HARUNA LEE
Playwright of 49 Days
Haruna Lee is a non-binary Taiwanese/Japanese/American theater maker, screenwriter, educator, and community steward whose work is rooted in liberation and healing. Plays include War Lesbian (Dixon Place 2014), Memory Retrograde (Ars Nova 2017, UTR 2018), plural (love) (WP Pipeline Festival 2022, Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab 2019), and Suicide Forest (Ma-Yi Theater & Bushwick Starr 2019, Off Broadway 2020), for which they received an Obie Award for Playwriting and Conception. Lee has received a Special Commendation from the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Steinberg Playwright Award, the Ollie New Play Award, FCA Grants to Artists Award, a Hermitage Fellowship, MacDowell Fellowship, Yaddo Residency, the Map Fund Grant, the Van Lier Fellowship, and is a current member of New Dramatists (2023-2030). As a writer and performer, they have collaborated with artists including Lynn Nottage, Vanessa German, Aya Ogawa, Ralph Lee, Mac Wellman, NAATCO, Minor Theater, Taylor Mac, Andrea Geyer, David Lang, and Anohni—among many others. For Television: AppleTV+'s Pachinko, Max’s The Flight Attendant. Their writing has been published by 53rd State Press, Theater Magazine, Table Work Press, Broadway Licensing, and Playwrights Horizons Almanac. They teach at Yale in the MFA playwriting program. www.harunalee.com
Why are you excited to bring this piece to the O'Neill and what are you hoping to accomplish here?
In the newest iteration of this beastly bilingual Japanese-English play, I've gotten rid of subtitles all together, and anything that needs to be translated comes from the actors themselves. So I'm really excited to bring this piece to the O'Neill and hear this version out loud with actors! I've also significantly shifted the scenic design where I now picture the space to look like one of those optical illusion drawings: we are in a 1970's Japanese family room AND a DIY celestial radio station at the same time. I'm curious to see the family and ancestors confined in one space, breathing on top of each other.
What inspired you to create this piece?
I started writing this play in 2012 after my grandmother passed away. She was the third family member to die following my own father and grandfather. I've always felt this proximity, a closeness to death... and I think this play honors that. I actually put this play down for a long time because I didn't think anyone would produce it. Fast forward to the summer of 2024: my mother and I (who I have a very complicated relationship with, but I guess... who doesn't?) finally had a bilingual joint therapy session and it was a big deal. Revelatory. And all of a sudden I picked this play back up and I knew how to finish it.
Why are you drawn to plays/musicals as a medium for storytelling and/or for telling this particular story?
In my bio I say I'm "Taiwanese/Japanese/American", but each of these words feel like a chasm to me; a chasm that is a mystery, and I enter the dark slit with a sonar device to find patterns and meaning. There's this deep urge to translate mystery and experience, to connect with people despite the gulf of languages, to know my own psychic blood and guts, the life pursuit of understanding something as intimate as my mother and father’s words, and/or to give up on words entirely and commune with each other through epic imagery, ritual, the visceral, and shared experiences—I think that's why I write plays.
What advice would you give to aspiring playwrights?
Your writing has a soul, a divine architecture. When you stop listening to what other people want you to write and listen to yourself, this authentic scribe emerges and writing becomes this beautiful, beloved practice you can return to over and over again.
Haruna's reading recommendations to accompany your experience with 49 Days:
Females by Andrea Long Chu
Chiharu Shiota by Chiharu Shiota
The Spider's Thread by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
The Uses of the Erotic: Erotic as Power by Audre Lorde
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong