Stars No Stripes, by Shannan Johnson, shows us that children are taught to live in a color blind society. But their eyes are still subject to racially charged images that inform and construct their view of the world.
Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from, where did you grow up, and how did you get to FSU?
I am from Houston,TX. I was born there, raised there. I went to undergrad at Texas A&M University, which is in College Station,TX, which is about an hour and a half from Houston. After that, I actually worked at Texas A&M University for about a year until I realized that my energy was being stifled because I knew I wanted to be a writer. And my second love is helping teenagers who are between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, getting them ready for college. As I worked at TX A&M, I was a recruiter and I got to go into high schools and do that which was great because it helped me fulfill my second love, but it wasn’t doing anything for my creativity. SO, I quit and moved to LA and started interning and taking classes, things like that, to get to know what this whole film thing was about. It was in my senior year in undergrad that I decided I wanted to write for film and television. I’ve always wanted to be a writer. My teacher, when I was like, eight, my third grade teacher, had us write a descriptive story. You know, like a page, and she told me, “That’s good! You should be a writer.” And I said, ok, I believed her. Teachers are supposed to know what we’re good at and I believed her. Since then, when anyone asked what I wanted to be, I would say an author. When I got to undergrad, I knew that authors didn’t make money overnight so I had to have some kind of nine-to-five. What am I going to do? I still wanted to write, so I went into journalism and did magazine writing as my specialty. I got with one degree in journalism and one in English. When I got to my senior year, I was interning at a magazine and so I spent a lot of time in front of a computer. I was also researching because at that time, I still didn’t know, well, what job I wanted to do in between times. Because even with magazine writing, similar to the film world, you start from the bottom and work your way up. I was thinking, how do I get in? I spent a lot of time on the internet and that’s how I learned about programs in film and television and theatre and all this other stuff. So, as I was working for the university the next year, I signed up for UCLA Extensions….kind of like a retreat, a workshop they have for four days. And you go and you learn how to do the structure of a feature length film. How to lay out the bones of a film. And I went and we were in class all day. It was very intense. We were in class all day and we only broke for lunch and when we went home, we were expected to come back with notes. It was a group feeling and everybody was making comments on everything and that’s when I really realized how much how everyone else has a say so in what you’re doing and I love it! I was like, ok, I need to be in LA. When am I going to get here? So I gave my boss a kind of ultimatum, you know? I was like, well, the summer’s coming and since I worked in scholarships and recruiting, my job was kind of done. So for the summer, I was just kind of sitting there. I was like, there are reasons I want to go to graduate school but I was going to go two years later but I said, “For this summer, if you let me go and take a class in LA, you know, and intern for a month, I’ll come back and finish out my next year. That way you won’t have to hire anybody or whatever.” And they said no. So I quit. I had said, either way it goes, I’m leaving. I went to LA and I lived on people’s living room floors and there was even one moment where I thought I was going to have to sleep in my car because I was living with one of my sorority sisters and I was there with her for maybe a week or two. Then her boss called and said, ok, we’re moving you to Missouri . I was like, uh-oh. Where am I going to stay? You know? I was like, what is going to happen? But I eventually found some people that I knew through and through from Texas. I didn’t…I couldn’t even tell you their names but I ended up living on their living room floor for about a month. Then I got into film school and drove from LA to Florida and here I am.
What we want to explore with this interview is the process of playwriting from the perspective of the playwright. Before we expand on that, tell us: why write plays?
I think plays give me the opportunity to really talk about what I want to talk about. I try to write about things that are gonna matter, that are gonna make a difference, that are gonna make people think. I like to write about social, political things. Not political as in politics but you know, things of that nature. The theatre gives me a very good medium to do it. Number one, you do get to have a lot of dialogue whereas in film, it’s more about the action. In theatre, you can add in heavy handed things without it looking heavy handed. Like, you know, in film, if I pick the camera and I make you look at the United States of America’s flag, then I’m making you realize that I want you to look at this. Whereas in theatre, it’s just hanging there, so some people will get it and some people won’t. Some people will realize a deeper meaning but it’s not like the writer’s going, “Look at this! I want you to know this!” And I think that’s why I like it the most. I actually get to work with the actors to help them get their beats and all these other things and I just feel that the audience can go away with so much more. Without telling them what they need to go away with.
Let’s talk a bit about developing characters. Where do the ideas come from? How do you find them or more accurately, how do your characters manifest themselves? Do you hear a line in your head? Do you hear a voice? How do you give the character a voice?
The hardest part is finding their voice. I tried for the most part to give each character a distinct voice. Not sure if I succeeded. I try to sit around and listen and so I tried to make their voices very different. I mean, who am I to say that I know what it’s like to be a white man? How can I write his voice? I mean, I’ll never know. All I can do is the best I can and maybe that won’t be good enough. That’s something that I struggle with as an African-American writer, too. I don’t want to make my people look ignorant. Yet, I don’t want to not be authentic with their voices. Because I know that as an African-American, someone can come in and talk to you and they might sound ignorant when they’re really extremely intelligent; it’s just the way they talk. And it changes when they’re at home or with their friends. My audience, nine times out of ten, is not going to be one hundred percent African-American, especially if it’s something I’m putting on here at Florida State. Do I want those people to come and hear the authenticity and then go home and think we’re ignorant? Or do I try to make the voices less authentic? And it’s the same thing as when I’m trying to write for an Asian female. I don’t know why they choose to say the things they say because I don’t know what it’s like to be an Asian female! Or what makes a Spanish speaking person speak in English in part of a sentence and then speak Spanish in another part of the sentence? I usually try to write for an African-American audience but while I’m here, I’ve been trying to expand. I’m not sure if I’ve done it right. I’m not sure if I’ve gotten their voices. We’ll see. I mean, I try to put myself in situations where I’m not with my people all the time and listen. I like to go and hear how other people speak and why they speak.
What is it that lights that proverbial fire under your butt? What drives you to create?
I think what drives me to create is that the media is powerful. I figured, how can I reach more people? You know, without being a preacher. That’s been driving me a lot. When people watch movies, they really do leave and take something with them in their soul. A lot of the stereotypes that people have about other people come from what they see on TV. You know, if you see the same stereotype on TV or in the movies and you’ve never had any personal experience with that particular group of people, that’s what you’re going to think they’re like. You know? And I figured if it’s that strong when it comes to stereotypes or other beliefs, then maybe I can have that kind of influence on the world. Authors that I grew up reading… I read Arlo Stein, but not the Goosebumps, that’s the generation right after me. I read the Fear Street novels with the cheerleaders that were killing each other. I read those and I read Pam Jansen and Beverly Cleary. When I was little, I always had a book. I always had one in my purse; I was always into reading and my book collection was huge. And because I liked to read so much at that age, I thought that everybody else read. I thought, well, I can write something that everybody else will read. I wrote my so-called first novel in the fifth grade and I read it to my class during our after-recess time. You know, the time when everyone’s cooling down. And they would be excited about what was gonna come the next day, excited about the next chapter. That just made me happy. I was just kinda riffin’ offa that. And when I got older and I saw that the McMillen books were being produced into films, I was like, wow! My books could be turned into films! It wasn’t until my senior year in college that I realized I didn’t have to write the book, I could just write the film. I can’t say that I have any playwrights that I looked after. I took as many Shakespeare classes as I could because I actually like Shakespeare, not because I was trying to write like him. I have some at home that I really like. Koreshi. I like his stuff because it’s cultural. Everyone can read his stuff and get something out of it. But this particular piece, I’m trying to remember what happened. I was either walking through the campus or I was riding in a car, one of the two. And I saw a Confederate flag. I see them quite often in Florida. I started thinking to myself how different Florida is from Texas even though they’re both Southern states. In Texas, if someone has a Confederate flag up, then they are racist. They are boldly and bluntly saying that they feel a certain way. Therefore, you don’t see many Confederate flags in Texas. Because everyone knows you can be in trouble for having it up. On my college campus, a boy had a Confederate flag hanging in his window and the administration made him take it down because it was causing a negative effect on the campus. Whereas, here, they’re selling them in the Student Union. Or almost one out of every five pick-up trucks or even cars that drives by have one on it and so I’m thinking to myself, all these people can’t be racist. They can’t be selling these negative images on the campus and thinking that they’re selling negative images. There must be something bigger. And so I started talking to people about it. I remember my friend told me about a conversation she had with her boss who said, “I hate when people judge me and think that I’m some kind of racist just because I have a Confederate flag. They can’t judge me; that’s my right. This, to me, is about the South. It reminds me of the old South and I’m just really into Southern pride and that’s why I have it. I don’t have anything against black people or Asian people or Jewish people. I’m just really into Southern pride.” And so the comment back, from my friend, was, “But you don’t seem to care how it makes me feel, so therefore, I can judge you back. I can judge you for having it because you don’t care how it makes me feel to have to look at it. It might mean one thing to you but it means another thing to me.” And so that, basically, is where this play came from. I have six students in a classroom, it’s a history class where they learn about Apartheid and how Apartheid is similar to our Jim Crow laws and things like that. In between that, they’re talking about their own racist experiences. So even though they’re only sixteen and seventeen years old, they already have these prejudices in their heads or people are prejudiced against them because you know, they assume that they’re bad people. One girl sews Confederate flags. That’s what she does. She loves to do it. So people think that she’s a racist because she sews Confederate flags. But really, she sews them because that’s what her family does. It’s their tradition; they just kind of hang around and sew flags. If she was sewing another kind of flag, would you not like her? Is it because she’s sewing a Confederate flag the reason you don’t like her? And then, how they interact with each other in between the monologues is just like any other kid. Hey, how you doin’? You wanna hang out, blah, blah, blah. And then they’ll turn around and tell a story about how they hate Asian people. But two seconds ago, you were just talking to and hanging out with this Asian person, hanging out with her after school. What I’m doing with this play is showing that everyone might have their prejudices but it doesn’t mean that they’re not human. And what can you think of to make it positive to the next person. And that’s basically it.
Have you run across the whole “it’s heritage, not hate” argument?
I’ve heard that a lot in Florida. I do not hear it in Texas. In Texasthere are cities where, if you’re African-American and you’re driving through them, do not stop your car. Those are the cities that are hanging the Confederate flag. In Houston, you might see one Confederate flag but you’re definitely not going to see them on bumper stickers. When I first got here, I definitely thought it was hate because that’s what it was to me there. But here, the more I asked people about it, the more I heard, “No, it’s my heritage; it’s the old South.” But even here, if you still look at it from an African-American’s point of view, in the old South, I didn’t belong. It still comes off as if I don’t belong. You know what I’m saying? But at the same time, these are the same people who have black friends and who hang out with black people, who do all kinds of things with black people but they hang the flag because it’s cool and it reminds them of their heritage. I’ve heard that a lot. Does everybody really know where the Confederate flag came from, though? Like, the one that we see now is kind of a knockoff of one of the earlier versions that they tried to have represent the entire Confederacy which didn’t make it up because it got voted down. You know? And the one that we see now is not the actual Confederate flag; it’s one of the Army flags, one of the battle flags. So we don’t actually see the flag of the Confederacy but everyone looks at it and calls it the Confederate flag. But it’s not. So just doing that research and just talking to different people and also realizing that like the movie, Crash, even though people are racist on the outside, it doesn’t mean they’re not human. It doesn’t mean that they don’t have their lives and that you can’t have any sympathy for them. And a lot of people do have prejudices in their minds but that doesn’t stop them from doing their day to day business. Someone may go home at night and scream and scream that they hate white people and they go to work the next day and they have lunch with them and talk to them and to all the things that they have to do to get through the day. If that’s happening out in the real world, then it’s probably happening in the high schools. Because no one would expect a fourteen year old person to say, oh, you know, I hate black people. But they’re learning it from somewhere. It’s either coming from home or from their friends or from wherever.
Do you remember the movie Misery? James Caan played an author who wrote novels, fiction. His character had distinct rituals that he went through when he wrote and also when finished a novel: he preferred certain paper, he had the whole cigar and champagne thing set up when he finished the final page… Do you have rituals?
Not at all. I am a just do it kind of girl. My ritual is to not think about it and just do it. But at the same time, in every other aspect of my life, I’m very OCD. So it’s weird that I get to this part of my life and I don’t have an outline. It’s usually just anything that sparks me; something that just got me and I think, you know what, I want to write about that. And I just start writing. As I write and as I rewrite, it becomes molded into this piece that looks like it came from this great structural thing. Now, it does help, especially in screenwriting, that they do make us do some kind of outline because when I go to write, I know exactly this thing is that, this thing is that, and this thing is that. But if it were strictly up to me, I would just write. None of my theatre pieces came from an outline or an exercise…
OK. You’re in rehearsals and things are moving along. What happens when the director wants to change or, gasp, CUT part of your script?
That actually has not happened this year. Yet. When it happened last year, I was just in awe because I didn’t know the process. So I didn’t know if that was right or if that was wrong. And after speaking to my instructor, I found out that that was wrong. But again, because there was no chemistry between myself and my director, it was kind of like, it became his baby and not mine. And he cut it and that was the end of it. It ended up being a war of e-mails with my instructor trying to have the back of the playwright saying, you know, that if this was real theatre, you couldn’t cut something without the playwright’s this or that. I haven’t had that happen this year. If anything, my play this year is very minimalist. It’s a monologue play and so she didn’t really add or cut anything when it came to the lines because she had so much action to give. There was none. There were just words and people. And so she just got really creative when it came to moving them around. What are these people going to be doing while this person’s doing their monologue? So I think that’s where her attention has been. We really haven’t had that problem [of cutting]. At least not yet.
Do you have an emotional response?
Well, again this year has been different because the writer’s aren’t in theatre this semester while it’s happening. Therefore, we are working on other things. And we haven’t necessarily looked at this thing every day since we turned it in in December. As attached as I was to it in December, it’s not so now. And the other thing I try to do when I come to the theatre environment is realize that I can’t be attached. In the film world, you walk in to a room and someone else is going to buy it. They can do whatever they want to with it. In [the theatre], I kind of have that same feeling except they need my permission. I’ll come in and say feel free to change, let’s try it all. We can try anything you want to try but if I don’t like it, let’s have it come back. So I don’t mind if [the director] comes and says, “You know, Shannan, this just doesn’t make sense. I can’t get it, the actor can’t get it, why is it here? Let’s try it without it.” So, sure, let’s try it. But if there was something that I wanted to be there and I feel like it’s missing, I would hope that she would just put it back and listen and kind of trust me. And the other thing is that we have three nights to do it and that’s one of the reasons I’m just so open to doing it. We can just try something and we can see how it works on the first night and see the audience reaction. And because we have a talk back afterwards so we can just ask the audience what they felt about this or that. Then you can go back into rehearsal and change it for the next time. So I am pretty open to additions and subtractions. When I first brought it up to class, though, I received a lot of animosity from my classmates and from my instructor because I don’t think that they could see past the Confederate flag. The way the play is set up now is totally different from the way it was set up in the first draft. At first, I had a big Confederate flag fly in and the six students turned around and said the Pledge of Allegiance to it. My instructor and classmates pointed out that it seemed as if I, as an African-American writer, was pointing out and saying that all white people are bad. My point was that no one will even know that I am the African-American writer until I go and stand up there. Another point was that I just wanted to make you think. If you were offended, then maybe you should think and try to figure out, deep down, why you were offended. Am I offended because it’s true? Why does this bother me? Are they gonna storm out? Are they gonna go home and talk about it? And I really didn’t care as long as I evoked an emotional response. In the beginning, I was very married to having that Confederate flag up there. I was married to it because that’s where the idea came from. And that was the whole point because that particular thing means so many things different things to so many different people. Who’s to say that in Florida people would be offended? If we went to Texas
, you wouldn’t see that flag hanging up there. But, I mean, I don’t know because I’m not from here… I was told that donors are going to be here and elderly people are going to be here but I don’t think they’re going to be offended. They probably have one at home or on their car. So I didn’t think they were going to be offended. And I’ve read several theatre pieces for this school that offended the hell out of me but I still had to read it; I still had to watch it. I don’t understand why it can’t be reversed. Why someone else can’t be offended if I have to be offended all the time. What I was told is that this is for educational purposes and this is history and this is how things were and I say, well, this IS for an educational purpose because this IS our history. The way the play has changed and how it’s been molded, it isn’t like that anymore so it’s probably not that big of a deal anymore.
Are you familiar with writer’s block?
Yes. (Grins)
How do you deal with it?
I write something else. I realized that if I move on to the next project, maybe something will trigger you. At least you’re being creative as opposed to just being stifled and not writing for a week! What’s hard for me is going back to things that I’ve already started. I’m in a creative writing class right now and we just got a short story back with comments and the professor said that she’d be ready for rewrites and all I could think was, “Rewrites? I am so done with this!” I had to make myself sit down and work on it.
Do you have any words of wisdom for new playwrights?
I’d tell them the same thing everyone tells me: just write. If it’s what you want to do, then write. Find a group of people who have the same goals as you. Because once you’re out there, sure it’s competitive but you need that support base. Most of the time, you’ll find a group of people who all want to be writers but they don’t all want to be the same kind of writers. You’re not gonna be going for the same jobs, you know? I think that what scares people about being in a writer’s group is that their competition is going to know what they’re doing and steal their ideas. Writers don’t steal each others ideas; we give them! If I’m writing and I’m stuck, then one of my classmates will say, hey, why don’t you do this? Even if I don’t do that, it triggers me to do something else. You get to take your credit and keep walking. Write all the time. Take classes. Try to hone your craft just like you would do if you played football. You would go to practice and you would have a teacher or a coach. Write all the time so you get better at it. Study it. Learn what’s pleasurable to the reader. I mean, for you it might work, but what’s going to make the next person want to put it onstage or on film?
