An Interview with Daphne White
Anna Li works with Valley Players on our marketing team. She took a few moments to have a conversation with Daphne White, the playwright of Shiva in the Garden of Eden.
ANNA: How and when did you realize you wanted to write?
DAPHNE: My mother encouraged me to write ever since I was a little girl. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing. It was never a decision!
ANNA: What inspires you to write? What type of stories do you like to tell?
DAPHNE: I write plays about issues that fascinate me, and won’t let me go. I only write when I feel I have something to say, something I really want people to understand. My first play focused on trauma and the power of energy healing, since I was working as a Healing Touch and trauma release practitioner at the time. My second and third plays are about betrayal, and the personal costs we pay for speaking our truth to power. (I have a lot of personal experience with this!) My fourth play is set at a retreat center and focuses on the power of ritual to heal. All my plays center strong female characters of a certain age. We need to see more of their stories onstage!
ANNA: What are the best and worst parts about developing a story and characters?
DAPHNE: To paraphrase a famous quote: “Writing is easy. Just open up a vein!” It’s not that bad, actually, and I rarely use actual blood in my quill. However, sometimes I get stuck on the plot and nothing seems to work. I have to go on long walks, or dance for long periods of time, and wait for something to shake loose. Eventually, it does. But never as quickly as I would like! So patience (or lack thereof) is one of the worst parts about playwriting for me.
ANNA: Can you describe what goes through your head and heart when you see your story come to life on stage and play out through living, breathing characters?
DAPHNE: That is the very best part of playwriting! Writing itself is sedentary and lonely work, but when you finally see actors reading it for the first time, it is incredibly joyful and makes all the work worthwhile. Seeing it on a stage — and especially hearing the audience laugh, or gasp, or respond in other ways — is what convinces me that writing another play is worth it. It’s a thrill like no other! I can’t even put it into words. You’d have to write a play and experience it for yourself. Just open up a vein…
ANNA: How much of your own life do you put into your stories? Your characters?
DAPHNE: I suppose we all write from our own experience, basically. We take what we know and then build it into a wider, richer, more dramatic and exciting world. Shiva in the Garden of Eden grew from the seed of a personal experience, but the plot and circumstances are totally invented. When I wrote my play about Susan B. Anthony (called Susan B. ) I drew on the part of myself that won’t take “no” for an answer. It wasn’t hard! I am also a journalist, so I decided I had to have a scene where Susan is interviewed by a reporter. That was one of the most fun scenes to write! And I invented a conflict between Susan and Frederick Douglass that probably never happened, but could have. That was fun as well, putting historical characters in hypothetical situations. There have got to be some perks to this job, and I try to avail myself of as many as possible.