Jasmine: I’m really excited today to have Professor Sylvan Oswald, who is head of playwriting in the Department of Theater. So Sylvan, thanks so much for being here.

Sylvan: Absolutely.

Jasmine: So I thought we could start by talking a little bit about sort of inclusivity and how it comes into play when you’re teaching playwriting.

Sylvan: There’s a couple of elements of playwriting where this kind of stuff pops. Every play starts with a page called the landing page- Okay… which, you know, there’s the title page that’s like the title, the author, your agent, whatever, the contact info, and then right after that is a page called the landing page, which features just like a, like a sort of really simple list orienting the reader about what’s inside.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: And it’s gonna say characters and time and place, or some version of that, and any other notes that the writer wants to include. And that page is really the first inkling that a reader [has], if the title isn’t explicit about who or what the play is about, the landing page is gonna give you a ton of information. 

Jasmine: Yeah. 

Sylvan: And sometimes in my playwriting classes, I will spend an hour on the first day of class on the landing page just to talk about how much information we can glean from that, because that’s the first place where a reader knows who is included and whether they themself might feel included.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: So with the characters, we’re gonna include gender, age, and race. And the reason we include those things is because we have to cast the play. And then for location, that’s gonna give us information about whether these people are in a place that makes sense for them, or whether they’re completely out of place, right? And a time is gonna tell us what historical conditions they may be experiencing or confronting, or [be] underneath.

Jasmine: Right. Is there an example, like, of… If you were thinking of, like, a landing page that you’ve read or that you’ve encountered when reading plays, what would an example look like?

Sylvan: I’m working on editing some proofs for a book of, an edition of one of my own plays. So that’s very much in my mind.

Jasmine: Right. 

Sylvan: ‘Cause I also wrote an introductory essay that’s, like, about landing pages. So on the landing page of one of my plays, Pony, it’s the characters and, like, age, gender, and maybe something, a little spicy element about their personality. I don’t like to give a whole paragraph. That’s, like, TMI. And then, you know, and then there’s gonna be a time, and for me, in that play in particular, it’s a response to an older play- Okay… called Woyzeck. So the time of that play is now and Woyzeck. Mm. And the setting of that play is on the other side of the forest from Woyzeck.

Jasmine: I see. 

Sylvan: So, it’s very much in relationship. So it’s, there’s something sort of meta going on there, where we’re both, like, inside of this current play that can completely stand on its own, and we’re talking about a dialogue in relationship to an older play. And actually, this is a really useful one to talk about partly because the reason I wrote my play was that I was really pissed off at this older play.

Jasmine: Okay.

Sylvan: This is, like, a really famous play, and it’s an example in theater history of one of the first plays that we have with a working-class protagonist.

Jasmine: Oh, fascinating. When is it from?

Sylvan: Mid-19th century Germany. This, like, sort of, like, young prodigy-type writer who, like, dies really young from influenza kind of a, kind of a thing.

Jasmine: Wow.

Sylvan: And, sort of one of those, like, goes mad kind of stories. And, like, leaves a heap of manuscript pages behind. And then this play is sort of assembled by a variety of editors, and in every version of it, he kills his girlfriend at the end. So it’s a play about how he is oppressed by the military industrial complex, and the medical industrial complex together, and sort of, like, loses his mind, and so starts to fixate on his girlfriend’s infidelity.

Jasmine: Mm-hmm.

Sylvan: And by the end of the play, he gets wrapped up in such a spiral of anxiety and paranoia that he sort of kills her in an act of, generously we could say, insanity. But this is one of our most key plays in theater history. And I remember being taught this class in theater history and being like, “Are you kidding me? This is… This is so important?” You know, what is so important about another story about a man, violence against women?

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: And so this really bugged me. Initially I think I wanted to direct it one time to, like, do something to it, but I ended up doing a Greek tragedy that time. So what I wanted to do was interact with that play in some way in which I was not replicating that violence. Mm-hmm. So I ended up writing a play that puts the girlfriend character at the center of the story.

Jasmine: Nice.

Sylvan: And so the Woyzeck character is, like, completely out of the play, offstage, is, like, an imagined kind of figure.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: And as we go through the story, there’s actually a trans protagonist who enters this world, and gets really wrapped up with her. It’s sort of like she’s solving a cold case, which happens to be the murder in this past play. And the way that this play lands is that this guy is just coming, this trans guy is just coming out of incarceration, and he’s trying to start a new life, and he gets really involved with her, and it gets a little scary and dark at some points. It’s like, are we role-playing? Is this real? What’s happening?

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: And I’m gonna spoiler my own play here, but we get to the end of this play, and part of how it turns is this recognition finally that actually maybe in this story nobody has to die.

Jasmine: Right. Right.

Sylvan: And that really defines my approach to inclusion, and rethinking our canon, and how we make plays. Because I have for many years put on my syllabus a clause that says that one of our learning objectives is to rethink historically oppressive narratives, and that could mean gay characters getting killed, female characters getting abused by anyone, but men in particular, people of color being oppressed or, victims of violence in some way or another. Like, do we need to retell these stories? Is that a narrative we need to replicate? I feel like the conversation around that in pop culture is much broader and sort of ubiquitous now, which is fantastic. But when I first started doing this, my students were like, “What? What is a historically oppressive narrative?” You know? Or “What is a narrative trope?” And I actually think it’s a beautiful thing that today we are constantly talking about narrative tropes, and constantly having a dialogue about how to tell different stories. But that has not always been the case.

Jasmine: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s really interesting because it sounds like, you know, with your own work, your own sort of practice as a playwright, you’re really sort of trying to undo a lot of the tropes that have been established. And then in the classroom, you sort of translate those— that approach, into the classroom for your students.

Sylvan: Exactly. Exactly. And I’m training the students, like, “Okay, you’re coming up with your story for your play,” you know, People write in different ways. Sometimes you start out and you know exactly who’s in your play and what you’re trying to say, and sometimes you have to sort of stumble your way towards it, and that’s totally okay.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: I think but once you get to the point where you’re starting to, like, draw up a landing page or start to share those pages with other people, that’s when we start to talk about responsibility.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: Right? We don’t wanna, like, burden ourselves with too much responsibility when we’re starting to write, ’cause we need that kind of freedom to play and make a mess.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: But then as we’re starting to bring the work out into public, that’s when we have to really start thinking like: What am I saying? You know, what impact is this gonna have on people? Am I moving the conversation forward, or am I re-inscribing an old conversation that we really need to move beyond?

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: So I’m always asking my students, like, well, we wanna… [trails off]. You know, I was thinking just for a second about that thing. There’s a computer program, it’s like an alternative script formatting software called Highland that was created by the screenwriter John August. He created it initially to be an alternative to Final Draft, which is the sort of standard screenwriting software that people use, and some playwrights use it. He actually created this element where you can just hit a button, and the computer program can be like, “Yeah, man, there’s not enough women in this story,” or, like—

Jasmine: Wow.

Sylvan: —you have 17 male character names and, you know, three female character names,” or something like that.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: Which is amazing.

Jasmine: Yeah.

Sylvan: So, like, how do we have accountability about that? I don’t think every writer’s job is to, like, be the United Nations of everybody, right? We’re gonna write the stories that we need to write and the things that we have access to and know, in addition to the things that we research, which we’ll talk more about later. But, it’s really an opportunity to kind of like show yourself what you are doing.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: Right? And to say, “Okay, I have put this many cis people, I have put this many trans or gender non-conforming or non-binary people in.” Okay, fine. And that doesn’t mean that there’s a rule, a hard and fast rule that anybody needs to follow. It’s just like let’s own it, let’s have awareness.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: Right? And then I think it really comes down to the narratives we’re using themselves, like the stories themselves are where we really start to look at, like… I have a student right now who is writing, a queer character that gets shot by their own brother. And I need to go tell that student, “Hey, actually, I just wanna flag,” or, “I just wanna observe or reflect back that you have a male character shooting a queer female character in your play. Is that a story you wanna be telling?”

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: “And if it is, what do you wanna do with that story?” Right? Because I think there’s an argument to be made that we can replicate a certain narrative if we believe the audience needs to see it, if we are also going to intervene in that story. Otherwise, we’re just telling the same old story again and again.

Jasmine: Right. Right. So sort of-

Sylvan: And that is re-inscribing this violence.

Jasmine: Yeah. So thinking about re-inscription, replication, versus intervention.

Sylvan: Yeah.

Jasmine: With the type of work that [they’re] doing as a student.

Sylvan: Yes.

Jasmine: Yeah, that’s really, that’s really fascinating. And the, you know, whenever I talk to students, the question around research that you brought up earlier… Because I, you know, I’m not a practitioner or anything like that, but I do talk to students in different programs and all of this. And I also talk, you know, to scholars who, you know, have to put together syllabi and things like this. And, you know, one of the questions that can come up sometimes is sort of thinking about how to approach writing characters that are maybe from different communities than your own. So you want to have, you know, maybe a breadth of representation. 

Sylvan: Mm-hmm. 

Jasmine: But at the same time, you also, as you’ve said, you need to tell stories that are also, you know, maybe grounded in a certain level of expertise or experience or something like that. 

Sylvan: Right. 

Jasmine: So, I was curious if you could talk a little bit about that, because that’s something that students have asked me about before.

Sylvan: Yeah. I have a couple of things about that. Thank you for that question. You know, similar to this point about re-inscribing oppressive narratives, I also have a thing that I say to my students, which is that “representation is everybody’s business.”

Jasmine: Mm.

Sylvan: I do have to think about my position — I’m a trans playwright— but that doesn’t give me carte blanche to do whatever. But I also have to acknowledge my position as a white person with the kind of privileges that I have grown up with and the sort of blind spots that that might generate. So when I… and I certainly believe that everybody needs more jobs.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: Right? And I don’t feel like I’d be living my own values if all I did was create jobs for white trans guys.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: Or if all I did was for white queer community. Like, that’s not enough.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: And I feel called to create space for lots of different people, and the way that I do that is research.

Jasmine: Mm-hmm.

Sylvan: So, I had a play that I wrote, a number of years ago that was a story from my family that was about my grandmother was an astrologer in the ’70s–

Jasmine: Wow, very cool…

Sylvan: –and ’80s and ’90s, and she ended up having her own astrology radio show, and she was an amazing woman. And she learned astrology from an African American woman — this is all taking place in Philadelphia in the ’70s — and they had a really amazing, deep mentor-student relationship that changed my grandmother’s life. And in order to tell that… So, I wanted to tell that story because of that powerful bond.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: I also added lots of other story elements that created conflict. I look back at that play, and I have a lot of problems with some of the things that I did in it. Like, I look back and I’m like, “Oh, I did that wrong. I would’ve done that differently. I would’ve done that differently.” But something I do feel good about is how I wrote that African American woman. I mean, I don’t know what people would say today, but when I was in the process of doing it, what I knew I needed to do was make sure I could get as deep as I could on that character. And I… You know, let’s say you’re writing something set in another city or something like that, right? You might go to that city. You might read books about that city. You might look at photographs online about that city. You might study its history. You might study its current politics, right? You really wanna immerse yourself in that world. And so as I was building this character, I started to think about what might be the music that she listens to? What might she read? Or which authors might represent a perspective that she might also share?

Jasmine: Mm-hmm.

Sylvan: Like, where might she come from, right? What might her background be? What kinds of speech patterns might she have? So while my goal is not, like, some kind of photographic realism or anything— if that’s even a phrase— for writing a character, or any kind of, like, I don’t know, verisimilitude. Like, that wasn’t necessary. What was necessary was an emotional or poetic truth.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: So I would, you know, I think also because I had to set my play in the ’60s, I was reading a lot of Black radical tradition kind of literature. I was making sure that I had plenty of perspectives of Black female writers in my reading queue. I was watching films. I was… And I wasn’t just limiting it to Black female authors. I was reading Black male authors. So that was really important to me to make sure that I had… [trails of] you know, and of course I was also talking to individuals. I was sharing my work with, Black colleagues. I was trying to… I made myself vulnerable in the ways that I could, while also trying to be as responsible as possible to make this character a full human.

Jasmine: Yeah.

Sylvan: Full of her own thoughts, visions, dreams, and objectives.

Jasmine: Yeah.

Sylvan: So I just tried to get as deep as I could to make the best character I could.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: And so that’s what I would recommend for folks. I mean, it’s really important. We do live in such an age of great sensitivity.

Jasmine: Mm-hmm.

Sylvan: Also, an age of great awareness. And an age in which everything we do can be disseminated quite quickly.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: So, you know, I think it’s important maybe to protect yourself in early stages of writing from critique. You know? Really try to do your homework as much as possible in those early phases so that you can then safely, carefully, respectfully approach people who might be available for that kind of feedback. So you might consider… I mean, I think it’s also really important when you think about who you are as the writer and who you’re needing advice from, that you think about how might you compensate that person for their time and energy.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: Because that kind of work is sort of called “script consulting work.”

Jasmine: Mm.

Sylvan: And people get paid for that.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: People can make a living on that.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: And it, you know, and someone might be open to a barter if you don’t, if you’re worried about having not enough money for that. But it is important to really respect that work as work.

Jasmine: Yeah.

Sylvan: And it’s not just your friend offering to read your script. And if you have that friend, great. And they’re cool with it, wonderful. But I would never assume that someone would be okay with that.

Jasmine: Yeah.

Sylvan: I’ve had people ask me to give feedback on “how realistic is this trans character?”

Jasmine: Mm-hmm.

Sylvan: And I was like, “You’re gonna pay me for that, right?”

Jasmine: Yeah.

Sylvan: You know? And they were like… [trails off] And at this point, this was many years ago, and they didn’t want to because they were doing it, like, sort of under the table, so to speak.

Jasmine: Hmm.

Sylvan: But I didn’t know that. I was like, “So if you can’t pay me, you’re gonna give me a credit, right?” And they were like, “Well, I can’t do that either.” And I was like, “This feels really bad.”

Jasmine: Yeah.

Sylvan: And I’m glad I had that experience, even though it felt really bad, to recognize what it feels like to be on the receiving end of that kind of questioning.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: And this person… and they’re like, “But don’t you care about good representation?” And I was like, “Yeah, but don’t you care about my livelihood and the value of my lived experience that I’m bringing?”

Jasmine: Yeah.

Sylvan: “I’m adding so much value and validation to what you’re trying to put out there.” I don’t think that I am here simply for that purpose.

Jasmine: Totally.

Sylvan: To just validate your desire to represent my community. Like, great, cool, glad you’re doing it. But you need to actually really acknowledge that you have asked for help. And in fact, it makes your work better!

Jasmine: Of course.

Sylvan: If you acknowledge that you asked for help.

Jasmine: Yeah!

Sylvan: How many more people are gonna respect that work product because you’ve acknowledged that you asked for help?

Jasmine: I mean, minoritized communities are often, you know, sort of in a position of having had long histories of invisibilized or anonymized labor. You don’t wanna replicate that when you’re trying—

Sylvan: — to represent them!

[Both laugh]

Jasmine: Ostensibly, yeah… to do something that’s more inclusive. So yeah, those are all really good examples of sort of best practices. And as you said, there’s a certain amount of sort of allowing yourself to sort of be vulnerable, to learn, but then also being very sort of sensitive and aware of the asks that you’re putting on other people if you’re reaching out. And I think that’s true too of, like, syllabus design in a critical studies context, you know? Because I’ve had conversations with people who are like, “Well, you know, I can’t include XYZ because I don’t know about XYZ.” And it’s sort of like, well, you know, you can learn about it. It’s fine. You don’t have to be a, an expert—

Sylvan: Yes.

Jasmine: —having written five books on everything, you know?

Sylvan: And you can’t. You know, but it’s like I’m not gonna teach a syllabus that only has white people on it.

Jasmine: Right. Exactly.

Sylvan: Are you kidding me? That would be really messed up.

Jasmine: Yeah, yeah.

Sylvan: So, I am all the time teaching outside of my lived experience, right? And there’s a difference between teaching something, and then, and also writing something, right? There’s a different space there because I feel like when you’re teaching something, you’re holding space for it, and you don’t have to supply the authority, so to speak.

Jasmine: Yeah, totally.

Sylvan: You don’t, you don’t have to be an authority. You can actually say, “I give up my authority today.”

Jasmine: Mm-hmm.

Sylvan: You know? Or you could just say, like… I mean, there’s probably a bunch of ways that you could approach it by asking students to do additional reading around the subject by bringing a guest, or by simply saying, “Let’s look at this element and try to imagine what this might feel like.”

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: You know, because you also have to be mindful of not, I don’t know, deputizing a member of a minority [group] who might be in the classroom.

Jasmine: Totally.

Sylvan: ‘Cause that’s not fair either.

Jasmine: No. So I’m curious about casting.

Sylvan: Yeah

Jasmine: Which I think would be another sort of, stage in the process, you know, where these questions come into play. I’m curious about how you approach, casting in your work and, you know, how you encourage students to approach casting in their work.

Sylvan: When I got started as a playwright.. [trails off]. You know, this story of myself and casting has also a lot to do with, like, my, dawning awareness of my own identity.

Jasmine: Mm.

Sylvan: And I think you only know as much as you know at the time, and the best thing you can do is just embrace that. When I started writing, like, plays that were more adult and not, like, kid plays, right? Like, “We’re going on a magical adventure!” Like, once we were done with that [laughs], and we’re moving on to more mature stories of love and loss and life and death, I was writing characters that I was calling pants roles. Which is a term from opera that refers to actually a narrative trope in which—And you can see this in, like, a Shakespeare play, like Twelfth Night—

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: —where there’s a girl who’s employed by a, like, master of some kind to dress as a boy to woo the lady for the man.

Jasmine: Mm.

Sylvan: Right? That’s what Viola does in the in the play for Duke Orsino. And the way that trope works is that at the end, the drag is revealed. “Don’t worry, I’m actually a girl,” and, “Oh, I’m still straight. I’m gonna marry this guy now.” Right? And so there was this thing of, there’s this trope of this sort of pretending, which itself is problematic, and then this revelation and this sort of, I don’t know if you would call it reconciliation, but this sort of, comfort at the end that this person is actually not gonna live their life in drag. They’re actually going to return to a normative gender and live a normative life.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: And but I was writing these roles in which that doesn’t happen. So it was really important to me to cast somebody who could represent that, who could hold that identity without shedding it at the end and being like, “Don’t worry. I’m…” You know? Because it becomes this question of, like, do you need your actor to be the same identity as the character?

Jasmine: Mm. Okay.

Sylvan: At the time, I didn’t know anybody who was a performer who could perform what at that point might’ve been read as like a butch role, like a more female masculinity. That’s how much I knew what I needed on stage. I didn’t know that this was a trans character until much later in my life when I learned more about what trans was and that was even an option for me.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: But at that time… [trails off]. So I was like…so at the time, I cast the only, the best actor I knew, who had short hair [laughs]. Because I knew I needed to represent some form of masculinity in a female-bodied or assigned-female person, but I didn’t have access to the right person, so I did the best I could.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: As I got older and I started to, like, enter more into a world of queer theater makers, I was like, “Okay, I know who those people are now. Now I can cast them.” Also, as I got older, I was like, “Oh, and they’re trans, so let me find a trans actor to play this role.”

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: So it really, it’s both, like, it has a lot to do with who’s in your community.

Jasmine: Mm-hmm.

Sylvan: And who’s available to play the part. But then as you grow up as an artist, you start to realize…and also as time has passed, we start to realize that certain casting choices are no longer acceptable.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: It’s no longer acceptable because there are valid, talented trans actors who can play those parts and deserve to get paid to play something that matches their identity.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: To really be themselves on camera or on stage. So, something I do when we have grad students who show up to UCLA, a lot of times they’re coming from out of town.

Jasmine: Hmm.

Sylvan: They’re moving, they’re relocating from another state or something, and let’s say we have a Latinx student.

Jasmine: Okay.

Sylvan: And we know in our department for instance, that we don’t have a plethora of Latinx performers.

Jasmine: Hmm.

Sylvan: Or we have a small amount, but there’s a lot more outside the department because maybe those students have not chosen to major in theater.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: So on day one of that student’s arrival, or day one of me teaching them, I will say to them, “Start casting your thesis now.”

Jasmine: Wow.

Sylvan: And this is a three-year program. And what I mean by that is that it takes time to cultivate your cast. It takes time to cultivate community, ’cause that’s really what you’re doing, is you’re saying, I actually know that in order to represent this community— which may be your own community— you need to engage people.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: You need to include them. You need to find them. You need to cultivate that relationship so that when it comes time for you to ask them to be a part of it, that groundwork is already laid.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: And I think the same would be true if a student was looking for someone of a different ethnicity than their own. Like, start looking for those people now so you’re not just plugging them in at the end and being like, “Um, can you give me feedback from a Latinx perspective on this character in my play?”

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: Also not their job necessarily, although actors do feel like… It is a blurry line when it comes to acting in a role like that.

I will say also it’s important if you have characters or individuals in a play that are different from, say, your identity as a writer, is to think about how else might you support that person in the room. How might you consider your director choice, your choice of producers, your choice of other aspects of context, where you’re doing it, who else is in the play, how you’re casting other roles? So that one person does not become tokenized.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: Let’s say you have a play with a lot of guys and only one woman, and you really cannot be having a male director and a male playwright in that scenario.

Jasmine: Yeah.

Sylvan: You really need to have some other women in the room, right? So we really need to make sure that when we’re working with inclusivity, that we’re thinking about it on all levels of production.

Jasmine: Yeah.

Sylvan: And that we’re also thinking about how we’re caring for people’s, like, hearts and minds so they don’t feel like it’s all on them to represent an entire world of people.

Jasmine: Yeah. Yeah. That’s so smart. And so basically, like, when you all are organizing productions, those are some of the factors that you think about.

Sylvan: I mean, playwrights are not always in control of all these things.

Jasmine: Mm.

Sylvan: You know? And so it varies widely depending on, like, how much money is involved in the situation. The less money, maybe the more power a playwright might have in making those choices. But also, it’s important to know that we are often involved in casting, and we are often involved in the hire and approval of whoever the director is. I mean-

Jasmine: That’s fascinating.

Sylvan: —it goes down to the thing of like, we own our work.

Jasmine: right.

Sylvan: We’re considered really important partners in the production of that thing, ’cause they’re gonna need a lot from us.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: Ultimately, the playwright is a significant factor in the promotion of a production, is the personality and, you know, the public persona of the playwright.

Jasmine: Right. Right.

Sylvan: And so it’s, because it’s really important, that relationship between the playwright and the director is so intimate, intellectually intimate, that it’s really essential that you work well together.

I mean, in a fancy, big theater maybe— and mainly what I’m thinking of is like in a first production, like a premiere situation, that becomes less and less true as the play has had more productions or as the level of this production gets to be fancier and fancier. You might have less say in those matters. But from my experience, I work at a lot of like smaller, more independent venues. That is, I pretty much always have that opportunity. And so like when I was doing this play about my grandmother and her relationship with her mentor, I was like, “I have to have a Black female director. This is not a question. This has to happen.” And so that’s who we hired. And that was really important to me because I knew that I alone could not, hold that dramaturgy, so to speak. And that also that perspective was really important in the leadership and in the support of that future performer, whoever we would end up casting.

Jasmine: Right. Right. This is so fascinating. I’m realizing I don’t know anything about how theater works [Sylvan laughs]. So I’m so glad we’re getting to… [trails off]. So how would you approach sort of finding, a breadth of material from different kinds of playwrights and communities? If someone wanted to include, sort of a broad range of plays, where would you recommend they go to seek them out?

Sylvan: Yeah. This is, I mean, my answer to this is almost like ridiculously simple. It’s like kind of a phone-a-friend kind of an answer. But like, it’s okay that you don’t know. I mean, I think the first step is like “it’s okay that you don’t know,” and “it’s okay to ask a friend. It’s okay to ask a colleague.” That’s why we have colleagues, right? That’s also a really great ask for social media. “Hey, I’m looking for some queer science fiction plays. Anyone have any suggestions?” Right? People love to give a suggestion.

Jasmine: Yeah, yeah.

Sylvan: Right? Wouldn’t you love to like recommend [something]? I mean, it’s a fun activity, and it actually builds bridges, builds relationships, you know?

Jasmine: Yeah.

Sylvan: Someone might follow up and say, “Hey, can I get that list?” And like, that’s a new contact for you. So I think, I think don’t be shy about asking. And, you know, we run on the quarter system, so there’s, it’s actually, you don’t get to cover the volume of material that you might like to cover in like a semester-length class.

Jasmine: Right.

Sylvan: But I think we can all still do our best to spread the love. What do we say? Spread the love. To really include as many voices as possible, because we’re gonna have students in the room who are from a broad range of backgrounds. And we want to give everybody an opportunity to feel seen and heard because we want them to feel like they have access to the art form!

Jasmine: Absolutely. In LA especially, because our student body at UCLA is so diverse, and the city is so diverse. So, you know, it’s important that we reflect that in our teaching here in particular. Everywhere, but I think especially here.

Sylvan: Yeah, and I just think that for moving the art form forward, it’s on us as writers to really think through these questions, and take the lead whenever we can because if we don’t write those parts, those parts don’t exist.

Jasmine: So thanks so much, Sylvan. I really appreciate it.

Sylvan: This was great. Thank you so much for having me.