Leah Nanako Winkler is a New York-based playwright, but before that, she made a home in Kamakura, Japan and Lexington, Kentucky. Her work is consistently playful, painfully frank and delights in skewering stereotypes and cliches -- often by amplifying them to absurdity. She's covered the clique-ish realm of high school (complete with Beaver football mascot), the sliding doors of feudal Japan (attended by talking cherry trees suicidal geishas) and the intimate and kinky space of the bedroom (wherein a spurned lover repeats the same plea for acknowledgment -- "I'm a person" -- 28 times), rendering them all with streaks of humor and pathos.

Her play Kentucky, a joint commission from Page 73, Ensemble Studio Theatre and the Radio Drama Network, focuses on the homecoming of Hiro, a New York transplant who’s back in the titular state for her younger sister’s wedding to a born-again Christian man, and her attempts to stop their marriage. We sat down with her over coffee to discuss the play and how it's evolved since its workshop production one year ago.

StageBuddy: Your plays always seem to be mining something personal or reacting to something. This play in particular feels a little more like it might be drawn from your own life. How did you come to write it?

Leah Nanako Winkler: All of my plays are personal in that I like to write what I know. I’m not a researched-based writer yet and I think that’s because I haven’t run out of things to say. But I started from a really personal place in the sense that my born-again sister got married when I was 27 and, I’m 30 now, but at the time that was very shocking to me—in a good way, I really like her husband and respected the wedding process—but it was a lot for me because I hadn’t seen my family in a long time. When she planned the wedding she planned it when I was in two other weddings, so I had three weddings in the same summer and if I were just going it would’ve been fine but I was in them. I mean how much do you spend on a wedding, it was like two grand a wedding or something right, if you’re a woman.

So I was really stressed out and then on top of that there were some family issues so, I started writing this play at a place of like “oh my god, what if this wedding didn’t exist?” and then it kind of morphed into what if I had tried to stop this wedding—which I did not do. I was amazing at the wedding. I would never do that. But a lot of the circumstances of the play are true… A lot of the circumstances of the family in the play are inspired by my life, but it’s not my family, y’know? And a lot of the friends and a lot of the characters are inspired by people in anyone’s life really that shape you. And that’s why it has so many people in it because everyone has like your high school friends and some sort of parental figures and if you have siblings and if you have a therapist and if you have like a love interest or a pet—all those people shape who you are.

But it is personal but it’s also not personal.

It’s informed by real things but not to be read as autobiography.

No absolutely not. A lot of people after seeing the workshop asked me if I’d made $60,000 a year because the character [Hiro] repeats that so many times but like, no I don’t—actually, I wish!

And in rural Kentucky of course $60,000 goes a longer way.

Yeah! The character also is—something that drives her is that she’s blindly confident and doesn’t listen to people around her and the difference is that I’m very self-aware. I wouldn’t have written this play if not. She is maybe a little bizarro-version of me if I never did theater maybe.

Has your family read or seen the play?

My sister actually read the script and she was very supportive.

Did you ask her to read it to make sure she was okay with it? To clear the air?

I didn’t ask anyone before I wrote it only because it’s so far from any events that happened in real life. My sister didn’t even get married in Kentucky, she got married in Michigan. And like, my father never—he was great at the wedding too. In the play he creates a lot of drama and in real life he was very tame and nice, so I made things a lot worse than they were and a lot better than they are. Both aspects of that are extremely, extremely exaggerated so I didn’t feel the need to really ask her permission. That’s how far removed it is. But at the same time there are so many parallels that it dawned on me after that I was like, maybe I should ask my sister, maybe I should send that to her.

There’s the danger the people seeing it are going to think it’s your life. Or that your family could think that’s how you see them. 

I think because my family has never seen any of my plays or read any of my plays it just didn’t occur to me. That wasn’t a factor at all. I have a lot of playwriting friends from Youngblood and they get nervous when their families come and because that’s kind of out of the equation for me I’m not like, ”What are they gonna think?” but it did dawn on me all of a sudden like, “Oh, shit.” So I emailed my sister the script and she was very supportive—but she doesn’t want to come see it, though, which I totally understand actually because she was like, “I feel like it would be too overwhelming in the way that I wouldn’t know if it was real or not.” She’s like, “obviously none of the things that happened are real but I don’t know which parts of the play are real for you and what parts of it are not,” and I wanted to respect her boundaries for sure… My mom is coming, though!

That’s cool!

(Laughs) I guess… I’m really nervous. Now I totally understand that feeling that people get. The mother character in the play is sooo different from my mom but she’s also the hardest character to watch. I’ve been told she’s just like very sad. And my mother’s one of the happiest people I’ve ever met so, if you put this in: Mom, it’s not you! You’re perfect. My mom is perfect. My aunt from Japan is coming too. This is the first time I’ve ever had family, any family come.

It's a huge thing to have a production like this with Page 73 and Radio Drama Network!

I’m so grateful, it’s a huge opportunity. Part of the reason I’m so overwhelmed is a part of me still can’t believe it’s happening and I went through a really huge change in my life when I learned about this production. Because there’s no way I would have been able to work a day job and be in rehearsal, so I quit my job. I’ve been just concentrating on the play and it feels so surreal to be able to do that. I feel like I just have to savor it cause it’s literally a dream come true even if it’s just for a few months. I’ll obviously need to get a job after that.

It must be wonderful to be able to operate at what’s essentially your home base with Ensemble Studio Theatre having been in Youngblood, EST's under-30 playwright's group, and working with the same team, including Morgan Gould who directed the workshop.

Morgan’s directing, which is crazy because theaters never do that. Page 73 and EST and Melina Brown from the Radio Drama Network were never like, “You should work with this person who’s a level up.” Morgan and I are in the same stage of our careers in terms of age and this is our first big show. And we’ve both been active for about the same amount of time, like, nine or ten years but in the self-producing capacity and it’s just so rare for any organization to honor that kind of collaboration. And they never even suggested otherwise. Like when they called to tell me that they were doing the show they said, “Of course we’re calling Morgan up, too.” And she’s a woman under 30—or actually she just turned 30.

Morgan is really great in the sense that she’s super, super fast and I’m also a fly-by-your-seat kind of person. I love collaboration, I’m very open to thoughts initially and I like having everyone in the room. I like it when actors kinda fuck up on their lines and then I’m like, “Oh that was actually great when you said that.” I change things a lot, and she is so great at execution that she can make anything work, which can be both a blessing and a curse cause she can make bad writing work. But because of the nature of how I am in the room, she’s very complementary to that. She’s open to trying things on their feet from day one. And I think we’re just really good friends at this point. People think we’ve been working together for a really long time, but this is actually the first full-length we’ve ever worked on. We worked on shorter pieces maybe four or five times before this. We both like having fun. We take ourselves very seriously, but not in a precious way. We’re both on the same page in the sense that we both want a great piece and it’s nothing to do with ego. We don’t really fight about “well I want this” and “I want this.” We sit down and we have a conflict and we’re like, okay what is the best thing. And we love notes too. We love gauging the room and finding out what works best.

You’ve retained a lot of the cast as well.

Mostly everyone’s back and it’s really interesting how they’re growing in their characters just cause we’ve been in it for a really long time and they’re so game in terms of the changes and no one’s there for their ego and it’s really amazed me with how much they’d all grown with the piece. And I was amazed how many people came back.

And it’s sixteen people. It’s a huge cast. I never thought I’d see this play again after Unfiltered.

It’s a diverse cast too.

It’s very diverse. And the thing is that really speaks to EST and P73 because the characters actually don’t have to be diverse. I mean obviously I want them to be. I always push for that, but I didn’t even have to push for it. There’s nothing in the script that suggests that anyone other than Hiro’s family is anything except white. Hiro’s obviously a Japanese American and James [Hiro’s Father] is white and the mother is Japanese and Sophie’s biracial. That’s also part of the reason people just assume those characters are me. I feel like you never see haafu sisters on stage so that was important to me, but other than that nobody has to be any race and it’s a universal story and I’m very excited to see just bodies onstage that reflect the world that we live in, in a stereotypically countryside setting that hopefully everyone can relate to. 

It’s been almost a year exactly since the Unfiltered workshop, which I saw.

I know! So much has changed.

Tell me a little about the changes. What’s exciting you about this new iteration?

When I came into the Unfiltered workshop, I came in with the script—I was shocked to even get a workshop. I was convinced that my work was unproduceable and that no one would ever produce it except for myself. And I just knew that that was an inherent part of who I was to always be writing plays. So I was kind of like what’s going to happen to me, y’know. But not in like an Emo way but just kind of—my work’s just perceived as a little bit out there. And I thought that I had written this really linear play and because RJ and Graeme [Tolan and Gillis, Youngblood's Artistic Directors] are so nurturing they never told me that having sixteen people was a huge, unproduceable thing to have a huge cast. Because I see musicals all the time. And I just wasn’t thinking about it. I didn’t purposely write that many characters, that’s just what came out.

So I had gotten the workshop and they gave us two and a half weeks, so I still wasn’t thinking about the fact that it was unproduceable or anything like that I was just “this is great.” We did it very, very fast and the response that we got was great and then I came down with it and I met with a lot of people in the industry who were like, “This will never be done,” like, “this was great but this will never be done. But keep us updated on your work” kinda thing. So I was a little bummed out. But I wanted to keep working on the script because I was just on a high from the Unfiltered experience and there were things that I wanted to work on.

And then Michael Walkup from Page 73 invited me to Yale to do a residency with them. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. Aside from Youngblood or Terra Nova collective I’ve never been invited to a company or anything. So I was like, “Can Morgan come?” and they said yes. And we worked for the script for about a week. That’s where a lot of the changes came from with a different company. There aren’t drastic changes, but what I’ve done with this draft so far is track the characters a little better so that everything they’re doing makes more sense and really shaping the play as Hiro’s journey.

Joseph Campbell?

Yeah, yeah. Everyone’s like, “Oh, you named her Hiro cause she’s the hero.” I just always liked that name. It’s H-i-r-o. I didn’t even think that but now I’m like "totally." (Laughs)

But yeah, it’s just fine-tuning a lot of stuff. Fine-tuning intentions and viewing the play outside of myself. And then the play got on the Kilroys list [a list of plays written by female and trans playwrights] and that was a surprise and opened up a lot of doors, too. I’ve been rejected from every agent in New York for ten years but because of all those things I got one. So that’s different… I feel like a playwright now and creatively, getting the time and space to push the play as far as I can go—it’s been like a party everyday but at the same time there’ve been challenges. It’s hard to not look at it through a magnifying glass so I’ve actually been going away from rehearsals and letting Morgan do her thing.

It is being produced though—you’ve proven them wrong. 

I don’t think that I proved them wrong! I think they’re right… The producers and the agents that I met with after the workshop weren’t wrong. They were giving me good advice.

Were they suggesting double-casting?

They asked me about double-casting and the play actually lends itself to that and I think in future productions that there will be.

There are definitely parallels with the three bridesmaids and Hiro’s three friends.

Yeah, absolutely. I cut one of the friends. There’s only two friends now. Not because I told them to but because the third friend kind of wasn’t doing anything. I guess that’s a difference.

And I can’t wait for you to see the set, it’s going to be off the hook.

Right, because when I saw the Unfiltered it was rep set.

The new set is basically a huge junk store that can double as a church. There’s gonna be things falling from the grid. It’s gonna be like a balls-out amazing thing.

What’s this about you working on an adaptation of The Mikado?

Yeah, I got a commission from 2G, they’re an Asian-American theater company. They offered it to me around the time that the protests were going on.

The ones about the productions using yellow face? You were instrumental in taking the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players to task for that.

Yeah, in some ways. They didn’t say adapt The Mikado but I was talking with the Artistic Director, Victor Maog about [my ideas]. And because The Mikado was both on our brains I said, sort of as a joke, “Can The Mikado not be racist?”

Will it be a musical?

I don’t know anything about what it will be. I just know that I’m adapting it. It would be cool if it were a musical. I just want to challenge myself because that whole thing happened to see if I can do it... A lot of those protests -- whenever that whole thing went viral I got a lot of hate mail. It wasn't theater people or anything it's just because I was on a lot of Anti-PC blogs, but the thing that really bothered me were these dudes that had directed The Mikado just being like, "Hey! You don't know anything and also, how would you do it then?"

It's crazy that this stuff's still going on. David Henry Hwang wrote Yellowface what, ten years ago about casting controversy in Miss Saigon? 

This particular production -- I think I probably wouldn't've said anything if it hadn't been protested in two different states before, and I think that's why New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players stopped the production. Like, it made national headlines in Seattle. People are like, "Oh man it got protested and it got shut down," but yeah, it was protested three times and then it got shut down. I commend them actually for canceling it. That's hard.

Things go up anyway with protests.

Yeah that's why it's funny when people are like, "Nobody's allowed to do anything anymore." Actually, you can do whatever you want. It's just that now, everyone will get shit for it. Like, if I'm writing something that has the potential to make a lot of people mad I'm fully aware and then I need to decide whether to do it or not.

You ever feel like you've come close to that?

I think every time I say the word "white person" on social media I know I'll get like twenty tweets saying "you are the PC culture," and I feel like that's why after the production was shut down I stopped talking about The Mikado consciously because I think at a certain point it would have been self-serving to kind of get attention, and that's not why I did it. I hated the attention. I didn't give interviews to a lot of big places.

You don't need the publicity.

Unless it's to promote my show!

Kentucky begins April 20th and runs thru May 22nd. Tickets can be purchased here. Leah's website's here and her plays can be bought here.