An Interview with Jayna Shoda Meyer - What is Gen Z Theatre?

2/7/2024

GENEVIEVE: Thank you for making time for me. I really, really appreciate it. First, can you introduce yourself? And just kind of explain how you got into theater and what you're doing now? 

JAYNA: Hi, my name is Jana Shoda Meyer. She/Her pronouns. I am currently living in New York City, but I'm a nomad. So I have no permanent address at the moment. How I got into theater… I got into theater truly because I think my mom was tired of watching me dance around the living room. An alternate story I heard from family was the summer after I went to Saipan for the first time, my grandma put me in voice lessons to sing in church and I was like so excited to sing in church that when I came back from Saipan I was like, “I want to do theater!” I don't know which story is true. All I know is my mom signed me up for a production of Peter Pan and I just never stopped doing it. I think what made me drawn to it was the fact that for as long as I've been doing theater, it's really been about community. All of my closest friends, including you, came through theater. And it's just a beautiful way to connect with people and to connect with stories. And I've just grown to love building community. So now I am a recent graduate of Boston University. I got my BFA in theater arts where I focused on acting and directing. I'm currently the SDCF directing observer on Lempicka on Broadway. Just crazy. So I'm like just beginning my directing career. Before coming to observe a Broadway director, I was working with a nonprofit theater company in Guam for the past two years. I traveled back and forth between Boston and the Mariana Islands in the summer to do projects with them and I'm still planning on doing projects with them. So I'm currently trying to navigate balancing the nonprofit work with the communities that are important to me and also the commercial work that will pay the bills. 

GENEVIEVE: Nice. Yes. Thank you for sharing that, you are so cool and amazing. But moving on to my next question, what are the values that you hold as a theater artist?

JAYNA: Right now I'm really interested as a theater artist in portraying honest humanity and like the full breadth of humanity is something that is really intriguing to me right now. I feel like especially post-pandemic, I feel like post-racial reckoning. That is what I'm really drawn to. I also love to focus on untold stories. Stories that don't always get the spotlight. And also stories that like center joy. I feel like especially within BIPOC communities a lot of the theater and a lot of entertainment and a lot of storytelling with BIPOC communities can often focus on trauma. Like I'm feeling like that's not really what we want anymore. We don't always want to be focusing on trauma. We want to be able to laugh and cry and love and all those things. So I feel like the thing that encapsulates that the most is like full breadth of humanity is something I'm interested in. The good and bad in everyone, and there's no like hero and villain but that like humans are complicated and messy and beautiful. 

GENEVIEVE: I love that. 

JAYNA: Thanks. That's like a recent discovery for me. If you asked me this like four months ago I would have said something different. But that's like what I'm interested in right now.

GENEVIEVE: Yeah and that's what this is meant to be - a capture of who you are right now. On that note, what kind of content are you drawn to right now? 

JAYNA: Right now I'm drawn to I'm drawn to more immersive work or like interdisciplinary is something that I would like to like do more of. I'm really curious by and drawn to and entertained by it when I see it. Especially pieces that immerse the full senses. I'm kind of tired of like seeing like actors on a stage just like talking about life. I tend to really enjoy shows when I I'm really getting a window into the experience of someone and they are not just talking about something but living through it. I love works that incorporate different avenues of expression, or incorporate music and dance. Not necessarily in the sense of like musical theater incorporated music and dance, but like music and movement being integral to the storytelling. I'm really drawn to that. Oh and on immersive experiences, post-pandemic I get excited as an audience member when I feel like something I'm seeing is transporting me to a different world or immersing me in that world. There was a grad student production I saw at BU where they transformed the lobby of the theater space and transformed the entryway into the theater that became part of the storytelling. As soon as you entered the theater, not even the theater where the production is, but like the lobby of the theater, you were you were entering this world and that is something that I'm really drawn to. 

GENEVIEVE: Yes. Speaking my language. That was something mentioned in the origningal article, too. Use of interdisciplinary arts and multimedia arts are somethings that I've noticed a lot among my peers. As well as bringing in music, dance, and projection while heavily experimenting with sound. And all of those elements feeding into the immersion. 

JAYNA: Yeah, immersion and integrating design…  Especially as a director, I'm really interested in the collaboration between director and designers in world building. That is essential and we don't always have the budget to do that, you know? It's really awesome being in a Broadway rehearsal room and seeing like, “Oh they have a budget to do whatever the fuck they want. They can really achieve all their wildest, creative fantasies.” And that's amazing, but when you're working on an undergraduat e thesis production or you're working at a true nonprofit level, yes you get more creative, but… especially in our generation where there's so much available online and Instagram and TikTok give such instant gratification in short form content, what sets theater apart is that it can immerse all your all your senses into a world. You can't get that from an Instagram reel. It has to be offering something new. It has to be offering something new and different. 

GENEVIEVE: Love it. Thinking of Gen Z, are any of the values that you talked about or any you haven't that you've seen widely shared by people of our generation?

JAYNA: I feel like things I said are shared. I also feel like our generation has a bit more of like a social justice mission, not everyone of course, but within the arts world…. Actually let me think on this. I don't want to speak untruthfully… What I hope is that our generation is thinking about the world we live in today. “What is the purpose of making art and how does it either reflect the society that we're living in or put some form of good into the world?” Our generation has a unique responsibility, too. As artists, with just all of the things that we're facing with the political climate and war and climate change and what feels like impending doom of things it's like what is the purpose of creating something now?

GENEVIEVE: You can speak specifically. 

JAYNA: Yeah, we're witnessing genocide and I just feel like people casually joke about America going into civil war and that just it doesn't feel far off within our lifetime. Or the world going into another global war and California going underwater, those are things that I hope we don't become numb to. I'm struggling to say what I feel like other people in our generation are.There are people who are with it and then there are people who aren't. 

GENEVIEVE: Yeah it's true. It's hard because no generation is a monolith. As artists and as young people, we intellectually overlap a lot. However, what Gen Z theater artists want is not representative of what Gen Z wants. 

JAYNA: Exactly. Gen Z theater artists are more in line with equity on all fronts and more aware of our intersectional identities in this moment inrelation to each other. We have more awareness of that, especially with how exclusive and predominantly white the theater industry has been historically. Our generation is more aware of that and wants to implement change. I hope that we're becoming- or at least the white folk are also becoming- more aware of like it being a process and not a one-and-done kind of thing or like a stamp of approval. There is constant work that needs to be put in. Shifting that mindset is important and it's challenging because a lot of things have to change. A lot of things at the top have to change as well and we're so young but we're working our way into more positions of leadership and more positions of power in the industry to implement that change. It's exciting seeing what's being done at the grassroots level and to see what what my friends, who are starting their careers alongside me, are aiming to do, and the kind of work that they're drawn to, and the kind of stories they want to tell. I feel this in life and also within art, that it's just a matter of time before we get to the places where we can implement the change that we want to see on a on a wider scale. It’s just a matter of time before generations ahead of us naturally phase out of positions that then will become available to younger generations of artists. A lot of the change we want to see is slowly and gradually happening but I have hope for the future of when we're in like our 30s and 40s and 50s. I hope that the values that we found in our youth that we're passionate about in relation to justice and equity are carried through throughout our careers. I hope it's not just a thing that when we're young everyone's passionate about. I hope that the work we're doing now is sustainable. 

GENEVIEVE: So beautifully said. Lastly, I wanted to ask about your work specifically as a traveling artist and your experiences outside of the continental US. How has that impacted your values and the way that you make art? 

JAYNA: Hugely. Immensely. Wonderfully. My work in Guam for the last couple years was predominantly focused on a project called the Oral Storytelling Project which is intergenerational storytelling. It was a group of five Chamorro writers, indigenous to the Mariana Islands, who each interviewed an elder in their family and then wrote pieces inspired by those interviews. It was very community based. I deeply value community and establishing the groundwork to build community… I hesitate to say “safe” community but it was a community built on trust and a community built on accountability with one another. It was a wonderful exercise of building community with these writers. We spent a year and a half writing the piece. The five of them writing it, mostly all virtual, which is a challenge in a creative process, but with with this group of people it was a real gift. I was in Boston. Most of the time we were meeting on Zoom and it was nice to have that that Chamorro community. Then we did a staged reading in October and brought actors into the room and got to meet mostly in person for the longest period of time. It was really, really special and because for a lot of these folks, stories like this just haven't been told on stage. Our story hasn't been put on stage in this way… It was an opportunity for them to share their story with an even wider audience and to share what was special about this elder to them or what lessons they had to share. We're hoping to continue on with it in the future. 

GENEVEIVE: And you were a part of that international theatre festival in the fall right? 

JAYNA: Yeah! With Breaking Leaf Theatre Company, I went to the New and Emerging Arts Professionals Festival in Rio de Janeiro at the Brazil International Theater Institute. I met artists from all over and it really opened my eyes to how people from different countries are creating and our similarities and differences. It was a week of sharing art and language and culture in a really beautiful way. I was deeply inspired by all the theater that I saw in Rio this idea of my interest in the full breadth of humanity started in college, but really expanded at this festival.  The pieces were all in Portuguese and so I was reading subtitles or just watching it and getting the story from bodies in space and the physical language of the performance rather than the words themselves. Each show that I saw focused on a super specific topic, either a cultural topic or historical or economic- an issue that that was really important to a specific community. A lot of plays that I've seen recently states try to talk about something and it feels like we're just like having this intellectual conversation about a topic that we've heard before. I leave the theater like, “What is the takeaway from this conversation? How does this conversation change anybody? Change the audience?” What I loved about the theater I was seeing in Rio, was it wasn't educating the audience about something. It wasn't talking at them. It wasn't trying to be like, “This is an important issue and here's why.” They just portrayed the full breadth of humanity of people experiencing these things. One show called A Hero's Journey was a one-man show with really incredible puppetry and lighting design (again like multi multimedia). It was going through the day in a life of a lower-class man who loses his job and is trying to get unemployment. It was very theatricalized and dramatized but it just showed the full breadth of the humanity of this character. [It showed] this one day of his life, and all of the obstacles that he was facing in this moment in time. It wasn't just talking about the issues he's facing, it was him living through those it all and navigating the joy, laughter, pain, and tears in a really beautiful way. I also connected with an indigenous director from Chile and it was interesting hearing from someone who grew up in a completely different part of the world a decade or two ahead of me. We both started doing theater in very Western formats and it wasn't until we kind got a little older where we started questioning the things that we were being taught or questioning the things that we were having to do as performers. We both reached a certain point of being like, “I'm tired of being ‘ethnically ambiguous’ and I'm tired of putting on someone else's identity. I'm tired of masking my identity. I'm tired of hiding a part of who I am to fit the roles that are available to me.” We both pivoted and found other ways of deepening the connection between our art and our identity, and our art and our community. There’s an infinite number of ways of to make theater it often feels dominated by Western culture. There's a lot more interesting things that can be done and so many cultures around the world where storytelling is in our blood. It’s in who we are. It's a way of passing along history. It's important to open our minds and imaginations to all the different avenues of expression and storytelling. 

GENEVIEVE: So beautifully said. It's very inspiring to hear you talk about your values and passions. I really loved talking to you and I’ll see you at book club!