Playwright’s latest work to premiere in fall
By CHRISTINA YOON Special to the Daily Press
WILSHIRE BOULEVARD While many want nothing more than to flip on the television after a long day’s work, local playwright EM Lewis looks forward to creating stories about prisoners of war in Iraq, Cambodian refugees and musical prodigies once she is off the clock.
“Having a day job and being a playwright is like two full-time jobs,” Lewis said, wrapping her hands around a steaming mug of tea at a coffee shop near her home in Santa Monica, where she has lived for five years.
By day, Lewis works in the student information systems office at the University of Southern California, where she earned a master’s degree in professional writing. The 37-year-old Oregon native said that she writes whenever she can fit it into her life. In five years of writing plays, Lewis has written four full-length works and over 20 shorter plays.
“I will write on my lunch hour,” she said. “I’ve also been going 65 miles an hour on the freeway, scribbling against my steering wheel.”
But Lewis would not want it any other way, and neither would her fans. In June, Lewis was honored with the 2008 Francesca Primus Prize. The prize is given by the Francesca Ronnie Primus Foundation and the American Theatre Critics Association to recognize female artists who are making a difference in the theatre community.
Lewis received the prize for her 2007 play “Heads,” a drama that centers around a British Embassy worker, an American engineer, a network journalist and a freelance photographer who are imprisoned in Iraq. The play premiered in August at The Blank Theatre in Hollywood.
Daniel Henning, the artistic director of The Blank, said that after seeing a performance of “Heads” at a workshop, he could not get the story out of his head.
“The play haunted me,”he said.“I felt like it was a play that needed to be done and it needed to be done at that exact moment.”
Despite its timeliness, Lewis said that the play doesn’t alienate audiences politically.
“I’ve had people from both sides of the fence see it,” she said.
Fans of the play span from those “further right than Atila the Hun to lefty-theatre people.”
“She told the human story, not the political story,” Henning said. “You could be against the war and see what you want to see in it, and you could be in support of the war and see what you want to see in it. To me, that’s a really good playwright.”
To research the experiences that her characters may have had while captured in Iraqi prisons, Lewis tried to collect as much information as she could about past and current hostage situations.
“I found myself going back to the past,” Lewis said. She read about the Beirut hostage crisis, hostages in Lebanon, and read John McCain’s book “Faith of my Fathers,” in which he recounts his time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
“I may differ with his politics, but I found his book to be very moving,” she said. “I was impressed with his spirit.”
The play opened to rave reviews, landing on the “Best of 2007” list of the L.A. Times. It received readings at festivals and conferences nationwide, including the HotINK International Festival of New Plays in New York. Catherine Coray, organizer of the festival, was immediately impressed.
“It was very powerful in the sense that it was political in a very personal way,” Coray said. “(Lewis) has a great deal of humility and I found that very refreshing.”
Coray recommended Lewis to the nationwide panel of theatre critics that selected the winner of the Primus Prize.
Despite all of the accolades she has received, Lewis still has a hard time reminding herself that she really is a playwright.
“It’s hard sometimes in creative professions to feel like what you are,” she said.
Lewis discovered her talent as a playwright after taking a play-writing class at USC after she had already received her degree in professional writing at the university.
“Suddenly I knew I should have been writing plays all along,” Lewis said.
Her latest work, “Song of Extinction,” although very different in plot from “Heads,” deals with similar themes of loss and dealing with crises. The six-character play is a story of a musically gifted high school student who struggles to cope with family trauma, and the bond he forms with his biology teacher, the only one who notices. “[The new play] has lots of magic in it,” Lewis said. “There’s beds turning into boats and hospital rooms turning into Bolivian jungles.”
The world premiere production of “Song of Extinction” will be held in November through a special winter partnership program with the Los Angeles County Arts Commission at [Inside] the Ford, an indoor theatre attached to the Ford Amphitheater in Los Angeles.
From Iraqi prisons to Bolivian jungles, Lewis feels that each of her works reflects her desire to learn more about life’s mysteries.
“Writing is a way of making sense of the world,” she said. “I don’t write what I know but what I can’t make sense of.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 7, 2008. Read the original PDF.