We just wanted to talk a little bit about Sunny days and about you as a playwright and  your ideas. Alrighty. Well, first, what really got you into playwriting? 

Oh, this is such an old answer. Like something I have not thought about for a long time  because I've just been. Doing it for a little bit. I was a theater kid and I really like to write.  But I didn't really put those two things together until. Until college. Because I kind of been  like. I had this kind of, I don't know. I was always like, waiting to be cast in a play or  something. I don't act anymore. But I had this idea that theater was something that people  chose you to do and then kind of writing and making up stories was something that I did  separately. So, I wrote a play, I think by Junior year in college because there was a contest  that I could enter, and I didn't win that. But I won a different contest. And that was kind of  enough encouragement to get me to go ahead and put it on at my college my senior year,  and that was a transformative experience. Because I kind of made everything happen  myself. I had a goal. I had no idea how to accomplish it. And then in between me and like  the production of this play, there are all of these steps that I figured out and I gave myself  hypoglycemia because all I ate were like candies in offices while I talked to various  administration people about getting space and getting performance space in versus space  and all that other stuff. And I was applying for grants. And I was scraping up. I was  borrowing set pieces from various places like, more established theater groups and the  English department, like a spare desk chair. And I think once I picked up a filing cabinet  that I found on the street and carried it back to use in the in the play. I just love doing it  completely. I loved having the ability to kind of go from writing something to having this collaborative process to having this live event that everyone could see and I've never kind  of gotten over that high. So, I just kind of kept doing it after that. And that first play that I  wrote in college was reasonably successful for something that a 19-year-old wrote. And I  wrote another play after that, and I didn't stop because I was an addict, and even though  I'm making more money off things like screen writing and nonfiction. It doesn't have that  same reward at the end. 

I've spoken to many playwrights who have a similar origin story, where they're like,  "Well, I was, you know, I was an actor or I did this, or he did that." And then they kind  of fell into playwriting and they just latched on to it, and they were like, this is part of  theater that I'm supposed to be involved in. So, I think that's so interesting.

I mean, I don’t think it occurred to anybody to be a playwright, unless they were an actor.  Pretty traditional, it's like you learn about the theater by being involved in things that you  need a lot of people for. And one of those is acting, right. So, it's almost like a natural built  apprenticeship program, right, like Shakespeare was an actor first. 

A little. More on the play itself. What was going on globally that kind of inspired you to  write this? Because you touch on what happened in 2004 from Kosovo and then you  also touch on the detention camps that were on the Texas border in 2018 and 2019  that were really a hot topic on the news. So, can you talk a little bit about what was  going on that kind of inspired this? 

Absolutely so, the original play has this kind of interesting history. A long time ago I got a  commission from InterAct Theater with a proposal to write a play about children's television. Specifically, this concept of having an American company go into a foreign  country and work on the kids TV show meant to help it. And part of what inspired me was  just the idea of political theater. Emma Goldman has an essay about “What is political  theater?” And she talks about the necessity for it to be accessible and targeted towards positive change and progressive political change. That's what she's advocating for it to be. I  think it's been a long time since I've read it. When I read that, I think it was like in a grad  school course about political theater. That was kind of center questions like, what is  political theater. Like what can you answer in that place? 

I was like, OK, like, let's think about this in an Emma Goldman definition and that is like  Sesame Street, right. That is children's educational television that is intended to affect  these positive changes. So, I looked into it more and did more research on it. And that was  part of the proposal that I submitted. For the Commission, I wrote a play called The Puppet  Show and it wasn't very good. Nobody liked it. I didn't like it but InterAct and I still liked the  concept so, they talked to the director and dramaturg, who I'm a frequent collaborator with  one of my best friends, Penny Ramirez. And me and them got together and kind of talked  through, like, OK, what are the things? What can we do to change this up a little and make  it work better? Or change it up a lot and kind of take the concept and come up with  something that we believe in because part of it is, especially if you're trying to write  something that responds to what's going on politically at the time. Things change  politically, everything changes, right. So, like the initial concept, because they found the  play challenging, it was an Obama era concept and then it became the Trump era and that  was a huge change, particularly when it comes to thinking about how we interact with the 

rest of the world. That was a big access of change because the Obama era we’re coming  out of Bush and there was a lot of anxiety about how are we interfering with the world?  Right, like, how are we imposing our own values on the rest of the world as Americans? And  there's a lot of insight here on that. And then during the Trump era was we're abdicating all  responsibility. We're taking this isolationist yet combative attitude. So, it was kind of like,  alright, what's happening right now and then like, how can we also break down what  concepts that I'm going with to say something that both of us actually believe. I really love  Sesame Street. So does Rudy. Like, we're not going to set some, like, evil, like insidious  thing like, that's just not how we feel. But it is complex, right? We were like trying to figure  out where and when to set it right, where to set it, because some of the feedback we got  from InterAct was like, let's have it be in a real place so that we know where we are. Making  up a country because I didn't know what to do otherwise was part of what didn't work  about it. We were coming up with all of these concepts and these ideas. You know, we  were like, talking about Kosovo would be an interesting real place because we have all this  information on it. But then you could do like present day, and you could you know. We were  not able to decide exactly where to set it. And then Rudy was like let's do all. Let's do 3. And  so, we came up with this idea of setting an act in the past. And an act in the present. And  an act in the future. We were starting to do this in like 2019 and or 2018, I think I forget  which year. And so, then the pandemic interfered, and it became very difficult to set things  in the present, so you kind of let that go, especially since me and Rudy came up with this  concept. Without any of the plot. So, we have settings and times I think for each thing I was  like, OK, we'll do Kosovo, we'll do Austin, TX, Since we were thinking this would be a show  that would maybe involve a company in Philadelphia and a company in Austin, TX and then we'll have the last act be in Philadelphia, so we'll bring all these things together and that's  where that idea came from. Just like responding to that time and thinking back to other  times to give it more timelessness. And then the whole concept of the second act ended  up having to kind of stay very Trump era, not just because of the plot, but also the whole  concept.  

The other concept that we came up with was that like, there would just be increasing  numbers of puppets the entire time, the first act would have like, you know, puppets,  except they would be totally realistic. And everybody would be a human. But you know  there would be a puppet who would have a puppeteer at the very end, right. So totally  realistic. The second act would be a mix of humans and puppets. And then the third act  would be totally puppets, although it ended up changing that. But the third act becomes  the show as opposed to there’s just more and more puppets. It became this kind of.  Response to a feeling that the world had gone crazy, right? And that the world was, like,  really hard to comprehend and just overall, very wacky and bizarre. And like seeing the 

world as puppets became kind of like a trauma response that people had and that kind of  enabled us to take it into where we used the puppets dramaturgically in the final act where  it becomes. Like a very extensive coping strategy. That there's like a reason for there being  more puppets. 

Something that we felt very strongly about was. Kind of just like thinking about these kinds  of attempts to help children in situations where it's very, very difficult to help children, and  something I was thinking about a lot at that time, is that there's all this rhetoric around how  

children are the most important thing in the world and they have to protect it. And yet they're very disposable. They're treated as disposable. Because they have no power. And  this is something that's unfortunately perennial, right. Going back to the idea of when all  you have is Political theater, when all you have is like the softest of soft power. What  resources do you have? This is the most inertia. It is a maximum internship right now.  When all you have is the softest of soft power. What can you actually give young people  that you're trying to protect? 

I work with mostly teenagers, as in like middle schoolers. I think especially the teenagers  right now that I was working with. You know, as recently as last year. They sometimes get  very frustrated with what adults are doing for them, you know? Like, particularly when it  comes to being in school and having someone come in to talk to them about climate  change and there's this particular point that gets made like, you know, “climate change,  you're the ones who are going to fix it. You know, like we can't fix it. You're going to fix it”  and they're like, “what the ****? What? What do you mean? I'm going to fix it. Why don't  you fix it? You're a grown up.” And I can't tell you how angry they are about this. Like this  form of rhetoric has no weight with them. If they do not appreciate it. That obviously feeds into act 3 and certain aspects of it like the fate of children in war wasn’t on my mind at the  time because of contemporary things happening. Obviously, it's now much more on  everybody's mind. But at the time it was going back and doing research into Kosovo. We  wanted to pick something that would be very specific and maybe not very deliberately  current. We haven't, really heard too much from Kosovo in in quite some time it. It was a  very old conflict. But it has not been on our radar, but it is something we were very involved  in that you could get granulated information about. Including actual footage of Sesame  Street creatives trying to make a shift because of them. And so there is newer laying out Who you’re gonna have. You're like, let's have four people. Let's have this be like Sesame  Street. So, we will have a white man or white woman, and we'll have a Hispanic man and a  black woman. It's like Sesame Street. And then it became like white or Middle Eastern  man. Because of what the first act ended up being. Kosovo was partially chosen because  of that cast, so that we could have something that fit the cast that we had. So, we thought a 

little bit about Ireland, and we decided Kosovo was something that we had more  information about. 

I was doing a little research, I know in the first act you briefly touch on, the  introduction of Kami in the South African version of Sesame Street who was an HIV  positive puppet. They introduced her to talk about the HIV/AIDS crisis that was  impacting people in the region and then in the Israeli version of Sesame Street they  introduced Mahboub, who was a puppet who spoke both Arabic and Hebrew. They  introduced that puppet too encourage children to learn about people of different  backgrounds and try to bridge the Israeli Palestine conflict. Both of those puppets  were greeted with so much controversy. But stayed active characters in Takalani  Sesame Street and in Rechuv sumsum. And I just think it's so interesting that these children's shows can touch on some really really heavy topics. Face a lot of  controversy and then stay relevant. 

I remember the controversy over Kami. I’m not sure when the other was. I’m not familiar  with it. What was the name of the other? 

Mahboub 

I don't remember when that puppet was introduced or like hearing about it on the news or  in what sectors. Maybe it was in Israel where it was most controversial, but I don't remember it popping through. I remember when people were, like, making fun of Kami right  and, like, treating them as the most ridiculous thing. And the fact is, in both of those cases  It was treated as some kind of, like, ridiculous thing that, like puppets, are a puppet and  shouldn’t address something like that, right? Because puppets are supposed to be this,  like, cute thing. That's kid appropriate. We got to keep stuff like that out of children's  entertainment. It's not appropriate for children. It's happening to children, right? Children,  being HIV positive was enough that children were going to know someone who was or be If  they were watching Takalani Sesame Street. And that was why that puppet existed. The  kids were already dealing with it. So, this was supposed to be a tool to help them and like  looking back on it like especially after having like written this play and studied it more, it  makes me so angry. The way that puppet was treated in the American media, like it has  nothing to do with you. Leave that puppet alone. You know, like you think you're so funny. 

I'm not as familiar with the conflict around that puppet from the Israeli Palestinian show, or  like what the tenor was of the controversy of it or like what kinds of jokes got made about it. I'm sure if I did know I would be angry. I have like a definite strong emotional response  because I remember not just like right wing. I was refreshed in my mind because I watched  a documentary that was at the time that she was introduced or after she was introduced.  So, I got to like, see some of that as well. I was like really young when I was seeing this  information controversy. And maybe I laughed too. Maybe I also thought it was funny and  then like it just makes me angry to think about it now. How little understanding there is,  what kids have to be a part of this to help them. It's already there for the kids. You know  what I mean? You haven't done a very good job of keeping them safe from HIV in the real  world, so there’s no point trying to keep them safe in their entertainment. 

And just what I was reading a lot of the controversy and backlash happened not in  South Africa, where that puppet was, but in America where children being born with  HIV enough of a topic to create a puppet about? 

Yeah, it's like the avenue Q effect. Like it makes us think of a puppet having sex, and  therefore that's funny and it is very funny when puppets have sex. To be fair. But  nonetheless. You know, obviously I was not in South Africa at the time to observe any of  the actions, but that I imagine there was much more understanding of why it was helpful.  Whereas it was treated differently because it's such an American show. They were treating  it as like the thing that was happening in America, almost the way the response was both  the fervor and the jokes that were made.  

It is weird because when I was writing act one part of the reason why Kosovo was picked  was that it was as similar a conflict to Israel and Palestine and that it's this very long  simmering. Constantly exploding thing that’s got a very very very long history. Actually, it  has a significantly longer history depending on how you count things. And like the kind of  intractability. But part of why we picked it was because it allowed us to talk about some of  those things without having something that was quite as current of an issue in America.  And again, also the availability of more information about that process of making a show  there. And kind of the opportunity to find like this very precise moment in time where there  was an outbreak of violence. That was very scary. But kind of manageable almost. Like very  scared to be there for sure. But fundamentally it was a relatively small outbreak of  violence. When you're comparing it to what's happening in Palestine right now. Certainly, 

we're in, you know, even in earlier times in Kosovo. It was still written in a time when the  Israel Palestine conflict was not as super present in the news. 

So, there's I think the one line in act one. Where they kind of briefly name checked? The  fact that that was something that they tried to do or that they did. Definitely it's different  now because it happened to be at an ebb at that time. Obviously, it's perennial, but there  are definitely huge huge spikes. And lower lower periods of conflict. Honestly, the highest  period of conflict that I can remember as an American. Not much about this stuff I didn't do  anywhere near as much research on it as I did on Kosovo, but it is definitely rough to think  about. As part of my earlier research, I did in fact talk to somebody who had been on one of  shows in that region. I talked to somebody who's an actor on one of them. And. And it really  drives home how much we want these tools to work and how flimsy they are, you know.  Writing this play, I wanted to be optimistic about the idea of having a show where puppets  understand each other. In the course of that act. You go. Back and forth between thinking  that's possible and thinking it's stupid. It's a battle between, hope and despair. That  ultimately can seem less important in the face of hard power conflicts. I think that's a lot of  what the show is about. 

I wanted to kind of touch on Captain Pickle for a minute. Captain Pickle/ Mr. Pickle is  the only character that's in all three acts, and he starts out as a creation. By a little boy  who kind of just wants a friend. And then the second act we see, he turns into this kind  of internationally recognized and beloved character, when that little boy grows up and brings him on to ABC City. And still, he acts as a friend to people who need him. We  see that a lot, specifically in act two. Can you talk a little bit about what Mr. Pickle  represents in the show as a whole? 

I think you did a really amazing job of summarizing it honestly because I didn't start from  there. Mr. Pickle really did grow kind of like organically, which and then it turned out, ended  up being really happy with, like, what he became. The subtitle for the show, in my mind, I  haven't actually added it officially. It's the life, death and resurrection of Captain Pickle.  And you know, he's a little King Arthur. He's a little Superman. He's a great deal, Grover and  a little bit Elmo as well, at least in his origin story. Elmo's history did not involve Kosovo, but  it did involve a jobber puppet being given a voice that somehow magically clicked. I should  also emphasize that, you know, Mr. Acosta is not based on the creator of Elmo. Who? Is a  controversial figure because of some bad stuff that he did, but a version of that guy that 

didn't do any molestations but just in terms of being somebody who was a young up and  coming puppeteer. Who was taken on and is like wow, look at this. Look at this New York  City kid. Then becoming like a hugely beloved character like that, that is what happened  

with Elmo. And there was, like, this idea of a jobber puppet until he found a voice for it.  Then it became Elmo. It was not built. It sort of was incarnated. I put together a lot of plots  and things that had actually happened in the real world. To create Captain Pickle,  including his death when he was a child. That's something I witnessed at summer camp. I  knew a few puppeteers in my life, right, and they're kind of like magicians. They tend to  start when they're kids, you know, they fall in love with The Muppets or Sesame Street  when their children and they don't stop being involved. And I did witness, not firsthand  because it was in the boy's cabin, but the harming of a puppet that was beloved by this  young, aspiring puppeteer, this middle school aged puppeteer. I think I saw him crying  about something bad that had happened to his puppet that he brought. And I also saw  something similar happen with a stuffed animal belonging to a girl, not a puppet. And I  think maybe that was the one that got hung, but. These acts of cruelty at camp. That I  remembered. I'm giving you the origin story as opposed to, what it means. But because you  did a great job of explaining what it means, he just came together. Out of these bits and  pieces of meeting. I think that's kind of how folk heroes work, you know. They come out of  somewhere and there's a need they fulfill. The need that Captain Pickle fulfills is to help  kids feel safe. And to help them deal with hard stuff in their lives, not necessarily by being a  strong person, but by being a fool. I think that so often that is where soft power does come  through a little bit. In that hard power, advances are very difficult to maintain. And you  know. You'll go to great lengths to save a city in 100 years, it'll be gone anyway. But, a story  or a hero or a concept that fulfills a need like that can stay around for a long time. That's  what Captain Pickle is.  

It's either Captain Pickle or Ricky. Is the kind of protagonist of this show. Ricky is somebody  who I identify with a lot. Obviously, we're very different people, but he has a lot of my  weaknesses. I gave him most of my weaknesses. He wants to help in whatever way he can.  He wants to entertain. He wants to express himself. He's an artist, right. And he loves kids,  and he loves puppets. And he's just a happy guy. You know just a delightful puppet person.  When he's brought face to face with what's difficult in the world. Captain Pickle is what he  has to give to it. And. You know the weakness and the strength of that is kind of what I'm  tracking throughout the play. 

I love that. My. My college roommate, senior year. Was a dual degree in early  childhood education and Family Services major and also a puppetry major. And she 

just heard things like I'm gonna combine both and she's a kindergarten teacher now,  which is always really her plan. Kids sometimes have things happening at home that  are heavier. And she. Utilizes puppetry a lot in her teaching, so I just think it's so  interesting. I'm just so fascinated by the utilization of puppets in programs like  Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers neighborhood. I think it's so great. So, we're presenting  this workshop at a time. Where there is such a significant amount of conflict  happening both on a national and a global level. What do you hope people take away  from this play? 

Ok. Much like Ricky, I feel perennially unequal to the moment. I don't know. I wish I did. It’s  a play about people who are doing what they can. And if you are also doing what you can I  hope you at least find some recognition or better understanding in it. 

Yeah. I created a moment in the first act, cause the first act is about conflict, right? The  second act is kind of more complicated. It's like the first act is about what happens to  children during war. The second act is about what happens to children who are kind of  

being used as political pawns. Kind of caught in migration. Children who are kind of being  dehumanized because of where they came from. The third act is. About children being  impacted by climate change and conflict is definitely very high on the list of concerns right  now.  

In the first act there's a magical moment of people coming together, and I think it's pretty  good. I like the way I wrote it. It's always moving when I see it on stage, but like asking me to  consider what people can take away from it in the context of stuff that's happening right  now. I don't know. It's a little trickier. Because I don't want to you know at least say like “oh,  yeah, well, I would hope that this would, you know, solve war, this play would.” but I don't  think I can honestly say that. I do think it’s important, and this goes back to Emma  Goldman's idea of “What is political theater?”, to at least retain your ability to imagine a  better world. Because if you don't have that ability. You do have no options. So, you should  at least be able to imagine that there is a solution or that there could be a solution. I do still  think that's important. 

We ask this to all our playwrights. What is your favorite play? 

No. Ohh, that's so mean. Oh, it's so hard. To decide. God, I've never prepared for that one.  I'll tell you. OK. I will not say what my favorite play is, but I will say a play. I will say one that I 

saw in the past few years. That I still. I'm like. Yes, I'm so glad I went to see that which is  Mickle Mars, It is Magic. I really loved that play. It was a. It was a Theater Oobleck show in  the basement at the show Pond that I watched before the pandemic. So. It was maybe  2018 or 19. That play was really special to me. I can't say it's my favorite play because it's  too hard to pick, but in terms of a slightly deeper club that I was like, oh, I'm so glad that I  got to see this. This made me so happy. It is magic. And it's more meaningful too, because I  went to see it with my boyfriend, now husband, father of my child who also really loved it.  And it's always scary taking somebody to see some weird *** theater. You're like, man, I  hope you don't hate it. I hope you can love. I do. So, you can have an experience together  and connect. And he did. And so, we have a baby, so we've got that to connect over too.