10 Questions
Take Ten: Heather Raffo
Playwright HEATHER RAFFO draws on the personal stories of Arab American women for the premiere of Noura, the Shakespeare Theatre Company's contribution to the Women’s Voices Theater Festival. This week’s Take Ten uncovers Raffo's admiration for fellow artists Sarah Ruhl (she “rules”), Caryl Churchill, and Ntozake Shange.
1) What was the first show you ever saw, and what impact did it have?
The first show I can remember seeing was Oklahoma at my high school then the opera Carmen at our local university (I was in middle school when I saw these productions). Both made me certain that I wanted to perform. I moved to London at 22, and that is where I regularly saw my first professional theater – I went to see a new show every night, it was the most incredible study in craft.
2) What was your first involvement in a theatrical production?
In second grade, my teacher had our entire class work on a play over the course of a school year - to me, it was heaven. But my involvement in Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine was a turning point during my sophomore year in college. It was my first experience with a truly challenging play, it ignited my passion for structure, politics, humanity, feminism – and was my first glimpse of the potential of theatrical impact.
3) What’s your favorite play or musical, and why do you like it so much?
Sarah Ruhl rules, she helps me transcend and discover. I also loved the play Jerusalem for the same reasons, it was a deep encounter with male mysticism. I’ve never had the opportunity to see Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls - but when I read that play in college it changed my whole perspective on what theater could be. Her work moved me to my core, she is the reason I started writing.
4) What’s the worst day job you ever took?
Working as an office assistant to an abusive doctor.
5) What is your most embarrassing moment in the theatre?
Every single moment of acting is embarrassing. It’s the act of getting comfortable in that kind of vulnerability that keeps the game on.
6) What are you enjoying most about working on Noura at Shakespeare Theatre Company?
The cast and company is incredible. There is a specific kind of generosity to their love and a relentlessness with their talent process. It is a dream team.
7) Other than your significant other, who’s your dream date (living or dead) and why?
Barak Obama! Who else could I go out for dinner with and talk about the complexities of an imploding Middle East? About how the refugee crisis is burning my soul? About communities across America, MeToo and Black Lives Matter? About how both he and I have spent our lifetimes bridging impossible divides simply because we were born to parents from two different worlds? About how stressful and joyful parenting is? About how alive I feel and overwhelmed I feel all the time? I guess my idea of a dream date is how he would hold my hand and offer me some vision of solace based in a rich understanding of history and his ability to always find the best in humanity.
8) What is your dream role/job?
I would like to experience singing opera at The Met and being an Alvin Ailey dancer. I would also like to experience working in space. And I would particularly like to experience being a theoretical physicist.
9) If you could travel back in time, what famous production or performance would you choose to see?
I’d like to see one of the ancient Greek plays, in the time they were first written. When I read about how these plays were used after war as a way to heal and reintegrate veterans and civilians back together, it makes me want to see that in practice. A social/communal event in a giant arena in Athens, I would like to experience exactly how story-telling heals.
10) What advice would you give to an 8-year-old smitten by theatre / for a graduating MFA student?
To make it yourself, in your bedroom, on your front porch, at your school. In learning how to articulate your own voice through the work you become an innovator of theater. Don’t rely on work already made. Reach for your own vision of what has yet to be expressed.
HEATHER RAFFO is an award-winning playwright and actress whose work has been seen Off-Broadway, off West End, in regional theatre and in film. She is the author and solo performer of the play 9 Parts of Desire (Lucille Lortel Award, Susan Smith Blackburn commendation, Drama League, OCC, Helen Hayes nominations), which the New Yorker called “an example of how art can remake the world.” The play ran Off-Broadway for nine months and has played across the United States and internationally for over a decade, with current productions in Greece, Hungary and India. Heather’s newest play, Noura, just won Williamstown Theatre Festival’s prestigious Weissberger Award. Recently, her libretto for the opera Fallujah was heard as part of Kennedy Center’s International Theater Festival. It then received its world premiere at Long Beach Opera in March of 2016 and opened at New York City Opera later that year. A film was made of the opera, as well as a documentary titled "Fallujah: Art, Healing and PTSD." Raffo is the recipient of multiple grants from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation to use theatre as a means of bridge-building between her Eastern and Western cultures. She continues to grow her storytelling workshop, Places of Pilgrimage, taking it to universities and community centers both in America and the Middle East. Clips of participants’ work from her New York workshop have been shared online through the organizations Bridges of Understanding and Refugees Deeply, as a means to connect the stories of young Middle Eastern women with their peers globally. Raffo continues her focus on cross-cultural work by speaking at universities across America and internationally. Her work has taken her from classrooms in Tampa to the U.S. Islamic World Forum in Qatar, and from the Mercantile Library in Cincinnati to the Rumi Festival in Oslo. She is a proud member of Epic Theatre Ensemble’s Artistic Advisory Council and prizes her decade long collaboration with Georgetown’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics. WEB: Facebook: HeatherRaffo; Twitter: @heatherraffo; HeatherRaffo.com.
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