We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kaela Mei-Shing Garvin a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Kaela Mei-Shing, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What do you think it takes to be successful?
Success for me is an ever-moving benchmark. I’ve been trying to shift my thinking to define success to look like my own satisfaction rather than institutional validation. Am I interested in what I’m writing? Is it challenging my abilities and existing forms? Does it make me laugh? Is my work engaging my communities? When I’m able to talk to my communities about my work and hear that it meaningfully connects with them, that feels like success to me. No matter the benchmark, I think one needs a strong work ethic above all. Writing is rewriting, and creating a great play is an elusive and subjective goal.
Kaela Mei-Shing, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I’m an emerging playwright creating work that uplifts abolition, carbohydrates, existentialism, and camp!!!; work that interrogates prevailing power structures through humor, pop culture, and history; work that dreams up liberation at the intersections of size, queerness, neurodivergence, gender fluidity, and mixed race / Asian America. I create plays that challenge the status quo, plays that are hopefully both incisive and stupid. I write about complicity in oppression and agency for the oppressed. I want to laugh toward a more liberated future. I write because I am compelled to; because I have questions and critiques about systems I’m complicit in; because it is how I manufacture hope through alternate realities. I started out inventing and staging plays during my family’s holiday dinners, where attendance was compulsory. I fell in love with doing youth theater in the Bay Area, and I went to college to study acting. My undergraduate program asked us to study all areas of theater, including directing, writing, design, and devising, and I realized that I wanted to create my own work, in part because I was disappointed by roles available to people like me in the canon.
After undergrad, I hit the pavement running in New York, working in downtown theaters assisting, interning, costume designing, and in wardrobe. I focused on writing my own plays during that time and self-produced my work in New York and elsewhere. As I entered my mid-late twenties, I wanted to hone my craft and learn how to teach, so I went to graduate school in the midwest to earn my MFA in playwriting. Since then, I’ve taught playwriting and other theater subjects at the undergraduate level, and I’ve also worked in nonprofit theaters as an administrator and in literary departments.
I’m most proud of my creative work when it subverts expectations, making people laugh, connect, and think in new ways. I’m most proud of my educational work when my students create bold work and continue on their paths as theater artists.
Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?
I recommend looking into New Play Exchange, which allows playwrights to share their work with peers and theater companies. I’m a big supporter of local libraries, which are incredible places to do research or get some writing done, and they often have incredible online databases once you sign up for a library card. A great thing I’ve learned through these resources is that there’s a wealth of artistry, theory, and history out there, so if you’re trying out something new in your writing you can research any precedents. Online databases were by and large how I found additional Asian American and queer playwrights that have come before me, got acquainted with their work, and educated myself on theatrical predecessors that I didn’t get to meet in my formal education.
Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?
When I’m teaching playwriting, I almost always include these essays: Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Elements of Style,” Elinor Fuchs’ “Visit to a Small Planet,” and Sarah Ruhl’s essay on structure from her book 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write… “Elements of Style” rocked my world when I first read it. Her perspective on history, laughter, and what to wear to an opening are formative. “Visit to a Small Planet” haunts me in the best way on the daily. I think about it when interacting with a lot of different art forms, but it’s particularly useful for analyzing plays on a gut level before script analysis. I’ve also reverse-engineered this essay to help me in the creation of work by envisioning the world of the play as a planet unto itself with its own ecosystem and rules. Ruhl’s essay expands on Paula Vogel’s ideas about different play structures. I find this invaluable as a playwright looking to subvert and complicate existing forms. It’s a great list of structures that are alternative to traditional Aristotelian models — if you’re looking for a way to build a play that’s not directly built on the foundations of interpersonal conflict, it’s a great resource.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.kaelameishinggarvin.com
- Instagram: @kaemeishing
Image Credits
All photographs by Leilani Carr / LPC Photography