Joyelle McSweeney Talks About Her Farce Form

Our pal Joyelle McSweeney, who "writes in all the genres," talks to Sarah Carson at Banango Lit, for a new series called “How Did You Do That?!” As you know, "[i]n 2013, McSweeney’s experimental play Dead Youth, or, the Leaks was awarded the inaugural Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Playwrights, which honors 'exploratory approaches and an innovative spirit in writing for performance.' As if winning such a title wasn’t enough, McSweeney wrote the play in just a few weeks, a feat deserving of a 'How did you do that?!' if there ever was one." An excerpt from the interview:

Sarah Carson: What was the impetus for this play? What made you choose this content matter + this form for communicating it?

Joyelle McSweeney: This play germinated from learning that Abduwali Muse – the teenage Somali ‘pirate’ who was tried in NYC a few years back—is imprisoned in a federal facility in Terre Haute, Indiana—the state where I live, the Rust Belt state whose name vaguely refers to a genocided people. That’s how misery moves around the globe and always finds its Target ™. Like many citizens of the Internet, I remember Muse for the movie-star grin he flashed at the cameras upon arrival at trial in New York. The charisma of that moment floods all through this play. I wrote it as a spell for his protection and an effort at occult communication.

In my play, a benevolent Julian Assange has hijacked a containership full of Dead Youth, a plural character made up of (un-)dead, saucy, track-suited teens who have died all over the planet from contact with violence: gang warfare, pharmaceutical industry predation, environmental toxicity, drones, suicide, johns, etc. He is steering them to his childhood home Magnetic Island where he will reboot them/upload them to the Internet. Muse and a female Saint-Exupéry (representing The Law) board the ship and attempt to wrest control from Assange. Their fortunes are all controlled by a female deity played Henrietta Lacks, the African-American cancer patient whose cells, harvested without her consent, at Johns Hopkins in 1951, have led to many important medical (and consumerist) discoveries and are used in research settings all over the globe.

This may sound like heavy stuff, but it’s actually a farce, given the many political figures who collide in this inside-out Tempest. There are many press conferences, song and dance numbers, show trials, etc, and lots of campy banter. The farce form makes your belly shake and then sticks you with its blade. Yikes!

Read the full interview here. And speaking of plays by Joyelle McSweeney, you can also find the starting sequence from her new opera-in-progress, Pistorius Rex, just up at The White Review.