Changing the Narrative
José Casas’s plays for healing and growth
—By Mallory Edgell
Live theater is staggeringly intimate. A shared experience of something often profound, sometimes humorous, but always affecting. Each person leaves a performance with different takeaways, changed by something witnessed in a crowd. While they may not know much about each other, that crowd is forever bonded by their shared experience.
A Zoom room on the other hand, now that’s a completely different experience.
With the click of my mouse, I entered a Zoom meeting with José Casas, assistant professor of playwriting in the Department of Theater & Drama. With his play, somebody’s children, gracing the U-M stage this month, I sought to discover how Casas has managed to guide his decades-long career, along with his students, through the struggles and revelations brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic.
From stages to screens
The online world is defined by common knowledge, where anyone can find facts about others. You can see what others eat for breakfast, where they vacationed last summer, and find out about their favorite musician. But while you may feel like you know everything about a person, their online presence only provides a surface-level understanding. Theater, on the other hand, is a place of exploration. To delve deeply into topics, to empathize with others, and to look at the world a little differently. Theater’s space of deep emotional connection seems at odds with online’s falsified version of human connection. In a normal year, Zoom would be the nemesis of the theater industry. Yet, in the face of mass unemployment of artists due to Covid-19, the industry has adapted. Since March of 2020, Zoom plays, online operas, and recorded performances have become reality for theater professionals. A far cry from the shared connections that led many to fall in love with theater in the first place.
The Department of Theater & Drama has dealt with these challenges, giving students and the Ann Arbor community opportunities for artistic engagement through the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance’s first ever fully-online season. While the season was successful, there has been much pressure within the department to return to traditional performances. Luckily SMTD’s 2021-2022 season once again features live audiences (with masking and vaccination policies set in place). But from Casas’s perspective, this pressure to return to the theater may do more harm than good. Recognizing the toll this pandemic has taken on the mental health of artists, and especially students, Casas says, “…we’re still struggling with it.”
While many think rushing back to “normal” life would be beneficial, Casas emphasizes the pressure this places on his students. Rushing back to fully in-person activities has been overwhelming and troubling for some. He wonders, “How do we create art and still struggle with our mental health and our self care issues? I mean that’s been the biggest issue: how to be creative during this real surreal time, and when we go out, how is that going to affect our art?”
The creation of art has most certainly been altered throughout the course of this pandemic, but it remains to be seen how the stories we tell through art will change when we emerge. Rather than exploiting the trauma of this pandemic, Casas hopes that writers use the issues we are facing now to remind themselves of the other struggles in their community that matter. However, he still worries that, “there’s gonna be a lot of people who capitalize on Covid and create art because, like oh, people are going to want to see the Covid movie or the Covid play.”
Casas’s own integrity when it comes to storytelling is unlikely to falter however.
Writing from the heart
Casas describes himself as a politically minded writer. Rather than coming up with stories, he finds a real issue and tries to distill it to something that allows people to deepen their understanding. “If there’s an issue that really kind of pisses me off and I’m passionate about that’s where I start.”
His 2009 play, somebody’s children, is a story of families living below the poverty line in Anaheim, California. While the characters grapple with everyday struggles and dreams in an environment with little hope, the fireworks from Disneyland loom in shimmering bursts over the motel they call home.
somebody’s children almost didn’t make it off the page. Without research, Casas admitted that his early drafts of somebody’s children were not very good. He fell into stereotypes of homelessness, and couldn’t find the heart of the story. He had to set it aside, and wait until it felt right to come back to it. But as he does with everything he is passionate about, he knew he wouldn’t give up. His solution for writer’s block is simply time away.
So he waited until he found something that felt right. That happened at last when a colleague sent him an article about homeless youth in Disneyland. When he read the story he realized the play had to come from the perspective of the kids. Once he had an entry point, the next step was to talk to these people. “I went and did interviews with people who work with the kids. They said these kids are not going to talk to you because they’re so ashamed of their lives that they try to hide it as much as possible. Most of the kids at their schools don’t know that they’re homeless because they work that hard at shielding that side of themselves from the real world.” Casas works to build trusting relationships with his subjects, and then conducts interviews if they are comfortable. The insight gained through interviews with these kids provides the heart of the play, giving it a raw, honest, and heartbreaking emotional center.
In order to translate the emotions of these young characters onto the page, Casas fell into the use of slam poetry. Just as musicals use songs to express thoughts when words aren’t enough, slam poetry to Casas is a form of release. Young people don’t often have the words to express what they are feeling, or in the case of the children in Anaheim, they simply refuse out of shame to put their experiences into words. The slam poetry in somebody’s children allows the kids to speak unrestrained. “I discovered that what I was writing was very lyrically poetic, and not just real world wise. It seemed to fit this story and these characters.”
The power of performance
Growing up, Casas had never thought to pursue theater; rather he had hopes of studying politics and going to law school. But while studying at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he was required to attend a performance of Death of a Salesman. The experience of that classic American play was Casas’s defining moment: the moment he understood how the arts help communities heal and come together in a very different way than the field of law.
“I went the first night, then I went to the second. I went to all four nights of the screening and you know it just hit me hard.” Casas finally understood the sense of belonging theater can provide for those often considered outsiders, “ You know my dad isn’t a 67-year-old Jewish traveling salesman in Brooklyn in the 40s. My dad came here undocumented. He snuck in here five times before I finally got here. He was picking strawberries, cherries, fruits, and vegetables in the fields and working shitty jobs. But I’m like, my dad is Willy Loman [the protagonist of the play]. You know he’s going through that same thing, that same struggle, trying to achieve this dream that always seems out of reach.”
Now, two theater degrees later, Casas’s own play will be performed at the University of Michigan.
First performed over a decade ago, somebody’s children is surprisingly relevant to today. With the pandemic emphasizing the financial disparity between communities, the issue of homelessness has grown to be perhaps an even greater part of the common consciousness in the time since the play was written. And so, while Anaheim is more than a stone’s throw away from Ann Arbor, the story doesn’t feel distant.
There is a purpose to doing this play here and now. “I want to remind people that homelessness still is a really big problem.… One of the bad parts is how it affects kids. All these kids are struggling with it. Their families are struggling with it. But you know, we are all one inch away from being homeless. As everyday people we are closer to understanding what it means to be homeless than we are to what it means to be a billionaire.”
To Casas, nothing beats seeing his work onstage, or rather getting to see the audience’s reaction to his work onstage. “I spend a lot of time looking at the audience. It’s always cool seeing your work on stage, because as writers you know if you get a play published that’s great, but if it’s never done then it’s a defeat. Playwrights don’t write for a play to be read, they write plays to get produced.”
SMTD’s production of somebody’s children ran from March 31-April 10, 2022. This was the first time Casas has ever seen a full-scale production of his play. It just so happens that this world-premiere production was performed in a theater named after U-M alum Arthur Miller: the very playwright of Death of A Salesman.
Feature Photo Credit: SMTD’s production of somebody’s children in the Arthur Miller Theatre, By Jack Doyle