Playwright gets chance to bring hope, healing to commission

During the pandemic, playwright Ray Yamanouchi found himself captivated by “Carole & Tuesday,” a sci-fi anime about two girls trying to make it in the music business. He began to think about how he could challenge himself to create something similar, something rooted in the kind of optimistic expectation that this show made him feel. Around the same time, Cygnet Theatre was looking for an artist to support in the creation of a play that would offer hopefulness to this current period of radical change.

Yamanouchi became the first recipient of the inaugural Dee Silver M.D. Commission, with an award of $10,000 and an unrestricted time limit. The commission includes three development sessions: a weeklong retreat with The New Harmony Project in Indiana, writing with a team and group of playwrights; a weeklong workshop with the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis to dig deeper into the play; and a final workshop with Cygnet for a reading in front of an audience with a full cast, director, and dramaturg (with the final goal of producing Yamanouchi’s play as a premiere at Cygnet in an upcoming season).

Yamanouchi is based in Astoria,

Queens, in New York City, earned a bachelor’s degree in film and theater at Hunter College-city University of New York. His plays include “The American Tradition” and “Impact”; he’s developed work with Leviathan Lab, WT Theatre, Rising Circle Theater Collective, among others; and is a commissioned playwright with Ars Nova and the co-creator of “RE: (Regarding),” a theater talk show in New York City. He took some time to talk about the Cygnet commission, his approach toward this new challenge, and hope as survival. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For a longer version of this conversation, visit sandiegouniontribune.com/sdutlisa-deaderick-staff.html.)

Q: Congratulations on receiving Cygnet Theatre’s first Dee Silver M.D. Commission award. What was your initial reaction to the premise of the project?

A: The fact that it has to be hopeful? It actually worked out really well because, with the pandemic and everything going on, I was watching this anime called “Carole & Tuesday.” It’s a very feel-good, family-friendly anime and I was just so drawn to it because it made me feel really good and hopeful. It was so different from the things I’m usually interested in, which is grieving or things that tackle big subjects. I was thinking, “Man, I want to do something like this.” Then, coincidentally, this commission came my way and the stars aligned, and now I get to do something that takes a different direction than what I usually go for. I always like to challenge myself in those ways. I still want to explore the big themes that I’m usually drawn to, but I’m going to try and explore in a way that’s different. I’m going to try to use the energy of “Carole & Tuesday.” I can’t say for sure because we’re still so early in this process, so I don’t know where it’s going to go, but I’m hoping that I’m going to be able to find something there.

Q: Where did the focus on approaching your characters with empathy, come from?

A: It’s based on my upbringing. I grew up in Long Island, New York, in the early 2000s when I was a teenager, and it was very White. I was one of the few Asian people, people of color, in the entire community, so I endured a lot of racism. .

I didn’t really think about it until I left and went to college. Becoming older, doing my own research, talking to different people helped me realize that that was the real world, especially learning about housing segregation and school segregation in Long Island. I realized that the environment I’d grown up in was so dictated by government policy and systemic issues and history. The only reason that people think the way that they do is because of the big, systemic, historic things that they don’t really think about, but it has shaped who they are, shaped their communities, shaped their families. In a weird way, it’s not their fault. These people have just been living in this false, artificial community that’s been man-made to keep certain people out of very White communities. Knowing that made me feel like we’re all products of our environments, and the only way I could really make character-driven plays while tackling these big subjects, was by approaching every character with seeing how they are psychologically and personally influenced by their families, their environments. I can’t do that if I’m going to immediately start painting people as good or bad, evil or racist; that’s reductive. It’s not that simple.

Q: The point of the commission is to provide funding and an unrestricted time limit to the creation of a play that “responds to our present times with hope and healing.” What’s been coming to mind for you in thinking about the meaning of “our present times”?

A: After the summer of 2020, there were a lot of institutions trying to “respond to the moment.”

You had a lot of companies saying, “Black Lives Matter” and “we’re gonna diversify, yadda, yadda, yadda.” Now, a lot of that seems to be pushed under the rug. I was so hopeful at the beginning. I guess, naively so. It almost feels like we’re now retracting to a business-asusual type of thinking and it’s very frustrating. I don’t know how that’s going to affect my work, but perhaps I can sort of see what kind of thing I want.

I’ve been really obsessed with this idea of a utopia. What does that word mean? The commission sent me to The New Harmony Project, and they do this thing that emphasizes the idea of that utopia and hopefulness for the work. I’ve also been interested in the ideas of this Dutch historian, Rutger Bregman, who talks about envisioning the utopia and working backward in order to make progress. You can’t just make these incremental changes that are just Band-aids, without having an idea of what you want your future to look like. It’s better to know what the future looks like and then take the necessary, concrete steps to get there. I’ve been thinking about that more and more, nowadays, especially with this commission. What is this utopia that I want and what are these things that I could explore in a play?