Amita Sharma (AS): Thank you for doing this, Martyna, it means so much.

Martyna Majok (MM): No, thank you, I feel honored. I loved the play. Before we started recording, you were talking about your kids and your writing process, and I’m interested in talking about the appetites of women. Throughout womanhood, we experience a splitting of selves that happens continually throughout our lifetimes.

AS: It’s interesting to hear you say that. When I became a mom, I really felt that splitting of self. I realized how little society values motherhood. This universal thing! And I love thinking about the splitting of selves, because it’s also a universal thing for many women, especially those from the diaspora—we’re conditioned to compartmentalize our different selves.

MM: To me, my mother is my greatest mystery and my deepest fascination. I remember Lisa Kron saying something about how one’s parents are often an artist’s greatest mystery. In a way, I may be trying to solve who I am through my mom.

AS: I love that so much. My mom is such a mystery to me too. I’ve interviewed her before, trying to understand and memorialize her life story as she gets older. The inquiry of my maternal lineage was a big impetus to write this play. I wanted my kids to know where they came from, and I realized how little I knew of my own family history. In that way, it’s also an ode to my maternal grandmother and the mothers that came before me.

MM: Do you feel a pressure to translate your family? Is it pressure? What pushes you to excavate deeper into yourself?

AS: I felt it was a primal need. During lockdown my daughter was three, my son was one, and writing was the only thing that would ground me when they went to sleep. It was an extremely overwhelming and painful time, but it was also so joyful and beautiful. My babies were growing into these wondrous little people, and I was viscerally reminded of my own childhood experiences, some good, but a lot of it not so good. Writing allowed me to investigate these feelings and really helped me heal and make sense of it all.

I also want my kids to know who their mother is and who their grandmother is, to understand who they are and where they’re from. I’ve been up against so much as a parent, yet I have so many privileges that the women before me didn’t. As first-generation kids, we don’t get a chance to really understand our parents’ stories because they’re just so busy putting food on the table and surviving that many of their stories risk erasure. And I also think many of our immigrant parents just don’t want to go there.

MM: I’ve experienced that with my mom. She may not have asked herself the questions that I am most curious about her answers to. I feel from her almost a resistance towards investigating, like it threatens something. I wonder if it’s because these women have done things in their lives—to survive—or because it was expected of their bodies and genders—that might not have felt completely authentic to who they felt themselves to be deep down inside. I imagine it might be devastating to hear their first-gen playwright children ask them the whys.

Do you consider yourself a political writer?

AS: Yes, I am a very political person, and it drives my work as a writer. When I became a mother, I became radicalized. The author Lucy Jones said becoming a mother was the most political experience of her life—“rife with conflict, domination, drama, struggle and power.” I felt that so deeply. I have been failed by the industrial medical complex. That’s something I wanted to show in Birth of a Mother, the blood and the gore and the ugliness of it.

I also didn’t see anyone who looked like me growing up in Iowa and Michigan in the 80s. My own kids today don’t see many people like them in the media and art that they love. So I want my kids to know the cultural power in their lineage. This really drives my work and motivates me.

MM: Some people chafe against the term “political playwright,” because it conjures images of punishing or schooling an audience with art, but I agree with you, the world is political.

Can you talk to me about naming the character after yourself?

AS: This play comes from such a personal place. Even though not it’s not autobiographical, there is a lot of real, personal sharing. I toyed with other names, but this felt like it was my only option.

MM: Was it freeing to write without the artifice of a mask? Instead of trying to pretend that this is somebody else?

AS: Yeah, I think so, I wanted to hear my heartbeat in it.

MM: I would be terrified to do that. I’d be worried that I’d lose access to the ugliness of certain truths.

AS: Yeah, I think there’s something about me that really wants to just embarrass myself? [laughs] Like maybe it’s worth it if it offers someone a release, even myself? I’d love to talk to you about that embarrassment. Writing plays can feel so embarrassing it’s almost unbearable. And yet, I still feel the need to do it.

MM: Does that need motivate you? Do you like writing from that place?

AS: No, oh my god it sucks. No. When I’m writing, I am vacillating between utter despair and some sort of grandiosity. How about you? What’s your relationship to your writing process?

MM: I hate writing. I hate it so fucking much. But I don’t know how else to be quite as honest about any part of my life without it. It’s agonizing, but I go through it to come out the other side and feel like I understand myself and others more. Or at least, that I have communed more deeply with something rattling within me. Writing to me is literally bringing that rattling sound outside my body to listen to it more closely. My mind has fucked me into believing so many seemingly logical ideas that are not necessarily true, but I have learned to chase that hunger in my body.

AS: Yes, it gets back to that primal thing, right? I see it with my children when they’re painting, or dancing, or doing pretend-play: there’s no pretense to it at all. It just happens to them. With my own play, even though it came from a very chaotic state of mind, it came from a very necessary place. And I hope that any future works that I embark on come from that impulse. My kids have really inspired me in that way.

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Amita Sharma (she/her) is a writer and actor. Her plays include Birth of a Mother, and Nani. She participated in the Restorative Story Writers Workshop at The Barrow Group (2020-2022). Amita is a graduate of the professional actors training program at the William Esper Studio. She hails from rural Iowa and Metro Detroit. The generational impact of the South Asian diaspora, hope and transformation are driving forces in her work. www.amita-sharma.com

Martyna Majok was born in Bytom, Poland and raised in Jersey and Chicago. She was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her Broadway debut play, Cost of Living, which was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play. Other plays include Sanctuary City, Queens, and Ironbound, which have been produced across American and international stages, and the libretto for Gatsby: An American Myth, with music by Florence Welch and Thomas Bartlett. Other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, Arthur Miller Foundation Legacy Award, The Obie Award for Playwriting, The Hull-Warriner Award, The Academy of Arts and Letters’ Benjamin Hadley Danks Award for Exceptional Playwriting, The Sun Valley Playwrights Residency Award, Off Broadway Alliance Best New Play Award, The Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding New Play, The Hermitage Greenfield Prize, as the first female recipient in drama, The Champions of Change Award from the NYC Mayor’s Office, The Francesca Primus Prize, two Jane Chambers Playwriting Awards, The Lanford Wilson Prize, The Lilly Award's Stacey Mindich Prize, Helen Merrill Emerging Playwright Award, Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding Original New Play from The Helen Hayes Awards, Jean Kennedy Smith Playwriting Award, ANPF Women's Invitational Prize, David Calicchio Prize, Global Age Project Prize, NYTW 2050 Fellowship, NNPN Smith Prize for Political Playwriting, and Merage Foundation Fellowship for The American Dream. Martyna studied at Yale School of Drama, Juilliard, University of Chicago, and Jersey public schools. She was a 2012-2013 NNPN playwright-in-residence, the 2015-2016 PoNY Fellow at the Lark Play Development Center, and a 2018-2019 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. Martyna has developed TV projects for HBO and written a feature film for Plan B/Pastel/MGM/Orion, currently in post-production.