Unrehearsed Futures (S3) #11 The Burdens of Witness: writing (by) women in times of crisis
In the swirling vortex that is our chaosmos, what does it mean ‘to woman’? Whether negotiating intimate family dramas or the grand scale of a global apocalypse, female protagonists are usually figured as witnesses to (though rarely agents in) the making of society. At a recent Unrehearsed Futures (Season 3) conversation, we dove into the chaosmos of writing stories centred around female protagonists and the complicated positioning of women in scenarios of social upheaval and crisis, with US-based ethnographer, storyteller and educator Nikki Yeboah and screenwriter Sarah McCarron.
‘What do I want to see / hear?’
Whether negotiating intimate family dramas or the grand scale of a global apocalypse, female protagonists are usually figured as witnesses to (though rarely agents in) the making of society. Responding to how she arrives at the choices about which stories are important to tell and why those stories might be important to tell, Nikki shares an interesting anecdote. When she studied television writing during her undergrad years in Toronto, one of the questions she was always asked was, “Who is your audience?”
“I wanted to write stories about West African families. And they would always ask, ‘but who’s going to watch this, who’s your audience’, and they thought it was productive advice,” she recalls, “But that caused me to stop writing for many years, because I thought that there was no audience for my work.”
However, when she entered the theatre, she found it freeing to create in a space where she didn’t have to consider her audience. Nikki, who went on to create The (M)Others, a 2018 piece of documentary theatre chronicling oral histories of women who’ve lost their children to police violence, felt she could consider herself and the stories she wanted to hear instead.
“That’s where I begin: what do I want to hear? What do I want to talk about? The stories emerge from there,” Nikki explains. “I find that doing it that way, I have found an audience. The audience finds you. You don’t have to go looking for it always.”
The M(O)thers came to be that way. She found out that someone had been killed by the police on the college campus that she worked at, and Nikki felt that nobody was talking about it. This was closer to the time of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014-15. “[The M(O)thers] was supposed to be a community piece for us to reflect. But obviously, since this is happening in so many communities across America, that it grew beyond that scope. But originally it started out as disbelief that this community wasn’t talking about this. I decided to interview some people and make a play. I thought it’d run for two days in the Bay Area, and no one will have heard of it. And then it continued from there,” recalls Nikki and adds, “There’s something freeing about writing what I want to hear, what I feel is not talked about that needs to be out there. And then starting from there.”
For Sarah, a Los Angeles and Minneapolis-based writer who is currently adapting Untamed with Glennon Doyle for HBOMax and Bad Robot, her approach to picking projects has to do with what images can/will a particular story yield that we haven’t seen, or that we need to see or that are not allowed to be seen, or that are being hidden or kept invisible. “The nature of the medium is collaborative. The creative team has to collaborative enough to go in and create something that nobody yet knows what’s going to be created, if that makes sense,” she adds.
Reacting to conservatism
The two writers also discuss how they respond to conservatism in the US today as female writers. Sarah, who has written HBO Max shows such as Station Eleven, says that the obsession with who is one’s audience is reducing a little bit, though not enough, in television writing today. “That’s related to conservatism too,” she says, “because conservatism is in the content of the material. It is what the values of the characters are, what the values of the world that’s being built narratively are, and then what the values of the system creating the content are? And how do you navigate that system in a way that it plays by enough of the rules where you can actually get something made, but also flouts the rules enough that you can actually get something worthwhile made.”
Sarah believes there are more and more creators in television – and this has to do with the proliferation of streaming and the whole business model, she says – who don’t care about Nielsen ratings and want to create things they want to see.
“I’ve always thought if I had any kind of unifying idea behind the projects I do, it has to do with being subversive. That’s like the opposite of conservatism, sort of,” Sarah adds. She also connects to this by how one invokes narratives one has grown up in with some orientation, and then completely pull the rug out from that orientation. “Thereby questioning the narratives we’ve grown up in.”
Theatre vs television
When compared to television, both Nikki and Sarah feel that theatre affords them greater flexibility and space to experiment. While film and television operate on high budgets, as does theatre, Nikki feels theatre producers are quite aware of the financial risks. “Our expectations are lower for the kind of monetary return,” she says. “Which means that people really get to take chances. I do think that if you do want to make things that are weird and different, and break things open, theatre is where you go still. I think it’s the more innovative medium.”
Sarah agrees and adds that working in television is having a “weird, Sisyphean love” of how impossible television is. For every one of the shows Sarah has worked on, she has “watched dozens die because you are subservient to the corporate overlords giving you notes”.
She shares an anecdote from the time she worked on Station Eleven, a post-apocalyptic saga spanning multiple timelines, telling the stories of survivors of a devastating flu as they attempt to rebuild and reimagine the world anew while holding on to the best of what’s been lost. The series is based on an eponymous novel by Emily St. John Mandel. In the book, the character of Miranda Carroll is a white woman from Canada, the author of a graphic novel in the world of the show. When it came to turning Miranda as a black woman, which raised complications along the way, Sarah shares. “There are notes from networks and there’s blind spots. It’s not easy,” she describes, “Then you bear witness to the death of so many projects, or the even an ability to get them started because of the failure of imagination of people who are serving corporate interests is absolutely why theatre is much more of a space for safe and free experimentation.”
A woman’s body and Apocalyptica
The world we live in today feels a lot like living through an apocalypse, in a sense where things are constantly falling apart, and radically changing. If that’s the case, is there something really good or useful about a female protagonist? Another way to understand apocalyptica could be not necessarily as a spectacularly immediate moment, but one that unravels over time.
Nikki believes that crisis lands differently on women’s bodies. She recalls a show survivalist TV show she has been watching called Alone, where people, on purpose, are sent to a middle-of-nowhere destination, and they have to survive alone, with nothing but their wits about them. “They have to hunt and forage their own food, build their own shelter, and it’s about who survives the longest. People often lose their minds because you’re alone. Just you and the camera that you bring with you,” she describes.
Nikki, who watches the show often, wonders out loud, “I look at the female contestants. What happens when they menstruate? They have these fears around a bear sniffing the blood of the meat that they killed and the bear mauling them. And I’m thinking, but what happens when you’re menstruating? It’s going smell that. What if you get cramps?”
Understanding that crises land differently women’s bodies, Nikki believes women’s experiences of historical events are not talked about enough and experienced in ways that one can’t fathom, because it’s not considered. When she did The M(O)thers, a play on police violence, what struck a chord in among her audience is that she was now talking to those who gave birth to a child that was no longer here “because they’ve been taken by the system”. “The play was about them (the mothers),” says Nikki, “It wasn’t about their children so to speak; it was about a mother’s experience of that kind of loss. So, while a lot of police violence is most is committed against black men, it has an effect on the women in that community. And the woman’s experience of it opens a different window into their humanity, into their childhood, the men that we’ve lost. It opens the window to allow us to access a kind of empathy that, unfortunately, men are not afforded at times.”
Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao
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