All Around Us

We met last weekend for the first time to work on INTERSTATE - just seven weeks to the premiere!

Donning double masks, working around a sketchy piano in an airy space on a frigid Ohio day, we dug into Kamala’s setting of our words, and into the difficulty of the story we are trying to tell.

It was an exhilarating day. And it was really, really hard.

Jenny plays a woman who’s in jail for murder, a prostitute who kills a violent client. I play her childhood friend. INTERSTATE is about what pieces of their shared life they do and do not remember.

Have you ever brought up a memory only to be met with, “I don’t remember?”

Memory of trauma is a funny thing. It’s on everybody’s front page right now, with polarized arguments about the pandemic, the election, and more. In the short days since that rehearsal, we watched as Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez went on Instagram live to talk about the January 6 assault on the Capitol, and in that context to talk about her experience as a survivor of sexual assault. We watched people line up on social media to say she was exaggerating, or lying. We watched some of her colleagues say it was time to move on.

We are women born into 20th century America. We are connected to people who have perpetrated assault as well as to people who have borne it. We know intimately the human propensity to turn away from the worst parts of our shared story. We both know all parts of that story: the assault, the long term fear and vigilance that follows, and the responses to your attempts to reach out.

You want attention. Maybe it wasn’t really that bad. Are you sure?

We know that story and so do you. And we know the urging, even from people that love us. Especially from them.

Isn’t it time to move on? What does it help you to be so angry, to look backward?

Tomorrow is Super Bowl Sunday. It’s one of the most significant human trafficking events in the country every year. Pass the nachos.

Does that seem too serious to you? Too negative?

What if we all decided to look at our shared pain, and at our shared responsibility, instead of turning away? What if we asked to hear more instead of wondering why the person before us in pain was being so weak?

We started writing INTERSTATE with an eye toward opening up some of these questions. But look, they are open all around us.