Interview by: Liv Garcia, Co-Editor-in-Chief
Maday Favela (she/they) is a Mexican creator of ritual and story through directing, design, and playwrighting. Currently based in Chicago, she strives to reimagine stories and immerse audiences into the worlds they help create on stage. Their TTS credits include assistant directing and lighting design for VIP!, assistant directing Meeting Points, acting for The Garden, lighting design for Overpass, Witch Way, and Swear on My Mother's Grave. Chicago credits include Assistant Stage and Production Manager for the 31st and 35th Annual Young Playwrights Festival, Playwright for Something Marvelous' Night of New Works, Stage Manager for the Loop Player's production of Proof, and run crew for The Nutcracker at The House Theatre.
Maday Favela wants you to think about communication. I sat down with the director, playwright, and lighting designer to discuss her Lab, Bajo las Estrellas/With the Stars and Us which opens February 25th at The Theatre School. The play is a bilingual queer fairy tale that asks the audience to reconsider the stories we tell ourselves. Our conversation ranged from their scholarship in Sociology and Performance Studies to the challenges of directing over Zoom to the joy of being a forest, and it was an honor to pick their brain and hear more about the impulses behind this piece.
Liv Garcia [LG]: Why don’t we start with this: pitch me like the 30-second version of what your lab is.
Maday Favela [MF]: Yeah, it's actually kind of funny. It was a lot of research and random tangents that I would go on with perspective, storytelling, and the way we tell our stories.
Let me put it this way – I transferred into The Theatre School. Had I met the image people create of you instead of you would we be friends? That is a very big question that I began playing around with. For me it was fascinating - and I have minors in sociology and performance studies - it was fascinating to see the way that people created stories. I think most of our class met me through story. That’s scary and fascinating at the same time. It really proves that there is no such thing as good and evil, more so as being momentarily displaced in time. That doesn't mean that you can't commit evil, it means that you can grow from it, but the way that people see you may not change.
LG: OK, that's interesting.
MF: Yeah, so for this lab, I feel like we don't have a lot of queer fairy tales. That's sad, because I've always wanted one that’s not bending an existing fairy tale, one that was written for us. One that we don't have to queer code. And I also wanted to go back to my roots. I know this all sounds really eclectic at the moment, but I swear I’m going somewhere.
LG: No, I love it.
MF: I wanted to focus on how perspective skews the way that you see people. I wanted to write something in Spanish because I was never taught to write in Spanish, I was only taught to read and speak it. I also wanted a fairy tale.
At the same time I think that as a person of color, being from Mexico, no matter what I do, it's always going to be taken as political. If I stop myself worrying about how people will take this, I could just tell the story that I want to tell. I think that often to get a look into a culture that isn’t ours, we feel that like the prerequisite to culture is to live or see the trauma. There is conflict, but also I suffered enough this past year, so I didn't want there to be trauma on stage. All of this connects into a whimsical and feel-good story. It's childlike, but not something that's necessarily just for children. It's the fairy tale that you wish you had as a child.
The reason also that I chose to do it in Spanish and English was on purpose. I know that a lot of people at TTS don't know Spanish. I was like “that's it! That's how we do it!” It's two stories running at the same time and the story that's being told in English is from Acantha. Nature intercepts that story and says no, this is actually how it happened. It's about a 70/30 Spanish to English split. In the English parts, you understand what's happening, but you're getting a different story in Spanish, which is the same as meeting people at different times. Same language, different translations, some things are missing. The way that you react to what you watch on stage is more than enough to understand what's going on. Everyone is going to walk away with a different story and everyone is going to piece together the story that they thought was happening. That's what I really want them to look at: how do you piece your stories and why do you piece your stories the way that you did?
LG: You're writing, directing, lighting designing - how do you balance all of those roles, and how does being that multifaceted with one process inform how you approach your rehearsal room?
MF: Well, it was hell [laughs]. It still is a bit but in the best ways possible.
I started as a lighting designer. I only started directing when I got here. I think that in a conservatory we have the tendency of separating everyone, yeah but a lot of it is overlapping. Arguably the script was the hardest to write.
I wrote it in a week. I do not like walking into a room thinking that no one else is going to offer something better than I can. I really turned more into a creative facilitator for this than a director. It was really about sitting down with them and asking “What do you like about this script? What don't you like?” After that day of feedback, I went back and I rewrote a good chunk of it, and then it came back, and now we're here.
But directing-wise, I had COVID, so I had to robo-direct which was eye-opening in terms of accessibility. You really don't need to be in the room as much as we think we do. All of my rehearsals have been two to three hours for that purpose. Even on Zoom, it was a lot of delegating and allowing them to really push on their instincts because when you're not there, there's only so much a Zoom call could do and there's only so much I could have seen. So I brought in the bones every night, I knew what I wanted to happen, and then I (which I know they say is a no-no), but I let them give each other notes. Because they're people and they’re characters in the story, and they know themselves better than I ever will. I'm only there to guide them.
For lighting, it's really just about painting the stage. Lighting is painting with color. I think that was more instinct for me than anything. I have a bunch of fun moments with a projector, but everything that we have is sourced. It already existed in my world because nothing is lost, just momentarily displaced.
LG: I want to talk about the sort of connection between queerness and fairy tales. You said something earlier about you wanting a fairy tale that we didn't have to queer code.
MF: It goes back to the idea of moving away from the urge of having trauma explain queerness. So for me, I'm just tired of coming out stories. I hated the idea of like, “a princess was going to marry a prince, and then she realized she was queer, so she ran away” so I said, “what if they were already queer?” In this story, the princess is marrying another princess. Then the problem doesn't become the queerness, but simply that they're not in love.
I feel that there's also a level of alienation in having the problem be queerness.
LG: What do you mean by alienation?
MF: I mean that when you make the problem queerness you're already setting the precedent that you do not belong. I'm tired of that. I don’t have time for that. I didn't want to sit every night feeling like I don't belong in my own show. If the forest is famed for things that are lost, the forest is for queerness.
I just wanted to exist. I think that we've had enough suffering. I just really wanted this to be an invitation to be okay with the unknown, both in language and people and stories. We play with the seriousness of children, but we're still getting the message across. You don't have to kill people to get a message across which is why we never see the conflict, it’s only a voiceover. I also did that on purpose because it’s the voices that we hear and talk about as who we are. It’s very eclectic in a very good way.
LG: So many different strings coming together.
MF: It's this constant fluidity between English and Spanish. One of the lines that I gave to nature was that “our stories are playful little things that take advantage of how trusting we are and run with it.” You're relying on your trust to tell which story is the real story.
LG: Your performance studies and sociology double minor, how does that show up in your work?
MF: Right, so sociology is really just about studying people and cultures, and I think that for me the audience was my little sociology moment. Basically, it stemmed again from the idea that the trees talk to each other.
LG: This is the root networks thing?
MF: The roots networks, yes, yes.
At the end of the play, the audience may talk to each other. But we're our own little trees and every tree communicates differently so we were like every audience has a little floppy disk and a save file of this story. When you compare notes it's not going to be the same story and when you talk, when you combine things, you'll realize that some things aren't meant to be translated, and some things will get lost in translation. You're just going to be firing back and forth between those save files. I think in that sense I was very curious to see how this play goes out and is thought about beyond like the theatrical element.
That’s the sociology aspect and then for performance. I mean performance studies and sociology are kind of the same thing. Theatre is very script-centric. I think that often the script informs how our body should react instead of the other way around. If there are no words for it then we discard it, because if we can't put it into words then it's not valid, it's not real. That is also a problem with history because the way we say words is very different from the words that are written down. I was able to play around with the language barriers. In theatre and in performance, we are so married to the words that are being said that we forget that the words that are not being said to our body are of equal gravity, or maybe even heavier. So I think that's something that I would love to see people piece together.
LG: I want to wrap us up by asking you what your dream is for how this show is received?
MF: I think the dream was always for it not to be dismissed as a children's tale despite using the archetypes of one. Even then, that's a little thread that we could pull on, because what stories do we dismiss?
I want people to feel good. We could learn from being happy, right? We don't need to be berated with sadness in order to be happy. You can just be and it can be just as nice. Just like walking away, knowing that the simplest of stories can give us as much knowledge as Shakespeare.
I don't need to use big words to communicate how I feel, and I feel that sometimes simplicity speaks louder than complexity. Just know that you're allowed to exist and no one gets to tell you how you should do it or require anything of you. If you want to vibe, vibe! There’s nothing wrong with that! Be a forest!
LG: Be a forest, I love it.
MF: Talk to trees.
LG: Hug a tree.
MF: Hug a tree! If you hear a story and you think it's wrong, wonder why. That's my dream. That is my 27-page little play. There you go.
Bajo las Estrellas, a new devised work written and directed by Maday Favela, will have performances February 24 through February 27 at 7:30 PM. Tickets can be acquired at the TTS Box Office.
The show features the talents of Nicholas Magel, Melina Arevalo, Daniel Suarez Valez, and Anais Ortiz Villacorta San Juan. This production is stage managed by Josie Moore and lighting designed by Maday Favela.
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