Jaclyn Backhaus, a playwright of Punjabi and German descent, is skilled at giving women a voice in her work. Her last play, “Men on Boats,” told the story of the 1869 Powell Expedition with an all-female cast. Her new production, “India Pale Ale,” focuses on a young woman who wants to forge her own path and leave her deeply-rooted-in-Punjabi-culture family.
Representation and diversity are pivotal issues for Backhaus. She believes that the theater industry has reached a turning point in terms of inclusion, and is listening to more playwrights like herself. She calls this a “change of tide,” an opinion that was recently reaffirmed when she earned the prestigious Horton Foote Prize for “India Pale Ale.”
Backhaus’ other works include plays “Set in the Living Room of a Small Town American Play” and “You On The Moors Now,” podcast “People Doing Math,” and the upcoming “Bull’s Hollow Trilogy.”
Women and Hollywood spoke with Backhaus about “India Pale Ale,” how real life influenced the events of the play, and winning the Horton Foote Prize.
“India Pale Ale” is playing at the Manhattan Theatre Club through November 18.
W&H: Love and resilience are two themes that seem to permeate through “India Pale Ale.” Your play really resonates today more than ever, in light of all the horrific events that transpired across America last week. Your play mentions the 2012 shooting at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, and now we have the recent shooting in Squirrel Hill and the attempted church shooting in Kentucky. Do you see any parallels and how do these events resonate for you?
JB: The shooting in the play is used as a jumping off point, it’s a work of fiction. The shooting in 2012 in Oak Creek was really horrifying for me and my family. We didn’t have any personal connection to it, but my mom grew up in a town with a very similar Sikh community in Northern California. It was scary for me to think that my family could have been there if they had been moved to a different geographic location in America just decades ago.
It took me a long time for me to feel I needed to write this play. I had been thinking about it for five years. It was a hard awakening when I realized in 2017 that the instances of my Sikh friends [dealing with racism and violence] were not going away and were getting worse.
For me, writing this play was a call to action, a call to awareness. Often you feel in these communities that we can distance ourselves from them, but actually, as Americans, we are all dealing with it. It was heart-wrenching when the shooting happened this past weekend and the cast had to perform only a few hours after the news broke. It’s really hard that this play ends on the question of what has to change. Every day we are realizing we don’t know the answer.
W&H: You just won the Horton Foote Prize. What did that award mean for you and what’s it like being a female playwright in 2018, particularly, a woman of color?
JB: It was an amazing phone call to receive. I was walking home from a rehearsal for [“India Pale Ale”] this past summer. We were doing a workshop here [in New York City] and up at Vassar College. So it felt like a big affirmation that the risks we were taking were worthwhile. It also felt important because I won this award alongside Lauren Yee [who won for “Cambodian Rock Band”], another woman of color, and we were both winning our awards for plays that are about American people.
It feels like, in some ways, a turning point, at least for me, that the plays I’m working on are no longer like fringe plays that aren’t accessible to certain parts of the American public. These are plays that should be universally regarded, thought about, and acknowledged. The people who are American playwrights are no longer white men. It feels like an acknowledgment towards that change in tide.
W&H: How important are the issues of representation and diversity to you as a playwright?
JB: There has been a lot of awareness and advocacy on the part of female identifying, gender non-conforming playwrights of color. These are underrepresented voices; theaters who have the ability to program these new plays are being held to a new standard. I think it’s important and exciting to regard that.
These plays are bringing essentially an entirely new constellation of awareness to what playwriting is, what the forms are, what the content is, whose stories are being told, whose histories are being represented or being acknowledged. It feels like it could very easily fall away and in three or four years we could be in a new homogenous cycle. I hope that is not the case.
W&H: Your last big play “Men on Boats” has been produced all over the U.S. Did the success of that play help bring “India Pale Ale” to the NYC stage?
JB: I think that it had a small part. MTC [Manhattan Theatre Club] produced it, and I didn’t have a chance to meet them until some of their staff got to see a remount production of “Men on Boats,” a co-production of Clubbed Thumb and Playwrights Horizons. We met and talked about some ideas. They gave me a commission for an entirely different play, which I’m still working on the first draft of. When my agent sent them the first draft of “India Pale Ale,” they were really able to get on board and were very excited to bring Will Davis, my director back from “Men on Boats.” We work very well together and it felt like a continuation of a larger theatrical exploration.
“India Pale Ale”: Joan Marcus
W&H: Is the story at all biographical — how much of the story is from real life? Is your real family part of your inspiration?
JB: There are bits and pieces that are autobiographical. There are some characters in the play who are like loosely drawn on beloved family members. There are also elements of [protagonist] Boz’s journey of leaving her home that closely align with my own, and some are like my mom’s journey of leaving her town. There’s a grandmother character that feels closely drawn to my grandmother.
For a long time, I was afraid to put my family on stage, which contributed to my tentativeness about writing about them, but I got more comfortable with that fact when I was able to acknowledge all of the beauty and positive energy that this family carries. It’s a fictional play, but there are definitely pieces of my family throughout. It’s an honor and homage in some ways to them.
W&H: This play so skillfully weaves fantasy and reality in and out of each other, with the pirate plot line. Where did that particular idea come from?
JB: It was the last piece of the puzzle for me. I needed an operating system for this family to use in order to cope and give strength, some kind of shared family energy.
I’ve always been obsessed with pirates. I had no idea about my great-great-great-great-grandfather — his life and what he did — and I didn’t know how to find it, so I wrote about it. So I wrote from the spirit of aspirational allegory, and it became a really fun thing for these characters to be able to celebrate who they are on a metaphysical, fundamental lineage-based level because I don’t have access to do that.
W&H: How involved were you in casting? The play primarily has a cast of South Asian talent that really makes it all come together.
JB: I feel such an honor to be able to give these actors roles like this. All these characters are incredibly rich. They get to play a person in real time and a shadow pirate self.
There’s not enough work that blatantly gives this kind of platform to these actors, and I’m really proud to do that. My job as a writer is to be able to give gifts to my actors, so I treated this whole process as such.
W&H: What are you working on next?
JB: I’m working on a play about my parents. They met in botany school so it’s about two botanists that fall in love. I’m also writing a play about a strange plague that hit the Alsatian Ryelands in the 1500s with the Woodshed Collective and the Public Theater. There’s also a couple of other things that are too new for me to talk about.
