LR: Your plays seem to envision the audience not as passive observers, but as participants in the life of a greater community, with whom you (via your characters, who frequently address the audience), seek to enter into a conversation. You also choose to work with producers who set your plays in ways that allow them to become an entrance into (rather than an escape from) community space: for example, your play R&L was staged around a fountain at the center of Stanford’s campus, while for the first New York production of Goliath, you worked with producers who decided to incorporate pre-show performances by community members writing about war, as well as post-show discussions in which audience members were able to engage directly with the cast and crew. Can you speak a little more about how you envision this relationship between community dialogue and performance? Why is important to you to write into a hybrid space in which the world of the play extends beyond the stage and the audience serves as both witness and participant? What steps did you take during the writing and recent premier production of Prometheus Nguyen to ensure that it, too, invited the audience to into such a space?

TR: An excellent, challenging question. Well, I dunno; I guess I’ve been inspired by the long, long traditions of activist theater. Harry Elam describes how groups like El Teatro Campesino and the Black Arts Reparatory Theater were crucial to the UFW and Black Power movements, for example; the kinds of liminal performances they were able to stage had people get up and start striking or marching, that kind of thing. Also, I should probably clarify that many of the community outreach efforts were not always because of me; director Alex Mallory and producer Jeremy Karafin, for example, deserve full credit for organizing the Goliath talkbacks in New York and the veteran outreach. In any event, by its very nature, theater is a community activity, and has revolutionary potential, much in the same way that, as Marx explains, industrialization produced an organized proletariat that worked together in the same factories. You bring people into the room into the same conversation, they’re gonna feel something together, maybe want to do something about it together. Now, having said that, I want to also clarify that I don’t consider my work agitprop. Goliath, for example, could be read (not inaccurately) as a play condemning American war crimes. It could also be read as a piece against sexual violence. And yet one of the strongest advocacy groups in support of Goliath is veterans’ groups, who also point out that the piece deals with PTSD. I don’t think my work always has clear “political” messages or courses of action despite the intense politicality of the subject matter. I try to reach deeper than politics. However, I wrote it with the audience of graduate students in mind, particularly lefty performance studies grad students who all had some form of political idealism.