A few pages into the script of Peregrine Teng Heard’s– playwright and artistic director of The Associates Theater Ensemble– newest play Redemption Story, I could sense its implicit political message: institutions can be propelled forward by the people least represented by them. In the case of Heard’s play, that person is a post-career Asian-American actress named Connie Lee. Lee, growing up during the Depression,dreamed of a career on the silver screen looking up to women like Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, and Bette Davis. Despite a life spent acting, she has mostly existed on the margins of the great behemoth of Hollywood she so adores, forced to either play stock characters or background figures.
One day, while sitting at the counter of a diner, a bright-eyed young man comes in– think Paul Newman or James Dean. The most prototypical Hollywood type. The only difference is it’s 1971 instead of 1954. This choice of chronology is in part why Connie comes across with such a clear sense of know-how: she’s been around a while. Connie immediately gets the attention of the young man and demands to hear his story. He hails from Las Vegas, to jumpstart, despite his beautiful face, a career in radio. Connie goes to work convincing him of his likely hood to strike it in the movies and puts him in touch with one of her industry friends. While it’s Connie who is immediately drawn to this boy, who she names Billy Jay, Billy starts to reciprocate, first out of politeness and then interest: who is this sophisticated older woman?
Redemption Story is a play about dreams deferred, living vicariously, and the unspoken yet damaging racial politics that compromise the edifice of certain aspirations. For every Billy Jay, how many other people struggle to get only a portion of what Billy’s sparkling eyes promise?
Last week, I spoke to playwright Peregrine Teng Heard and director Sarah Blush about their collaboration and friendship, the universal themes of Redemption Story, the contemporary state of American theater, motherhood, and romance. Gearing up for tech, they both displayed their passion for the art of live theater and spoke about their own work and partnership with charity, kindness, and love.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
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Eve Bromberg: You seem like such fun collaborators!
Peregrine Teng Heard: We’ve known each other for a long time! We met in 2011 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival when we were both in college. We’ve stayed in touch over the years and made a point to always see each other’s work.
EB: Can you provide a thematic summary of the play and speak to how it relates to the mission of The Associates and your approaches as Playwright and Director?
PH: The play is about a woman in middle age or older, who has survived a career in the movies, not without damage. One day she meets a White young man and begins to channel her unfulfilled dreams through him. Given his identity, she can concoct these elaborate Hollywood fantasies for him that she could never have achieved herself as a Chinese-American woman on the fringe. Thematically, their relationship moves between wholesome mother/son dynamics and more perverted kinds of exploitative dynamics, sexual and romantic for instance, as they mirror the power dynamics at play in any sector of the entertainment industry, but especially present for artists and performers.
Sarah Blush: There are two themes we’ve focused on in preparing Redemption Story. The first is a correlation between people’s access and ease in the performing arts, specifically the film industry in this period piece [the 1970s], and the presentation of their racial identity. There’s a wonderful gradation in the play where we see this dynamic played out in a very blunt way. The other theme is the complicated reality in which children and parents can never fully know each other wholly. We’re always trapped in a power dynamic. The question of what we owe our parents, and what they owe us, hangs over the play and has certainly been present in the rehearsal room.
PH: I think if someone came away from this play thinking about love—the kind we seek, how we’re never given exactly the type we need, and how it can lead us to harmful relationships that may echo dynamics from our past—I’d say they’d understood it. The central dynamic of the play fluctuates between Connie caring for Billy and co-opting his face.
SB: And how much of love is selfish.
PH: Yes. She’s trying to act out what she needs to heal her own heart. One way to look at the play is all the characters are on a spectrum of how much they’re willing to do for success or art but because we’re in 1971 and there’s queerness at play and generational difference. Everyone’s standard of what is too much to sacrifice is different.
EB: The chronology is certainly interesting. When you think about the heyday of Hollywood you might think about the 50s or early to mid-60s. What was the thinking behind setting the play in the 70s?
PH: We were talking with Gregory, who’s playing Baker, the young Black actor, and I see a future where Baker does Blaxploitation films and flourishes. At the start of the play, maybe he can only point to Sidney Poitier, but things are starting to churn. I wanted to plant this play in this soil because [Americans in the 70s] were up against so many of the complications that we are today but I didn’t want to write about representation and diversity in 2024, because in 2024 we know what we know.
EB: I don’t know if either of you saw Appropriate, but what was so interesting about that play was how it felt so dated. How do you deal with the dynamic of representing past racial mores?
PH: Like in Appropriate, characters’ protestations of innocence or attempts to clear their conscience still hit us as wrong, blind, or insufficient. There’s a wish, I think, to condemn large swaths of our history, and one of the pleasures of writing this play was personal—my parents were college students in 1971 at Yale when the Black Panthers were on trial when protests in defense of the Panthers erupted [and were supported by the administration]. We’ve been in this process with someone on our team who works at Barnard and their campus is shut down because of the protests over Gaza and it’s crazy to think about how at the same time its a repetition of history and the difference by which the protests have been addressed., So, I think the period setting of the play works in both directions. It feels both close and far away. I went to the period because it allows the audience to imagine themselves in that space rather than just comparing themselves, like they might with contemporary characters—the beautiful repetition of history and the cyclical nature of these struggles. Identity is always this kaleidoscopic collage work. You can pick up a thread anywhere and make a play.
EB: I’ve noticed that a lot of contemporary theater is so set on capturing the immediate present. Can you speak to that sort of amnesia of anything existing say before the iPhone?
SB: I’ve observed that layers of distance allow for resonance and proximity, even stylistically. This play has a lot of shades of naturalistic truth and verité, but also tonal differences through dream sequences that are homages to the films Connie was either a part of or hoped to be a part of as well as the style of movie that Billy Jay is becoming involved in over the course of the play. I think our two leads themselves have tropes, and stereotypes, and a larger-than-life stylistic quality to them and that’s intentional.
The difficulty of this medium is it’s fundamentally make-believe. The audience is tasked with determining how truthful the situation is. For me a play that directly replicates life as I know it will always fail, regardless of how incredible the writer’s ear is or the designer’s ability to find a direct replica of an object. We are all fundamentally aware of the artifice in front of us [laughs].
When you’re attempting to capture socio-political concerns, the standard of truth is so high because we’re all right in our understanding of our experiences with contemporary questions. If you’re trying to look at a contemporary issue, there’s something to be said about placing the play in a different period. It ends up being a wise strategy because it enables a comfortable distance to examine. Refraction allows for criticism because the main concern won’t be individual honest representation of an experience.
EB: And similarly, with contemporary plays, attempting to replicate something so closely ends up being more explanatory than anything else.
SB: It’s a thesis statement! What’s so special about this piece is if you were to interview every member of the cast and every member of the creative team, you’d get a different answer from everyone about what this story is trying to tell. The theater audiences that I know, which are all my friends making theater, we’re allergic to being fed a thesis statement that we already know and agree with. It’s so much more interesting to have a play that tells a story or lays out a series of images, relationships, and ideas and you can pick and choose how you approach or pull away from them. This play is not on trend, in an interesting way.
EB: Peregrine, can you speak about where you were in your life while writing this play? I sense a trace of personal narrative in the work.
PH: I started the play thinking about this magnetic attraction between two people who should have nothing in common and then I wrote myself into this mother-child relationship as a way to exorcise some of my own child-mother angst. My mother and I talk about the same events but we can never reconcile our versions of reality, it just won’t ever happen. My parents are in their 70s and I’m in my 30s, and Sarah is reminding me that I can share that I’m going to be a mom shortly after this play opens.
EB: Oh my goodness! Congratulations! That’s so wonderful.
SB: Peregrine is going to be eight months pregnant when we do the play! She’s sitting on a bouncy ball currently as instructed by her doctor.
PH: It’s time to think about these things. People say you have to say what you need to and hear what you need to because our parents aren’t here forever. It’s a funny thing, a child being misunderstood by their parent, and vice versa, when theoretically these are the people who should know and understand you most. That’s what came out from within this very stylized setup that I had begun writing.
EB: Are both of you actors and if so how do you reconcile that part of your practice with either playwriting or directing?
SB: I’m not, but Peregrine is and I’d like to speak to this. Peregrine is the most wonderful writer to work with and it’s because she’s seen so many sides of the process. In some ways, it feels like a challenge to the new play system where deference is given to the playwright because they’re responsible for the words being read. There’s no reason why a lighting designer, after months of rehearsals, can’t suggest something about the text or our staging of it.
PH: It’s such a gift having someone who comes from such a technical background and medium suggest something. They’re contributing things, like knowledge of light and color, that I myself cannot contribute.
EB: I noticed from what I read of the script that there are some dream-like sequences. Sarah, how do you deal with portraying those scenes to ensure an audience understands what’s happening?
SB: Directorially, because those are the most recognizable directorial touches, I might ordinarily start by thinking about those kinds of scenes, but I pushed myself with this play to focus on the relationships between the characters. I have all the stereotypical traits of a director. I do think very visually and often character is the thing I think about last, but I really wanted to approach this play differently so the dream sequences have in some ways been the last part of the puzzle instead of being baked in from day one. But I’m actually glad that we did it that way because we’re so grounded in Connie’s reality that the dreams end up being a flourish rather than feeling like we’re telling the story of a delusional woman. We’ve lived in what she does experience in her waking life so the dreams are more like choreography. A lot of it will be revealed in tech. We have this lighting instrument that can move across the stage and allow us to create this sense of being on a film set. The next task for us is envisioning how that can be handled and manipulated.
EB: I like the idea that there’s a direct reference to a film set because it’s Connie’s past and Billy’s future.
PH: I think the way film has informed Connie’s inner life is something we’re holding on to. It’s been really fun doing the film research for the various periods. Even on the level of our intimacy choreography, we’ve asked for clips of how Hollywood portrayed kissing and these grand divas that we associate with swanning around in their kaftans and reclining on couches. The cinematic vocabulary is so steeped in an idealized conception of Hollywood and still so quotidian. I keep coming back to that idea of Hollywood as the great American export and how it continues to give– for our cultural conquering of the world.
EB: Because this play deals with romance ambiguous, a sociocultural question, are we living in an anti-romantic era?
SB: There’s a level of blind hope that love takes and we’re in a moment that’s weighed down by an understandable necessity toward unveiling truths. I understand why there’s an inability for things to just be frivolous and loving without considering the implications. And of course, romantic comedies are a white genre which would explain why they aren’t on trend and require reexamination. But man, those movies have a feel-good quality and I will say that Peregrine and I are both in really special wonderful marriages with people we love. I am a total cynic and yet I do believe I’m able to live my life and be a person because I have such a loving partnership. There’s a total silliness and abandonment in how my husband and I love each other that makes me wish that art could be more fun and free, but it’s sort of hard to do right now.
But another thing I cling to is that it’s very important for me that people have a good time. This extends not only to my collaborators but also to the audience. I always want to consider the audience. If we’re asking people to give an hour and a half of their uninterrupted time to something, please let it not be torture, but something that can have joy at its center.
Peregrine Teng Heard is an actor, playwright, and Artistic Director of The Associates Theater troupe. See her website here.
Sarah Blush is a NYC-based director and writer. She works on both theater and tv. See her website here.
Redemption Story will play from May 4th to 19th at A.R.T./New York Theaters. You can learn more about the play and purchase tickets here.
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