Playwright Winter Miller, best known for her play “In Darfur,” is back this season with “No One Is Forgotten” at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. It’s the story of two women, a journalist and an aid worker, who are being held captive somewhere in the world. Directed by Miller and starring Sarah Nina Hayon and Renata Friedman, the production is set in a concrete cell.
Miller’s other plays include “Spare Rib,” “The Penetration Play,” “Seed,” and “The Arrival.” She has created theater with youth in war-torn areas of Northern Uganda and Palestine, as well as with marginalized youth in NYC. Miller is also a journalist and a founding member of the Obie-winning collective 13 Playwrights.
We spoke to Miller about creating and staging “No One Is Forgotten,” the current state of journalism, and being an inclusive force in theater.
Tickets for “No One Is Forgotten” are available on Miller’s website. The show runs through July 27.
This interview has been edited.
W&H: When putting together the team for this run, both on stage and off, I know that you made a conscious decision to work with nearly all women, people of color, and LGBTQIA folks. What actions have you been taking specifically for gender parity in the arts?
WM: My personal, political, and artistic values are very intertwined, and I put my money where my mouth is. I go see shows by all people in those categories. I mentor [female] writers. In my social media posts, I write about the importance of gender parity, race, and basically how important representation is by a particular group being able to tell their story.
W&H: How important is it for you to work with, cast, and hire women?
WM: Absolutely. I write parts for women because I want to see them on stage. I want them to have jobs. I also write parts for women who are middle-aged and up. There’s this incredible talent pool that gets shut out between mother and grandmother roles.
W&H: Do you feel that there are more opportunities for women today?
WM: I think that women and people of color are really working hard to bust down the door and the perception that women don’t attract box office and subscribers. The best plays I have seen in the last few years have been written by women of color. The more these extraordinary writers are out there, the more plays [by women] people will see.
If the gatekeepers would look around, they would see that there’s definitely not a pipeline problem. There are hundreds of writers out there and thousands of plays that are incredible. We’re here, we’ve been here, and there’s more of an effort because theaters are being called on it.
W&H: Your plays tend to be very topical, very physical, and very moving. Do you have certain collaborators who help you bring your work to the stage?
WM: I don’t because my work doesn’t get to the stage often enough to have such a coterie.
W&H: What experiences of your own inspired you to write plays such as “In Darfur” and “No One Is Forgotten”?
WM: When I was working in journalism, I was a news clerk and a researcher at The New York Times. My first job was on the foreign desk and I was the liaison between reporters in all of these places. I remember hearing one of our reporters, Jane Perlez, on the phone saying, “Okay, we’ll get you a bulletproof vest.” I was like, “Shit, what’s Jane going into?” I was so impressed and thought about how that was what people had to do to tell stories and get them out there.
I wrote “In Darfur” about three central characters — a journalist from the NYT, a Western aid woman who has gone to Darfur, and a Darfuri woman trying to flee for safety. I wrote about the pitfalls people make when trying to do their best without endangering others. I’ve always been interested in what journalists do and how they do it, but in particular, for this play, I was thinking about the really brutal execution of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl, the reporter who was executed in 2002 on video. As Westerners, we thought we had some kind of cultural immunity that we could go anywhere, whether we were tourists or journalists, and if we were captured, there would be a ransom — a prisoner exchange, weapons or money. Al-Qaeda changed that by saying we don’t want to value these lives and want to show force in dominance. In doing that, it made the jobs of all these people so much more dangerous.
I was thinking about people who take that risk and what the calculus is. Many of these people have loved ones to return to. I found myself following journalists being held captive and I wanted to know what they did to pass the time. To me, that just seemed like the most intriguing question of when you don’t know what your fate is, what do you do? If you’re trapped in a very small space with other people, what do you do? I first thought about it as a big cast play.
“No One Is Forgotten”: Paula Court
W&H: How different is “No One Is Forgotten” now from the script you first started with?
WM: I sat down to write a very commercial, mainstream play. I challenged myself to write a two-person play with a heterosexual couple, a white man and bi-racial women, cis-gender. It was going to be a rom-com. I thought if I keep it right up to the middle, I’d get some of my work seen. After writing plays that I thought were exciting and political and seeing them get passed over for stuff that was not political at all, I thought I do want to see what I make in the world get out there.
I sat down to write this mainstream rom-com, starting with two people playing hangman. I let that continue and soon realized this was not going to be a rom-com. It was going to be political. I decided to let the characters tell the story and in the space of a week, the play essentially wrote itself. I didn’t stand in the way of it. Yes, initially, it was a man and a woman. I took the play out to a workshop in California and was given two actors, a man and a woman. The man was such a pain in the ass to work with that I decided to rewrite the character to be two women so I didn’t have to deal with a man who doesn’t want to be directed by a woman. So, I did. In the stage directions of the play, it says this play may be performed in rotation with two women and two men and they alternate. One night, it’s two women, one night it’s two men, one night it’s a man and a woman, and to do that in repetition. I’d love to see it done that way.
I later had a second workshop in Salt Lake City. In that time, I realized the play wasn’t just about these two people in captivity. It’s about the intimacy of a long-term relationship. At the beginning of a new relationship, there’s starry-eyed talk, and down the line, it’s different where we need our own space and parameters. But because these two characters are in captivity, and because everything has been taken from them, their bodies are no longer theirs. They have no freedom whatsoever. The only space of autonomy is what goes on in their heads. One person has a greater need for access to the other person, and the other person is threatened by that. The relationship becomes a battle for control and independence, but it’s also full of tenderness and love. But it’s also that battle of what we want to keep for ourselves.
W&H: These women don’t know when they were captured, or how long they’ve been held. Was it a conscious decision to keep that information from the audience?
WM: It was. I wanted the audience to project their own idea of who these people are and why they’re there. At a later workshop in Kansas City, I asked every person in the audience what they thought the two characters were in there for. Each person had a totally different idea. Some people thought it was because they were queer and traveling abroad, or they were hikers in the wrong place at the wrong time, or they’re in the U.S. and had been sex trafficked or that they were journalists.
W&H: Your play really brings home the concept that being taken hostage can happen to anyone, particularly with the current administration’s attack on the media. Is that part of the reason you brought this play out now?
WM: I wanted the audience to see themselves reflected in these characters and also have the recognition that as a country we are only as free as our press is. Our press is in great danger. I wrote this before the election of Trump, but he’s a president who threatens to put journalists in jail and encourages people to punch and kill them, making it all the more dangerous. He’s a president who hasn’t had a press briefing in 120 days, which is unheard of. There’s less access to what’s happening in the White House. Newspapers and magazines have so much less money and have shrunk their staffs. There are fewer people to cover a greater area. The U.S. is the fifth most dangerous country for journalists in the world. We’re up there with Mexico and Yemen. That’s chilling.
I wanted the audience to be able to connect with these two people but also wake up and figure out how to better defend our press.
W&H: Can you talk about the development process and your choice of working with the Rattlestick Theater?
WM: It’s all me. I’m the only person who had it produced. The Rattlestick is a curated rental. I chose Rattlestick because of their physical space and they had always been a proscenium theater, but they just recently tore up that part of the stage. It was going to be mostly a blank canvas, and I knew this play had to be set in the square with the stage in the middle. When I saw that they had an opening in July, I jumped on it. There are many other black box [experimental] theaters in NYC, but it mattered to me that the environment was peeling and not put together — like the Rattlestick. I like the Rattlestick for other reasons, but it was the exact space I wanted.
As far as the process, I formed an LLC, Winter Miller’s Community Theater, in order to pull this off.
W&H: “In Darfur” got a standing room only performance at the Public’s 1800-seat Delacorte Theater in Central Park, a first for a play by a woman. That story would resonate again now with what’s going on in the world. Have you thought about bringing it back to the stage?
WM: Yes, of course. Darfur is once again in the news as Sudan crumbles and the story is no less relevant. The last performance of the show was in Texas, but I would love for the Public Theater to bring it back and do a full run of it, or any theater. I am always excited when people do that play. It’s a really thoughtful play that gets at who we are as people, where does ego intervene, where best intentions have disastrous consequences, and how we are as global citizens.
If anyone reading this wants to do a play about a journalist, an aid worker, and a Darfurian refugee, I have one.
W&H: What are you working on next?
WM: I have a play, with all women, about the history of abortion that is dramatic and also hilarious. As soon as I can get the energy back, I’ll figure out how to put it into the world. I’d like to do staged readings in towns across the U.S. and have them be simultaneously fundraisers for abortion clinics.
I also have a play I’ve been working on that’s a response to “The Crucible,” about how the people marginalized by Arthur Miller’s version had been able to tell their story, what that would have been like. Miller’s version is misogynist and racist. You could say that life was like that at the time he was writing it, but it’s the first or second most-produced play in high schools across the country annually. All the people seeing this version are getting an idea of what the witch trials were, which blames girls and women. I think that the play was directly tied to rape culture and all the blame that’s placed on women. People say the Salem girls lied. I think that the real Salem story was very different from what was told.
