A Conversation with Zach Barr

[Quinlyn Can Paint is] a monologue play. We have these three sisters, Quinlyn, Olive, and Gabby. And they talk a lot about themselves and about each other, but they never actually interact. Can you talk a little bit about the challenge of crafting a story without any of the characters physically interacting? 

It's interesting because the idea that became Quinlyn Can Paint, I actually started when I was in college. That was much more traditional, it still had the three characters, their parents were in it too. It was a five-hander. I had the basic idea of this talent versus inheritability and talented versus not and how much that is skill versus whatever. I had some of the themes in there, but it just wasn't working. It felt like it was hitting a wall. I was like, whatever, you put it aside. Then nine years later, I come back to this idea. So much of this play is about self-doubt and it's about them challenging themselves. When it's a character drama or they're talking directly to each other, then they're reacting not just to what they're saying, they're reacting to what other people are saying, which is normally the thing that you want in theatre! You want other people to be bouncing off each other! I realized that so much of the drama of this piece is about how they see themselves. I think that is heightened when you put them in a situation where we're really watching three solo performances that are happening interwoven that are on the same topic. I wouldn't describe it that way because that's confusing. I would describe it as a play in monologues while they interweave and there's pieces that show up in all of them, because the story is consistent across the three.

Really the reason that they don't speak to each other and the challenge of that is that it's really three different character dramas. Three different monologue plays in which each of them has a moment in the play in which they realize, like, “Oh I've now become aware of the way that I think about myself.” They either double down, or they challenge themselves on that. The hardest thing is the same challenge that comes with writing any good monologue, just a single minute monologue, which is that as characters are telling a story, they have to grow and evolve as the piece goes on. The very first monologue in the play is Quinlyn talking about this trip that she took with her dad to an art museum when she was 11 or 12, and even just within that piece you can see where she starts at the beginning, in her recollection, to where she ends at the end of it. You can see her starting to come to this moment of, “Oh, maybe this story isn't as upbeat or it isn't as blasé of a thing as I'm making it out to be.” That happens throughout the whole piece. The hardest thing about it is that you really have to write three solo plays. 

Throughout the play, you have this tension between Quinlyn and Olive about their painting careers. You see the admiration between both of them, but the tension still breaks through, especially on Quinlyn’s end. Can you talk a little bit about finding the balance between rivalry and sisterhood with these characters? 

I have 3 younger siblings, two of whom also work in the arts, luckily, we work in different categories. We're not directly competing like any of these people are, but it's that tension of, I'm so proud of you, but also, I'm so frustrated with you. Being able to hold the two of them completely simultaneously is what a sibling relationship is, especially when you're both in an artistic field. My younger brother, Noah, is a musician and he plays, like, 16 instruments and he's a drum major at his college right now. And on one hand, I'm like, you're so freaking talented. He's so good at all this stuff with music. And there's part of me, as a sibling, that's like, God, he's so much younger [than me] and he has things so much more together than I did at his age. It's not annoyance toward him, I can recognize that I am very proud of him because he's amazingly talented. But the frustration I feel isn't towards him, it's towards me. It's me being like, “Oh, I wish I was there. I wish I was that,” but in a sibling relationship it so often gets thrown at the other person because you've grown up with them. I think that this is not a universal statement, but at least in my understanding of it or in my experience, the relationships you have with siblings are like parents. It's the only one that you can't escape from.

There's a certain amount of intimacy and vulnerability that comes with that because you've known them for long enough that you knew each other before [your own] subconsciousness. You have to navigate [sort of], “But how does it look to the other person? How do I feel about them? About myself?” I think that what I hope comes through is that holding the tension between the two of those things is an ongoing process. I don't think Quinlyn or Gabby or Olive are ever going to get to a point where they're like, “I've thought through everything, I've gotten the measured response. And I now have decided that I do or do not like them.” There's always going to be this tension. There's a little bit of pride and there's a little bit of frustration. I can't say that that's true for every sibling relationship. There are people that have falling outs, but I think that for these three specifically, the real thing that activates this play is that you never feel that the three are ever going to completely break off from each other. There's always going to be something tethering them together. I'll also say, because I think it's relevant to the question, when I wrote this, I told my younger siblings that I was writing a play about siblings in art, and I had to give them the warning ahead of time. I said none of the characters are you. All of the characters are me. All three of them are me. This is an autobiography where I split myself in three. 

I have an older sister, and I saw the relationship between her and I really kind of echoed in this play. I was reading about Gabby and about her career and her husband and her son, I was like, “That reminds me of my older sister a little bit, and the relationship that I have with her.” I think that there is always something very special about sibling relationships because, like you said, they are with you forever.

Even in a situation where, God forbid, you do have some sort of actual falling out and you don't talk to them for a while, like, that is still a relationship. You can't just cut them off completely. Like even if you're not talking to them, you are choosing to not talk to them like that. They're never outside of your purview completely. I've always liked stories that centered on sibling relationships being the predominant emotional connection between people. I think it's more interesting over romantic partnerships because you don't choose them. So, you're forced to deal with them. 

Speaking of sibling relationships, you have Quinlyn and Olive, who, throughout the play, are both really focused on their career specifically and the legacy that they leave behind. And then you have Gabby, the middle child, who is focused more on her family and on her career as well, but less about the legacy she leaves. There's a moment with Gabby where she talks about how her song, Lemon Wedge, had a moment in pop culture when it was covered by a pop star, and it could have led to something bigger, but she chose to remain anonymous and focus on education and her family. She has that monologue where she talks about how she played it for her class, and the her son, who asks her what it is. And she says, “Mommy’s song. It's Mommy’s song.” She could have said, “Yeah, it's a song that I wrote that had a big moment in pop culture and millions of people loved it and listened to it,” but she didn't. Could you talk a little bit about what that song represents within the context of these three sisters and their individual goals? 

Yeah! Man, I love [that part of the show]. The first reading we did of this, Red Theater did a reading of this back in January. And when we got to the mommy's song line, it was the first time I heard somebody crying. And I was like, I'm glad that it landed! It's such a good moment. One of the threads that runs through this that I think is more subtle, but I hope comes through, is the tie between Olive and Quinlyn. Not just that they're both working as painters, but also they have this driving ambition that pushes them on where they're like, “I have to do the next thing, I have to keep getting bigger. I have to leave this legacy. I have to do all of it. I have to keep going.” There's no end goal in sight aside from painting, immortality. And I think what Lemon Wedge represents is that there is also merit in the idea of doing art for art's sake and doing it and just being like, yeah, it has whatever impact it has. And I'm kind of satisfied with that. I think that if either Quinlyn or Olive had had a song go viral like that, they absolutely would have tried to capitalize on it, not even that they necessarily wanted to be musicians. I think that even if they had musical talent as a child and they wrote this song and then nine years later it gets a cover, I think they would immediately be like, oh, there's the outlet, and they pivot back to music. Then as Gabby said, she was all in for music and she's still involved in it, but she's moved on to something else.

What the song and that subplot represents, for me, is this idea of being satisfied with having an impact that is measurable and positive but doesn't need to be ongoing. I mean the whole final monologue, or near the end of the piece, she has the bit about like, “sometime in the future someone will play that song for the last time. And I have to be OK with that.” And I think the thing that's great about Gabby is that she is! And that runs through her whole character. She doesn't have this very American idea of always wanting more, and this endless, boundless ambition. I wouldn't say that Gabby isn't ambitious, but she is more able to recognize the success that she has and the happiness that she has at this point without constantly thinking of the next thing. Part of that is the fact that the things that make her happy are so much closer to hand. It's something like her husband and her son and her work, which is so much more tactile, actually going into a room and working with kids. 

Olive has a monologue where she talks about how she had a showing, and she was asked for an artist statement. What would you say your artist statement is? 

I knew that was going to be the question. There's a section on [New Play Exchange] where it asks you to put an artist statement out and currently my artist statement on NPX is one sentence and it says, “No more plays that could have been thinkpieces.” Which is mostly me just being like, I think there's way too many plays that are basically people talking. People sitting around a table where every person is not a character. They're just a perspective on a particular issue. And they're just arguing with each other. They're not bad plays, but they're not interesting to me. If I have it, it's that. But in reality, if I have an artist statement, if I have a clearly defined one…I think that the reason I work in theater rather than any other artistic medium is because it's dynamic. Part of the purpose of a play like Quinlyn Can Paint is the fact that the audience will interpret it differently based on the subtleties of each performer. There was a fellow artist that attended the January reading, and they said, “This play is really interesting and good. But I think it might be a documentary or a mockumentary. It might not be a play. It might be best if you were to film it.” And I was like, “No, no, no. It can't be that because it has to be a different performance every night.” It has to be that every different audience has a different opportunity to see different subtleties in who you believe, and what intonation is given to every line. And with New Oleanna, which is the other play that I have is that it's in a very similar place. So much of it is about how much the audience trusts the characters and how much they believe what they're actually saying versus how much of it is the impression they're trying to convey to people.

That, to me, is why I do theater, rather than any of the static art forms like film or TV or painting. Paintings are a static art form. The line that I've used before is that as a playwright, my job is not to write a play, it's to write a script and the job of the theater company is to take the script and basically use it as a blueprint to build a play out of it. My goal is that I want to write a script that can become a lot of different plays. And I think that that's kind of where Quinlyn Can Paint comes from. Something that is really important about it is that there will be productions of the show where you really side with Quinlyn, and you feel like she's been unfairly ostracized and maybe she's not dealing with it in the right way. And then there's gonna be versions where you're very on board with Olive or ones where you feel like Gabby kind of has it nailed because she's not ambitious or you're angry at her because she's not ambitious. I hope that all of those interpretations can come out of different versions of the play, and that's true of everything that I write, because that's why I work in theater. If I wanted to write something where I wanted a real concrete read of it or where I wanted the audience to take away a specific interpretation, I would write a movie, or I'd write a book. But I write plays because I want them to be performed more than once. And I want different pieces to come out of it. I don't have a way to make that punchy, but that is the closest thing I probably have to an artistic statement is that I work in a dynamic medium, so the art has to be dynamic.  

The goal in the plays that I write is that I want the audience to be questioning when they are in either mode, because there's moments in Quinlyn Can Paint that are really genuine, where the characters are speaking what they truly feel and real insecurities. And there's moments where they’re putting on either confidence or projecting a sort of insecurity to cover for that they don't have it. I have my interpretation of which moments are which, but I really think that the strength of the play is that a director and actor and audience can disagree and can read different things. I wouldn't say I want people to walk out of the play arguing about it, because that feels dickish, but I do think I want people to leave discussing it and disagreeing on it. 

Oftentimes in art and in literature womanhood is almost synonymous with suffering and with pain. You touch on that a little bit in this play as well with the language that Gabby uses to talk about Olive’s transition. In a play where womanhood is a very constant, repeated theme, can you touch a little bit on your choice of the language that you used there? 

Everything I write is also about gender too, with the question of “what does it even mean,” “what is it,” you know, “how much is it a part of your identity.” But it's also still in flux and it's flexible and fluid. I think what a lot of that monologue is and similar pieces like it, how it ties throughout the play, it's sort of me coming to grips with my own gender identity and how I've chosen to express it. Because in all honesty, the person that Quinlyn is probably talking about there is me and other people similarly. I didn’t know I was nonbinary until I was 25. So I was raised the whole time, expecting from both myself and the world that I was male. And so to transition during, “the fun part,” where you get to deal with things like, oh, I have to deal with what am I going to wear and how do I want to look as opposed to, oh God my body is exploding and I hate myself. There's a part of it to me that's like, I'm not going to give TERFs any credit, obviously, but I do think that at the heart of their argument is this interesting idea that to be a woman, is to suffer. There's so many plays nowadays that are about how being a teenage girl is awful and terrible for what it does to your mental health. There is a certain part of me that's like, I never had to deal with that. [My sister] had to go through that, and she's talked very openly about how much of it was struggling, especially growing up where the only other women that she really had were my mom and her aunts, who we’re close with. But I think that from Quinlyn's perspective across the whole play, there's obviously a lingering thread. I don't think that this is a secret. There's a lingering thread throughout Quinlyn’s treatment of Olive where she is supportive of Olive and her transition, but it is, to a certain degree, on sufferance. There's a part of her that's like, well, this is what I need to say. You know, I recognize that she is a woman. And the way that she talks about it, and she's not gonna go so far as to be like she isn't, but there is that lingering tension. At the very end she has a big moment where she is like, “She's a woman now, but I became one. I went through the process.” And maybe it's suffering. Maybe it's joy because there is joy that comes out of that as well. Obviously, I can't speak from experience, but it's got to be a thing. But it is a process, and I think that what Quinlyn is expressing in that monologue is this idea which has its roots in truth, but can be twisted into something that's really insidious. That people who are trans or nonbinary (especially who go M to F, trans or nonbinary) don't go through the same kind of suffering, because they don't have the physical transition that could be traced. That someday, they just decide, you know, it's all internal struggle. That one day they put on a dress and they're great. Obviously, that's not how it is. But to a lot of outside observers who haven't gone through that, that is a similar thing.

And Gabby has a companion line where she says, “I was really annoyed with Olive when she came out because I feel like she didn't trust us enough to tell us and we didn't see what she was going through.” “Seeing what she's going through” is the keyword there because with Quinlyn and with Gabby, seeing what they're going through with the transition from girlhood to womanhood is inevitable, because they're going through puberty with it. And there's this idea of Olive’s transition happening when she's at college and also happening so quickly, at least in the physical side of. It can feel like it happens overnight or that was a snap decision or didn't happen due to years of struggle. Quinlyn also has that insidious line later where she says something like, “Olive was in a frat. And that's supposed to be, you know, where you realize.” There's such doubt in that. In brief, I think that what Quinlyn is expressing there is something that is real, but I think can often be levied as a strike against trans and nonbinary people, which is that there is a lived experience that cisgender women have, or people that were assigned female at birth of going through a physical transition that people who are not assigned female at birth can't understand. And that is both true and also should not invalidate the experiences of trans women and the internal struggles they go through. I think that what Quinlyn is doing there is basically saying the first part to imply that the second one is invalid, but she would never say it because she's smart about what she says. And again, it's all about face. It's about how she expresses herself. Quinlyn has learned by the time the play starts that she can't be openly transphobic to all this. And again, I don't think she necessarily is, even internally. It is important to me that, when Quinlyn says that monologue where she says, “Olive is a woman. And I have to accept that.” I think that she is genuine in that. I think that that is a moment where she is really like, you know, she would not believe that her sister is not a woman. But that doesn't mean the tension doesn't exist. It doesn't mean that she doesn't still have a frustration of like, I went through a thing you didn't go through, you're being rewarded the label of being a woman when you don’t have the experience to “back it up.”

I didn't set out with this play to write a play about how trans folks justify themselves. Quinlyn… She's got transphobic tendencies, but I still wouldn't go so far as to say that she is openly transphobic. That line is an indication of what she and a lot of people are holding back in a frustration of being like, “Oh, I have some sort of more genuine and real expression of womanhood because I suffered through it.” To answer the question more directly, do I think that womanhood comes with an inherent amount of suffering in the transition from girlhood to womanhood? I do think it does. And I think that that's true for cis women and for trans women. But the harm is different. The suffering is a different kind. And the real terrible thing about transphobes is that they only see one kind of suffering as valid. Not a single character in any of the plays I've written has had their gender chosen by default. Every single person is the gender they are for a really specific reason. Because of the narrative I want to tell, because even the ones where I've left it open to interpretation, that is me as the writer saying, I want this to be a blueprint. I want this to change with each production. I want this to be flexible. Nothing that I do with gender is random in these plays. It's all very pointed.