An Interview with Becky Wahlstrom
Becky Wahlstrom is a writer, actress and arts educator. Her plays have been performed in Los Angeles at IO West and The Fanatic Salon, in Chicago at Chopin Theater and Chicago New Work Festival, in Nashville at TWTP and Chaffin Barn, where she won first place in Clash of the Playwrights. She was a participant of Nashville Rep’s 2017 Writers Room Program and is the recipient of the 2018 Tennessee Arts Commission Award for Playwrights. Becky Wahlstrom is an accomplished actress on both stage and screen. She graduated from The Chicago Academy for the Arts and London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts (LAMDA) in the UK. The In Process Series will present a staged reading of Captain Aurora, directed by Jaclynn Jutting, on September 17 at 4:30 pm.
How did you choose acting?
I think I always knew I wanted to act. I liked pretending, I liked playing pretend as a child, and when I got older, I took a few community theatre acting classes in Chicago. They taught me that acting could also be a profession. Writing kind of came naturally from that because I did improv, which would turn into writing sketches or writing scenes that we wanted to do or characters I wanted to play. Acting sort of got me organically into writing.
Has your acting experience helped you better understand playwriting?
I think so. I think I have an easier time with writing dialogue and subtext, such as understanding what you don’t have to write because an actor can portray that. That’s my strong suit. I’m not as strong with structure, and I had to learn and understand more through practice. We say “structure,” but I think we all naturally fall into a story structure because we learn really young how to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end, and we know something big has to happen. That structure is built into us by listening to stories daily, but I was less familiar with it. So, yeah, acting helps me, but there are things I still had to learn as a writer. Also, acting allows you to know what is possible on a stage. You can have a storm on stage, you can be in space on stage, there are a lot of things you know are possible. But what taught me about possibilities more than anything was working with kids. I was teaching many summers at Nashville Children’s Theatre, and one of the structures of the camp was they build their own stories. I always loved when they’d come up with something insane. In one play I read, the main character was a talking brick. I was like, “oh my god, this is going to be horrible.” As an adult, I don’t think you’d ever imagine this is going to be possible, and it ended up being one of the most hilarious plays. The brick went on this huge journey and found out he was needed because this bridge was falling down. He jumps, almost ending his life, but winds up in this river, floating down to fill the gap in the bridge. It really was this whole journey of someone with depression. Even though it was this ridiculous, cartoon-y sounding thing, it had a really cool message and was interesting. The story of the brick — who would’ve thought of that other than a child?
How did you create Captain Aurora, and what compelled you to tell Abel’s story as an autistic boy?
I was actually commissioned to write a ten-minute version of this by an organization attempting to bring the arts to people with disabilities. I was given autism as the prompt, and I interviewed families affected by autism and people with autism. Through the interviews, I started to realize there was a theme that interested me which was the word “disability.” The word feels like it alludes to the fact that they have less ability or lack of ability that we have. And while that’s true, they also have other abilities that we don’t have. So, the word should really be “different-abilities.” For a while I was romping around with people who were deaf. My friend was an interpreter and I was learning sign language, so we’d go hang out at deaf happy hours, and I remember some of them saying they didn’t want to hear. All their lives, they’ve been unable to hear, and that’s how they experienced life, a different version of it. They enjoyed that they didn’t hear, which blew my mind, but it makes sense because that’s the world they know. So, with this play, I guess I wanted to explore the idea that a disability could really just be a different ability. And when you talk about autism, there are so many different versions of autism or what people experience when they fit under the umbrella word “autism.” Some lack abilities that are needed to cope in our society. If the world was built for those with autism, we would be the ones with a disability, if you think about it backwards like that.
As a writer, do you feel like you have a responsibility to tell the stories of people misunderstood or rejected by society?
Well, those are the stories you haven’t heard as much, so those are the ones most interesting to me. I don’t feel that I’m responsible to tell those stories; I feel a little bit like an intruder by telling those stories because they aren’t my story. So, to go in and say, “I’m going to write a story about autism when I don’t have autism,” often actually makes be feel like a fraud. Had I not been asked to do it and invited by the autistic community to do it, and for them to help me with their story and point of view, I don’t know that I would’ve done this piece. This boy could be anyone who feels like an outsider, anyone who feels different or behaves different than others expect them to behave. That’s the way I approached it simply because to speak as if I was inside the autistic mind, I’d have to do so much more research.
What impact do you want your stories to have on the audience?
Most of my stories, I love to include a bad guy who’s got a good side, I guess, because I want to believe we’re all innately good. And it’s very easy to villainize the bad guys and root for the good guys, and I just don’t find those stories realistic really because I feel like that’s an easy story. A more difficult story is to learn and understand why someone is behaving this way and making bad choices. To me the “why” is very interesting and maybe that goes back to the acting. I want to know why people are doing what they’re doing. What’s their subtext? What do they want, and why are they behaving this way? To me that’s very interesting.
How do you get to know a character better and bring them to life?
Sometimes, it’s asking a lot of questions of them that may not even end up in the play. Just questions of what are their hopes and dreams, what are they afraid of, who’s that person they can most trust in the world, who’s that person they aspire to be, who are they jealous of, what do they wish they could do but can’t seem to get there? I like to explore all of those and once you know those things, sometimes the story ends up guiding itself. I like to write down thoughts that I have or props I know I want in the play, and I’ll just make lists and then they’ll find their way in…or they won’t and you’ve got to leave them for a different project.
Do you have any habits that help motivate you to write?
I’m constantly taking classes or getting together forming a writing group. I’m the worst if I don’t have accountability with other people. I’m such a social creature, too, that writing for me is a lot of sitting alone, so once I have characters developed, I don’t ever feel alone. I’m in the play with them, and I can write for hours alone because the characters are there and I’m socializing with them. But when I haven’t a great idea yet, and I’m still in that brainstorming phase, I can be the worst. I can go days without touching my computer at all to write. They say you should write every day; it’s a muscle. It definitely is a muscle because I’ll find getting back onto my computer and writing is harder than having been writing. I don’t care what it is, I beg for assignments sometimes from a friend. They could be like, “you have to write ten pages and it has to be a story about a squirrel and include a shooting star.” Like okay, at least I have an assignment now and I can go from there. It’s great when someone makes you do that because it does stretch your imagination. I think for me that helps the most and being in a writing group really helps. I had a group I would meet with every week to brainstorm ideas and the group would help unpack those ideas. That’s helpful because while you all are talking and unpacking, you yourself are figuring out what’s interesting to you and what you want to keep going with.
What’s the most challenging aspect of the writing process and how do you overcome it?
Getting back on the horse to start writing when you’ve stopped. It’s always difficult, and you hate yourself for not doing the thing you know you love to do. I think the toughest thing about writing is when you’re not writing. Sometimes you follow the five-minute rule where you literally just sit down and need to start writing for five minutes, even if it’s just journaling. Often, I’ll go back to journal writing when I have nothing. During this whole pandemic I think everyone thought they were going to be busting out amazing scripts because we have all this time. We thought we had all this time to create the story we always wanted to write, but it wasn’t working that way for a lot of people, and it hasn’t worked that way for me. I’ve been writing a lot of short, chunky things during the pandemic and I’ve been in virtual writing groups, but I haven’t written anything long. But so long as you are writing, that helps. If you’re all consumed, especially by coronavirus right now, then write about it. You’re probably not going to write a play about coronavirus but at least you’re journaling about what’s happening on a daily basis. In the beginning I was just writing about what I was doing everyday because that first lock-down felt so surreal, and I thought it almost felt sci-fi. This feels like something post-apocalyptic. But at least I was writing, and it’s the best you can do. I also try to do exercises and create rules for myself to write for five to ten minutes. Rules for me actually make me think outside the box. You’d think a rule would be so confining but it’s the thing that makes me work
Many ideas come and go, but how do you decide which ones to toss away and which to develop?
Sometimes it’s because it’s the story beating on the inside of my brain trying to get out so that’s what I choose to work on, and sometimes it’s because someone asks me to write a certain play. Again, I do really well with assignments. I was asked once to write a play called In Stitches, about a group of old ladies who do handy-crafts together over at Centennial park, and they’ve been getting together for over 17 years. I was invited to sit with them and write a play about them. I remember thinking it sounded boring, like who needs another Steel Magnolias, right? Steel Magnolias is a great play, but we don’t need another one. But it ended up being so much fun to hang out with these women and hear their stories and to be part of their circle and write about them. It wasn’t something I would’ve thought to write about, but I’m so grateful for that opportunity. I’m so glad when someone asks me to write about something I know nothing about because I get to learn and explore something new.
What writing advice do you have for new writers?
I would say go and see as many plays as you can. Right now, we’re in a pandemic so I feel like all my advice is worth nothing, but once you can, go back out and experience anything you can. See live-theatre or dance or any art form. I feel like the different art forms inform each other. If you want to write for theatre, you should also watch a dance performance, listen to a band, go to the art museum. I think all those things combined will help inform theatre. Because theatre, in a way, has all of those. If I’m not writing much, but I see live theatre, I feel inspired. I think the best artists steal from each other; they pickpocket the things they like and then use them. Nothing is more inspiring than to see other plays that blow my mind or show me another way to utilize the space that I hadn’t thought of before.
Do you have a favorite character?
It’s not my favorite character, but I do find my father to be my muse, and he sneaks into almost all my plays somehow. I do write a lot of realism and then put my own fantasy into it or write what I wished happened in life versus what does. If there’s one person whose chasing me to write about all the time, it’s my dad, and I would actually like to get out of that habit. He’s such a mystery and I think that’s why I write about him; I spend time trying to figure him out through playwriting.
Who do you look up to?
Well there’s one person when you said that that came to mind. She’s the reason I’m in Nashville. She’s a nun and about 95 now. She’s black and was rejected by about 54 different convents back in the 1950s for being black. She pursued it anyway, and when you pursue the life of a nun you’re pursuing a life of complete selflessness of serving God and others. She fought for that life while also fighting against discrimination. When I think of who I look up to, I think of people who are good listeners and people who can see the good in everyone and every living thing, and that’s who she is. I find that so inspiring and peaceful, and I want to be her when I grow up.
Hadley Pegg is a Criminal Justice major at work on her Honors thesis — her first play — at Middle Tennessee State University.
