and people managed to find peace, joy, even a modicum of closure under circumstances that very few American civilians (aside from anyone who was in NYC on 9-11) have ever experienced. Human beings are remarkably resilient and their capacity for love and forgiveness is nearly bottomless.

Finally, NYTW is planning to provide a nightly post show series of what I will call “reflections” where audiences are invited to dialog about the work. What is your hope for these dialogues?

BOTH ERIK AND JESS: Our intention is never, ever to tell our audiences what to think or believe, or to provide answers; quite the opposite. The goal of this piece is to raise questions. To that end, we hope that those who choose to stay for post-performance discussions will grapple actively with their own questions, whatever they may be. We hope that our audiences will grapple with the realization that our fates and the fate of the Iraqi people are now inextricably intertwined--in a profoundly human, individual, and non-abstract way--and will reflect on what that might mean for ours and future generations.