I can’t remember the last time I cried in the theater. Or at all, really. I used to fear that I lost the capacity to feel deep enough to cry, but what can I expect when every minute of every day, social media and news outlets bombard me with tragic headlines after tragic headlines? Images and videos that brought me to tears a few years ago now don’t elicit as much as a sharp inhale. Typically, I’d turn to the theater to crack open my hardened shell and release me from this apathy. Unfortunately, at the theater, I find more of the same: audiences checked out.
In my work as a Dramaturg and writer, I’m consistently meeting with audience members to survey their experience or looking around the theater to read their expressions. I see blank faces. I hear surface-level chatter. I see audience members leaving the theater, thinking and feeling the same as when they entered. As a theater maker, I seek to facilitate a space where audiences can encounter and process deep emotions, whether they’re uncomfortable, distressing, or euphoric. I think the path to understanding is through emotion.
But I can’t place all of the blame on audience members. They’re suffering from the same numbness that I am. If I can’t shake off enough apathy to experience emotion, I can’t expect my work to inspire emotion in others. How can artists resist apathy to facilitate moments of catharsis?
For R&D Cohort Member, Francisco Mendoza, the answer is to reconnect with the humans whose stories inspire our work.
Inspired by his nightmares during the immigration process, Mendoza pitched a project featuring a fictionalized governmental department where workers purposefully construct nightmares to force immigrants into obedience. He imagined a star-crossed love story between an immigrant woman and her husband, who manufactures her nightmares. Mendoza wanted to conduct interviews with immigrants to populate the nightmares in his script. With each interview, Mendoza fell deeper in love with his sources’ stories: enamored by their resilience and touched by their fears. His story failed in comparison. He needed to capture their harrowing journey through the immigration system for his audience to understand the complexity of the nightmares.
Inspiration struck when Mendoza’s colleague asked him to facilitate a discussion between artistic and cultural leaders to determine how they can best support the immigrant community. The conversations at this event affirmed Mendoza’s belief that Americans were not adept at navigating immigration conversations because they couldn’t understand the plight of the immigrant as a legal status. This was Mendoza’s audience. These were the people who needed to understand the emotional journey of navigating the immigration system.
For them, he needed to humanize the legal.
“I remember getting in the car with my friend and saying, ‘I think this is the play that I’ve been trying to write.’ And she was like, ‘What do you mean?’ And I was like, ‘I think the play should be a bringing together of people so that they can experience something. The reason I think my play is boring me right now is that I can absolutely tell that the audience, for the most part, will not have the necessary lived knowledge actually to experience the play and that the lived knowledge is much more interesting and dramatic than the thing that I could tell from a stage.’
So, at that point, I started to become convinced that if the audience wasn’t an active part of the play, there’s very little point in my telling this particular story.”
Thus, USCIS: Immigrant Nightmares Division, part one-man-show and part role-playing game, was born. This piece took audience members inside a fictional department of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, dedicated to giving visa holders nightmares about deportations to keep them compliant with the system. It blends the actual process of applying for a visa at the U.S. consulate with the playwright’s personal journey. Audience members had to secure a visa to witness the end — and it wasn’t guaranteed.
In the following interview, playwright and performer Francisco Mendoza reflects on crafting and performing USCIS: Immigrant Nightmares Division…, a project that is entirely different from what he originally envisioned.
You had a clear image of what the show would look like when you applied. I’m sure letting go of what you had was difficult. Was crafting this narrative in this new structure also difficult, or did you find that the story fit easier than you thought it would?
Once the idea was in place and I started diving into the nitty-gritty of the dramaturgy of securing a visa, I opened so many doors and could feel in my gut that I was getting somewhere.
How do I feel about the arrival at that version that I presented? I’ll be candid with you. I haven’t quite found the exact vessel. On the one hand, I feel very confident about the idea of exploring these nightmares — exploring the fears the American Dream generates. That feels very powerful to me. It is a very human way to restore the legal angle to the conversation. I also deeply believe in the play’s interactive aspect. I deeply believe even though it was imperfect, and even though not even though potentially because it caused such strong feelings all across the aisle. I feel pretty confident that that was the way to go.
Did you have a chance to talk to your audience about how they experienced the performance?
Yes. Not formally at that moment. It was an exhausting day. We started around 9 a.m. and we ended at 8 p.m.. It was crazy. To give you an idea, we were putting together a semi-functioning version of a US consulate in a couple of hours. Three rooms had to be tracked and operated. It was such an endeavor that the moment it was over, we collapsed. Over time, I’ve heard from people, and I’ve listened to very different things. More than anything else, people were hurt by it. I don’t necessarily mean that in a negative way. I remember a particular audience member who told me, “I hated how much fun some of my other patrons were having because I have cousins who are in deportation hearings right now. I hated that people were making a joke out of it,” they said. “I left and had to call my brother to tell him I had a really bad experience.”
Another audience member got so angry that they went to one of the other performers and said, “Why do I have to do this? My husband is an immigrant. I’ve been through this visa experience with him. Why am I being made to go through it?” I had an audience member who said, “It was horrifying to me as an immigrant to find myself being approached by people in the show and asked to sponsor them or marry them. It forced me to say, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you because I don’t know you.’” They said, “I hated that I was saying the thing that I myself have been told and been so resentful of when it happened to me.” I had one of the actors say, “It was so uncomfortable being in the body of someone who had the decision-making power. I hated being mean to people.” They could see themselves starting to make up stories in their head to justify why people deserved to be treated that way.
They said audience members would come to them without having printed their application, and the actor would get angry at them. They’d then stop and think, “Oh, no, wait. That’s just a bureaucratic thing that we made up. Why would I get angry about that?” In their minds, they needed to create a narrative that justified treating people this way. They told me, “I can only imagine what someone who actually has that job has to go through.”
So all around pretty bad feelings, but I think that’s the play.
That’s so important to the conversation about effectiveness in the theatre. It’s what inspired me to write this piece because I think it’s very easy for an audience member to sit back and separate themselves from what they’re witnessing. And what your piece is doing is creating an emotional experience that really sits in the body. Having been through it, the audience is different. Who knows what will change in people’s lives as they leave the theater, but they can say they understand the immigration process better than before.
I think you’ve made an important distinction: better than they used to. I would never dare suggest that my play can provide an experience that captures what it feels like to go through the immigration process, but I do hear what you’re saying. And I’ll say, this is not something I would put someone through if they didn’t want to be there. There was a form for my audience members. “I acknowledge that I might get kicked out of the show. I acknowledge I may not understand why that is happening.” I don’t want to grab someone and say, “You should care about this. Come see it.” I’ll admit that for myself, I have a limited amount of energy, attention, and emotional stockpiles that I reserve for the cause I believe to be my calling in the world.
What I find interesting is the idea of inviting someone who says, “I think I understand! I want to understand!” It’s like what I experienced in that conversation with the cultural leaders, where I realized they didn’t really understand, and therefore, I want to make sure that you do. There are embodied ways of understanding that perhaps you don’t have access to. It’s precisely because you’re in a close relationship with an immigrant that you think you get it. Like you have access to part of the experience but not the experience itself.
How has this experience of creating this process affected your artistic process? Are you going to lean into more structural experimentation as you go forth with your writing career?
It gave me access to so many new things at once. I’d never created an interactive piece before. I had never directed my own work. I had never performed in my own work. I feel like all of these new doors are open in my head—almost to the point of confusion. It has undoubtedly led me to see things differently. Right out of the workshop for this, I had a different workshop of a different play, and I immediately changed the ending to make it interactive. Will that be the case forever? Who knows? But it certainly has added to my understanding of what the theater is for.
Sometimes, I think of a story and think that it could be a screenplay or a short story or a novel. Why a play? Out of all of the work I’ve done so far, this is the one that demanded to be experienced in person to the point where it’s almost impossible to describe to people who weren’t there.
This experience feels very in line with the purpose of the R&D Group. Can you reflect on your experience working in this way in your Civilians cohort?
I think it’s difficult to understand what the Civilians’ method has to offer a creative unless you’ve been working on that register already. For people like me who have never done anything like this, it can be challenging to understand why this process is necessary. If you’re going to pitch a story to The Civilians, I would encourage you to pitch a project that has more questions than answers. Embrace, at least for yourself, that this will be a process of discovery. You won’t know what you’re going to end up with; otherwise, the investigation would be pointless. I assumed I was going to do a bunch of interviews to confirm what I already thought and then write the play I wanted to write. And that’s not what happened at all. And I’m very glad that that’s not what happened.
I think there’s something quite exciting about pitching something that requires an investigation to decide what it is.✦
Extended Play is a project of The Civilians. To learn more about The Civilians and to access exclusive discounts to shows, visit us and join our email list at TheCivilians.org.
