EM Lewis’ work has been produced around the country. She is the winner of the 2009 Harold and Mimi Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award for her play SONG OF EXTINCTION and of the 2008 Primus Prize for an emerging female theater artist for her play HEADS—both awarded by the American Theater Critics Association. She has also recently received a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University for the 2010-2011 school year. SONG OF EXTINCTION premiered in fall 2008, produced by Moving Arts through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission”s Winter Partnership Program at [Inside] the Ford. The play—which explores a biology teacher’s struggle to help a troubled student and deal with his own history as a survivor of the Cambodian genocide—won the $25,000 Harold and Mimi Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award from the American Theater Critics Association, the EcoDrama Playwrights Festival, the Ashland New Plays Festival and the 2008 Ted Schmitt Award for the world premiere of an outstanding new play from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle. It was named Production of the Year at the LA Weekly Awards, and actor Darrell Kunitomi won best lead actor for his portrayal of the main character. Before its Los Angeles production, the play was a finalist for the 2008 Sundance Theater Lab and HotCity Theater’s Greenhouse Festival. It was also featured in Atlantic Theater’s 2008 Next Page reading series, NYU's hotINK International Festival of New Plays and the Blank Theater’s Living Room Series. In 2007, Lewis was selected as one of twelve Los Angeles theater artists to watch by LA Stage Magazine as two of her full-length plays received their world premieres. HEADS—a hostage drama set against the war in Iraq—played at the Blank Theater in Los Angeles in August/September 2007. It was Critics’ Pick in the LA Times, and they named it one of the top ten productions of 2007 at the end of the year. Deborah Klugman, in LA Weekly, said about the play that “...the question of who we are beneath our posturing lands with such force, it jangles the nerves long after the play has ended.” Edward Albee called the play “provocative and wonderfully threatening” when it was read at the Great Plains Theater Conference. INFINITE BLACK SUITCASE—a large ensemble piece about grief and survival, set in rural Oregon—premiered at the Lillian Theater, put up by TheSpyAnts, in April/May 2007. After seeing that production, Variety’s Julio Martinez said that “Lewis gives evidence of being a significant talent to watch.” Also in 2007, Lewis won Coe College’s New Works for the Stage Competition for HEADS, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s IN10 Competition (honoring short plays that create strong roles for young women) for THE EDGE OF ROSS ISLAND. Lewis is a writer-in-residence at Moving Arts Theatre Company, and a member of the Dramatists Guild, the International Centre for Women Playwrights and the Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights. She lives in Santa Monica, California now—but she is originally from Oregon

Check out EM’s play,
available from Samuel French
Song of Extinction

Q & A with EM Lewis

Q: Your play SONG OF EXTINCTION has been honored with a number of prestigious awards, including winning first place at the EcoDrama Playwrights Contest. Did you set out to write a piece relevant to ecological awareness? Or did that evolve as you wrote the play?

It occurred to me one day—I remember exactly where I was standing—that I ought to write a play about science. And all of the characters in SONG OF EXTINCTION tumbled into my head. Max, the musically gifted, troubled boy, and Lily, his much-loved mother, who writes science textbooks. His father, Ellery, a biologist engaged in an impossible war against the extinction of a species of bug no one else cares about. And Khim Phan, Max’s biology teacher, a survivor of Cambodia’s killing fields, who reaches out to try to help Max. It took me a good while (and lots of work, and lots of research) to write the play, and to see where it wanted to take me—but the genesis was a single moment’s notion.

So I didn’t plan to write a play about ecological awareness. But at the same time, I don’t think you can write anything that isn't inside you. I grew up on a small farm in Oregon, playing outside, picking strawberries, going fishing with my Dad, raising chickens and climbing trees. My brother and I waded in the creek, and took walks in the woods with my grandparents. All winter, we ate fruit and vegetables from the garden that my Mom had put up. We didn’t have a lot, but we had everything green and growing and wonderful. And I still think that’s the luckiest thing ever.

The world is important to me. And by the world, I mean the natural bits—the water and the woods. They are beautiful and precious and worth saving. I’d hate to be a kid growing up in a world without them.

Q: In the past few years, you have quickly gathered a number of accolades and opportunities. To what do you attribute this rapid succession of happy surprises?

I don’t know what to attribute it to! I’m very lucky, and I know it. I’m very grateful.

I do know that it has helped me enormously to be part of a rigorous playwriting workshop (Lee Wochner’s “Words That Speak” workshop, specifically). It’s important to me to have a place to share my work on a regular basis, where I will be both challenged and supported. I’ve also found a theater company (Moving Arts) and a theater community (Los Angeles) that have been a wonderful home base for me from which to work. All three of my full-length plays—INFINITE BLACK SUITCASE, HEADS, and SONG OF EXTINCTION have premiered in Los Angeles. It’s been a great place to learn to write and connect with passionate, talented theater artists who want to do new work for the stage.

Once I began writing plays in earnest—around 2004, I guess—I started to look for opportunities to connect with other playwrights and theater artists, here and elsewhere, and I think that's helped me, too. I’ve attended a number of conferences and festivals, including the Last Frontier Theater Conference in Alaska and the Great Plains Theater Conference in Omaha. And I belong to several playwrights groups via the internet—the International Center for Women Playwrights and the Playwrights Binge List (which supports the process of submitting your work). It’s good to see what other people are working on, and to learn from people who are better than you are, and to begin to see the larger context in which we’re telling our stories.

Q: Your work often deals with larger themes, such as war or the environment, all while focusing tightly on character relationships that are very identifiable. Given that you are working on multiple levels in this way, does your method of writing change from play to play? For example, do you always start with a particular element (characters, plot, concept, etc.), or does it vary?

I always start out with voices—characters talking in my head—and with something that is unfathomable to me, which I cannot understand or cannot accept. It's hard to explain. I never think about concept. I often think about need and conflict. I work very hard on my plays, but there are bits that come to me like magic. Both mystery and manners, as Flannery O’Connor puts it. How wonderful that is! I’m lucky I get to do this.

Q: When and/or how did you know that you wanted to create play?

I’ve written ever since I can remember. Soppy poetry, at first, and odd little short stories. I needed to write, and I found writing freeing, and I kept doing it. But I didnv’t write plays until after college, and after grad school. I took a class in my old graduate program (through the wonders of tuition remission, part of my benefits package), after going to work on staff at USC. The program is multidisciplinary, but it was the playwriting class that had seats open, so I took that. And everything fell into place. It was a great class—two weeks intensive with Paul Zindel, then the rest of the term with Lee Wochner. Everything that had been wrong with my fiction was right with my playwriting. Everything felt right, anyway. I’ve written almost nothing but plays since then. (I still write the occasional soppy poem, but I almost never foist them upon people.)

Q: What inspires you to take on a new project?

On a fundamental level, I guess it’s a need to understand something that I find unfathomable. That’s what's underneath. But up on the surface level, I’m a geeky girl who loves research and is fascinated by the wonders of the world around her. Being an English major was grand, but being a playwright is better—I get to research whatever I want, not just what someone assigns me. So I follow my plays and I follow my whims, and I read a lot—mostly nonfiction, many memoirs about people doing wonderful, terrible, interesting things. And I scribble constantly. And I wait for my need to fall into the proper crucible in which a play might happen. My new play, which I’ll be working on during my Hodder Fellowship, is set in Antarctica, and I'm having a great time with that so far...

Q: Have you ever come across a production that made you see one of your plays in a new or unexpected way?

I went to almost every performance of my play HEADS when it was produced at the Blank Theater in Los Angeles. It’s a wonder I didn’t give the poor actors a complex! But somehow I really, really needed to hear whatever I was trying to tell myself in that play. SONG OF EXTINCTION was more difficult for me to watch. I can’t tell you why. But on our last weekend, we put together a panel discussion, and the panel was made up of survivors of the Killing Fields, which my play references. There is a large Cambodian community in Long Beach, and they’d driven up to Los Angeles that day to see my play and to tell their stories. I listened to my play with them. And then I listened to them—talking about what they’d lived through, and what they’d lost. I couldn’t stop weeping. I felt humbled by their honesty and their generosity. And I felt keenly my responsibility. And I hoped I hadn’t got it too far wrong.

(Photo courtesy of the author)