Eisa Davis Discusses New Play ||:GIRLS:||:CHANCE:||:MUSIC:||, Plus Angela's Mixtape Revival & Warriors

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||:GIRLS:||:CHANCE:||:MUSIC:|| will run through June 21 at the Vineyard Theatre.

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The Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer and actor Eisa Davis discusses her new play at the Vineyard, ||:GIRLS:||:CHANCE:||:MUSIC:|| , as well as her other upcoming projects including a revival of Angela’s Mixtape and the new musical Warriors .

When did you first start writing the play ||:GIRLS:||:CHANCE:||:MUSIC:|| , and what was your initial inspiration for it?

The reason why this play came into being is because of Pam MacKinnon.

In 2018, Pam MacKinnon became the artistic director of A.C.T. [San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater]. One of her first actions as artistic director was to commission people that she really wanted to tell stories about the Bay Area, and that’s where I’m from. She thought: I’m coming into a new space where I can really highlight the stories of the people that are going to be my new contingency.

She and I had known each other. I’d been in a workshop of hers and of course, I just admired Pam MacKinnon, this person who is this amazing interpreter of Edward Albee and Craig Lucas and Lydia Diamond and Itamar Moses and all of these people that she had worked with. I was gagged that she wanted me to write a play.

She came to this play I was [acting in] at the Public Theater, directed by Tommy Kail—a Sarah Burgess play called Kings . And she was like, “How do you feel about writing a play [as] a commission for A.C.T.?" I was a little hesitant [at first]. I was a little burnt out from writing in TV rooms and having deadlines. But then I was like: I do want to write about the Bay and I want to write about the music program that I went to as a child, from ages 10 to 17. I want to find a way to honor the teachers that I had there and the beautiful days that I spent studying music: classical piano, voice, jazz, gospel, pop, and experimental music. All of that was happening in these incredible weeks in the summer that I spent [there] and also [in] weekly lessons during the year. So it was [due to] Pam’s urging. And then I said, “I always love to write about either a question that’s haunting me or a passion, a deep love I have, or both.”

I started actually writing the play, [during] a little bit of a residency in the Bay Area, in 2019. I wrote the first draft at the very top of 2020, right before COVID hit. From there, the process was that we did a Zoom workshop over the course of a week in November of 2020 with an adult cast and a teen cast. I wanted the teens to be able to tell me if they really identified with the writing that I was doing for kids their age and then the adult actors would be able to provide the experience and dramaturgical support that you need when you’re testing out a play in unfamiliar waters. We found a really cool way to jam together. This was early Zoom days, before it was possible for artists to really make sounds at the same time. But we found a [way]. And I was like: let’s find a way to always keep this element of chance and improvisation going in these workshops. So, we did that.

I wasn’t sure if Pam was really into the play after that. I didn’t know if they were going to have any funding to keep going with it. But then they were responsive at A.C.T. and we did another reading. I did a writing residency at A.C.T. in 2023 and that’s where the shape of the play started to happen. I originally wanted to see if I could randomize all of the scenes. I thought maybe I could find a way to make this work with the scenes going in any order. They would be determined by the audience in the same way that the audience chooses the tone row now. Maybe each scene could be tagged to one note and then the audience would determine the order of those notes and then we would have a play that [could] go in every which way possible. We tried that out in workshops [and] it didn’t work at all. I failed miserably, but that’s what experiments are for. You find out what [works]. I realized that the story I wanted to tell was cumulative, that it was a narrative that required things being consequential. There was such a really strong response [to] that reading. The emotional shape of the play really started to land in 2023.

In 2024, A.C.T. said yes, we want to do it. And then [at] the Vineyard, where I had a commission and had been given an award through Paula Vogel and Daryl Roth, I [asked]: “Do you think this play would work as my commission here as well?” They read it at the Vineyard and loved it, so we got to do this co-production between A.C.T. [in the Bay Area] and the Vineyard in New York. I can’t say how beautiful that process has been. Often you’ll have that with a musical where you have an out-of-town tryout. And that’s what we got to do, we got to spend all the time we needed to spend on really developing the music and the relationships between the characters. We got time for the actors to really start to feel at home in those shows.

And once I was able to see the run in San Francisco, I pulled apart the play again. Once [I] had that idea of ‘can scenes go in any order?’, even though it wasn’t something that we formally did, it was something that I definitely did in the revision. And once we got to New York, I rewrote a lot of the play, combined scenes, cut scenes, [and] wrote new scenes. Even in rehearsal, we changed the order of how the scenes would go. What you’re seeing on stage at the Vineyard now is really, really different than what was playing in San Francisco in March and April and of course, what we had in all these workshops.

Along the way, it’s really transmogrified and I love that Pam and Joy Meads, our dramaturg, have been so trusting of me listening to the play and letting it tell me what shape it wants to take, what it wants to say, what the characters have to offer us in terms of their story being a reflection of what it is we in the audience are also feeling. There are these really passionate moments that they have as young people that I think so many of us can really identify with, especially folks who are in New York who have a strong arts background. And if they aren’t [still] in it, still have a deep love for it, and that might even be why they live in New York at all.

I love that what you shared shines a light on how I felt watching the play—I felt the nostalgia the characters were going to have [for this time] before they have it. Would you say that the play is autobiographical or semi-autobiographical?

Neither. And it’s not a memory play—it’s actually a flash-forward play. We talked about that distinction because it’s very different to be looking back on your life than looking forward. Of course at the end of the play it can feel like: was that a memory play? But I really love the energy [where it’s] something that’s moving forward in time. And [the play is] not autobiographical at all. The characters are invented, the plot is invented, and even the setting… I was inspired by the music school that I went to, but that was a long time ago and [my] school was all gender.

The way that Pam always puts it is: it’s not autobiographical, it’s just very personal. And the way that I put it is that [the] feelings of the play are from the deepest recesses of my soul. That is unmistakable. That is me. It’s just my heart on a plate. There’s nothing that happened to me in the play—except for stealing some 2-liter bottles when I was a kid with some friends and getting into some mischief with that. And the love of music, obviously. But it’s not autobiographical [although] it’s definitely very [deeply] felt and very [much] a world that I know.

I’m so curious how you strike a balance [between] those feelings of reaching back into yourself and what it felt like to be a young person when you were going through a similar program and then the present day of it all. I feel like anyone that’s not in the current generation is always talking about how different it is to be a young person [now] because of technology. You spoke a little bit about working with people of a different generation in the Zoom workshop. Can you talk more about how you work on a piece that has young people of today?

I didn’t feel it as a challenge because I really trust the listening that I do as an artist. No matter who I’m writing about, I’m listening very carefully to the stories they want to tell, what their interests are, how they feel unvoiced, sometimes.

There’s a play that I wrote that David Mendizábal directed back in 2022 called Mushroom . That was about undocumented mushroom pickers in Pennsylvania. That play is bilingual in both English and Spanish and there are actually some other languages in it as well. Of course I’m not an undocumented mushroom picker and yet I just used the exact same technique of listening, just listening. What are the stories that need to be told that we don’t know about?

Or my play, Bulrusher . In some ways, that’s an imaginary kind of listening. I was listening to the voices of my elders in Birmingham, Alabama, where some of the characters are from. I was listening to the sound of the dialect that I had only heard in a couple of oral histories and read in a book. I felt that there was a real kind of rhythm to it that I understood and could tap into. So in some ways, just as I work as an actor and step into different roles, I do that as a playwright, stepping into different roles and trying to find what genuine connection and voicing I can give. So again, [here], I was looking for conversations with young folks in this process.

It’s been really wonderful having young folks as audience members. We had a student matinee yesterday and there’s such a sense of recognition. People feel like: oh my gosh, this is my story, this is something that I feel. People [were] coming up to the actors afterward and young folks were just sobbing and sobbing saying, “I feel the same way.”

There have been times, too, where I have listened and I haven’t listened fully enough. And then I have been, gently or firmly or angrily called in by the people that I am attempting to represent. When that happens, I do everything I can to make sure that they feel that their representation is fair and accurate.

Can you talk more about how you feel your work as an actor impacts your work as a playwright and specifically if it intersects with how you talk to actors in a play that you’re writing?

A lot of my writing has always come from a place of: what are the roles that I would want to play as an actor? Of course I can’t play these characters in ||:GIRLS:||:CHANCE:||:MUSIC:|| but were I in that age group, I would love to play these characters. There’s a bit of wanting to make sure that actors have something that feels really juicy and meaty, and that they aren’t in any way feeling sidelined by the story. I think it’s good dramaturgically to not feel that anyone has a lesser role than anyone else. Even someone in this play like Clementine, who is the character that we hear from the least has got a certain pizzazz and a certain sense of being over it all. She doesn’t need the drama that is going on in this triangle of these other three teens. She just practices [music] and she does her thing and that’s what makes her happy. There have been a lot of people who have come up to me afterward, or co

_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Eisa-Davis-Deep-Dives-on-GIRLSCHANCEMUSIC-ANGELAs-MIXTAPE-and-WARRIORS-20260614)._