Student Blog: Why Play Write?

I genuinely cannot get over the fact that all the people in my life who told me to “wait because it gets better” or “give it time it will pass” or “no Leah you have to take your SIM card out when you send the original product back to Apple Inc for repair,” were 100% correct. 

My entire adolescence was a blur of “should’ve, could’ve, would’ve” and I seem to have an eternal case of the “supposeda’s.”

This article came to me through a grand combination of two very different coincidental moments. Of course I shall lay them out for you as I always tend to do, but first let me embellish elaborate and unnecessarily amp up the drama, as I always tend to do. When I was in my freshman year of high school, jesus christ that was so long ago, anyhoo. When I was in my freshman year of high school I had a crazy clear vision for my life. I was going to be a psychologist or a lawyer, but first I would do all the theater I could, just to get it out of my system. To ensure I never had the urge ever ever again, I’d purge all my childhood fantasies in a blazing four years of slowly broiling adolescence. And boy did I rise to that! Anyone who knew me in high school can say all I did was eat, sleep, and breathe theater. 

My former theater teacher Laura Gallo’s favorite memory of me is at age 7 when I asked her if there were cuts for our 3 week summer camp production of You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown. My other former theater teacher Michelle Taplin’s favorite memory is when I came up to her at a middle school rehearsal of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and demanded to know where or not the Michelle I was speaking with was THEE Michelle Taplin who I saw in Oceanside Theatre Department shows growing up. Spoiler alert: there were no cuts, and yes she was the real Michelle Taplin. And yes, Little Leah had no chill. 

Middle-ish Leah thought that I would never be able to pursue a career in theater. Which is INSANITY. By my calculations I contributed over 800 hours of service to the theater program during my four years of high school alone. I took every chorus and theater class offered practically in the whole district, and was in every show I could physically be in without passing out during curtain call. Yet I called myself a hobbyist. The interesting part is, it's not like I didn’t come from an arts background. 

Growing up I didn’t have cable. I had VCRs of The Wiggles,  The Muppets, and The Fraggles. My Russian mother put me into piano lessons at the age of 3, by the age of 6 I was in my first musical and by age 10 I was the Sour Kangaroo in Seussical as the only 5th grader with a lead role. All I wanted to do as a kid was play pretend. Write stories, sing songs, make art, play music. I doubt I’m the only kid who did this to myself. I also strongly doubt I’m the only kid of immigrant parents that did this to myself. 

So much of my life has been trying to live out a future that isn’t even mine. I feel like I owe my existence to about a million people, some of whom I’ve never met, but also all of the people who’ve dragged my butt across the finish line deserve some kind of compensation vis-a-vie my success? My mother immigrated to this country in 1991, escaping the former Soviet Union with her son (my eldest brother) and my father, to live a better, freer life in Monsey, New York. Both my father and mother had Masters degrees in applied mathematics with my mother set to defend her thesis within the year, but then they immigrated and she was forced to give that up in search of a better life. 

I don’t even speak to my parents anymore and that sacrifice still weighs on me. Its one of the reasons that I am working towards a Ph.D even though I am in an objectively creative/non Ph.D like field. I am Atlas with the earth on my shoulders, Sisyphus rolling the rock up the mountain. The Brooklyn Nets….. Anyway, it can feel inevitable that I will fail in this theatrical trajectory and will have to fall back on something but also I have faith I will go on and just don’t have a backup so I’m eternally a lil screwed but we do not need to think about that too hard. 

So with all that in mind: back to my journey to being a playwright and theatrical scholar. That’s more fun to focus on. 

I have done (almost) every job in theater you could think of. I’ve acted in both straight plays and musicals, as well as revues and cabarets. I’ve helped produce, done PR, play selection committees. I’ve written works, edited works, worked on staged readings, dramaturged and helped with presentations of new plays. I’ve stage managed, ran sound and light boards, painted sets, built sets, designed sets, deconstructed sets. Also, mopped floors, ushered, and worked at the box office! Directed, dance captained, choreographed, music directed, vocal directed, arranged music, filmed work for shows. 

But nothing fits quite like playwriting does. I’ve always been a writer - since my days of writing mystery novels in my 4th grade writing class notebook, to the little plays I’d compose entirely orally in my living room at age 5. I wanted to be a Wiggle, A Fraggle, A Muppet! But also I wanted to be the person that thought up those characters in the first place. But somewhere along the way that particular idea got lost in a sea of well - life. I found other passions, spread myself thinner and thinner in terms of career specificity. I started living just for the joy of theater and it worked! It worked until I looked around and realized I wasn’t entirely content where I was, just as an actor, constantly putting myself and my sanity on the line. 

I love acting. I will always love performing. But if I can’t wear every hat or at least have the choice of wearing a different hat if I get scared that I’ve been wearing just one hat for too long. I’m a drifter. I'm a wanderer of the world and the wiles of life man. Walt Whitman and his yawp, the spotted hawk I want all of it I wanna contain multitudes. 

That’s why I’m a double major in English and Theatre and a French minor, I wanna know things! Right now I’m working as a social media manager and producer for an Identity Play Reading Series at SUNY Oneonta and it's unlocking a love for graphic design and producing in general that I’ve never really gotten to explore like this before.(If you’re in the Otsego County Area…come see the reading of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of An Author. There will be cookies and lemonade (hopefully)) I’m so proud to be a jack of all trades. I'm so anti-BFA [FOR MYSELF! - everyone else can do as their heart desires :) ] and it's for this reason. I don’t think de-facto specialization gets you a solid education. College is a mere series of survey courses into a career you could possibly want and no matter how much I love technical or musical theatre, if I didn’t have the equal amount of time to spend exercising my writing skills and my English brain - I simply wouldn’t be happy, and there isn’t enough time in the world for us to not be happy with whatever we’re doing with our lives. 

So I’ve found my niche. Found my tiny little hole within the realm of dramatic writing, and I didn’t get there alone. I was backed by every theater teacher I’ve had since I first picked up a pen and a piece of paper to write down a scene. My senior year of high school, Laura Gallo took a chance on me and decided to let this random 17 year old write pre-show scenes for her mainstage shows, so my work was onstage before I even knew how much that would mean for my career. I’ve been backed by the writers whose works I worship like the bible. By the Lauren Gunderson’s and the Kimberly Belflowers and the wonderful transformative music of Kerrigan and Lowedermilk. I would never have gotten to the authentic, and raw point I am at with creating my art if I had not been ushered in by the music and words of writers, playwrights, singers and artist who lit my way home. Without the magic of Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt, I wouldn't know that mental health isn't something to be ashamed of. Without the art of Alison Bechdel, I wouldn't know the beauty and diversity of queerness.

But also I’m an English major with a writing concentration, so it’s inevitable that I also worship at the feet of such authors as Alan Ginsburg, Sylvia Plath, Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes. I have loved poetry for as long as I can remember. As a child growing up in a Soviet immigrant household I grew up on rhymes and verse. The main educational pedagogy in the Soviet Union was memorization with recitation, we told our stories, anecdotes and life lessons in verse - therefore poetic communication is literally my bread and butter. When I discovered that there were entire plays written in verse, that choreopoems existed - HELLO HONEY I’M HOME!! 

It's not that I don’t love to act. Acting is at the core of my love for theater, I am a performer always. So that's where my favorite label comes in “Multi hyphenate.” I love that I am a playwright and a performer. It’s why I idolize Lin Manuel Miranda above all else. I want to bake the cake, have the cake, and eat it too! Right now I am planning to grab onto as many graduate degrees as I can and I want to be an interdisciplinary theater Ph.D too. I have a ton of dreams and I’ve really only just started seeing my career trajectory with my glasses on (it’s clear and omigod what do you mean the tree has always had leaves), and I have to constantly remind myself that I’m just at the beginning right now. I haven’t even gotten to a 1/4th of my life expectancy yet, so therefore, I’ve got time. 

As a playwright I know that I can write a world into fruition. I can use sound, light, words and movement to create a truth that is 100% plausible for up to 150 minutes, I can play god for exactly that long if I want to. Books showed me that art matters. Words matter. Creating worlds shows certain kids that they actually matter. Once I discovered theater well there was no turning back. Now that I’ve found my niche. I want to create a world where the queer neurodivergent children of immigrants, like me, have representation and feel seen, right from the get go. For me it was through books, musicals, and my theatre teachers. Without them, I wouldn't be sitting here writing this article as a proud queer and trans artist/writer looking to make their mark on the world. They taught me that my voice would be heard by those who needed to hear it most, and to never ever silence it for anybody. I want my art and my creative voice to either help people find their voice so that someone tells them they matter, their voice matters, and their stories matter.