HANSOL JUNG (HJ): I’m interested in why animals and folktales keep appearing in your work. Do they just keep appearing? Is it something that you’re consciously working on? Is it a technical thing or is it more aesthetics?

NINA KI (NK): I think it's primarily just because I like them. I've always liked animals, and if I'm going to research something, I get excited about researching animals. I would define the type of writing that I'm interested in as having some kind of supernatural or fantastical quality. Animals talking really does that for me, along with folktales. I'm interested in an emotional truth that exists in the queer, fantasy type space as opposed to straight realism.

HJ: A teacher of mine, Paula Vogel, used to say that, especially around writing trauma or writing stories that are going to hurt you, “you must look to the left of the sun to tell the story of the sun.” I have maybe two plays that I haven't written an animal into. As the magical figure, or in a fairytale scaffolding myth, and I feel like it can help us do that a little bit, to take a well-known story and then tell it through a little look to the left. To use this thing to speak to the left of the sun.

NK: That's so smart. Wow. Paula Vogel!

HJ: To speak a little bit about the diaspora, do you feel a weight to being in the Asian diaspora? Do you embrace it? Do you feel like you want to be an Asian writer or an Asian American writer? How do you navigate around that?

NK: Like everybody else, I did not have very many complex, authentic, positive representations when I was growing up and that really affected me. When I saw Crazy, Rich Asians, I recognized the feeling that there are other people who also feel the same way. Other people are also in the same boat. Maybe even for generations after us, there's still going to be a little bit of that desire to see ourselves. Because I do think it’s important to see how we understand ourselves and the world around us, and what kind of future we can envision for ourselves.

It is really important to me to keep writing queer Asian stories. I don't shy away from people referring to me as a queer Asian writer, because I am and it’s so ingrained in my practice of writing too. I want my work to be an opportunity for communal healing, ideally. I know that some writers hope they won’t be pigeonholed and that they will get fair opportunities to tell whatever kind of stories that they want.

HJ: Well, I think it's very complicated. I feel caught in how I want to serve this certain community. I want to write things that someone exactly like me can revel in and feel reprieve about. But I don't enjoy that burden or responsibility in every play. I guess that's what pigeonholing is, right? I would love to just be a white man, a straight white male writer, and only be concerned with the things that I'm concerned with without my being straight or white or male applied to why I wrote this.

There’s often still the lens of “who I am in it,” which feels like a very specific American question that playwrights have to answer. But I feel very conflicted, and I envy your embrace of the job that you set yourself to do.

NK: Yeah, I think I feel comfortable with it. But I wouldn’t ever cast judgement on any other artist because we’re all trying to figure out what the right way to do this is. I think we're all just trying to do that as artists. We're all just trying to do it in our own way. I completely empathize with what you’re saying. How do you think about it?

HJ: It comes down to a question of what inspires you. There is community and then there are non-community things that inspire me and lead me completely down another road. So maybe that's where I guess I am in my career now, I might be interested in some other stuff.

So I know animals and myths get your juice flowing, but what are other inspirations? What are you inspired by?

NK: My Spotlight Series play, Ravage, comes from different things. There are some plays where I know it has to ruminate. Where I know I want to write about this one day, but I’ll keep it there until it's ready. But for Ravage, one part is that I was a big Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan when I was twelve—

HJ: Oh my god! Yes!

NK: Yes! So Buffy. And then also, when I was young, right around that time, there was a book called Uncle Vampire by Cynthia Grant which I read when I was a tween. It’s about somebody who believes that their uncle is a vampire, and then there's a twist! So I was really interested in these things and asking questions around how people who have experienced trauma eventually start to reframe themselves as heroes of their own story. Those were the things that Ravage was coming from. Having a flawed protagonist who is looking through this distorted mirror of perspective and at the same time trying to find empowerment.

HJ: A character who is fragmented, due to her trauma, and is wading her way through it.

NK: Wading her way through and actively trying to recreate. In this way, it's like a queer retelling of the past and how it's informing the present.

HJ: There feels like there's like a theme of or at least importance you've placed on story telling as both a coping mechanism and a way to find agency in a current problem. Can you talk a bit about that?

NK: This is a little grandiose, but I believe that stories are written in the language of power. Even if we look at history, history is the storytelling of the victor's perspective being imposed on events. I am really interested in how people who exist in marginalized communities keep finding power when they have so little of it sometimes, then how they survive it and end up thriving. I think about those stories because I think we still need it. Or at least I still need it.

HJ: It seems like you’re using the retelling of a story to give your characters power or refracting it inside of a reality of their choosing. I appreciate the way you couched the act of storytelling as a tangible power of authority. The ingredient to making an emperor is the stories and the narratives which feed into beliefs.

Sometimes as a writer about stories, I ended up having to do a lot of explaining about the original story to let the story I want to tell have its intended dramatic function. Do you feel like you must navigate around that?

NK: When I first started writing, I would write a lot of white characters or characters who didn’t have an ethnicity and therefore were basically white. They had no cultural specificity. And later I had a moment where I just decided to say fuck it, I’ll just try writing as if I was the authority. It put all of my experiences at the forefront of how I’m writing as though everybody will know what I know.

Can I ask you a question? How would you describe your writing?

HJ: I actually do believe in the ability of theater to make a tangible change in a person's life or point of view. Unfortunately.

NK: Why is that unfortunate?

HJ: It’s a little earnest, or precious. I thought I might mature out of it one day. I haven’t.

NK: Well, if it helps, I also believe in that, so I'll just be in the same boat.

Nina Ki is a Queerean (Queer + Korean) American playwright living in Brooklyn. Xe graduated from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 2008 with a BFA in Dramatic Writing, and xer plays have been read, recorded, and presented nationwide, including with Clubbed Thumb, Ma-Yi Theater Company, MCC Theater, The Parsnip Ship, Yale Summer Cabaret, and Queens Theater. Xer play “Moon Bear” was given special consideration for the Relentless Award, and xer play “Ravage” was a finalist for the Playwrights Realm's Fellowship. Xe was also an inaugural member of The Parsnip Ship's Radio Roots Writer's Group and a member of Clubbed Thumb's Early Career Writer's Group, and is a member of Ma-Yi's Writers Lab. To contact xer or learn more about xer work, please visit xer website at www.nina-ki.com.

Hansol Jung is a playwright from South Korea. Productions include Merry Me (New York Theater Workshop), Wolf Play (Soho Rep, NNPN Rolling Premiere: Artists Rep, Company One), Wild Goose Dreams (The Public Theater, La Jolla Playhouse), Cardboard Piano (Humana Festival at ATL), Among the Dead (Ma-Yi Theatre), and No More Sad Things (Sideshow, Boise Contemporary). Winner of Lucille Lortel Award Best Play, Obie Award for Playwriting, Steinberg Award, Whiting Award, Helen Merrill Award. Commissions from The Kennedy Center, The Public Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Seattle Repertory Theatre, National Theatre in UK, Playwrights Horizons, Artists Repertory Theater, Ma-Yi Theatre and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Her work has been developed at Royal Court, New York Theatre Workshop, Hedgebrook, Berkeley Repertory, Sundance Theatre Lab, O’Neill Theater Center, and the Lark. Hansol is the recipient of the Hodder Fellowship, Page 73 Fellowship, Lark’s Rita Goldberg Fellowship, NYTW’s 2050 Fellowship, MacDowell Artist Residency, and International Playwrights Residency at Royal Court. Hansol has written for Netflix Series Tales of the City and Apple+ Series Pachinko and has developed new projects for film and television with Bad Robot, Amazon Studios, Apple+ TV, Fifth Season Production and Kindred Spirit among others. She is a proud member of NYTW's Usual Suspects, Kilroys and a founding member of the new play collective The Pack. https://www.thepackcompany.org/  MFA: Yale.