About the Play:
In Ya Heard Me, two worse-for-wear Irish farmers debate the ramifications and due reckoning when one of their own discovers Jesus in a potato.
About the Author:
Daniella Shoshan is a New York (formerly of New Jersey) playwright who completed her MFA at Columbia University in May 2010. This year she was mentored by Kia Corthron and Stephen Adly Guirgis. Recent projects include: They Call Him Young Lou (MFA Thesis Productions, The Cherry Pit, dir. Pirrone Yousefzadeh); Pluck & Tenacity (MFA Ten Minute Play Festival, Second Stage, dir. Kim Weild); Jack Perry Is Alive [and Dating] (co-written with Harrison Rivers, ANT FEST ’09, Ars Nova); Tell It To Me Slowly (FringeNYC ‘09); Ya Heard Me (Theatre Masters National MFA Playwrights Festival ‘09, Rattlestick Theatre); Take The Parkway North: And Other Ways to Ascend to Power in New Jersey (produced at Columbia, February ‘09).
Daniella’s Forty Days to Forty Plays Interview:
OOB Festival (OOB): Tell us a little about your playwriting career. When did you start writing plays? What are some of your proudest accomplishments as a playwright?
Daniella Shoshan (DS): I started writing plays when I began undergrad at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. Up until then I had only written short stories and poems, my only prior theatrical experiences having been musicals my mother took me to see at Papermill Playhouse as a child, and my first-grade production of Alphabet Soup, in which I played the angst-ridden, complex role of the sometimes-vowel, sometimes-consonant Y. Since then I’ve studied with Chuck Mee, Kelly Stuart, Lucy Thurber and other amazingly brilliant folks at Columbia University, where I completed my MFA this month. It is sometimes difficult for me to experience the sensation of “pride” considering I am a smidge brutal on myself and tend to set impossibly (depressingly) ridiculous standards that are really more accurately like hazing or capital punishment, usually in short amounts of time and with truly absurd parameters, BUT. I’d say I’m close to very proud of the work I’ve done at Columbia and the plays I have managed to beat out of myself.
OOB: Talk about your entry to this year’s festival. How did you come to write this play? Was there a particular inspiration behind its creation? What do you hope festival audience will take from your play?
DS: The inspiration behind Ya Heard Me is a fascination with a turn of phrase and the musicality with which two people toss it back and forth. What I value and search for in theatre-making is an authentic, specific life of language; the way people who share the same space, same blood, same sense of root-less-ness tend to search for some identity-location in their speech. I’m interested in assumed or resurrected narratives, and what we communicate in our unsaid, our need-to-be-said, our never-gonna-say.
OOB: What is the history of your festival entry? Do you plan to hone and further develop the play in upcoming rehearsals? Has it already been produced?
DS: Ya Heard Me has had a brief history prior to its inclusion in the Sam French OOB Festival. It was part of a larger project I worked on during my first year at Columbia, in which three different pairs of people –differing in demographic, geographic location, and tone – converse nearly exclusively with the phrase “Ya heard me?”. After playing with the shape and nature of these three sections, I selected the Irish potato farmers’ piece to submit to the 2009 Theatre Masters National MFA Playwrights Festival, for which the play was performed both in Aspen, Colorado and at the Rattlestick Theatre in NYC.
OOB: Tell us a little about your producer? How did you come to form your relationship together? If you are self-producing, please talk a little about that process—have you ever mounted your own work before?
DS: As of right now, I believe I will be producing my own play in this festival, possibly with the aid of a colleague and former classmate from Columbia, Grant Boyd (MFA Acting 2010). I am…OK, fine, a bit fearful of producing my own work, but am excited for, and look forward to the challenge and necessary experience. As more and more artists opt to produce their own work – for cost effectiveness as well as artistic control – I think it is vital to my future success and produce-ability to understand what it entails to navigate a new play from page to stage (or in my case, brain to page to stage). I think the short-form nature of this festival will be a great, fast-and-dirty tutorial for me in terms of learning how to execute a high level of polished professionalism with simplicity, clarity, and grace.
OOB: Looking back over your personal history in the theatre, what emerges as your favorite memory? Is there a particular story you’d like to share?
DS: One of my favorite moments in my personal history in the theatre (admittedly a short era thus far!) is my recent workshop production of my full-length thesis play, They Call Him Young Lou. The experience of working with my cast fulfilled me in a way that I hadn’t yet felt from playwriting or theatre up until that point. To have the opportunity to write specifically for actors I love, and then watch them exceed the words and muscles and minds I’d constructed for them was a luxury; to meet new actors and find myself immediately engaged and inspired and bettered by them, a blessing. Pulling together a project that legitimately feels full and fresh and complete on a student budget (a.k.a. a nada-budget) is a rarity, and I felt honored that these actors brought my play to such vibrant, vital life.
