Elizabeth Heffron is an award-winning playwright and teaching artist. This past July, Elizabeth joined a small group of women who traveled to South Africa as part of Engaged Theatre’s investigation into gender-based violence around the globe. We sat down with Elizabeth to talk about practicing theatre outside the United States and how cultural context informs the way we experience art. We also briefly discussed penguins.
Hi Elizabeth. Can you talk a little bit about how you got involved working in the Gender Based Violence Project?
Well, Robin contacted me. Robin and I have gone into the prisons, you know, for the last probably 20 years. We’ve gone into the women’s prison, down at WCCW [Washington Corrections Center for Women], and did a theater project where we would be there for four months, and would run playwriting exercises, and the women would generate material. We’d find all these ways for them to generate poems and songs and scenes, about their lives, or imaginary things, whatever they wanted. And then at the end of the four months, I would kind of quilt their writing into a script, a performance piece, and they would perform it for the other women inside, and also for guests and visitors.
And so, because of the pandemic, we couldn’t go in anymore. And so we haven’t been able to be in there since 2021 and I think…you’ll have to ask Robin, but my impression was we needed to do something with that time and with those skills. And so she asked me if I wanted to be a part of this project, which was more of a global project on gender based violence. And I said, “Yes, that sounds awesome.”
And so in the summer, I think it was maybe June of 2023, we had a group of women–including Fatima Dike, a playwright from South Africa–convene in Seattle. And we were in a little Airbnb in West Seattle and just talked about what we would want this project to be–that would be dealing with gender based violence and just the global nature of it, the fact that violence against women is everywhere, and it’s been around for forever.
We wanted it to be a play, a performance piece, but also have a world around it that lived sort of on a planet outside of it, through the cyber world. So we’ll have a place where, if we’re in the community and we’re performing the piece, there could be story times or a web-based place where people could put on their own stories, or tell their own tales, or have their own reactions.
The more we talked about it and the more we realized the global scale of it [gender-based violence], we really felt like we wanted to have a third playwright, so that we would have three different points on the globe. Three stories from three different parts of the world that all deal with this issue, but from these various cultures. And so that’s when we started looking for a playwright, possibly from the Middle East, and that’s how Robin was connected with Naghmeh [Samini]. I guess she worked with a designer who also works with Naghmeh. And so Naghmeh came on board, and she said “Yes, yes, yes.”
And so we actually did go to South Africa for two and a half weeks in July, to work with actors down there in a township called Langa–at the Guga S’Thebe Cultural Centre, that Fatima Dike helped form. And with Fatima, Naghmeh and I came, and we had Jen Moore for sound, and two actors, Emily Pike and Azadeh Zanjani. So I think there were about seven of us that went down to Cape Town to workshop what we wrote.
Each of the three playwrights wrote about a 30 minute piece that could stand alone. But also what we did within the project was weave them together, so that you’re kind of moving from story to story–you can keep track of it, but they are all kind of part of one larger narrative, one global narrative. And then we were experimenting with what is that external performance world that allows these pieces to be braided together.
So we had two readings down there–one of the full play, with all the pieces from all the plays connected together, and it ran almost a little over two hours. So it was long, but it was awesome to hear the whole thing, and then two days later, we read most of the plays with some narrative clipped, which ran about an hour and 45 minutes, something like that. And so we had two different audiences, and we just got feedback.
And so now we’re sort of regrouping. We’re looking at what we have, how to focus the plays more and more so we’re paring them down to what really needs to be dramatized.
Our goal is to have performances in the fall or winter of 2025 ultimately, and take it into the prisons, if we can. I think we’ll be doing a reading this November of a couple of plays at the women’s prison. So that’s sort of the evolution of it.
Can you talk a little bit more about the day-to-day experience of being in Cape Town and workshopping your plays?
We stayed in Cape Town, which is on the coast. It’s way down on the tip of Africa, so almost two oceans are sort of meeting at the base. There are penguins. You know, it’s amazing. Some folks got to see the penguins. I didn’t get to see the penguins.
We stayed in an area near the University of Cape Town. In South Africa, or at least in Cape Town, they don’t have heat in their houses, because I guess in the summer it’s nice and warm and no worries. And so the winter gets colder, but everybody just keeps putting on layers. So it was cold.
So we would go in and we would work, you know, eight to 10 hours there at Guga S’Thebe. They had a theater rehearsal space, you know. And that got really cold sometimes, because there’s no heat, right? It was a gorgeous space, but cold.
I’d never traveled for theater work outside the country. And there are universal things to theater that were a part of our convening down there, like warm ups, and first readings and the rehearsal structure was also there. But there’s also a form of–and I’m not sure if this is a South African or Xhosa tradition–but you don’t really start working until everybody has talked to everybody, which a lot of theater exercises do as you go along, but this was much more intentional. We would also eat our meals together, which, you know, in the States is like ”We got 15, take 15.” And in Cape Town it was more like, “This is it. This is what we’ll be doing. We’ll be meeting together and eating together.”
We did cross cultural casting. In my play, all three characters were written as Americans, you know? There was a young woman, her mother, and her new stepfather. Azadeh, who is Canadian Iranian, played the mother. And then Emily Pike played the daughter. And then Chris, from the Guga S’Thebe group, played the stepfather.
We were doing it cross-culturally out of necessity, due to the economics of not being able to bring over a full cast for each play. But once we were there and we had some of these cross-cultural things happening, it was an interesting thing to hear. As long as the audience can follow three different stories from three different cultures, it’s an awesome thing to add to the mix.
Were there unexpected challenges in telling three stories that have similar themes but presumably very different cultural contexts.
Well, take Fatima’s play. It’s a Black family, part of the Xhosa tribe, where to this day the family elders are so powerful. I think about my life in America, and people were cut off from the roots of all their old heritage, just by this ocean. There’s an automatic chop off of that. And so you have to recreate some of that here, but it’s weaker than if you were from the original tree. I mean, that’s my interpretation of how it feels. These cultures and these traditions [in South Africa] have been going on for thousands of years.
In Fatima’s play, the young woman in the play, Chumisa [who is getting married], wants to study. She wants to go on to college and she wants to become a lawyer. And so if she gets married, she’s going to want to keep doing that. And her father-in-law-to-be talked to his elders, and they disagreed. They said, “No, we don’t want her doing this.” You know, it’s not even between her and her husband-to-be, or her father-in-law-to-be. It’s a group of elders that kind of run that particular clan. And so her father-in-law makes a choice to go against what the elders say, which will cut them out of that whole part of the family for forever. When you’re translating this to a global audience, that’s one of those things that sounds like an administrative detail, but it would seriously affect this family for time immemorial. The South African audience totally got it, right? It’s like, “Oh my God, that’s huge.”
Thanks so much for your time Elizabeth.
Thank you.
