We were lucky to catch up with Cris Eli Blak recently and have shared our conversation below.

Cris Eli, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

Personally, I learned by doing. I guess you could call it being “self-taught.” I learned by sitting down and writing, and I learned by sitting down and writing really bad stuff. My earliest plays were terrible and got rejected from every place I sent them to, without fail. But that’s how it has to go. You have to write the bad stuff, you have to find your voice and your style, you have to grow – – and once I did those things, the work started to get better. But here’s the thing, I am painfully aware of the fact that I’m still learning. I’m forever a student. And I’m forever striving to get better at what I do. Every writer knows this. You can’t stop at the first draft. It’s a gig that involves you learning for the rest of your life.

I also learned by consuming content. If you want to be a writer, read. If you want to be a writer, watch movies and TV shows that are well-written. It’s the best kind of education there is. I wanted to make films growing up, so I already had a habit of wasting whole days away in front of a screen. If you do it enough, you’ll start to pick up on structure and dramatic beats. You’ll know how a story works, even without trying. And you’ll know the kinds of stories you want to tell and the ones that speak to you.

I don’t think I could have done anything to speed up my learning process. I think everything happened faster than I could have imagined anyway, and I’m grateful for the process. I know that for many reasons I’m not supposed to be where I am today, so I would never say that the process needed to be faster, and if I did it would only be me trying to feed into my impatience. But that’s why, in my case at least, passion is most important. It is what’s most essential, because in the learning process and beyond, you are going to face more rejection than acceptance. A lot of times you’re gonna feel like maybe you don’t know what you’re doing, and you may feel like quitting. But passion – – that’s the thing that brings you back into it. It’s what keeps you growing after you write those early bad things or after the seventh rejection of the week. It’s getting knocked down, being disappointed, and still getting up to fight another day.

I think that I knew that no one was going to do me any favors. No one was gonna knock on my door and give me my shot. I had to create the life I wanted to have out of scraps, because I was starting from zero. But I knew it was what I was supposed to be doing. I felt it. I went in with this hunger, drive and determination to prove myself right and show that I could do this thing. I kind of found my lane and ran with it. And of course there were, and are, obstacles. I’ve never taken a playwriting class in my life. I don’t have any “training.” I don’t have a theatre degree from a big fancy institution. I don’t come from a family “in the business.” I came in with zero contacts. But you can either let obstacles stop you or drive you. I wanted to show that the Black kid from Houston, Texas with nothing but a back-pocket full of dreams could make something of himself. And that’s what I fight towards everyday of my life. I don’t think this stopped me from learning, though. Nothing can stop you from learning. There’s always a way to get where you want to be. I’m living proof of that.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am a playwright who specializes in telling the stories of the people who don’t usually have their stories told. I think that’s really why I started doing this. I wasn’t a theatre kid and I think a lot of it came from me not feeling like I had a place in theatre. None of the shows my friends were in had anything to do with real life. They had nothing to do with the struggles I was seeing and experiencing on a daily basis, so they felt so out of reach and out of touch. I’ve always been less interested in spectacle and more interested in humanity, really zooming in on moments in people’s everyday lives, watching folks who are searching for answers, who are conflicted, who are going through hardship, who are falling in and out of love, who are looking for redemption – – this is what interests me, because it’s what’s true. So often we place people on the margins and ignore them, acting as if they don’t exist. Or even worse, we acknowledge them but in a judgmental way. Why can’t the drug addict or the gang member or the ex-con or the homeless woman be the focus of an entire show? I think they can and I think they should, because I think that if we sit and watch and let them tell their stories, we’ll begin to see that they aren’t that much different than us, that we feel the same things, that we want the same things. I don’t want an audience to leave the theatre talking about my show, I want them to leave questioning themselves and the world they’re stepping out into.

This is what I’m most proud of as well. There’s no feeling like having someone feel seen because of something you created. The best experiences are when people come to me and say, “I grew up in a family full of substance abuse and this made me see those family members in a new light,” or, “My daughter came out to me and I didn’t know what to say or do. I wish I had seen this first and I could have handled it better.” Art is great for entertainment, sure, but it can do so much more. It can be so much more. These stories inspire me because they’re the stories I’ve lived and the ones I grew up around. Theatre has to be for the many, not just the few. I use my work to hold a mirror up to society, showing the good, the bad, and the ugly. I don’t know how much this sets me apart, but I think that I have a style and a voice and a way of tackling these stories that’s unique to me, and I think a lot of that is because it’s coming from the heart and it’s coming from a place of truth and rawness and realness and not censoring that truth and not caring if everyone likes it or not, or gets it or not. What I hope I do in my work is allow the underrepresented to take ownership of their narratives and be the ones under the spotlight, not left in the dark.

: Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Absolutely. I want to bring more people into the theatre who didn’t feel like it was for them beforehand. We have a lot of important and necessary conversations about diversity and inclusion but rarely in these conversations do we bring up the simple truth that simply having more Black and Brown bodies on stage is not enough. It’s a good start, but it’s not enough. What is the point of having Black and Brown bodies on stage when there are no Black and Brown bodies in the audience? How can you expect Black and Brown bodies in the audience when you are only marketing towards white audiences and communities? How can you expect Black and Brown bodies to have an interest in buying tickets when the ticket prices are through the roof and the only thing you’re offering is the same Shakespeare plays every season or revivals of musicals that have been around since there was still segregation?

Moreover, I have something to prove, and my goal is always to show that you should never underestimate the underdog. You should never judge a book by its cover, so to speak, you know? When I walk outside I know that people don’t see me as a writer, they see me as a man of color, and to some people that is either a dangerous sight or a laughable one. I’m the product of the public school system, where arts programs are the least funded and athletics are put at the forefront. But I want to show that it doesn’t matter where you come from and it doesn’t matter where you start out. You can still make it and accomplish things and achieve and succeed just the same as anyone else who has had the advantages you haven’t. A lot of people use their struggles as setbacks, I use them as rocket fuel to show that such things shouldn’t define the rest of your life. As corny as it sounds, if I can do it, some kid sitting in a classroom in a school forgotten by its own district will see that they can do it too, that the closed doors and gates can come down and that they can wake up and do what they love and have a fair chance at going someplace with it. That’s the goal. Because guess what? We’re not gonna be here forever, so while it’s important to do good work while we’re here, it’s equally important to make sure that we are influencing those who come after us. And that’s why it’s important to me to do good work, because it’s not just about me. I’m on a mission and I’m not slowing down until I reach my destination.

A big goal with my work is to show that there is no such thing as a monolith with the lives and the issues I choose to examine: race, religion, sexuality, addiction, ambition, mental health. There is no one face to these stories, there is no one way to tell it, there are so many interesting layers. And, of course, I want to make my family and my community proud. I’m also friends with some of the most talented people in the world, so I would love to be able to have my work be a way in which they are exposed to the public and are able to do the big things that I feel they are deserving of. Like I said, it’s not all about you as an artist, it’s about who you bring along with you and who you hopefully inspire or influence along the way.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The most rewarding aspect of being an artist is just that! Being able to wake up everyday and create a piece of art that you feel is meaningful is a crazy privilege. I am so in love with the process of taking something from my mind to the page to the rehearsal room to the stage. I mean, that’s magic, right? Think about it. It all starts with these characters in your head, begging for you to tell their story next, then you put it down and then it comes to life. That’s just wild to me. People who know me are probably annoyed by hearing this at this point, but I always say making art is like architecture. All I do is lay the blueprint, the basic design of the thing, then it goes from an independent project to a team sport, as people with much more talent and brains than me come in and take that blueprint and build the three dimensional home an audience will live in. That process and that collaboration never gets old.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @criseliblak

Image Credits
Lime Arts Productions Ying Qi Downtown Urban Arts Festival Firecracker Productions Willow James Paterson Performing Arts Development Council