A Conversation with Sheila Callaghan

When our company first read We Are Not These Hands, we were struck by playwright Sheila Callaghan's nervy balancing act between global themes and intimate stories, poetic language and shocking humor. The vivid characters — village girls Belly and Moth, and the mysterious Westerner they name "Leather" — are at once archetypes and painfully, recognizably human.

These dualities were foremost in my mind when I had the chance recently to sit down with Sheila in a Brooklyn coffeehouse for a chat. We talked about her inspirations for the play, the characters, the girls' dialect and more with my trusty microcassette recorder perched on the chair arm between us. Or not so trusty; turns out the recorder microphone is shot and not a word made it onto the tape. Following is our attempt to recreate via e-mail our original conversation. (It's really close. Promise.)

-- Dan Via

How were you inspired to write a play that touches upon issues of globalization?

I spent some time touring really poor villages in China along the Yangtze, ones that were about to be buried completely underwater when the government flooded the Gorges to harness the river's energy. I was surprised at how most villages I encountered all had Internet cafes, even the ones where the inhabitants couldn't afford shoes. These weren't tourist towns... people in the cafes were local, and very young. Kids still found a way to afford their computer obsessions, and businesses found a way to illegally provide them. 

Shortly after my trip, two stories came out of China. One was of an explosion in a rural Chinese school, where the children were packing firecrackers in the afternoons to sell to westerners in order to help pay for their textbooks. The other was of two teenage boys who set fire to an internet cafe because they were denied access. Both of these events got me wondering about the influence of the west on a communist country, when the country itself was so clearly struggling with capitalist ambitions. 

How did the characters come about? Were they written to fulfill a story you had in mind, or did the story emerge from the characters? 

The play was a commission from the now-defunct Eye of the Storm Theatre in Minneapolis. At first they commissioned just the first two scenes, which were the two girls alone with their bizarre language. But then the theatre commissioned the entire play, and I wanted to add a linguistic counterpoint to the girls. Leather came from this initial impulse, and later became a representation of an outside force, which added a new tension to the girls' relationship. 

You've created a sort of abstracted third-world setting for your play. Why didn't you just set the play in China?  

Well, I'm not an economist or a historian or a journalist, and I wouldn't even know how to begin to document the effects of globalism in an accurate and responsible way. I wanted to write a love story, and I wanted to utilize the images that had been fueling my imagination of late, so setting the story in a fictional third world country accomplished these goals. The play isn't a cautionary tale of the dangers of capitalism, but rather, a small story set against the backdrop of a developing nation. I have a lot of fear about  inadvertently simplifying very complex issues in my work, which is why I couldn't even fathom writing a play about China. 

The play challenges the audience on a number of fronts, such the girls' dialect and their sexual assertiveness. As a playwright, is there some level at which you set out to keep your audience on its toes?

I don't have any dogmatic theories, but I do think that any good piece of theatre (or art for that matter) should be a dialogue between an audience and the work itself. The act of watching a play for me is most satisfying when it is a creative act, when I am engaged in the process of making the play meaningful to myself based on what the playwright has given me. I don't like feeling alienated by theatre, but I also don't like feeling coddled by it. The work I find most fulfilling falls squarely between those realms. This is what I strive for in my own writing.