Elizabeth Heffron is a playwright, teaching artist, and facilitator for Freehold’s Engaged Theatre Residency program. Last fall, Elizabeth was one of three international playwrights who wrote the play hidden/current, which premiered in Cape Town. We spoke to Elizabeth about the process of getting this play made, what it means, and how it might affect how we think about gender-based violence.

 

To get us started, would you mind talking a little bit about how you got involved with hidden/current?

Oh, boy. I hadn’t thought about the history of all this, but it was a couple of years ago. It was probably in the midst of the pandemic, when everything was shut down at the prisons—because I was part of that group that would go in with Engaged Theatre to the women’s prison. So it seemed like a time to try and fund a project that kind of spoke to our hearts, but wasn’t necessarily on the front burner before the pandemic hit. 

I think Robin [Freehold cofounder and Artistic Partner Robin Lynn Smith] kind of spearheaded this for sure. We got together with Fatima Dike, who is a South African playwright, and Robin had known her for years. So Fatima Dike is in Cape Town, and as we began to coalesce this around issues around gender based violence and the [societal] imbalance, we brought her over to Seattle, and started working in an Airbnb in West Seattle. And we had kind of an extended weekend, sort of a confab. It was a small group, and we were like: “What would we want to say about this, and how would we want to approach it?” 

And it was during that Airbnb [meeting] that [we decided] we wanted it to be global, especially with Fatima involved, and we wanted it to be almost universal in terms of what the issues were. So it’s kind of how we came up with using three different playwrights from three different cultures. And so we had one from the Middle East, one from South Africa, and then one from a more Western approach. 

And so the idea was to commission three short plays around the issues of gender based violence, without any demands on how that would be realized. Robin was also in touch with Naghmeh Samini, and so she contacted her as an Iranian playwright, for something done from that cultural perspective. And so that was kind of the assignment, to write these three plays, completely disparate, totally different characters, totally different situations, and then see how they could be coalesced into one performance piece. 

And so the next year it was our summer, but Cape Town’s winter. We went to Cape Town for a three week workshop, and we had the initial three plays, and we had a vague idea of working with an exoskeleton that began to center around everything that came from the meetings. And I don’t remember who came up with what, but [the group introduced] the idea of a group of dead young girls called rusalka, which come out of traditions where there’s been a violent death of a young woman. I think this is mostly Eastern European. They’re drowning or they’re in the water, and they come back to life. They are working out their rage, basically. And if some young man starts swimming across that water, they’re going to grab his limb and bring him down. 

So there’s a certain sense of trying to make—in a destructive way—but make the imbalance right. Sort of like some kind of karmic payback in a way. And so we began to coalesce around….creating this external vessel for which these three pieces could live. And it was also during that workshop that it was really clear that this triptych needed to be [part of one piece]. You weren’t going to see a South African play and then a US play and then a play set in Istanbul. They were going to be threaded.

So then it was also a matter of cutting. You’re moving from one piece to the other in places where the story can sustain it to the next time you see it. And that was quite a dramaturgical feat. And in the end, Robin mostly did that. 

And so by the time we got out of that workshop and came back to the States, we had kind of the basic elements that wound up in the performance. You know, a year and a year and a half later, we used a lot of the same actors—as many as we could. By the time we were heading towards Cape Town, the [presidential] administration had changed, so we had certain wonderful actors who could not come with us for either economic reasons, or they didn’t want to leave the country because they weren’t sure they were going to be able to get back in (even though it was absolutely valid for them to leave the country, it was just felt like too much of a risk). 

 

What were some of your takeaways from the performances in Cape Town?

The performances were wonderful. It was wonderful to talk to people who had been there. And it really struck people just the nature that these were just three moments, as if you just went into a closet and picked. You know, it was just kind of random incidents of gender based violence. One was a 14 year old being forced to marry a 70 year old—something monumental. Others were more private. [There was a] young woman in the play in Washington state, called “The Trailer Visit.” She was soon getting out of prison, and her mother had promised to sponsor her, which would allow her to come out, and she could live with her. And…you don’t get out until you have a sponsor, and it’s kind of hard to get. So her mother promised her this. But then when she and her new husband kind of come to visit her, they wind up telling her that, no, they aren’t gonna sponsor. And [this concerns] just the whole nature of generational elements of gender based violence, that it’s not all about men doing stuff to women.

The South African play was about bride price. And that is just a part of the tradition that is so powerful, and it’s not seen as in any way abusive. But [it concerns] the power of money and the power of who can pay for you to go to school or who decides what you get to do once you’re married. 

So it was really interesting. I feel like I learned so much about so many different ways of looking at this that allowed for the universality of it, because they’re all such different situations, but they all have things in common.

 

How did your story change from rehearsals to the performances that happened over a year later? 

in Washington state prisons, they do these things called trailer visits, where, if you’re getting close to getting out, you can have a weekend visit with your kids or with your husband or with your parent—your mom or your dad. So you have like a 24 hour period, and [the meeting takes place] in one of those portable, prefabricated small houses. It’s really tight. It feels small, beige, everything looks like a rental thing. It’s got just the basics in there: a table, chairs, a sofa, basic kitchen, that kind of thing. 

And so the feeling is that they’re in there and they can’t really leave. They cannot leave that place because you’re sitting in a fenced area inside the prison. It’s not somewhere else, it’s in the prison. So you can’t just go out and walk outside. So it felt really compressed and tight in a kind of a way that, for me, meant I was going to write the story in that kind of classic compressed sense of time. So, they get there, and it happens over time, and then the thing explodes, and boom, right? So it’s a very compressed kind of thing. It’s not episodic. So once we start, you know, it only takes place over one afternoon, whereas other pieces were much more episodic in nature. So going with my piece, once I came up with the initial [idea], it was so locked in to: “Tick, tick, tick, tick…” that there was not a lot of leeway for huge changes. So I made changes, but not too many.