Quiara Alegría Hudes (QH): Hi Karina, I just adore this play, and I am so glad I get to do this with you, because I am really interested in our bodies, so the topic really spoke to me. I am curious….no naming names, but how many family members or friends or just people that you know have gone through a BBL process?

Karina Billini (KB): Thank you, Quiara, I’m so touched. I don't have any direct friends or family who have done it. I have acquaintances who have gone to the Dominican Republic and had other things done. But I think the seed for this play was just the numerous WhatsApp group chats I was in during the pandemic, where folks were casually gossiping about women they knew who were getting this procedure. And how jarring that was in juxtaposition to the very brief news coverage on the numerous BIPOC women dying from BBLs overseas. But since then, I’ve been to Miami, and I’ve spoken to plastic surgeons and the Dominicans there who have facilitated or undergone these procedures.

QH: That’s interesting. From the women you interviewed, did you get a sense from them about the pain? Did they know what they had gotten themselves into?

KB: The general response I've gotten is that they knew of the pain, but they didn't know how extreme the pain would be and how challenging recovery is. It’s interesting with BIPOC women, you know? We are taught very early on that we must endure pain gracefully; that we must have a high tolerance of pain. Society imposes that on us.

QH: How can you prepare yourself for pain you haven't experienced yet? You know in the beginning, when Krissy gives her sales pitch, and she's putting on that hard sell, hitting all the right emotional places, it all made me curious about your experiences. What or who sold you on certain ideas of beauty and body attainment, and what sales pitches have been around you in your life?

KB: I grew up in a household filled with very curvaceous, full-bodied women. Most of them were 5’2 firecrackers running my life. They're all the presidents of my life. They were my beauty standard growing up. I was the outlier: I was very thin and gawky. I never felt “Dominican” enough. Within our communities, my female relatives were celebrated for their curvaceousness. They were the epitome of womanhood, fertility, and sensuality. But outside in a white society (especially during the 90’s pop era), their bodies were considered excessive and flashy, and they were told to “tone it down.” I watched the women in my life grapple with those two ideas, inside and outside their communities.

It was my anger towards the Kardashian’s commodification of brown and black bodies that propelled me to write Apple Bottom. It was like 2021 and “slim thick” had become another kind of unattainable idea of how we should look. And the Kardashians came in with BBL’s, as the whitened slim versions of my sisters and my tías and other women in my life. And I think that physical messaging is sending women to run and get BBLs, because of this new standard.

QH: This feeling that media packaged and sold them a version of what they should be.

KB: Totally. And there’s a component of that sales pitch that the procedure will improve one’s quality of life. Especially for characters like Krissy and Andrea, they have a belief that this change will make them as successful as the celebrities that have glorified this procedure. It’s the self-talk that says, “I will finally make that change in my life, tackle these projects or enroll in school, and my ambition would triple if I could just feel at ease with my new body.” And sometimes that works for some women. Some of these women who run these recovery spas credit their own BBLs for giving them the confidence to start their own businesses. But for the majority, a BBL doesn’t really resolve the body dysmorphia most of these women are navigating. Since their body dysmorphia is not being properly treated, a lot of women go for a second (or third) BBL like Krissy. I just want to say this out loud: body dysmorphia isn’t just a “white girl thing” as we’ve been told by our elders and the media. It’s a “every person thing.” I sympathize with both cases—as a woman who struggled with how my own success and body looked like.  That said, I always feel conflicted about this—I’m not 100% for it or against it, and Apple Bottom is also about the bigger issues at hand. 

QH: I love that you say this is so complicated, I have the same feelings. I have this theory that tragedy is a male invention. There is something about the male worldview that says that nihilism and destruction is the inevitable endpoint of human interaction, and I often feel that women don't have the luxury of indulging that. Because more often, we don't have time for tragedy. We have to pack lunch, we have to go shopping, we have things that need to happen—we don't quite get that privilege of the tragic ending. I was really thinking about that with your play, because these women go through hell, and I was nervous the whole time that something horrible might happen. And these women do go through hell, but in the end, it's also just a Tuesday.

Is there a character you relate to the most?

KB: I totally relate to Krissy. I had my Spotlight series director, Nadia Guevara, point this out to me, because she's read a couple of my plays, she said two things: “one, you write a lot about the body, and two, you write these scrappy failure-to-launch women.” And I relate to them!

QH: I’m here for it!

KB: I've been playwriting since I was fifteen and have gotten all my degrees in it, but I didn't have the privilege of working a part-time job or being in a cafe in the middle of the day to write my plays or do an application or network. A lot of my creative energy was spent on surviving and that really slowed me down on a playwriting front. The summer I wrote Apple Bottom, I was in my early 30s and in a very trying time of my life—and I was sick and tired of being a victim of my circumstances and of time. I made a bet to myself that this would be the very last play I would write and if something didn’t happen, I was going to go back being a teacher full time. So I gave up a summer to show up for myself, my writing, and for my mother and the women before me who wanted this writing life for themselves and was told they couldn’t have it. Because we were “too poor, too brown, too urban.” I call Apple Bottom my ‘first born’ because it saved my life. So Krissy really channels all of that for me. She really could be a great businesswoman, and she could really have a life for herself. But things are happening, and she keeps surviving. I think she knows that time is an antagonist towards her.

QH: Can you talk to me about why you’re interested in writing about aging? I was thinking about this play after I finished it, and I really want to see these women when they're sixty. What successes will these women have had? What dreams will they have had to let go of, and where will they be in their bodies? I wanted to see them twenty years later. It made me think of what Maya Angelou said about aging, about how her breasts are in a slow race to see which one gets to her waist first.

KB: That’s hilarious. I think about aging a lot, usually in the way I think about the body a lot. It's incredibly unfair how time and the body work, how you can find yourself and find financial, emotional, and spiritual stability while your body slowly declines. You can finally find your people and get your first apartment. You’re finally making good money, you're living your life, and then you're getting older. I struggle with that all the time. You know? Like folks who had to overcome so much in their youth and finally found their footing later in life. You can finally decorate the living room however you want, but now you have a heart condition, and you can't move as fast. I'm actively obsessed with that, with the body and aging. Not on a superficial end, it's not about appearance. It’s just, is my body functioning right now so I can go live my life? Finally?

QH: This is why I love your play. I found it so refreshing. Because as playwrights, we trade in bodies on stage. Literally, that's the bare materials: bodies and a voice. And yet I don’t often leave the theater feeling like I spent time with bodies. Often, I've spent time with ideas, I've spent time with plots, with characters, with stories. But in your play, these are bodies. They follow the laws of gravity and follow the laws of time.

How do you decide how much to dramatize and how much to imply or hold back? Are you trying to kind of hold back a little bit? What are your strategies there?

KB: Oh, man, I wish I had a strategy. I feel like it's always been intuitive for me. I've always wanted to show the full reality of it. I’ve spent my entire life around caregiving and complicated bodies. My mother devoted her life nursing both of my grandparents until their passings. With both traditional and holistic medicine, I’ve seen my mother resuscitate my grandfather back to life like three times. My little brother has Crohn’s. I’m a fixture at my mom’s cardiology appointments in Chinatown. The body in crisis has been normalized for me. Like you said earlier for women of color, it's just a Tuesday. I use playwriting to grapple with watching our bodies revolt against us. I hope the graphic nature in my work can inspire empathy in my audience. I feel society is very unempathetic with people who grapple with physical pain on a daily (the disabled, new mothers, the elderly, etc.) Even with your loved ones, if they have a headache, you’re immediately like “you’re alright, you can do this, get on the train and go to work.” We don’t carry each other through our pain. We don’t put ourselves in other people’s bodies.

QH: I think it’s because we don't have good vocabulary for it. The question “what’s your pain number” communicates nothing and that’s why no one likes answering it. I don't know what my pain number is, but it's painful! One of the things that I think makes this play special is how it dramatizes a space where there are the two tasks for the characters: be present in your pain and care for women while they're in their pain. It's unlike any other space. These women get real. They get silly. It’s even a strong enough space to hold a fight, a real fight about points of view, but the structure can hold it because it is the sturdy structure of womanhood.

KB: I've never written an all-female ensemble piece. When I was thinking about Apple Bottom, I wanted to see if I could I transfer that fervent energy of my mother’s kitchen. How can I write a love poem for the women in my life and then do it in this play?

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Karina Billini is a Dominican-American playwright, poet, and educator from Brooklyn. KB completed her undergraduate degree in playwriting at Marymount Manhattan College and received her MFA in Playwriting from The New School for Drama. She is a proud alum of the New Harmony Project Conference, Ensemble Studio Theatre's Youngblood, Pipeline PlayLab among others. Her plays have been workshopped and/or produced at Alliance Theatre, Williamstown Theatre Festival, New Harmony Project, Fault Line Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, among others. Her play, APPLE BOTTOM, is a recipient of the Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation commission.  Billini is a second-year  Lila Acheson Wallace American playwriting fellow at The Juilliard School. She is forever grateful for her mother (her favorite poet), Rafaela, and her five siblings for their limitless hope and humor. 

Quiara Alegría Hudes is a writer and barrio feminist whose plays and musicals have been performed around the world. They include Water by the Spoonful, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize; In the Heights, winner of the Tony Award for Best Musical; and Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, a Pulitzer finalist. Her memoir, My Broken Language, was hailed “flawless” by the New York Times and chosen for many Best of 2021 lists. Quiara’s new novel, The White Hot, will land in bookstores this November. She has also written two major motion pictures - the animated Vivo and the big screen adaptation of In the Heights - contributed essays to the Washington Post and American Theater Magazine, and founded a prison writing program called Emancipated Stories. Quiara is a native of West Philly, USA.