Artistic Statement
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Gena Treyvus
Artistic Statement
Whenever I’ve entered a theatre, I’ve always felt a certain presence that has been difficult for me to put into words, and perhaps the word that comes the closest to describing it is ghosts. To enter a theatre means to confront the ghosts of every character who has been written, and every artist and audience member who has ever been present there. My playwriting is an exercise in the naming and portrayal of ghosts. I write about the ghosts from my family, ghosts from the memories of my own life, and ghosts of the imaginary characters residing in my head. I try to create characters who not only feel like ghosts, but also like breathing living people who are with us at this moment, and who will continue to stay with us.
It's important to me to be emotionally honest in my plays, and to make the relationships between characters intimate and recognizable. My goal is for someone to experience my play and be able to point to a character and say “Yes, I know that person” or “I’ve never met someone like that before but now I feel like I have”. Theatre can warp time and space in that way and make us feel like we know people we’ve never met before, and I’m curious about how and why this phenomenon happens. I hope to explore the relationship that theatre and writing have with time because ghosts are timeless.
Ghosts also inhabit spaces, and while these spaces can be liminal, I’ve been most personally moved by work where characters are rooted in specific spaces. In my work, I’m interested in the idea of hyper-locality. I grew up in a Russian Orthodox Jewish neighborhood called Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, and I wrote a play called Strawberries at the Datcha that’s very concerned with this neighborhood and the history of the people who immigrated there. Strawberries at the Datcha is also very concerned with Zhodino, a small town my family used to live in Belarus, and the mining truck production company that holds together that local economy. My most recent play 21 North is concerned with the youth psychiatric ward on the north section of the 21st floor of Bellevue Hospital. The patients can see the Empire State Building from the window, and this is important to me. I care a lot about what my characters see when they look out of their windows, and I’ve found that my audiences are interested in that too. This is what makes ghosts feel real and bloody and haunting in the most tender senses of those words, and this is what I try to name in my plays.
It's important to me to be emotionally honest in my plays, and to make the relationships between characters intimate and recognizable. My goal is for someone to experience my play and be able to point to a character and say “Yes, I know that person” or “I’ve never met someone like that before but now I feel like I have”. Theatre can warp time and space in that way and make us feel like we know people we’ve never met before, and I’m curious about how and why this phenomenon happens. I hope to explore the relationship that theatre and writing have with time because ghosts are timeless.
Ghosts also inhabit spaces, and while these spaces can be liminal, I’ve been most personally moved by work where characters are rooted in specific spaces. In my work, I’m interested in the idea of hyper-locality. I grew up in a Russian Orthodox Jewish neighborhood called Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, and I wrote a play called Strawberries at the Datcha that’s very concerned with this neighborhood and the history of the people who immigrated there. Strawberries at the Datcha is also very concerned with Zhodino, a small town my family used to live in Belarus, and the mining truck production company that holds together that local economy. My most recent play 21 North is concerned with the youth psychiatric ward on the north section of the 21st floor of Bellevue Hospital. The patients can see the Empire State Building from the window, and this is important to me. I care a lot about what my characters see when they look out of their windows, and I’ve found that my audiences are interested in that too. This is what makes ghosts feel real and bloody and haunting in the most tender senses of those words, and this is what I try to name in my plays.