DANIEL INTERVIEWS STEPHANIE AND TONY ABOUT #HAOLEBOYFRIEND
A Play in One Act
CHARACTERS
STEPHANIE KEIKO KONG
TONY PISCULLI
DANIEL AKIYAMA
Scene: Zoom
A backwards slash “/” indicates overlapping dialogue
DANIEL: Why do you write plays?
(A pause.)
STEPHANIE: Jesus, let us warm up, Daniel. Can we start with an existential conversation? Absolutely.
One of the reasons—the political reason why I would write anything ever—is because the voices of my people—I would feel that I am failing the onus placed upon me by the great privilege of my lineage. I have the privilege of formal education, and enough free time and mental and emotional resources to put towards telling the stories that I wish I could have grown up with. That’s the zoomed-out reason.
The personal reason that is much less socially anchored, but also a lot more selfish, is Tony is hilarious. He’s one of my favorite collaborators. He’s very, very smart. He is a cheeky bitch. And the most fun that I get to have with my best friend is when we are together working on something almost like a puzzle. But because we are theatre artists, our favorite kinds of puzzles are the puzzles of human experience. Relationships, social dilemmas, awkwardness at a party, those kinds of things. And the ways that people get in and out of those situations are a favorite pastime of mine to explore, especially in collaboration with somebody who I like and admire. And those don’t always go together. You can leave that part out of the printed interview—
TONY: Leave it in.
DANIEL: Tony, how about you?
TONY: I’m glad I didn’t go first now because I was going to say something shallow and silly and not at all related to that.
I will say: the first part of what Stephanie said, the importance of telling stories for a community? That’s why I’m a board member of Kumu Kahua. I think it’s a really important institution. And I got involved when the theatre was struggling. They had announced that they were closing their doors. And that’s when I got involved in the board. This theatre is too important. It cannot close.
STEPHANIE: Orient us in time, though.
TONY: Oh, that was ten years ago.
I have to write. I’ve been writing for a long, long time. I write much better with Stephanie, for all the reasons that she said. I mean, she’s smart, and a fantastic collaborator. And we have a lot of fun working on these plays together. This is the first play we ever wrote together actually, #haoleboyfriend, and the second one to be produced.
As far as writing goes, I’ve written a lot. I’ve written in every medium there is. I’ve written interactive fiction. I’ve written a web series and other plays, a novel, articles, short stories have been published. And this, of anything I’ve ever written, is the most happy product.
STEPHANIE: Aww.
DANIEL: So now, this play. Where did it come from? Does its origin story come from one of you, or from both of you together...?
STEPHANIE: I don’t remember the specific origin story. So I may fictionalize this a bit—Tony, please, of course, correct me—but the way that I tell myself the story in my heart is that I was probably lamenting to Tony about how— (Pidgin:) —you know, why I no can find stories (standard English:) of my people, of Pidgin culture, that aren’t empty, irritatingly self-referential and upsettingly nostalgic in the kind of stomach-turning, sepia-toned, moist way, i.e., (Pidgin:) “Ho, you know, nowadays not like before.” (standard English:) I can’t do that.
I grew up in a family—I am still growing up in a family—of human beings that refer to themselves as post-grad mokes. So we do things like debate the social architecture of public school in Hawai‘i post-COVID-19 pandemic while we are eating furikake popcorn and Kung Fu Panda is on in the background, and we’ll just like, throw in some Rap Reiplinger quotes. That’s having dinner on Saturday nights with my parents and grandparents. And we do not talk about how Pidgin is. We don’t talk about how we’re talking about stuff. It’s just like, you know, (Pidgin:) “This babooze, you know, what is Tier Five? I don’t know what Tier Five is. You know what it is? It is mismanagement of pandemic related resources because—” (standard English:) and then they’ll just go on...
TONY: I would say that Stephanie’s family is a huge inspiration for the high level of communication of the characters in the play, and the free code-switching / between—
STEPHANIE: Hang on. Redacted, redacted: I disagree with you on the “high level of communication—”
TONY: You disagree?
STEPHANIE: —because this is just how people talk. And it is a common misconception, in pop public perception, that Pidgin equals uneducated—
TONY: Yes, and you could also redact this, but it’s a common presentation on the stage that Pidgin equals uneducated.
STEPHANIE: Yes. As tropes are reinforced by continued pandering, right? Instead of educating the audience, we say, “Okay, we’ll just reinforce what you already believe.” And thereby shortcut much of our character development, sadly. (under her breath) Lazy writers,
TONY: Maybe they’ve just escaped me. But I haven’t seen plays where people are very bright and the Pidgin is part of who they are, and it’s something that they revel in, and they code-switch freely because they enjoy it or because they’re with their friends. As opposed to, “We are the Pidgin-speaking characters,” “We are the standard English-speaking characters.”
STEPHANIE: Yes. There is some literary precedent for what you’re discussing. I remember getting drunk with Craig Howes, and he’s just like, (as Craig Howes:) “Unless you tell the story, nobody’s gonna fucking tell the story!” Because it is a privilege to be simultaneously of this culture, and formally educated, and smart. Because those three things can be separate circles on a Venn diagram, frankly.
TONY: Absolutely.
DANIEL: So how do you work together? How do you collaborate?
TONY: Like this—
STEPHANIE: —yelling at Starbucks—
TONY: —talking over each other, saying, “No, you’re wrong.” Mechanically, how we work is either side by side or together on Zoom. And we craft literally every line together. We don’t trade drafts, we don’t divvy up scenes. And we frequently stop and read what we’ve got from the top, you know, alternating characters. Every time we get stuck, it’s like, Let’s start at the top and read and see what we end up.
STEPHANIE: Yeah. Tony will not admit to this in public, but he might let you print it: Tony’s Pidgin is quite good. He is PSL for sure.
DANIEL: What’s PSL?
(A shocked pause. STEPHANIE stares open-mouthed at DANIEL.)
TONY: Pidgin as a Second Language.
DANIEL: Oh.
STEPHANIE: He’s got quite a handle on vocabulary and syntax. So we will sometimes back up to the beginning of a scene, pick characters, read our way through it, and then say the next natural thing according to our understanding of the characters, and we have written—I’m impressed by this—we have written, word-for-word, shit Tony has said in Pidgin.
TONY: You can print this, but I will never speak Pidgin in a public context. And like a lot of PSL speakers—I wouldn’t even call myself “PSL”—but like a lot of PSL speakers, you need to be around a Pidgin speaker to ramp up. You can’t just bust it out. You gotta reflect. You gotta take in the Pidgin and give it back
STEPHANIE: Context-specific.
TONY: Right.
DANIEL: Was this play written pre-COVID?
STEPHANIE: Yeah. We did not intend this play to be a period piece. There are jokes in the play about being fully vaccinated. And pre-vaccine, during the quarantines and shutdowns, there was a Zoom reading of this play. And it just rang a bit...hollow at best, and squirmy-uncomfortable, perhaps disrespectful at worst. And now that there is such a thing as a vaccine, and there is such a thing as partially and fully vaccinated, it’s got a bit of timeliness to it that we certainly did not intend at the time of its writing.
DANIEL: What about Enigma? How did you work on that? Was it the same process?
STEPHANIE: Yeah, same.
DANIEL: But that one was post-pandemic, right?
TONY: It was neither pre- nor post-. It was specifically created during and for the pandemic.
DANIEL: Oh, right. We’re not post-pandemic. Do you see any thematic relationships between these two plays?
STEPHANIE: I do, actually.
TONY: Do you really? Fascinating.
STEPHANIE: Well, perhaps “thematic” is not the right word. But I will, if I may, adjust the line of inquiry to say “foundational,” perhaps. That is, I see a powerful similarity in the empathic understanding of the character, as opposed to a curation of their circumstances and environment. So it’s much more about the emotional reality—our stories, Tony’s and my stories, are much more driven by the emotional reality of the characters.
My favorite thing about the writing is that there’s this arc to every single character. In everything that we’ve ever written, there’s change, a discovery that is trackable. We don’t write minor characters. We don’t have anybody that just comes on. We would be terrible, terrible five-act Shakespeare-style playwrights. Because nobody comes on and says the thing and then leaves and never comes back.
TONY: Except the guy who comes into the bathroom scenes.
STEPHANIE: There’s an arc there—there’s an arc—
TONY: —it’s a journey. Person frustrated—person frustrated a second time—
STEPHANIE: —there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end.
(Laughter.)
TONY: So the thing Stephanie said about the characters grounded in their emotional reality, is a huge part of what Stephanie contributes to the playwriting process. This is something we’ve talked about—we dissect our process as we’re working. Because I am primarily a director, not a playwright, and Stephanie is primarily an actor, not a playwright, I approach playwriting like a director and she approaches it like an actor. So I am always thinking about the big picture. I’m always thinking about how it’s going to work for an audience. I’m often thinking about how it’s going to sell. So for #haoleboyfriend, I came up with a title. And Stephanie was like, “Okay, I know who the characters are. They’re the people that I knew in high school, / they’re—”
STEPHANIE: “They’re the people that I was in high school.”
TONY: And then Stephanie is always thinking as an actor. Like, “I can’t make this leap from here to here. That’s ridiculous.” And I’m like, “Well, the story demands it.” She’s like, “Fuck the story.” Okay, we have to adjust the story so we can make that. The director is an advocate for the audience and the actor is an advocate for the character. So she’s always, always, always advocating for the character. And I’m always, always, always like, “I don’t care.” I don’t care that much about—I do, I care about their life—but ultimately, I care what the audience perceives about their inner life. Because if the audience doesn’t get it, it doesn’t matter.
DANIEL: That’s really interesting, the vocabulary that you have in common, because you’ve worked so frequently together as actor-director.
STEPHANIE: I’d say a key part of the process is the trust that we have in one another. In any creative process, I think, but especially with writing because you have so fucking little to show for it at the end of the session, you know? No one’s clapping. You just close your laptop, wipe off the table at Starbucks, and cry on the drive home. Yeah, there may be twenty extra words on the page from when you started—maybe—net—but we have such trust in one another that even if we have a more frustrating session, we acknowledge that there is good work that has been done, and that will be done, as a result of our collaboration.
TONY: That said, I think we actually write pretty fast. I mean, we wrote each of these plays in a matter of weeks.
STEPHANIE: Can you take me back to the timeline? I kind of think it took us I think it took us like a hundred hours, maybe
TONY: Of actually sitting on the keyboard? For #haoleboyfriend, we were talking about it and talking about it—we would just like, meet up and just have half-hour conversations about who these characters were—for maybe a month, maybe a couple of times a week. We would just have these conversations. But when we actually sat down to write, we just said, “We’re gonna meet every single night.” And I think in four weeks, we had the first draft. That’s substantially the draft that’s going up. We made changes after every reading, but never more than—The biggest change after this was something that Jason (Kanda) requested for production: we rewrote one scene, and basically flipped it on its head, so dramatic action was more clear.
STEPHANIE: So, conservative estimate, a hundred hours of actually sitting together and writing. But to Tony’s earlier point, this is actually sitting down together. No going back and forth with drafts or communiqués—literally four eyeballs on the same laptop screen for a hundred hours.
DANIEL: Amazing.
TONY: Get yourself a writing partner, Daniel.