The Ditch Weekly

 

[I selected this article for reposting on Rick On Theater for one reason: the teens who are its subject have impressed me.  This is my way of sending them a shout-out (though I doubt any of them will see it . . . unless one of them Googles her- or himself, or their publication). 

[Go, you guys, go!] 

“COVERING THE HAMPTONS FROM A TEENAGE VIEW”
by Callie Holtermann 

Print is dead? Don’t Tell These 15-Year-Olds.

A newspaper started last year by Montauk eighth graders offers a local take on their world, minus the celebrity sheen. 

[Callie Holtermann’s article about The Ditch Weekly ran in the New York Times on 25 May 2025 in the “Sunday Styles” section.  It was published on 23 May 2025 as “They’re 15. Wait Until You Read Their Newspaper“ on the Times website and updated on 27 May 2025. 

[For this article, Holtermann reported from Montauk and East Hampton, New York, both in Suffolk County, the easternmost county on Long Island.  Montauk is a hamlet within the town of East Hampton, which occupies the easternmost tip of the peninsula known as the South Fork of Suffolk County.

[Montauk is 114 miles east of downtown Brooklyn in Kings County (i.e., New York City’s Borough of Brooklyn), the westernmost county on the island. East Hampton is 100 miles from Brooklyn.  (Between Kings and Suffolk Counties on Long Island are Queens County, which is also the Borough of Queens, and Nassau County.)  Montauk and East Hampton are 117 and 103 miles from Manhattan (New York County), across the East River to the north of Long Island.]

The Ditch Weekly, a Montauk newspaper, is staffed by middle and high schoolers.

On a Saturday morning in May, five hard-nosed reporters filed into an office on the South Fork of Long Island and picked up their red pens. 

For two hours, they combed through the drafts in front of them. Clunky sentences were tightened. Inelegant adjectives were cut. Powdered doughnut holes were eaten, and mini bags of Cheez-Its, too.

This was the final proofreading session for an issue of The Ditch Weekly, a seasonal newspaper about Montauk that is written and edited by locals ages 13 to 17. Its staffers had gathered to put the finishing touches on their first paper of the year, which would be published over Memorial Day weekend [24-26 May 2025—the unofficial beginning of summer in the U.S.].

Billy Stern, the paper’s 15-year-old top editor, kept tabs on their progress in a planning document on his laptop. According to his color-coding system, reporters had already filed articles about nearby summer camps and the construction of a new hospital on the grounds of a former baseball field.

He turned to Teddy Rattray, 15, the paper’s most prolific columnist and Billy’s friend since Little League, to float ideas for a restaurant review.

‘‘We still haven’t done hot dogs,’’ Teddy said. Billy agreed: Hot dogs should be an editorial priority.

The operation has grown slicker since the boys got into the news business last year, as eighth graders at East Hampton Middle School. Billy had been looking for a summer job that was more stimulating than his usual gig squeezing lemons at a food truck. He enlisted Teddy and Teddy’s cousin Ellis Rattray to put together an eight-page paper exploring Montauk from a teenager’s perspective.

‘‘We were still very young; we had no idea what we were doing,’’ said Billy, a junior varsity quarterback whose hair was tousled into a cruciferous mop.

The trio got an early publicity bump with an article in The East Hampton Star [see below], a stalwart local paper whose owner and editor is Ellis’s father, David Rattray. Hyperlocal and proudly anachronistic, The Ditch Weekly in some ways resembled a more wholesome little brother of The Drunken Canal, Dimes Square’s onetime paper of record. Here was another unexpected print publication from members of a digital generation, just with more boogie boarding and fewer club drugs.

[The East Hampton Star is a weekly, independent, family-owned newspaper published each Thursday.  Founded in 1885, it’s one of the few such papers still existing in the United States. The Drunken Canal was a New York City-based newspaper of a little over two dozen pages from 2020 to 2022 (i.e., the pandemic years) that focused on youth culture in New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood. Dimes Square is a “microneighborhood” of New York City between Manhattan’s Chinatown and LES. The name is a play on “Times Square,” and refers to Dimes, a popular, health-conscious, Californian-style restaurant located at the intersection of Canal and Division Street on the LES.]

The Ditch team published 10 issues last summer before taking a break to start high school. But on FaceTime calls and in English class, where Billy sits one desk in front of Teddy, they have been plotting their return.

For The Ditch Weekly’s sophomore summer, its staff has swelled to 20 teenagers. Their goal is to distribute 2,000 copies of the paper a week through Labor Day, funded entirely by ad sales. And they do not want their parents to be involved – except for when they need their parents to drive them places.

Perhaps most ambitious of all, they hope to persuade other teenagers to put down their phones and pick up a newspaper.

‘‘When you’re on your phone, it gets boring after a while,’’ said Dylan Centalonza, 14, a new writer for the paper who covers motels with her twin sister, Fallon. ‘‘This is something you have to put work into.’’

Local News, Local Kids

The teenagers who work on The Ditch Weekly are almost all year-round residents of the South Fork of Long Island. They have summer jobs working at golf clubs and jewelry stores; their parents are real estate agents, financial advisers, farm stand owners and restaurateurs.

They are well aware of the area’s reputation as a part-time playground for the superrich, where Manhattanites sip cocktails poolside and browse the Gucci store. But they are frankly bored by the idea of covering that world and the celebrities who often populate it. ‘‘There’s so many that sometimes you just walk right past them,’’ said Lauren Boyle, 14, adding that practically everyone on staff had bumped into Scarlett Johansson.

They would rather assign stories about the version of Montauk and its surroundings that they know best. In interviews between copy-edits, they described quiet winters attending East Hampton High School and summers spent surfing and biking around Montauk Shores, the community of high-end trailer homes that overlooks Ditch Plains Beach.

[Ditch Plains Beach, widely considered one of the best surfing beaches in the area, is about two miles east of the village of Montauk.]

‘‘Everyone thinks of it as just a rich, touristy place, but there’s so much of the past that nobody really knows about,’’ said Ellis, 15, who wrote an article last year about the history of Montauk’s skate park. Working on the paper, he added, ‘‘I learned so much about the town I live in.’’

Early issues of The Ditch Weekly, which is named for the founders’ favorite sandy hangout, contained Teddy’s review of dueling pancake houses (headline: ‘‘Battle of the Buttermilk’’) and Billy’s interview with a surf shop owner. Ellis wrote a weekly roundup of mischief from police reports (headline: ‘‘Spring Shenanigans’’).

‘‘A Greenwich Village man is facing a felony charge for possession of cocaine after police spotted him in downtown Montauk,’’ he wrote in a dispatch last July, followed by an account of a spat between two intoxicated people over the ownership of a Rolex.

There are also more ambitious offerings. Lauren was especially proud of an article she had just written with Valentina Balducci, 15, about how Montauk business owners stay afloat in the winter offseason. Last year Teddy’s older sister, Nettie Rattray, 17, snagged an interview with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer [b. 1971; lawyer and politician; 49th Governor of Michigan since 2019 and her second and final term ends on 1 January 2027] of Michigan about Gen Z voter turnout that ran on the paper’s front page.

Their output is impressive enough to invite some questions.

‘‘I get asked a lot, ‘Are the kids actually doing it?’’’ said Dana Stern, Billy’s mother, over omelets at a diner in East Hampton. Her attempts to contribute are usually shut down, she said. ‘‘They made it very clear that they don’t want adults helping.’’

Billy does not want the paper to be perceived as a junior spinoff of The East Hampton Star, even if both publications have a Rattray on the masthead. Mr. Rattray, who surely has wisdom to pass down about running a newspaper, wrote in an email that he had intentionally stayed out of Ditch Weekly operations beyond helping Ellis learn how to decipher police reports.

Still, the office the teenagers work out of belongs to Dr. Stern, a dermatologist. A staff member on The Star’s production team, Matt Charron, taught Billy how to use page layout software last year. And Bess Rattray, Teddy’s mother, has offered occasional journalistic advice informed by her career writing and editing for The Star and Vogue. (One suggestion, directed at her son: Don’t accept free pancakes from a restaurant you plan to review.)

The parents are mostly just grateful that their children are doing something other than sitting inside and playing video games, Ms. Rattray said.

‘‘Last year we were kind of keeping them on schedule, through sheer parental panic,’’ she said. This year, she added, ‘‘the parental role is really going to be winnowed down to ‘driver.’’’

‘Print Is Dying’? Don’t Tell Them That.

It is not exactly an obvious moment to break into the newspaper business.

‘‘I hear a lot of, ‘Print is dying,’’’ Ellis said. He and Billy started discussing potential business ideas in the summer of 2023, like selling food on the beach or writing a newsletter. A conversation with Mr. Rattray about his line of work made them consider a paper.

Billy, who joined his high school newspaper as a freshman, called a printer to get an idea of production costs and looked up ad rates on The Star’s website. ‘‘The numbers worked out,’’ he said.

The founders’ parents said they were not covering the paper’s expenses, which are supported by advertisements that the teenagers sell to local restaurants, real estate agents and surf shops. (A few ads have been sold to relatives of staff members.)

Harry Karoussos, the paper’s 13-year-old head of sales, said that he and Billy usually walk into stores with a copy of the paper and a three-page media kit. A degree of transparency is required when he calls business owners to make them aware of advertising opportunities with The Ditch Weekly.

‘‘I have to, like, notify them that I’m a kid,’’ he said, estimating that he had made at least 40 sales calls this year.

Despite industrywide headwinds, The Ditch Weekly is ‘‘very profitable,’’ said Charlie Stern, the paper’s chief financial officer, who at 17 is something of an elder statesman on the staff.

He is also Billy’s older brother; the two have a standing meeting on Sundays to discuss ad revenue and expenses. Staff writers are paid $50 to $70 an article, and printing costs are around $900 per week. A portion of their profits are donated to A Walk on Water, an organization that facilitates surfing for children with disabilities.

The team declined to disclose their profits, but Ms. Rattray admitted that she had been ‘‘astounded’’ by the paper’s financial success. With his cut from last summer, Teddy bought an e-bike.

‘Mom, It’s Under Control’

Back at Ditch headquarters, where the doughnut holes were dwindling, veteran staff members sat with the paper’s first two writers from New York City, Annie Singh and Sofia Birchard. The group debated: Would a TikTok account help them reach more teenagers, or would it cheapen the appearance of their reporting?

‘‘It’s definitely easier to blow up’’ on TikTok than on Instagram, where they currently have an account, Valentina said.

[The Ditch doesn’t seem to have a website, but I gather that the Instagram account serves that purpose at present.]

‘‘And even if we don’t blow up, that’s fine,’’ Lauren responded. ‘‘As long as we have some social media that makes us look fun. We’re not, like, boring people, I don’t think.’’

Nearby, Hudson Tanzmann, 15, the paper’s head of distribution, said that he and Billy had been trying to set up a more sophisticated delivery program than the current system of leaving stacks of free papers at stores around Montauk, weighed down by painted rocks.

The enterprise has turned friends into colleagues, and summer vacation into a cascade of deadlines.

Billy is in charge of making sure everything gets done, hence the color-coded planning document. (‘‘Red is, We need it now,’’ he said.) At times Dr. Stern has worried about her son’s stress levels during what should be the most relaxing season of the year. ‘‘Billy’s always like, ‘Mom, it’s under control,’’’ she said.

But if the learning curve is occasionally painful, it is also kind of the point. Grace Dunchick, 15, said she had returned to The Ditch for a second summer because she liked trying something new alongside her friends and having a physical product to show for it.

This summer, she plans to photograph beachgoers and write about the trends she observes, in the tradition of the fashion photographer Bill Cunningham [1929-2016]. ‘‘I spend a lot of time on social media, so anything to break me away from that,’’ she said, adding: ‘‘It’s really bad. It’s like, actually an addiction.’’

She looked over at her friends, still gathered at the proofreading table, and editorial inspiration struck. ‘‘That would be a cool article.’’

[Callie Holtermann, who joined the New York Times in 2020, reports on style and pop culture for the Times.

[In two posts on ROT, “Books in Print” (14 July 2010) and “We Get Letters” (7 April 2015), I wrote about the disappearance of paper documents, both handwritten and printed. 

[Over the years that I’ve done research projects for school, publication, my individual edification, or out-of-town clients, I used old newspapers and magazines—some of them really old, back into the early 20th century, the 19th century, and even the odd 18th century—digging through newspaper morgues and clipping files, peering at microfilms and microforms years before there were computer databases or Google.

[Many newspapers, especially small ones like the weeklies or semi-weeklies in towns like East Hampton and regional papers covering counties across the country, have closed down.  Some big-city dailies have shut down their print edition and now publish only online, such as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which has just announced that its final physical print edition is scheduled for 31 December, and in New Jersey, four dailies went all-digital earlier this year: the Newark Star-Ledger, the Times of Trenton, and the South Jersey Times covering Camden, Cumberland, Gloucester, and Salem Counties (last print editions: 2 February); and the Jersey Journal in Hudson County (1 February).

[As each paper goes digital and forsakes print, there will be fewer and fewer of them to preserve in any format.  Newspaper websites, like all websites, are, despite the myth that nothing ever disappears from the ’Net, evanescent.  Editors and publishers can decide after a while not to archive back issues, as the Jerusalem Post did in 2004 because the owner decided it was superfluous, making it hard to find old articles for reference.  Without some kind of access to hard copies of back issues, even microfilms or PDF’s, research becomes impossible.

[Libraries keep old books and periodicals we can get to when we want them.  Some old magazines are still paper copies, but they’ve mostly been transferred to microform and then digital computer files, but they had to start out as hard copies.  When there are only electronic files to start with, who’s going to archive them?  Will someone keep them updated so that as the storage and retrieval technology changes, as it inevitably does every few years, they can still be read? 

[The East Hampton teens are working with paper and ink, however retro that seems.  I hope someone in the Ditch group is keeping copies of their product for posterity (and that they’re giving a copy to their local library, who I hope is keeping them for future reference.  You might be surprised at how often little papers like The Ditch Weekly have been helpful to some research project of mine. 

[Has any of you ever heard of the Park Slope News?  Or Fountain of Light?  Or Park East?  They’re all tiny papers from which I got useful material for one project or another.  Then there’s Falcon Times and What’s What—a junior college student paper and one from a high school, both of which gave me information for which I was searching.

*  *  *  *
“TEENS LAUNCH A NEWSPAPER FOR MONTAUK”
by Christine Sampson

[This is the East Hampton Star article mentioned above in the Times report.  I thought it was worth adding to the post because it’s a local story, and was published on 23 May 2024, the day before The Ditch’s first issue came out.]

Three East Hampton Middle School students have embarked on a new project: a weekly newspaper called Ditch Weekly, chronicling all that’s happening in Montauk from a youth perspective.

In the first issue — 800 copies of which will drop today in shops and restaurants across the hamlet — readers will see restaurant reviews, interviews, photos, a hiking guide, and even a police blotter. The young publishers went out and sold advertisements — all the things a grown-up newspaper does. Look for nine more issues just like it spanning the rest of the summer.

The newspaper was the idea of Billy Stern, an eighth grader from Amagansett who comes from a community-oriented family. His older brother Charlie, who’s in high school, started an effective peer-tutoring program last year to help fellow students with math skills, and his twin brother, Wylie, volunteers for A Walk on Water [see above] and works for Corey’s Wave [surfing instruction].

“My parents are really hard workers,” Billy said in an interview. “They wanted us to do something, with our summers especially. They want me and my brothers to jump on opportunities when we’re young.”

Billy is joined on the Ditch Weekly masthead by two friends who were already pretty familiar with the news business: Ellis Rattray, whose father, David Rattray, is the editor of The [East Hampton] Star, and his cousin Teddy Rattray, whose mother, Bess Rattray, is the co-editor of The Star’s East magazine.

Ellis said his participation was inspired, in part, by his family’s involvement in the newspaper business. “This is my first time working with people on an actual job,” he said. “I feel like I’m becoming a better writer and getting used to newspaper style. I’d only written papers for school before.”

Teddy commented that “being a part of this newspaper really gives you the ins and outs of journalism. You learn how difficult it is.”

Along the way, the boys got some technology lessons from Matt Charron, who works on The Star’s production team handling photos and page layout. “They’re impressive,” Mr. Charron said. “They’re super motivated. Billy, especially, is so passionate about doing this.”

The boys agreed that deadlines — time management, in general — was the biggest challenge, but that working together has been a lot of fun.

Dr. Dana Stern, Billy’s mom, is proud of them and excited about the debut of Ditch Weekly. “It’s definitely been a huge undertaking, more so than anybody realized,” she said. “It encompasses so many different areas — running a business, writing, editing, and even just the experience of talking to adults and corresponding with adults.”

“There’s been a lot of ‘school-comes-first’ reminders,” Dr. Stern said, “but it’s been incredible.”

Billy said putting the first issue together was “grueling.”

“We thought an old-school newspaper would be a really cool idea,” he said. “We wanted to create something that would help us explore our passions, and I think it really has. I can’t wait to see it. It’s going to be great.”

[Christine Sampson, Deputy Managing Editor of The East Hampton Star, began contributing to the Star in March of 2015.  Her work has appeared in a variety of print and digital publications, including the New York Times, Patch.com, the Huffington Post, and Newsday.

[I love newspapers.  I always have.  Not just what they publish or the people who make them, but the paper document itself.  Each paper has its own style, its own look, from the nameplate on the front page, to the typeface, to the layout and writing style.  Big-city journals, small-town papers, neighborhood papers; dailies, weeklies, semi-weeklies; tabloids and broadsheets—they were all fun to encounter in their own ways.

[When I was a teenager and lived in Germany (my dad was a Foreign Service Officer; see “An American Teen in Germany“ [9 and 12 March 2013]), I kept a list in my head of the different airlines on which I flew and the airports where I landed or took off.  Later, I sort of did the same thing with newspapers I came across in my research.

[I think the first “exotic” newspaper I saw was one my father brought back from a business trip.  It was November 1960, and Dad went to Alaska to scope out potential investment opportunities for a group he and some associates had started just before the territory was admitted to the Union (3 January 1959).  Mom went along with him and they were in Fairbanks on 8 November—the day John F. Kennedy (1917-63) was elected the 35th President of the United States. 

[Dad brought back the whole issue of the next day’s Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, the daily newspaper published the farthest north in the U.S., with the banner headline announcing the result of the first presidential election in which the new state had participated.

[I was in eighth grade and about to turn 14, and I’d been very focused on this election, the first one of which I was truly aware.  (Frequent ROTters will know that two of my schoolmates at that time were Julie and Trisha Nixon, the daughters of Vice President Richard Nixon [1913-94] who was the Republican candidate for president.)  I kept that newspaper, wrapped in a plastic sheet, for years, until it literally disintegrated from age and handling.

[Of course, none of this has anything to do with the content of any given article, which is the point of the research, but it’s interesting nonetheless.  It’s amazing how many variations there are on what’s basically the same basic design. 

[Sometimes, however, it is significant to see the original print edition, even a PDF instead of an HTML file.  The optical readers that digitize the original printed text can misread what they scan and you can get gobbledygook in the HTML version.  The HTML also often doesn’t preserve italics where the original print used it and you’d never know if you didn’t check the PDF or microfilm.

[But mostly, it was just fun—like playing the License Plate Game.]

Immigrant Imaginations 2

 

[As a continuation of the examination of how official U.S. immigration policy directly affects the arts, and theater in particular, I’m posting a second article from the “Immigrant Imaginations” issue of American Theatre.  This piece deals specifically with the vicissitudes of visas for visiting artists and troupes.  As you’ll read, the repercussions of this system effect not only the artists who want to come here to show their work, but the host companies that invite them, and how the vagaries built into the system can throw off a festival or a whole theater’s season,] 

“EXTREME VETTING AND EXTRAORDINARY ABILITY”
by Miriam Felton-Dansky

[This report ran in American Theatre, volume 41, issue 4 (Summer 2025). It was also posted on the AT website on 22 July 2025.]

The politics of international artist visas have never run smooth,
but they’ve become increasingly bumpy in a changing U.S.

Last year, before curator Elena Siyanko left her post as executive and artistic director of PS21 [“center for contemporary performance” in Chatham, New York], she programmed Hatched Ensemble, a piece by a South African dance group led by Mamela Nyamza [b. 1976, Cape Town, South Africa], to play the Hudson Valley venue this past spring. This year, in her new role directing a New York-based festival called “Down to Earth” [29 August-7 September 2025], she’s booked the Senegalese circus troupe SenCirk. International exchange is central to Siyanko’s curatorial mission. Yet, when she spoke for this article, she was unsure whether either ensemble would safely arrive in the U.S. Even if visa petitions and consular interviews were to go smoothly, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol could prevent them from entering the country. “I am terrified by what may happen,” she told American Theatre. (Crisis averted in both cases: Hatched Ensemble went up without incident, and SenCirk members all got visas in time for two outdoor appearances at Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park on Sept. 5, and two at LaGuardia Community College Performing Arts Center in Queens on Sept 3.)

Since President Trump’s second inauguration, international travel to the U.S. has become distinctly more dangerous. In an era of international student visa revocations, unlawful renditions of legal U.S. residents, a sweeping new travel ban, and terrifying uncertainty as ICE [United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement] ramps up detention and deportation actions, the U.S. and global artistic community has not been spared scrutiny and stress.

In January, lawyer Matthew Covey [b. ca. 1968], executive director of the nonprofit Tamizdat, which advocates for international artistic mobility and cultural exchange, emailed the organization’s constituents with an update about the potential impacts of Trump’s litany of executive orders. One of these, Covey wrote—with the title “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats”—was, in his words, “the one to watch.” Its broad application could lead to discrimination based on artistic expression as well as country of origin, for “visa applicants—especially those from Global Majority nations [a collective term for people of African, Asian, Indigenous, Latin American, and mixed-heritage backgrounds, who constitute the majority of the world’s population].”

[The link embedded above in the name Tamizdat leads to the organization’s website. It explains the organization’s mission and purpose, recounts its origin, and discusses its works. If, however, you click on “about” at the top or bottom of the page, you will also find an explanation of the organization’s name, about which I was curious. (It’s related to the Russian portmanteau word samizdat, if any reader remembers that from the Soviet days. The Tamizdat site explains that, too.)]

The U.S. performing arts face a range of dangerous unknowns, and for anyone concerned about the fate of international cultural exchange, the current state of the visa system sits at the heart of them. The problems, though newly dire, spring from a system that has long been unfriendly to international artists, particularly artists from the Global South [a broad, non-geographical term referring to countries, mostly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, that are often characterized by lower-income status, a shared history of colonialism, and current socio-economic challenges]. For many presenters and artists, the U.S. was already unpredictable and hostile terrain, characterized by unpredictable geopolitics, American prejudices, and enervating bureaucracy, even before the current administration took office.

Many presenters told American Theatre that this puts the U.S. out of step with the international community. In Canada, international performers must apply for an inexpensive entry visa, often with no additional work permit; in the U.K., visa requirements are conveyed in “plain English” so that applicants don’t need legal teams to parse them. Such distinctions hardly apply only in Anglophone countries. Producer Thomas O. Kriegsmann [b. ca. 1975] of ArKtype, which produces the recently reconfigured Under the Radar Festival, said that in touring choreographer nora chipaumire’s [b. 1965] ensemble to Brazil, he encountered little of the red tape and the expenses he’s seen in over two decades of working with the U.S. visa system.

The challenges apply to artists across the U.S., whether they’re attempting to navigate a long-term career or a short touring engagement. Individual artists have long navigated a costly, confusing, and prejudicial system here, even if they arrive on student visas and work steadily after graduation. Presenters at major organizations suggest that the American immigration system, while generally expensive and opaque, places particular burdens on artists from the Global South, especially those from Africa and the Middle East.

“It’s Islamophobia, it’s racism,” said Siyanko, who led PS21 from 2019 to 2025. Doreen Sayegh [b. 1988] of Pemberley Productions, which has managed major North American tours, from the immersive theatre piece The Jungle [created by Joe Murphy (b. ca. 1991) and Joe Robertson (b. ca. 1990) in 2017] to choreographer Matthew Bourne’s [b. 1960] Romeo and Juliet (ballet, débuted 2019), echoed the sentiment. “We do work harder around petitions where we have artists from certain countries,” she said, naming the Global South and the Middle East.

[Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, known as “The Two Joes,” were also the creators of Little Amal, the giant puppet character of The Walk in 2021. Little Amal was conceived as a character in The Jungle, and I blogged on her and The Walk on 7 October 2022.]

“We know the level of evidence is more than we would need for artists coming from the U.K., for example,” Kriegsmann concurred. Obstacles to artist mobility, he said, stem from a “lack of predictability” around how the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) processing center “is going to receive an application and what materials are going to satisfy their investigation. And of course, that varies wildly between white and Global Majority countries.”

For some presenters, these political pressures date back to changes in U.S. immigration policies post-Sept. 11. “It’s an ebb and flow,” said Lori N. Jones, director of programming and operations at Fairfield University’s Quick Center for the Arts [Fairfield, Connecticut], “and it tends to run in alignment with our government at the time.” 

Others point to more recent changes, noting that policies set during Trump’s first administration lingered, even if unofficially, into the Biden years. Kriegsmann recounted that in the 2025 Under the Radar Festival [4-24 January 2025], the January production of Iranian playwright Amir Reza Koohestani’s [b. 1978] Blind Runner [created 2023; at St. Ann’s Warehouse, 8-24 January 2025]—which included an Iranian cast and production team—encountered heightened scrutiny because the U.S. held outdated information about ensemble members’ military service in Iran. Eventually the company landed safely in New York, but without their stage manager.

This intense, country-specific vetting was expanded by the first Trump administration, the most infamous example of which was Trump’s 2017 ban on U.S. entry for residents of seven Muslim-majority countries (recently expanded to include a dozen more countries in the Global South). For Kriegsmann, the restrictions got to the point that “all of a sudden, we weren’t even able to consider artists from certain countries. That was unprecedented.”

[On 27 January 2017, Trump signed Executive Order 13769 banning entry to the U.S. by residents of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Legal challenges were instituted and succeeded, and Trump superseded the ban with revised orders to include additional countries with full or partial bans, which were also challenged in court. Ultimately, the Supreme Court affirmed the orders, which remained in effect until President Joe Biden issued a proclamation revoking the Trump travel bans on 20 January 2021.

[On 20 January 2025, newly reelected Trump signed Executive Order 14161 restricting entry to the U.S. from Afghanistan, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen, as well as partially restricting entry from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela. As of late August 2025, there are legal challenges pending against the implementation and enforcement of EO 14161, but none has curtailed its being enforced.]

These issues persisted even after Trump left office in 2021. Jay Wegman [b. 1964], executive director of NYU-Skirball, recalled that when Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen [b. 1980] brought a dance ensemble in March 2024, one Iranian-born ensemble member, despite holding a European passport, was denied entry to the U.S. while other company members were allowed through.

Last May, seeing widespread problems like these, Tamizdat submitted a public comment to the State Department protesting continued use of an intrusive questionnaire they described as “extreme vetting.” The questionnaire, Tamizdat wrote, “is predominantly used by non-immigrant visa units at U.S. consulates in Africa and the Middle East, where its use rarely correlates to legitimate security concerns. . . [.] The questions requiring applicants to provide all social media handles, phone numbers, and email addresses used during the last five years chill free speech.”

Global Politics and the Visa Pipeline

This “extreme vetting” form is just one of many types of evidence international artists must provide to enter the U.S.—evidence that ranges from proof that they don’t plan to overstay temporary visas to proof that their work is widely lauded or culturally unique. Current visa classifications, established in the Immigration Act of 1990, are not all created equal. There’s the O-1 [see “Immigrant Imaginations 1” (28 August 2025)], for artists of so-called “extraordinary ability”—a phrase so memorable it has inspired at least two plays, Saviana Stanescu’s [b. 1967; Bucharest, Romania] 2008 Aliens with Extraordinary Skills [premièred off-Broadway at the Julia Miles Theater (WP Theater, formerly the Women’s Project) on 22 September 2008] and Chloé Hung’s [b. ca. 1991] Alien of Extraordinary Ability [workshopped  at the Geffen Playhouse, Los Angeles, 2020], which had a reading at Playwrights’ Center in March. To obtain an O-1 visa (for individuals) or a P-1B (for groups [members of entertainment groups that are internationally recognized]), artists or their presenters must submit dossiers of reviews, awards, and other forms of recognition that will be legible to a USCIS employee unlikely to have a background in the performing arts.

Then there are P-3 visas for artistic groups showing “culturally unique” work. According to immigration lawyer Jonathan Ginsburg [b. 1951], who negotiated the implementation of the O and P visa system in the early 1990s, the P-3 created better access for artists without high-profile English-language press. “That was designed to ensure that we had broader cultural flows of art into the U.S., not just from Western Europe,” Ginsburg said.

Yet the designation “culturally unique” can be even more subjective than “extraordinary ability.” Case in point: In 2009, the USCIS’s Administrative Appeals Office (AAO) rejected an application by L.A.’s Skirball Cultural Center to bring the klezmer-Latin fusion band Orquesta Kef from Argentina, claiming that “fusion” was not considered “culturally unique.” Though their denial was reversed a month later, the performance was not rescheduled. In 2012, the USCIS and DHS [Department of Homeland Security] Administrative Appeals Office issued a new binding precedent decision addressing the term “culturally unique” and its significance in the adjudication of petitions for performing artists—good news, but a bit too late for that performing arts season.

Organized labor, too, has long played a role in the USCIS visa process. As far back as the early 1990s, Ginsburg represented the arts community in negotiations with unions seeking to limit visas as a means of protecting American jobs. Artists or their petitioners must typically conduct a “labor consultation” and obtain a letter from the relevant union (often Actors’ Equity) declaring non-objection to the artists’ appearance in the States. While the website “Artists from Abroad,” a commonly used resource guide for international artists, states that AEA charges $250 for such letters, Equity spokesperson David Levy [b. ca. 1978] told American Theatre that letters have been provided free of charge since at least 2017. Ralph Sevush [b. ca. 1962], attorney and Dramatists’ Guild executive director of business affairs, confirmed that the Guild considers O-1 applicants’ requests for non-objection letters, but declined to comment further on the process.

State Department data reflect enormous variations in results for artistic petitioners from countries in the Global South and Global North. In fiscal year 2023, the U.S. granted 2,747 O-1 visas to petitioners from Great Britain and Northern Ireland and 848 to those from France, while granting—for instance—just 139 O-1 visas to petitioners from Nigeria, eight to petitioners from Iraq, and two to petitioners from Syria.

[“Global North” is not a geographic term but a concept referring to wealthy, economically powerful countries, primarily in North America and Europe, along with others like Australia, Japan, and South Korea, which dominate global wealth and control manufacturing.]

These numbers don’t tell the whole story. For one thing, publicly available State Department data do not include refusal rates by country: We know that two Syrian petitions were granted, but not how many artists from Syria were invited by U.S.-based presenters to apply.

Even that number, though, would hide as much as it reveals. Since even the most globally ambitious presenters take shifting international dynamics into account when planning their seasons, anxiety about securing travel for artists from the Global South and Middle East can inhibit those invitations in the first place. Wegman admitted that he thinks twice before inviting artists from “any of those countries that were on Trump’s ‘Muslim no-fly list.’ Look at the way he’s involved himself at the Kennedy Center—it does play into my head,” he said. “There’s a very interesting company from Bolivia. Is it worth the trouble of bringing them, not knowing what the political impression of that country is going to be in a year?”

Big-picture electoral politics and financial forecasts can also play roles in which artists make it to U.S. stages. In previous decades, multiple presenters said, it was common to seek assistance from congressional reps when the visa process stalled at USCIS or in consular offices. Now that support is less forthcoming and less powerful, they say. Last year, when Jones sought to bring a Senegalese ensemble to perform at the Quick and struggled to book embassy interviews for the company members, Connecticut’s elected officials had limited capacity to help. “What once felt like an empowered opportunity for them to support what we wanted to accomplish, international exchange,” she said, has diminished in recent years. “It feels like their hands have been tied.”

Such assistance is called for because of the U.S.’s frequently opaque, highly expensive visa system. USCIS raises fees regularly, and the system’s complicated requirements compel many organizations to hire lawyers to put together their visa petitions, putting small nonprofits and individuals at a financial disadvantage. Wegman estimated that NYU-Skirball spends $10,000 on visa-related expenses for each international production they present. In 2024, a rate hike made increases ranging from $50 to over $500 a pop, depending on visa type, and extended response times for “premium processing”—often the only way to ensure petitions are reviewed in time for performance dates. Premium is exponentially pricier than standard processing, making it, Sayegh said, “a very high financial burden for having a diverse range of artists from less affluent countries.”

That’s not the only way money talks. As Sayegh pointed out, new tariff policies may affect artists from different countries in different and unequal ways, dependent on each country’s trade agreement with the U.S. Here too, money—or lack thereof—might determine the kinds of work that presenters invite in the first place, another indirect constraint on freedom of artistic expression.

Free speech constraints can emerge indirectly too. Kriegsmann noted that decreased funding for the arts can prompt an institution like Under the Radar to seek out private and corporate funds. With Trump’s executive orders prohibiting DEI and so-called “gender ideology,” corporations may be less willing to support challenging and subversive art, creating de facto limits on which art finds a platform. He added: “We’re not going to stop, but moving forward with challenging voices or artists that are voices of dissent, or thought that is adverse to conservative thinking, could potentially end the life of the festival.”

Facing the System Alone 

Meanwhile, artists who come to the U.S. to stay long-term face additional hurdles, ones not always understood by their American theatre colleagues and employers, which, like the obstacles touring artists encounter, often reflect U.S. positioning in the world at large. Argentine playwright Francisco Mendoza [see “Immigrant Imaginations 1”], who has been working in the U.S. for years, noted that immigrant artists face daily questions to which U.S. citizens and permanent residents may not be attuned.

“When I was on temporary visas, I often found myself being asked to take responsibility for the future,” Mendoza said. “Looking for jobs on my OPT or O-1, prospective employers would ask me: ‘What happens when your visa expires?’ I don’t know! I don’t know the future. I know that I’ll try my hardest to get a new visa; I know if I get this job, it will make that process easier. Would you ask any other candidates to guarantee you that they will never have to leave the job? Would you single any of them out for anything that could potentially impact their ability to stay? No, because it would be discrimination.”

[OPT refers to Optional Practical Training, a program for international students in the U.S. under an F-1 visa, a non-immigrant visa that allows foreign nationals to enter the United States as full-time students at academic institutions. It’s a form of temporary work authorization for F-1 visa students to gain practical experience directly related to their major area of study. Students must apply for OPT through USCIS.]

Immigrant artists are often asked to fight bureaucratic battles that can become deeply personal. Director Hamid Dehghani [Iranian; b. 1984] explained that, after receiving an MFA in directing from Northwestern University [Evanston, Illinois, a Chicago suburb], he navigated a seemingly endless series of hurdles to continue directing in Chicago: years of requesting letters of support and advance contracts to prove he had U.S.-based work and accepting underpaid jobs to prove he was in demand. “It’s something that becomes part of your identity, this visa,” he said.

Even if Equity letters are free of charge for artists touring to the U.S., the union has posed other hurdles to immigrant artists, such as those faced by Canadian actor Jessica Wu. After graduating from NYU with a degree in musical theatre, Wu embarked on a successful acting career that included appearances on Broadway and at the Kennedy Center—yet each time she received a job offer, Equity informed her that, despite holding a legal O-1 visa to work in the U.S., union bylaws prevented her from accepting Equity roles.

“I’m legally allowed to work these jobs,” Wu said, so “why is the union I’ve been paying into trying to tell me I can’t take these hard-earned jobs?” In 2021, following years of research and advocacy, Wu ran as a delegate to the AEA’s national convention, where she proposed a successful resolution to eliminate AEA policy language limiting participation by members who are not citizens or permanent residents.

Wu’s friends and colleagues were overjoyed at the news. “I’m AAPI [Asian American and Pacific Islanders], and because of the nature of a lot of the shows I did, I had a lot of friends who are from different countries, a lot on artist visas, who would go to an audition, get hired by casting just like anybody else, and then receive communications from the union saying: You can’t do it,” she said. A rejection like this can be terrifying. “If a union is telling you you’re not allowed to do this, there’s that threat of deportation always. It ended up forcing a lot of really amazing talented people out, denying them further career advancement, and putting an end to any intentions of immigration.”

All the presenters, producers, and artists who spoke to American Theatre agreed that the U.S. system is confusing, expensive, and dangerous. The confusion is no accident, said Mendoza.

“I think Americans often feel justified in discriminating against immigrants, or at least don’t feel compelled to stand up for us, because there’s this underlying assumption that no one forced us to be here—that there’s nothing inherently wrong with putting Americans first,” he said. “With which I would agree—except, of course, that America is the so-called ‘leader of the free world’ and puts itself first throughout the entire world. Immigrants often come here from countries whose political and economic systems have been manipulated and destabilized by American foreign policy. We are here precisely because America puts itself first.”

In putting “America first,” though, Siyanko reflected, the U.S. downplays the value of culture as a form of diplomacy or even soft power, the way many other countries do. The U.S. once did so as well: Think of the U.S.-sponsored Cold War-era tours by Alvin Ailey [1931-89; American dancer, director, choreographer, and activist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater] or exhibitions of Jackson Pollock [1912-56; American painter; major figure in the abstract expressionist movement; renowned for his “drip technique” of pouring or splashing paint onto a horizontal surface]; this was America attempting to demonstrate its democratic ideals by showcasing a Black choreographer’s dances and abstract artists’ freedom of expression abroad.

Stakes are high and implications are uncertain everywhere. While Siyanko worries for SenCirk, director Andrew Schneider [b. 1981] (best known for YOUARENOWHERE [see “‘Design & Tech: The Magic Of Design,’ Introduction & Article 1” (9 September 2021)] and the trilogy of mind-bending, tech-heavy works that followed it) said that he’s scheduled to perform a world-premiere commission at Jacob’s Pillow [the world premiere of HERE, 16-20 July 2025] this summer with two international collaborators whose travel to the U.S. could be denied at any point.

What can the American theatre community do? A baseline would be for American artists and producers to educate themselves about U.S. visa regulations so that immigrant artists don’t have to bear the burden of briefing every potential employer they meet. “We might not be powerful enough to change the visa system,” said Dehghani, “but for our American theatre co-workers to know what we are struggling with is so helpful.”

More broadly, standing up for artist visas means standing up for the art form itself. Said Sayegh, “Every artist that we are advocating for, we are starting with not just why this piece, why this artist is important, but why theatre is important.” 

Kriegsmann agreed, saying, “I truly believe the answer lies in being louder and more challenging. We have to prove the distinction of what the performing arts alone can do, we have to be brave about what the response is going to be—and we have to act collectively.”

[Miriam Felton-Dansky (she/her) is a theatre critic based at Bard College.]

Immigrant Imaginations 1

 

[Immigrants and immigration has become a top-of-mind subject in recent years, especially so at this moment in time.  When I saw that the Theatre Communications Group’s quarterly magazine American Theatre entitled its Summer 2025 issue “Immigrant Imaginations,” I thought it would be useful and interesting to repost some of the articles on the topic on my blog. 

[The first one that struck me is a conversation among six playwrights working in the U.S. whose origins are all beyond our borders.  In the published discussion, the writers touch on several aspects of their work that have been affected by their change of venue, so to speak.  Some of that has to do with culture, some with language, and some, I was curious to read, has to do with time.  I won’t try to explain that last one; I’ll let you read it for yourself.

[The article ran in volume 41, issue 4 (Summer 2025), of AT.  It was also posted on the journal’s website on 29 July 2025.] 

“HERE, THERE, AND EVERYWHERE:
AN IMMIGRANT THEATREMAKERS ROUNDTABLE”

by Lyndsey Bourne 

Immigrant theatremakers working in the U.S. reflect on what they write 
and who they’re writing for.

“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.”

That’s an Agnès Varda quote I love. I think about it often. These past few months, I’ve been thinking about landscape and place, and how they are present in a play. How, for example, Cuba feels so present in María Irene Fornés’s work.

[Agnès Varda (1928-2019) was a Belgian-born French film director, screenwriter, and photographer. The quotation is from her 2008 autobiographical documentary film The Beaches of Agnès (Les plages d'Agnès; Ciné-tamaris and Arte France Cinéma; distributed by Les Films du Losange).

[María Irene Fornés (1930-2018) was a Cuban-American playwright, theater director, and teacher who worked in Off-Broadway and experimental theater venues in the last four decades of the twentieth century. See a report on Fornés’s play Drowning in “Signature Plays” (3 June 2016).]  

I’m a playwright, a Canadian with an O-1 visa. I’ve been living in New York for nearly 15 years. Even when the plays I write are set in the U.S., somehow I’m always writing Canada.

[According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency within the Department of Homeland Security that administers lawful immigration and naturalization, the O-1 visa is for the nonimmigrant individual

who possesses extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics, or who has a demonstrated record of extraordinary achievement in the motion picture or television industry and have been recognized nationally or internationally for those achievements.

[There are two classifications of O-1 visas; the applicable one for this discussion is the second one (O-1B):

O-1A: individuals with an extraordinary ability in the sciences, education, business, or athletics (not including the arts, motion pictures or television industry)

O-1B: individuals with an extraordinary ability in the arts, or extraordinary achievement in motion picture or television industry

[There are also special visa classifications for those accompanying O-1 visa holders.  See the USCIS website for details.]

In early April over Zoom, I spoke with a group of international playwrights all living and making theatre in the U.S., writing stories and landscapes between places: Bazeed [aka: Mariam Bazeed; born ca. 1976 in Kuwait; relocated with their family to Eqypt during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990], an Egyptian playwright, poet, performer, and multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn; Francisco Mendoza, a playwright who was born in Argentina and partly raised in Brazil before moving to the U.S. a decade ago, now also based in Brooklyn; Stefani Kuo [b. 1995], a playwright and actor raised in both Hong Kong and Taiwan now based in New York City; Khristián Méndez Aguirre, a director and playwright from Guatemala now based in New York City and Austin; and Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke [b. ca. 1988 in Helsinki, Finland], a playwright and director (and sometimes actor) from Sri Lanka now based in New York City.

Together, we reflected on the ways our immigration status, cultural distance, and shifting audiences shape our work. It’s a precarious thing to be an immigrant artist—a tension too often made invisible. For immigrant and diasporic theatremakers working in the U.S., writing is often shaped not only by personal or political urgency, but by the realities of bureaucracy, translation, and institutional legibility.

Here we gathered to engage in questions of authenticity, audience, representation, and survival, from the politics of language and translation to the very real pressures of visa applications and institutional gatekeeping. We considered how lived experience shapes approaches to our artistry, and how for international artists working in America, storytelling itself becomes a site of both constraint and possibility. What happens when you write about a country you no longer live in? How do time, language, and place intervene in the storytelling?

Below are excerpts from our conversation, edited for concision and clarity.

LYNDSEY BOURNE: I want to start by asking about your writing practice. What is your process like these days? How are you thinking about your plays and where they come from? Who are they for?

FRANCISCO MENDOZA: I came to the U.S. as a student and then I transitioned to an O-1 visa. In some ways, the O-1 did shape the writing, because I was writing plays that were most easily going to lead to the kind of achievements that I needed to show for my visa. Then I got my green card, and my writing has gotten weirder and weirder. The further I walk away from the necessity of achievement, the more the plot doesn’t necessarily make logical sense. I am not as afraid to branch into a way of writing that maybe people won’t understand. And it’s okay if they don’t! I think the safety of not feeling like I have to perform has influenced, not necessarily the kind of stories I’m telling, but definitely how I’m telling them.

ARUN WELANDAWE-PREMATILLEKE: In Sri Lanka, I ran a theatre company [Mind Adventures Theatre Company in Colombo; an associate artistic director, 2011-17], and I worked with the same people from the time I was 18 until I was in my 30s. Moving somewhere else, of course, changes the way you work and what your concerns are. The day I got into NYU was the day everything shut down in the world [in 2020], so my first semester was in Sri Lanka over Zoom. But the writing changed when I was writing for that audience, even from home. At that time, we were heavily under the Mahinda Rajapaksa regime—essentially a dictatorship. My work had always been political, and we had always changed scripts to get through censor boards. I was very used to it, and I always felt like I was saying what I wanted to say. But the moment it had the safety of a different audience, the work changed—I became much more willing to point at the thing and name the thing in a very different way. If anything, I found a kind of political freedom.  

[Mahinda Rajapaksa (b. 1945) served as the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka from 2004 to 2005, then the sixth President of Sri Lanka from 2005 to 2015, and then PM again in 2018 and from 2019 to 2022. He was the Leader of the Opposition from 2002 to 2004 and 2018 to 2019, and the Minister of Finance from 2005 to 2015 and 2019 to 2021.

[When Rajapaksa was forced from office in 2022, he launched what amounted to an attempted coup, but ended up signing a letter of resignation. During his political career, he’s been accused of war crimes during the last years of the Sri Lankan civil war (1983-2009) as well as other criminal accusations including human rights violations during his presidency, corruption, and for instigating violence on anti-government protestors during the failed 2022 coup. As of 2023, he’s been sanctioned by Canada for human rights violations.]

STEFANI KUO: I write a lot about Hong Kong and Taiwan, especially Hong Kong. I remember going through a phase where I was reading about all these theatres and their mission statements, which all have the word “American” or “America” in it. So even if I’m writing about an international thing in Hong Kong, it still has to relate back to America. Sometimes the actors I work with in the U.S., even if they have heritage from where I’m from, don’t understand how to relate to my work, even if they speak the language or understand the culture from their grandparents or parents. That was shocking to me; I thought we were all in the same box. But there’s a gap because of where I grew up versus where they grew up.

That gap really interests me—the shared feeling of “I’m not from here.” It leads to my next question: A lot of the plays getting produced in the U.S. telling stories that represent other countries and other cultures are written by second- or third-generation Americans, who are often writing about the experiences of their own parents or grandparents. There are obvious reasons for this: Bureaucracy, gatekeeping, and systemic barriers make it much harder for immigrant artists to break through. As we’ve been saying, there are also the ways in which we have to tailor our writing to an American audience. Is this something you think about? How is this sitting with you?

KHRISTIÁN MÉNDEZ AGUIRRE: Right now, I’m trying to find Guatemalan actors and a director for a reading I’m doing, and you can imagine what that process is like. The assumption is that I have something in common with someone who is Guatemalan but perhaps grew up in the U.S. and is first-generation Guatemalan American. That’s an assumption that makes both of us legible to the artistic leadership of those institutions and how they make us legible to their audiences, because the question always is: Will the audience get it? Will the audience come? 

FRANCISCO: I think Americans are always more comfortable seeing immigration as a cultural issue rather than a legal one, because it demands less work to make space for a cultural experience than for a legal reality. I have been here 10 years and I’ve seen more and more plays about international experiences, and even about immigration, getting produced. Yes, the vast majority of those plays have been written by Americans, even if they come from families who were not originally American. So clearly the appetite for the experience is there. The barriers that prevent immigrants from getting to write and direct their own experiences on American stages are also in place. 

BAZEED: There is a divide that I feel as someone who very much still identifies as “fresh off the boat.” I am not from America. I am not of America. I just live here—and that has meaning in my life. There’s a sense of belonging that isn’t here. I’ve lived in New York since January 2002, so it is the place where I have spent most of my life. At this point, English is more accessible to me than Arabic. It comes easier because I use it every day. But I was born into a condition of diaspora. I was born in the Gulf. I was there for 14 years. Egypt is where I have spent the least amount of time in my life.

All of those things funnel me into a certain perspective and positionality. I’ve worked with first-generation Arab Americans and we’re different—we’re trying to tell the story of these places differently. In some ways, their access to their culture has been mitigated. There’s a local access that happens in the family home, or you may have it in the community around you, but otherwise, in most American immigrant households, it’s these tiny nuclear families that are still getting access to the stories of their cultures through imperialism and through American hegemony and American media. So the version of life that they’re often talking about when they talk about their cultures is a little bit Orientalized, and you can see that filter; mine is becoming more Orientalized as I have more distance from my culture. I can’t make a contemporary reference or joke if my entire life depended on it. For me to name a cultural meme from Egypt that’s big right now? I wouldn’t know. I’m not there. 

[I can’t be certain if Bazeed chose the word ‘Orientalize’ for the overtones expressed by Edward Said (1935-2003; Palestinian-American academic, literary critic, and political activist) in his 1978 book Orientalism (Pantheon Books), but it sounds as if they did. In Said’s terms, the word means to represent or portray cultures of the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa in a stereotyped way that emphasizes their exoticism and otherness, often reinforcing colonialist views of Western superiority.]

I would love to talk a little more about something that you just brought up, Bazeed, which is how time shifts your relationship to your own culture and the ways that you are writing about culture and place.

STEFANI: I write a lot about Hong Kong, but I didn’t used to. I remember in 2019, when the Hong Kong protests [15 March 2019-30 June 2020] started, a friend was like, “Have you written a play about it?” Which I was totally taken aback by, but then this friend said, “Well, you know, if you don’t write it, some British guy who’s never been to Hong Kong is going to write it.” So I wrote a play, and in the play Trump is mentioned because he was president back then. Because of that, because American politicians are mentioned, the play is relevant to America. There’s a relatability thing that I find to be very American. People often ask, “Would you do this play in Hong Kong?” And the thing is, if this play was done in Hong Kong, it would be done entirely in Cantonese. It would be a different play. People think because it’s multilingual, it’s globally applicable. That’s not true. If you put it in another place, it will become a different play. It has to.

FRANCISCO: I often feel like I’m existing in a world that asks me to be sure of who I am. My bio starts with my markers, and I am those markers: I am this sexuality and this race and this nationality, and this is what I’m bringing into the rehearsal room. I have a connection to Argentina, of course, but, as Bazeed was saying, ask me to pull up a meme and I won’t get it. I think the natural instinct is to feel shame about it, like I’m an imposter, and I feel like that shame has the potential to bring in a harshness about my identity—that I have to defend it. So I actively have to build for myself a flexibility that maybe the industry itself won’t necessarily permit. Maybe my experience and my nationality and my passport don’t endow me with an automatic authority to speak on everything that relates to my identity. I don’t want that for myself. There would have been a time where I would’ve felt ashamed of the distance that I’m acquiring from the culture that spawned me. But I don’t live there; I live here. There’s no shame about that. That’s just what it is. 

ARUN: A lot of the stuff that I’ve written is a period piece, now that Sri Lanka has a democratically elected, left-leaning socialist government. An extraordinary thing has happened in our lifetime, and only a few months ago. Finally! So I’m very conscious of the idea of becoming a diaspora writer who is constantly trapped in a vision of a country that you left rather than what that country is now. I’ve had moments back home where we thought we were in a better place, and the work did become sort of irrelevant, and then, five years later, it became relevant again. It is constantly moving, and your work is constantly shifting to both place and time. I think you can’t really escape that.

[Anura Kumara Dissanayake (b. 1968) was inaugurated on 23 September 2024 as the tenth President of Sri Lanka. He is the leader of the National People’s Power, a coalition of left-wing and progressive parties. Dissanayake, however, is, himself, a Marxist.]

KHRISTIÁN: I do think we have this capacity or this privilege or curse of trying to make sense of a thing without having to live it every day by virtue of being outsiders. Some of the environmental issues that are now happening in the U.S. have happened in my country for a long time. My family hasn’t had steady water in northern Guatemala City for over 10 years. I’m able to be here in the U.S. and take a break from not having steady water and write a play about it, which is for sure privilege. It’s also a way to reflect things back to these communities that we come from, and there’s pride in this. The NGO that I was working with to write my latest play, they were like, “Oh my God, you’re in New York, and you want to write a play about the forest fires in Guatemala?” It puts this expectation on the work. I just want to name that transnational tension and privilege and joy too, because it’s kind of cool that the work also gets to serve that.

[Guatemala experienced an alarming number of forest fires in April 2024 and a "state of calamity" was declared. By May, when the start of the rainy season extinguished most of the fires, over 157.5 square miles of land were affected.]

I’m thinking more lately about the use of theatre and performance in terms of writing place, and how that sense of place lives spatially in theatre; it unfolds and exists physically and in real time. How do you write non-American places into American theatre spaces, knowing that translation or mistranslation—cultural, linguistic, temporal—is inevitable?

STEFANI: When I picture plays in my head, it’s just a vacuum. And then I see things, and those things are usually influenced by where I’ve been. So a lot of plays are set in Hong Kong or Taiwan. They are murky, specific places, but a lot of it is influenced by how time is working with the landscape. I don’t really write linear plays, and I think that’s because I grew up watching and reading so much Taiwanese and Chinese stuff that is very nonlinear, very circular. I was reading this book about the colonization of time that talks a lot about how we think of colonialism as mostly a spatial thing. But it’s also a time thing. It’s not just about land; it’s also about how we perceive and experience time. Even the 24-hour clock or the calendar year are very superimposed Western things. That’s not to say it’s American. But I often feel that tension in how I think about storytelling relative to being in America; it almost feels like I’m trying to bring in a different experience of time into how we experience time in the U.S.

BAZEED: Surveillance is in almost every conversation I have these days. I think being strategic is part of this moment. Right now, I’m interested in erasure and allegory as form. What gets left out becomes part of the argument, not just the aesthetic. I think about Sheikh Imam’s protest songs from Egypt with all these veiled allegories like “They’re taking the milk from the cow” to talk about how the British were stealing our resources.

[Sheikk Imam, aka: El Sheikh Emam (1918-95) was a famous Egyptian composer and singer, known for his political songs in favor of the poor and the working classes. Britain controlled Egypt in one form or another from 1882 until 1956.]

STEFANI: I don’t identify as Asian American. I feel like I’m an Asian in America, but I didn’t grow up here. I have a different experience with language and storytelling. I find it really fascinating that so many playwrights try to use English in place of their native language, because I’m not interested in doing that at all. If the play is in Cantonese, I will be writing in Cantonese, or if the play is in Cantonese and English, then we’ll do half-and-half and you can read subtitles. I understand why people use English for access, but for me it feels like hearing the language is a huge part of experiencing the culture—just the environment of being in that language, what it brings out in people. Because people behave differently when they speak different languages.

ARUN: For me, the hardest thing about language is, like, a Sri Lankan sentence in English sort of has too many words in it for an American mouth. There’s a process I can see of an American actor getting used to it and finding their way into it, which is lovely. But the moment there’s a person who’s grown up in Sri Lanka in the room, and they read the lines—it’s like, Boom! Oh, right, I’ve forgotten what the ease was like.

FRANCISCO: Translation is not just about finding equivalents, but rather thinking, approaching a view of the world from a different perspective. Right? With theatre, in some ways it’s always a translation. I wrote something, and the people who are going to put it up will translate it to that time, to that moment, to who they are, to the resources that they have at hand, to the audience that they’re playing to. When we make a play from one country in another country—even a production that’s been transferred—none of us can have the same experience. There isn’t a complete encapsulation of the theatrical experience that can survive place and time. It’s just going to be completely different.

[Lyndsey Bourne is a Canadian writer, teacher, and doula (born and raised in North Vancouver and Penticton, British Columbia, in Canada’s far west) working with The Doula Project. Her plays include The Second Body (2020), Mabel’s Mine (2025), and I Was Unbecoming Then (2020).  She teaches playwriting at Playwrights Horizons Theater School (New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts).