Social observer and playwright, Mike Lew tells all about Bike America
Bike America’s playwright, Mike Lew, had his moment in the Atlanta sun on Hertz Stage at the Woodruff Arts Center from February 1 to 24. The play centered around its main character, Penny, who is looking for answers to so many large questions. She thinks that going on a cross-country bike tour will provide such answers. It’s a story about looking in, instead of out to find what you need, and below I got a chance to get a few answers myself from Lew.
Q: Your play, Bike America, played on the Woodruff Arts Center’s Hertz Stage and also won the 2013 Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Award, what has this experience been like?
A: Having my play performed at the Alliance was such a thrilling and overwhelming experience. Writers learn best in process, tweaking their work in rehearsal and gathering impressions in front of an audience. But production opportunities for young writers are exceedingly rare. It was so liberating to hear a theater say, “We’re producing your play.” Not “We like your play” or “We’ll do a reading” but actually committing to producing it. I’ve learned a ton from this process, which I’ll take with me into the next round of rehearsals when “Bike America” goes up in NYC in Sept 2013 (with Ma-Yi Theater).
Stepping back from my own personal experience, I really think the world of the Alliance/Kendeda for creating this competition, because the bridge between grad school and a professional career is rickety at best. I totally understand that mounting any new play — much less a new play by an untested writer — is highly risky. But I worry that the theater isn’t doing enough to foster the next generation of artists, and I’ve witnessed a lot of highly talented people leaving the field. Which is why I think that this contest is so earth-shaking. I’m in awe of the previous writers who have come through this program, and so grateful to be a part of that.
Q: Bike America centers around Penny, a millennial trying to figure out who she is, what she wants, and where she wants to be, what was the inspiration behind this play?
A: With each play, I try to marry my impulses as a theater-maker with my impulses as a social observer. From the theater-making side, I love giving challenges to my fellow collaborators: creating a world that demands a lot of ingenuity from the director, designers, and actors. I also try to create a uniquely theatrical experience that can’t be done in any other medium. This play takes place across the country, frequently on the road biking, and I wanted to give the director and designers free reign to tackle the challenge of depicting motion within a static space as well as cramming myriad locations onto one tiny set. I wanted to create characters that undergo not just an emotional transformation but a physical one as well.
From the social observer side, I wanted to take the national temperature by dropping us down in iconic spots throughout the US and by looking at how regional differences set us apart (or tie us together). I also wanted to make a generational study, because I think that every generation undergoes a process of self-searching but then once they’re past that life phase they quickly forget how hard it is. So I wanted to create a distinctly Millennial story, but with fellow travelers of varying ages and backgrounds.
Q: The strangers that surround Penny on her journey become more like family, despite her distance inducing personality. How did you balance the love/hate relationship that the audience has with Penny, as well as the love/hate relationship that those with Penny on this journey have?
A: It’s hard and it’s something I’m still tweaking. I wanted to look at that figuring-yourself-out phase that all 20-somethings undergo, the period between schooling (which is all very structured) and the family/career phase (both of which provide enormous definition and grounding). That period of time is highly self-indulgent, but it’s also highly necessary. Like a kind of emotional puberty. So with Penny specifically I didn’t want to blunt the rough edges of what she’s going through, even if the other characters (or potentially the audience) at times get annoyed with her. All I can do is cast a super-charismatic actress and give her a very full-throated defense, and pray that the audience goes along for the ride.
Q: In the end, Penny dies, and only seems to truly grasp the advice that her companions were trying to lend her in her afterlife. The audience is left with a powerful message from beyond, what made you decide to end the play in this way?
A: From the opening monologue of the play, we know that at the end of this journey Penny will die. And she dies mid-process, having figured out some things but still not quite there yet. Which is what I think happens to all of us, albeit over a longer time scale. We’re all working on things we’d like to improve within ourselves, or change within ourselves, but we run out of time.
At the end of the play Penny talks to us from beyond the grave, and she’s still the same Penny: still a smartass but still in process. She feels doubt and regret, but just because she’s dead doesn’t mean she been Raptured into some kind of greater level of understanding. Which was important to me because I think we’re trained to see stories like this – the cross-country soul-searching journey – and expect some kind of epiphany at the end, and to me that rings hollow. I feel like we’re all very slow learners – we rarely accept given wisdom, we have to figure things out on our own even if it means failing utterly, and the lessons that stick best are the ones that were hardest-won. So why do our narratives insist on depicting these big last-minute epiphanies?
We all know we’re going to die, but we act like we’ve got all the time in the world. I don’t think of this play as a cautionary tale per se, but I do want to be clear that we owe it to ourselves to seize life and not waste the time we’ve been given.
Q: Penny challenges herself physically, emotionally and mentally to try and find answers and her next route in life. What are you planning on tackling next?
A: “Bike America” comes to Ma-Yi Theater in Sept 2013. I’m also working on a few other plays – a big epic about the drug war in Mexico, a play about doomed love in the theater, and an Asian identity politics play that takes us out of the 80s.
