Rehana Lew Mirza is the first South Asian playwright to have her work be produced by the Drama Desk and Obie Award-winning Ma-Yi Theater Company. I spoke to her about her journey as a playwright, the Ma-Yi Writers Lab and her latest work, Soldier X, which tallies the emotional scars inflicted on our young men and women returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

When did you start writing plays and why?

I started writing plays in high school. I was sixteen when I wrote my first play. I took a playwriting class at Montclair [State] University. I remember it was a really early morning class and I used to make my brother drive me there, but I just ended up loving writing plays. From there I went to NYU and studied Dramatic Writing at the Tisch School of Arts and then went to graduate school at Columbia University and got my M.F.A. in playwriting as well. In between NYU and Columbia, I started a theatre company with my sister called Desipina and it was through that company that I produced my first play, Barriers, which was a play about how South Asians’ lives were affected after 9/11.

Can you tell me a little more about your experience with running Desipina?

When I graduated, I really wanted a community of artists to work with because at NYU I was writing a lot of stories about South Asians and there wasn’t that much support for those kind of stories when I was there. So we founded Desipina and we started with Barriers, but then we got more and more artists and we started the series called Seven.11 Theater, which was seven 11-minute plays, all set in a convenience store. So for me, this was a way of meeting writers, directors and actors, but also getting people involved in a movement that would be turning stereotypes on their heads.

How has the experience of running Desipina been useful to you now that you are the Co-Director of the Writers Lab at Ma-Yi Theatre Company?

I’m used to wearing a lot of hats and thinking about things in a lot of different ways so that enables me to be pragmatic while also lending support. It’s also prepared me to anticipate some of the moving parts of a production.

Coming to Soldier X - what’s the genesis of the work?

Soldier X was commissioned through the Lark Development Center and NYSCA and the idea was really centered on this war that we feel so disconnected from yet it’s been going on for so long. I started to shape this play in 2011 when a friend of mine from high school went to Afghanistan as a medic and he had done quite a few tours there while I was in graduate school. I was thinking about that when I came across an article about how a family was grieving the death of a soldier. And then as I was writing, the laws around women serving in the military were changing as well. So the play developed and changed and shifted as I came across these different developments.

Why Soldier X now? What’s the relevance of the work today?

I wanted to specifically look at this generation, what the effects of fourteen years of war are on our society. Even though we try to distance ourselves from it, it feeds into the way we interact with each other and even the way we think. It’s a very unconscious thing, how it affects our day to day lives.

Even though there’s an idea the war is over now, a lot of operations are going on and lots of vets are coming back. The system needs to revamped to provide support to all the veterans. There are a lot of things that we’re not quite looking at yet that I hope the play brings to light.

How has the experience been of having the work be produced by Ma-Yi Theater Company?

It’s been interesting because I’ve been just doing it all myself at Desipina so it’s been a little bit of a learning curve for me to just focus in on the writing. It’s both a luxury and a strange feeling to just focus on being the writer; on just making sure that everything is reading as it should be, on tweaking every line. It’s been a great experience to have such a supportive group of people around me. I feel very lucky to have that – the cast, the director, the design team and Ma-Yi itself. It’s been a great privilege for me to see my work be done with such love and care.

How involved have you been in the rehearsal process?

I’m still re-writing today. It’s the third preview, but there are still tweaks. I’ve attended rehearsals regularly, writing and re-writing. The director and I have really been on the same page in terms of trying to make sure the play is clear and engaging.  I’ve had workshops and readings of the play but really the production is the real thing, it’s taking on a life of it’s own.

Since that first playwriting class you took at Montclair University to Soldier X – how has your work changes/evolved?

Debargo Sanyal who was in my very first play ever out of NYU 13 years ago was at a preview, and I think he said it best. He said, "Your work is more layered now, with lots of elements; it’s more ambitious."