Questions prepared by Artistic Coordinator Walter Byongsok Chon

WBC: As a prelude to your new play I Am a Superhero, could you briefly tell us how you became a playwright and also introduce us to the plays you have written previously?

JT: I'm currently the joint winner of the Old Vic New Voices Theatre 503 Award in London and I Am a Superhero received a workshop production in January in the UK as part of the award. I've been a member of the Old Vic New Voices company since 2006—the Old Vic selects seven young writers each year as part of the company for a three-year period, and it's been a really inspiring way of learning how to become a playwright. Prior to that, I first started playwriting at the Royal Court Theatre, where I was part of their young writers program for two years. I took part in the Old Vic New Voices 24-Hour Plays last year with a short play called Lucy's Brief Guide on How to Be Human. My other plays include Way You Can Survive the World, which, like I Am a Superhero, is part of The Yasmin Trilogy and which was produced at Theatre 503 in London, and George Bush Saved My Life Last Night, which was performed at the Hampstead Theatre in London. I'm currently working on The World Is Not Ending Now, which is the final part of The Yasmin Trilogy, and which takes places when Yasmin is fifteen/sixteen and just on the verge of becoming an adult.

WBC: What drove you to write I Am a Superhero?

JT: I wanted to go right back to the beginning of The Yasmin Trilogy with I Am a Superhero. In Ways You Can Survive the World, we learn about Yasmin when she is slightly older and starting to become a little disillusioned with the world, and so I wanted to write a play where we see Yasmin's starting place—that at twelve years old, she still believes that it's really possible to save her family by becoming a superhero. The Yasmin Trilogy will, hopefully and eventually, tell the story of what it is like to be a young girl growing up since the millennium and dealing with issues like terrorism, and war, and what's going on in the world now, as well as what's happening in her personal life and in her family, for example the death of her father in I Am a Superhero. I also wanted to explore how a child deals with these issues that are almost too adult for them and what kind of an adult these experiences lead Yasmin to become.

WBC: Is I Am a Superhero at all autobiographical?

JT: I think that, to an extent, all of my plays draw on my own experiences of the world. I Am a Superhero is definitely a play where I feel like I particularly put a lot of my own experiences into the work, as my father died when I was nine years old. Part of me wanted to write about this, and explore how his dying affected the person that I eventually grew up to become, and, in that sense, I think that both Yasmin and her mother's reactions to the father's death are exploring two sides of my own experience—wanting to make everything ok again and also feeling a sense of overwhelming grief. The mother's experience of this more grown up reaction to death also allowed me to explore the death of a close friend a couple of years ago, which was something that I wanted to do. I also wanted to write a play that was inspired by my mother's strength after my father's death. She's definitely more like the Yasmin character in the play, who decides to become a superhero, or at least complete super-heroic tasks, in order to hold our family together at the time. That said, I feel it's important, for me, not to make plays too overly autobiographical and so Yasmin's mission to learn how to become a superhero is definitely pure fantasy, I hope that it lifts the play and makes it an enjoyable and fun experience, as well as a somber story of a child dealing with grief.

WBC: Which playwright or plays have inspired you the most? How have they affected your writing?

JT: John Guare was my mentor on I Am a Superhero, which was a really terrific experience. John helped me work out ways to use craft better in the play, whilst letting me write the play that I wanted to write, using the voice I wanted to use. I think that is the best kind of mentoring that you can have. I'm also a big fan of Lynn Nottage, with whom I've recently worked on the last play in The Yasmin Trilogy, The World Is Not Ending Now. I enjoy both Lynn and John's plays as well. When I was interviewed for Yale School of Drama, Richard Nelson told me that whilst he really liked the play I had submitted about dancing pigs called Ron's Pig Palace on Wheels—which was produced in the UK and Italy—he also wondered whether I wanted to think about writing something more personal and close to my own experiences. That's really the conversation that got me thinking about the character of Yasmin, and which The Yasmin Trilogy came out of, so I'm very grateful for that. In the UK, the playwright Simon Stephens was my first teacher of playwriting, whilst I was at the Royal Court Theatre. He was a big inspiration, both for me and for a lot of young playwrights in the UK. Getting to know Naomi Wallace and working with her when I was commissioned to write George Bush Saved My Life Last Night by a small UK theatre company was also another really important experience for me.

WBC: How would you describe the character of Yasmin?

JT: The specific character of Yasmin really came out of nowhere and her voice was immediately clear. During the course of The Yasmin Trilogy she goes from age twelve to sixteen and from being a child to becoming an adult. In George Bush Saved My Life, which isn't a part of the trilogy, we meet this very funny, very intelligent, but slightly misguided and awkward fifteen-year-old. She doesn't have a clue that she keeps saying the wrong thing to everyone around her, or how to manage this world which seems like such a crazy place to her. The play begins with the line “the first terrorist attack on my school occurred shortly after I had finished delivering a speech proclaiming the merits of George Bush, which was unfortunate timing to say the least.” In The Yasmin Trilogy, I wanted to explore this character further, and during the course of the trilogy we see her move from having this really determined belief that her own willpower and intelligence can make everything ok into a greater understanding of the world.

WBC: How would you describe I Am a Superhero?

JT: Hopefully, at times, a lot of fun, as the audience learns how you can become a superhero—they need a moral code to teach themselves specific skills, a costume that sums up their superhero persona, and a specific mission. I hope the play also says something very true and simple about overcoming grief. I'm interested in exploring what makes theatre theatre, but I hope that, at the same time, the play stays in a very real place. I'm always trying to write plays that will strike a chord with people, and that people will come out of thinking “I feel like that too” or “I never thought about it that way before.” I think being at Yale has taught me that I'd rather put a lot of time into plays that strive to capture something real, than to write a million less well-thought out plays.

Read about Jennifer Tuckett