A CONVERSATION BETWEEN
JASON TAMBORINI, PROLOGUE THEATRE’S ARTISTIC DIRECTOR &
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill, PLAYWRIGHT OF A Wake At Singh's
Jason Tamborini:
Hello. Welcome. I am Jason Tamborini, the Artistic Director of Prologue Theatre here today, talking with Aeneas Hemphill, the playwright of A Wake At Singh's, the second play in our FOREWORD, new work series workshops. We will be doing a two-week workshop of this piece, culminating in two readings on May 5th and 6th. Welcome, Aeneas. Thanks so much for joining us today.
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
Oh, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.
Jason Tamborini:
Yeah, super excited about the workshop. Super excited to get a chance to work with you and this team of people we're starting to put together. We're just going to jump into these questions. I know I sent them to you ahead of time.
So I guess just the first thing, just tell us a little bit about yourself briefly. What else you're doing today, what else you've already done, what other projects you're working on, that kind of stuff.
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
Yeah, sounds good. Yeah, so I'm Aeneas Sagar Hemphill. I'm a writer, performer, composer, lots of many things, especially at this point, but I'm multiracial. So my mom's side is from India. My dad’s side’s from America, and I grew up in Vienna, actually in Northern Virginia right here. But I've lived away for many years, so now I'm coming back and this has been a great way to get back in touch with the DC community.
But yeah, what am I working on? I'm working on so many things. I have another play about internet trolls that I'm trying to finish a draft for a workshop for... Been working there for a long time, and we're going to play around with some of the technology elements of it and see what we can do, bring that into the theater. And I'm working on some screenplays and EP if I can ever get my act together to actually record and write some lyrics. Yeah. So I'm just trying to stay creative and work on as much as I can.
Jason Tamborini:
Very cool. Very cool. Lots of side hustles. That's all making one big thing, like a career or something.
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
Yeah. It's a living.
Jason Tamborini:
So, speaking about your playwriting, and you've mentioned you have more than one piece. You actually have several. Do you have though a particular writing routine or a specific philosophy that you follow?
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
Yeah, I know a lot of people do the hour a day thing. Over time I've realized that I do have some structure for it, but it doesn't feel very structured. I do a lot in my head before I sit down and write. And for a long time I was like, people say that's not writing, that's doesn't count. But it really, I have to get to a certain point. There's like a switch that goes off and then I'm like, "Okay, I'm sitting down and writing." My favorite is if I can have a whole day uninterrupted and just write and not feel rushed about the process. But yeah, that's basically it. It's just at the mercy of my muse.
Jason Tamborini:
Cool. All right. We'll talk specifically now about the play A Wake At Singh's. What was the inspiration for this play?
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
Yeah. So originally I had this idea for... I'd always heard about this play Waiting for Lefty from the '30s by the group theater, Clifford Odets. And that was about a cab driver strike, and apparently, it got such a rise out of the audience. It caused basically a riot. But I wanted to add my own contribution to that legacy and look at the similar situation, the same situation today. And what are the contours of that? What are the intersections of that? What are the things that we understand better or what are the way things have changed? All those like, "Okay, it's 2022, 2023." 2022 when I first started writing.
So, I wanted to write something about how, and driving has been disrupted quite a bit by the ride-share structure. So with Uber and Lyft and having no regulations, it threw off basically the systems of that cab drivers have been relying on to make it a decent living.
So, when I was looking at it, I thought I was just going to be mainly about the experience of the gig economy, the experience of ride-share. But then I was like, right when I started writing and presenting it, I was developing it with the Civilians’ R&D Group, which was amazing. So we had other writers who were able to give feedback and stuff. But right before my first presentation, there was news about a hunger strike by New York City cab drivers and that they won a huge concession from the city after, I think it was 10 days to two weeks of hunger striking.
At that time, this time of hopelessness or where it just seems like there's just so much, how are we ever going to do anything? It was this pure moment of organizing of people coming together independently. It's not a political party and voting and transferred through all these different levels. It's people taking charge of their destiny. And it was because of this debt that they were experiencing. Should I go into the whole thing? It's basically, the mechanism of how cabs were able to survive was destroyed by a deregulation. And since it's a speculative market, so all these cab drivers are in debt and there was a string of suicides.
So then I was trying to figure out how to write a play about this, and there's a way that you do political plays. I guess there's a way that people know that they're done. And so I was trying to take that distance view of it, but then I was not connecting. So I thought I would use the history as a launching pad and then create a story where I get to reflect reality, refract reality and bring in little sparks of reality into it. But it's a story where I can not impose, but I can talk about what I... I can steer the conversation in ways that I think are useful for the story.
Jason Tamborini:
Yeah. Using the art as itself, as the distancing mechanism.
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
Yeah, because we already know we're watching a play. And so it's almost distancing after that is funny because I'm like, "Well, we're here to watch play about cab drivers." It's not totally realistic, but it kind of like I was reaching in two directions and then I found some weird middle ground.
Jason Tamborini:
Cool. What, if anything, has changed for you about this play in your thinking about it since it was conceived?
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
Yeah. I started going into it, but it's my approach to the story and the scope of the story. I was stuck for a long time. I was terrified, because I'm like, "Oh, I have to have a reading of this at some point." But yeah, I really did.
It was about my relationship to the history and the reality of the story and the relationship with that, with what I wanted to write. And yeah, I transformed my vision of what the play is now. It's about the intimacy of these characters, of this found family of immigrant cabbies. We're all from different places and different generations. From there, that's when I was able to open up the... I actually start digging.
Jason Tamborini:
Cool. You've had a couple of different workshopping experiences. What for you is the most important part of the workshop experience?
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
I love rewriting. It's scary. I hate it. But also when I'm in the middle of it is so rewarding, especially... Okay, so the best part of the workshop is, I guess the workshop, but it's being in the room in rehearsals where you have all these brilliant people who bring in all of their experiences, all of their knowledge. They come in the room. Because my plays tend to deal with all these concepts and what defines a lot of my work is dealing with these larger structures and then finding their reflections in reverberations and intimate human stories.
So the rehearsal rooms end up becoming very in-depth conversations about larger issues. And it's just so rewarding for me to see what is in the play, what people discover from working on the play. And also, what I discover from working on play. I come to a play, I think I'm writing sort of a blueprint, or I'm writing as much as I can as a single human person trying to tap into whatever.
But then you get all these people who are actually trying to make it work and make it stand on its feet. And it's like that, you know. It makes it so much clearer what your changes need to be. Because you're like, you can hear if it works or not, and you can know, "Oh, it's actually this a rhythmic issue." Or, "Oh, actually the person shouldn't go there. They should go there. They should say this line somewhere else." And I love cutting lines because I hate, I actually will sometimes be fighting with actors because they'll be like, "No, no, no, let's give another shot. We can make it work." And I'm like, "No, no, no. Get rid of it." But it's a great dialectic for creating this piece.
Jason Tamborini:
Very cool. So what happens, so we're going into this workshop in just a couple of weeks. Do you have a plan for what happens after this workshop for this play for yourself?
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
No. Step by step, I've been taking it. It just really depends on the process; I’ll learn a lot. And I think through the process, I'll come to the end and then I'll know. But I know that I have a hint at one thing I really want to explore. I originally devised this play as an investigative theater piece. And I imagined I would have done interviews with all the relevant characters who are reflected in the play, and the experience of going on the hunger strike and all that.
But I kinda put it on hold mainly because I was still working on my connection to the material and didn't know what I really wanted to know. And also what would be different? Wouldn't just be reiterating things the news already interviewed them a million times about already. So yeah, I think now I feel ready to hone in my investigation and have more targeted questions and I think I'm particularly curious about the organization. What goes into organizing, one the street demonstrations that they were doing for days and days, and days, and days before that.
And then also, what is the decision-making process of saying, "We're going to actually take this next step." What is the minutia of doing that? Because I think that is also something that people don't get a vision of usually. They get a vision of this very romantic, but there's so much grunt work and spreadsheets and I don't know. So I'm very curious about just the very detailed experience of the people who went through this.
Jason Tamborini:
Cool. That's awesome. That's it for the hard questions, I promise.
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
All right.
Jason Tamborini:
So just a couple quick rapid fire things, you can choose to briefly explain or not. It's totally fine. It's this or that, so I'm curious. So this or that, robots or dinosaurs.
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
I say robots because you can have robot dinosaurs. I'm pretty sure that's how future wars will be waged, but-
Jason Tamborini:
Okay. Trains or planes?
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
I cannot stress enough how much I prefer trains. I hate flying. I'm terrified of it, and I've been working through it my whole life. It's been crippling at times, but most of the time I get through it. But if I could get everywhere on a train, at least everywhere in the US or on this continent and a train, it would just make my life so much better.
Jason Tamborini:
Yeah, I feel that.
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
I think it's a better way of travel. There's more intrigue because there's more space to move around. There's dining cars. I don't know. It's just a better thing.
Jason Tamborini:
I'm there with you. Salsa or guacamole?
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
I'd say I'd probably looking over my experience of both. I think guacamole has to win for just the hit rate. Well, I think I like the creamy texture. You can get the spiciness of salsa and the flavoring, but there's something more substantial going on.
Jason Tamborini:
Okay. Final one, time machine or magic wand?
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
Ooh, magic wand. I think playing with time in a scientific way is dangerous, but a magic wand, you can do all sorts of things to change your reality that don't require like ripping the space-time continuum.
Jason Tamborini:
Fair. Very fair. Well, Aeneas, thank you so very much for your time. It's been wonderful chatting with you. Again, A Wake At Singh's, the workshop is coming up with presentations, readings on May 5th at 7:30 PM, and May 6th at 1:00 PM here at Prologue’s rehearsal space in Arlington, Virginia. Hope to maybe see you there. Thank you again. And we will see you soon.
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
Thank you all so much.
Hello. Welcome. I am Jason Tamborini, the Artistic Director of Prologue Theatre here today, talking with Aeneas Hemphill, the playwright of A Wake At Singh's, the second play in our FOREWORD, new work series workshops. We will be doing a two-week workshop of this piece, culminating in two readings on May 5th and 6th. Welcome, Aeneas. Thanks so much for joining us today.
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
Oh, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.
Jason Tamborini:
Yeah, super excited about the workshop. Super excited to get a chance to work with you and this team of people we're starting to put together. We're just going to jump into these questions. I know I sent them to you ahead of time.
So I guess just the first thing, just tell us a little bit about yourself briefly. What else you're doing today, what else you've already done, what other projects you're working on, that kind of stuff.
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
Yeah, sounds good. Yeah, so I'm Aeneas Sagar Hemphill. I'm a writer, performer, composer, lots of many things, especially at this point, but I'm multiracial. So my mom's side is from India. My dad’s side’s from America, and I grew up in Vienna, actually in Northern Virginia right here. But I've lived away for many years, so now I'm coming back and this has been a great way to get back in touch with the DC community.
But yeah, what am I working on? I'm working on so many things. I have another play about internet trolls that I'm trying to finish a draft for a workshop for... Been working there for a long time, and we're going to play around with some of the technology elements of it and see what we can do, bring that into the theater. And I'm working on some screenplays and EP if I can ever get my act together to actually record and write some lyrics. Yeah. So I'm just trying to stay creative and work on as much as I can.
Jason Tamborini:
Very cool. Very cool. Lots of side hustles. That's all making one big thing, like a career or something.
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
Yeah. It's a living.
Jason Tamborini:
So, speaking about your playwriting, and you've mentioned you have more than one piece. You actually have several. Do you have though a particular writing routine or a specific philosophy that you follow?
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
Yeah, I know a lot of people do the hour a day thing. Over time I've realized that I do have some structure for it, but it doesn't feel very structured. I do a lot in my head before I sit down and write. And for a long time I was like, people say that's not writing, that's doesn't count. But it really, I have to get to a certain point. There's like a switch that goes off and then I'm like, "Okay, I'm sitting down and writing." My favorite is if I can have a whole day uninterrupted and just write and not feel rushed about the process. But yeah, that's basically it. It's just at the mercy of my muse.
Jason Tamborini:
Cool. All right. We'll talk specifically now about the play A Wake At Singh's. What was the inspiration for this play?
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
Yeah. So originally I had this idea for... I'd always heard about this play Waiting for Lefty from the '30s by the group theater, Clifford Odets. And that was about a cab driver strike, and apparently, it got such a rise out of the audience. It caused basically a riot. But I wanted to add my own contribution to that legacy and look at the similar situation, the same situation today. And what are the contours of that? What are the intersections of that? What are the things that we understand better or what are the way things have changed? All those like, "Okay, it's 2022, 2023." 2022 when I first started writing.
So, I wanted to write something about how, and driving has been disrupted quite a bit by the ride-share structure. So with Uber and Lyft and having no regulations, it threw off basically the systems of that cab drivers have been relying on to make it a decent living.
So, when I was looking at it, I thought I was just going to be mainly about the experience of the gig economy, the experience of ride-share. But then I was like, right when I started writing and presenting it, I was developing it with the Civilians’ R&D Group, which was amazing. So we had other writers who were able to give feedback and stuff. But right before my first presentation, there was news about a hunger strike by New York City cab drivers and that they won a huge concession from the city after, I think it was 10 days to two weeks of hunger striking.
At that time, this time of hopelessness or where it just seems like there's just so much, how are we ever going to do anything? It was this pure moment of organizing of people coming together independently. It's not a political party and voting and transferred through all these different levels. It's people taking charge of their destiny. And it was because of this debt that they were experiencing. Should I go into the whole thing? It's basically, the mechanism of how cabs were able to survive was destroyed by a deregulation. And since it's a speculative market, so all these cab drivers are in debt and there was a string of suicides.
So then I was trying to figure out how to write a play about this, and there's a way that you do political plays. I guess there's a way that people know that they're done. And so I was trying to take that distance view of it, but then I was not connecting. So I thought I would use the history as a launching pad and then create a story where I get to reflect reality, refract reality and bring in little sparks of reality into it. But it's a story where I can not impose, but I can talk about what I... I can steer the conversation in ways that I think are useful for the story.
Jason Tamborini:
Yeah. Using the art as itself, as the distancing mechanism.
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
Yeah, because we already know we're watching a play. And so it's almost distancing after that is funny because I'm like, "Well, we're here to watch play about cab drivers." It's not totally realistic, but it kind of like I was reaching in two directions and then I found some weird middle ground.
Jason Tamborini:
Cool. What, if anything, has changed for you about this play in your thinking about it since it was conceived?
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
Yeah. I started going into it, but it's my approach to the story and the scope of the story. I was stuck for a long time. I was terrified, because I'm like, "Oh, I have to have a reading of this at some point." But yeah, I really did.
It was about my relationship to the history and the reality of the story and the relationship with that, with what I wanted to write. And yeah, I transformed my vision of what the play is now. It's about the intimacy of these characters, of this found family of immigrant cabbies. We're all from different places and different generations. From there, that's when I was able to open up the... I actually start digging.
Jason Tamborini:
Cool. You've had a couple of different workshopping experiences. What for you is the most important part of the workshop experience?
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
I love rewriting. It's scary. I hate it. But also when I'm in the middle of it is so rewarding, especially... Okay, so the best part of the workshop is, I guess the workshop, but it's being in the room in rehearsals where you have all these brilliant people who bring in all of their experiences, all of their knowledge. They come in the room. Because my plays tend to deal with all these concepts and what defines a lot of my work is dealing with these larger structures and then finding their reflections in reverberations and intimate human stories.
So the rehearsal rooms end up becoming very in-depth conversations about larger issues. And it's just so rewarding for me to see what is in the play, what people discover from working on the play. And also, what I discover from working on play. I come to a play, I think I'm writing sort of a blueprint, or I'm writing as much as I can as a single human person trying to tap into whatever.
But then you get all these people who are actually trying to make it work and make it stand on its feet. And it's like that, you know. It makes it so much clearer what your changes need to be. Because you're like, you can hear if it works or not, and you can know, "Oh, it's actually this a rhythmic issue." Or, "Oh, actually the person shouldn't go there. They should go there. They should say this line somewhere else." And I love cutting lines because I hate, I actually will sometimes be fighting with actors because they'll be like, "No, no, no, let's give another shot. We can make it work." And I'm like, "No, no, no. Get rid of it." But it's a great dialectic for creating this piece.
Jason Tamborini:
Very cool. So what happens, so we're going into this workshop in just a couple of weeks. Do you have a plan for what happens after this workshop for this play for yourself?
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
No. Step by step, I've been taking it. It just really depends on the process; I’ll learn a lot. And I think through the process, I'll come to the end and then I'll know. But I know that I have a hint at one thing I really want to explore. I originally devised this play as an investigative theater piece. And I imagined I would have done interviews with all the relevant characters who are reflected in the play, and the experience of going on the hunger strike and all that.
But I kinda put it on hold mainly because I was still working on my connection to the material and didn't know what I really wanted to know. And also what would be different? Wouldn't just be reiterating things the news already interviewed them a million times about already. So yeah, I think now I feel ready to hone in my investigation and have more targeted questions and I think I'm particularly curious about the organization. What goes into organizing, one the street demonstrations that they were doing for days and days, and days, and days before that.
And then also, what is the decision-making process of saying, "We're going to actually take this next step." What is the minutia of doing that? Because I think that is also something that people don't get a vision of usually. They get a vision of this very romantic, but there's so much grunt work and spreadsheets and I don't know. So I'm very curious about just the very detailed experience of the people who went through this.
Jason Tamborini:
Cool. That's awesome. That's it for the hard questions, I promise.
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
All right.
Jason Tamborini:
So just a couple quick rapid fire things, you can choose to briefly explain or not. It's totally fine. It's this or that, so I'm curious. So this or that, robots or dinosaurs.
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
I say robots because you can have robot dinosaurs. I'm pretty sure that's how future wars will be waged, but-
Jason Tamborini:
Okay. Trains or planes?
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
I cannot stress enough how much I prefer trains. I hate flying. I'm terrified of it, and I've been working through it my whole life. It's been crippling at times, but most of the time I get through it. But if I could get everywhere on a train, at least everywhere in the US or on this continent and a train, it would just make my life so much better.
Jason Tamborini:
Yeah, I feel that.
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
I think it's a better way of travel. There's more intrigue because there's more space to move around. There's dining cars. I don't know. It's just a better thing.
Jason Tamborini:
I'm there with you. Salsa or guacamole?
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
I'd say I'd probably looking over my experience of both. I think guacamole has to win for just the hit rate. Well, I think I like the creamy texture. You can get the spiciness of salsa and the flavoring, but there's something more substantial going on.
Jason Tamborini:
Okay. Final one, time machine or magic wand?
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
Ooh, magic wand. I think playing with time in a scientific way is dangerous, but a magic wand, you can do all sorts of things to change your reality that don't require like ripping the space-time continuum.
Jason Tamborini:
Fair. Very fair. Well, Aeneas, thank you so very much for your time. It's been wonderful chatting with you. Again, A Wake At Singh's, the workshop is coming up with presentations, readings on May 5th at 7:30 PM, and May 6th at 1:00 PM here at Prologue’s rehearsal space in Arlington, Virginia. Hope to maybe see you there. Thank you again. And we will see you soon.
Aeneas Sagar Hemphill:
Thank you all so much.