The Playwright Special - A Chat With Jodi Gray

Peep in theatre in this Friday & Saturday, Nathan and I took the opportunity to Zoom with playwright Jodi Gray and pick her brain about her play, process as a writer and general outlook on creative life.

To visit Jodi Gray's website, click on the image.

As an aspiring writer myself, I was quite nervous to meet (albeit only via video conference, but still) an actual published author who gets paid for her work and art. I somehow imagined I would feel like a fraud, but on the contrary Jodi straightaway made me feel like a peer. For example the eternal struggle of finding a balance between living off her craft and still having to put food on the table with a regular job. Knowing that I am not the only one finding it challenging, and realising that even a published author such as Jodi has to go through it, makes me feel less of a failure. We are our own worst critics, aren’t we?

Jodi Gray started writing when she wrote her first short play at 10 after having been in a theatre group when she was about 8 or 9. As the years went on, she enjoyed writing more than being on stage, and she realised that she had potential and talent. She noticed she tends to start her plays with characters that she would like to play and builds on that.

As for her being a writer and balancing that off work, she admits that there are times it is fine, and others when it really isn’t. For example, before going freelance, she worked for many years at a publishing company that publishes plays.

“It was really hard because my work was to read other people’s plays that are being put on, and then I’d be going home and write, myself. And some days, I would read a play and think ‘Well this is crap, I’m better than that. I’m doing fine.’ And some days equally with some really good ones. It could be as inspiring as it could be daunting and depressing.”

She feels lucky to have had a boss who was understanding and supportive of her craft and if she needed time off to go to rehearsals of her plays, she could. She knew that she wanted to eventually write full time, so she gradually took the steps towards it. Unfortunately, she became full time freelance just before the pandemic started, so work quickly became scarce, But she “battles on”, as she says with a laugh.

Peep, and plays in general, are not made in one day. Jodi Gray has a process that is harmonious with her inspirations, moods, ups and downs. She doesn’t force the words or ideas out, letting them instead come to her when they, or she, is ready. She writes with conscious stage realisation factors, mastering the medium to her advantage. Writing a play will be different to writing a movie script, to writing a novel. You have limitations as much as you have freedoms. She is aware of those and manipulates them skilfully to make it work for the story and the characters she is writing.

Jodi originally wrote Peep as a 3 minutes scene for a showcase back in 2013. She enjoyed the idea and concept so much that she wanted to expand on it. And so, over the years until its release in 2018, little by little, chunks by chunks, she revisited her project, her characters, her plot. All of this was without a budget, no one commissioned her for it, and were it not for it being published and put on stage, it might not have been a success.

When I say success, I mean a source of income. Being a creative and putting your work out there is nerve-wrecking, because after putting your soul into it 110%, you cannot control the outcome. Luckily for us - the audience, readers, performers, artists - it was a hit and made its way in our hands.

Jodi wanted Peep to be impactful, powerful in its rawness and irreverence. One of the topic of it being sexual assault, she uses her play to voice her frustration with the media, and their representation and manipulation of the subject, as well as the obscene statistics. With the rise in sexual assault awareness, through movements such as #metoo which started in 2006, or numerous scandals breaking out, the problem has still not been solved.

With that frustration as inspiration, Jodi incorporated the matter with her original 2013 showcase piece and made it a profound, honest, ugly truth about human nature. One thing which came out of my reading of Peep, is that we are ALL deeply flawed. None of us can claim to fit the norm, because the norm doesn’t exist.

We each lead a life that nobody else has lived. We each do our best with what we’ve been dealt and with what we know.

That does NOT excuse the acts of the man in question, in this play, nor that of either girls. But it makes them human. And it is that honesty and rawness that makes Peep such a treasure.

We get confronted with hard topics. But Jodi does it with matter-of-fact humour and such depths to her characters that we (or at least I) do not feel depressed afterwards. Shocked, revolted, shaken, sad. Yes, all of those. But maybe a little hopeful (and dare I say, empowered) as well?

When asked about her characters, Jodi said she gave the girls names so that the audience could relate to them and left the man nameless to make him abstract, so the audience cannot connect to him. In that sense, I assume, the man becomes no-one, and everybody at the same time. It is a clever way of shaking her audience.

Let’s be clear, writing about someone else’s actions does not make Jodi approve of them. She just puts it down as she imagines what they think and what they do. So while she enjoyed writing about revenge, and the “eye for an eye” philosophy of the play, she does not think the girls are justified in their actions.

I asked Jodi about May and Caitlin’s connection. She replied that she wanted her characters to be conflicted and paradoxical, between them and within themselves. Their flaws and struggles are what makes them touching. While I do not think I would have reacted as they do or gone down the same path, I understand their complexity. Jodi modelled them to inspire our empathy, all the while displaying their scars and failings. Their ugliness makes them real and multi-layered, not just flat, superficial characters on a piece of paper. They came to life in my mind as I read. And boy, can life be a b***h, sometimes.

Peep is a huis-clos, which means it is a play that only happens in one location, here, Caitlin’s apartment, with the same handful of characters, in this instance, only Caitlin and May. They talk about other people, but we never actually see them come on stage.

Jodi has written countless drafts over the years, where she’d introduce a third girl, or make the man finally appear on stage by making him confront the girls in their apartment, or change the location to his home for the final scene, but after consideration and readings with friends and people of the industry, it became clear that the way to go was to keep it as just the two women, and only in their voyeur room. It was also, at the start, a necessity.

Jodi is very careful of how her plays are going to translate to stage. As it originally was a short piece for two actors to perform and present to agents, she wanted to keep things to a minimum. It would therefore strip the play of any artifice and only make room for their performance. It is later, as she expanded on the play, that she realised she liked the idea that the audience’s experience of Caitlin and May’s world was only achieved through their eyes, their comments, their filters.

It is also visually impactful, to have the two performers face the audience, watching through them as they watch their ex’s home. Not changing the location of the scenes keeps the momentum and continuity of the plot. It also maintains that sense of safety that Caitlin seeks, as well as piquing the audience’s curiosity when something does happen across the street. We want to see what happened. But watching their reaction to it is far more interesting and unusual.

After covering the play itself, we also wanted to hear about Jodi’s life as a creative. Nathan playfully asks Jodi if she has any favourite plays that she’s written. To which she responds thoughtfully:

“Usually it is the one that I am working on. And then, once that’s done and cannot be revisited, it becomes the one that I like the least. Once it’s published, I kind of think ‘Mmmh, maybe it should have been different’. But it is what it is, and I could have continued writing it again and again, and added things that came to me, but at some point you have to stop and accept that this is the play. This is the time that I wrote it in, and today I could change it, but I can’t. I go from being slightly disappointed and frustrated and then just going ‘Oh it’s a product of me then, and that’s fine’”

Hearing that from Jodi, I could definitely relate. I block myself so often because I want what I am working on to be perfect and I think I am done, but when I proofread it, I want to change it again.

I definitely agree with her stating that you have to step back at some point and let your project go. You have to trust in the work that you have put in and let it speak for itself. If you keep on working at it, it’ll never be read, seen, published, whatever, it just will never get out. Now, I just have to apply it, we’ll see how I go.

At the moment, Jodi is about to start a third draft of a horror film which she adapted from a one woman show she had done a couple of years ago, about a female werewolf. She loves the genre and is having a lot of fun with it. She is also writing many different plays.

“I’m not writing all of them at the same time. I start one, and then I am not sure what it is or where it’s going. So I just put it on the back burner and work on another one, and then get back to it and somehow it has brewed and I am ready to work on it again.”

It was reassuring hearing her describe how she works, because, incidentally, I write very similarly to her.

The way, one day I will be inspired for one project, and “neglect” the other ones, and then do a 180° the next day, and be completely flat for that same piece, but full of ideas for one of the others. There are also some days when I am flat full stop. But she says that she keeps her curiosity and inquisitive mind about many things so that when she does get blocked, she focuses her energy on anything else, and eventually, the block disappears, or becomes something else that she can draw from.

She then shared some inspirations with us. She’d write something and then stop and contact composers about collaborating because she realises

“there is music here, but I don’t know how that works, but if I work with someone else, then it is going to feed into what I am doing. That collaborative stuff unblocks me. Work with a movement director or a set designer, and suddenly it comes to life.”

Nathan who, as we know, is all about the collaboration of creatives, enquires: “What is your approach, when you are looking for a collaboration? Or when someone wants you to write something? How does that work?” I see him making notes for the future, as he is enjoying working on Peep so much and has enjoyed sharing experiences with Jodi during the conversation. He will be looking to commission a play from her in the future, no doubt about that.

“Well, I’ve worked with drama schools, where they just hire you and you write stuff for them to showcase, but otherwise, it’s usually people that I meet, working on something else, or friends of friends, people who came to a show.”

Something that stuck with me from my years in acting school was that work comes from three things: your skill set (talent and honed skills), luck and connections. And having Jodi share her experience with work undoubtedly confirms that connections are indeed paramount: how you talk about your craft, how you present yourself, your passion, that will draw people in. Which in its turn, at one point or another will bring work, paying work, to you. Whether directly or by word of mouth, it will eventually pay off.

So not only did that interaction with Jodi taught me a lot about myself as an artist and the areas I can explore to make me successful and happy, I also, and that was the main objective, learned a lot about the play, the author and her writing process, in general and for this specific project. An absolute gem to talk to, and very insightful, Jodi Gray is now on my radar for her future works. Definitely on Nathan’s too.

Written by Julia Mesrobian

PEEP is produced by both The Drama Merchant & Reverie Theatre Company, and runs for 3 SHOWS ONLY, at a new location, Javeenbah Theatre, on August 20th at 730pm and 21st 3:00pm & 730pm.

Tickets can be purchased by clicking here