Julia Sonya Koyfman
Interview Highlights
Julia’s creative mission is talking about the things we aren’t supposed to talk about as women and putting that on stage.
Theatre that has “feminine stakes” includes situations that are high-stakes for people in female-presenting bodies but might seem unimportant to others.
Women are the key to helping other women succeed. The community of womanhood is the most beautiful thing about being a woman.
Women should have the freedom to be authentically their whole selves in all of their muchness.
Julia’s Current/Upcoming Work
It's Always Off Season At The Chalet Flamingo, written by Koyfman & Sanders (won first place in New Musicals Inc. Search for New Musicals 2021)
Flush: A Mini Opera, written by Julia Sonya Koyfman & Paul F. Stovall
Close (But Not Too Close): A 15 Minute Musical, written by Paloma Sierra, Dusty Sanders, and Julia Sonya Koyfman. Upcoming festival showing!
Content Warning and Related Resources
Bio
Meet writer, comedian, and performer Julia Sonya Koyfman!
Website: https://juliaisnotfunny.com/
Instagram: @missjuliakoyfman
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/julia.koyfman.5
Julia Sonya Koyfman (she/her) is a lyricist/librettist, screenwriter, filmmaker, comedian, and performer. A single Seattleite, Julia is actively working to create new works for live and digital theatre, including the mini online musical, Close (But Not Too Close). Along with her writing partner, Dusty Sanders, Julia won first prize in the 2021 Search for New Musicals for their musical It’s Always Off Season At The Chalet Flamingo. In 2015, Julia founded, wrote, and performed in the From Seattle With Love concert series, a mix of music and storytelling that showcased up-and-coming Washington musicians and performers. The series later spun off with Why Won’t He Call Me Back: A Live Nervous Breakdown and Holiday Cabaret. Julia holds a degree in playwriting/screenwriting from SUNY Purchase and is an alum of Seattle Opera’s Jane Lang Davis Creation Lab. She is also involved with New Musicals Inc. in LA and the Musical Theatre Writers Collective in New York.
“To me, being a woman in theatre, a woman in comedy, a woman in this industry, is finding what’s actually underneath all of the grandiose theatricality that we’re putting on a stage. It’s finding the heart and the brain behind it.”
Julia’s Creative Work
Hayley: Julia, can you tell us about what you are working on creatively?
Julia: Hayley and Amy and I met through classes with the Musical Theatre Writers Collective, and one of the first lyrics that Hayley brought into our lyric writing class was about a young woman who wants to be like Amelia Earheart and steals a plane! And I was like, I want to be a part of this. Plane Girl - that’s the working title of the thing that we’re very excited about right now.
Hayley: One of the things I love about you is you’re like the Energizer bunny - you’re always going, always discussing creative things, and you have so much passion.
Amy: You also have so much going on! You are always working on this show or that one, it’s very impressive.
Julia: I wouldn’t be able to do any of those cool things without my collaborator Dusty Sanders. We actually just won an award for our show It’s Always Off Season at the Chalet Flamingo. We will hopefully be in Los Angeles doing a workshop/reading situation with that sometime next year!
Amy: Tell us about your collaboration with Dusty and how that got started.
Julia: Dusty and I met through New Musicals Inc. in Los Angeles, over Zoom. For the first year and a half of our collaboration, we had never met in person. NMI has a curriculum called “Core” - every month you get a new assignment and you write a song and a scene and present it. You try that with the different people in the group, and then you start writing 15-minute musicals. Dusty and I did an adaptation of Anna in the Tropics, which was a 12-minute odyssey of a group number, our little BABY. We liked working together, and we got paired with the incredible Paloma Sierra, our bookwriter.
That was when the pandemic struck. And so we were like, “Let’s do a Zoom show.” Except we didn’t like the idea of a Zoom musical, so we thought, let’s create a scenario where the performers are not on Zoom but in some other video chatting situation. So we wrote Close, But Not Too Close, an online dating mini-musical, and we were lucky enough to be selected by Project Y for their Zoom Play/Women in Theatre Festival.
Julia’s Mentors
Hayley: Did you have any influential mentors growing up? Do you have any in your life now?
Julia: I grew up with a lot of really strong women in theatre. I was part of a Russian theatre troupe as a child with powerhouse director Margarita Vartanova, who was very into devised theatre. In my current space, I wouldn’t be writing musicals if it wasn’t for Sara Cooper, who is an incredible lyricist/librettist - check out Elevator Heart, an amazing feminist piece. Sara was my musical theatre writing professor in college at SUNY Purchase. I didn’t think I had the skillset or ability to write musicals; I was doing mostly screenwriting at the time. Sara was so open to the weirdness that I was bringing in.
Now, in the Musical Theatre Writers Collective, I’m around incredible women like Kate Wetherhead, who is very game for talking about feminine stakes and our place as women in theatre. Or with Zina Goldrich, hearing about what it was like coming up as a woman in theatre. I know how privileged and lucky I am to be my age, coming into the theatre space at this time, and how much work women had to do to get to where they are now. And it’s cool and scary, and sad and exciting.
Thoughts on Feminism
Hayley: Julia, what does feminism mean to you?
Julia: For a long time, I was the token feminine-presenting woman in comedy. I was working in the comedic space and felt like I had to talk about being a woman. I didn’t know what I could say to appeal to everyone but also stay true to me. I knew that I was quirky, loved a rom-com…and was also like “Rom-coms - that doesn’t feel very feminist!” Now, learning what feminism means to me…I still don’t know! To me, it’s a moving target. I know that I feel uncomfortable that I have to explain why it’s not okay for me to have my body touched in a certain way, or for people to look at me or treat me differently.
I’ve had older men tell me, “You will be sexually objectified, you will be asked to do things that you will be uncomfortable with.” In a classroom setting. Literally in school, paying thousands of dollars, for a professor to tell me, “By the way, to go into this industry, you’re gonna have to participate in the casting couch. But it’s okay for you not to, and you probably shouldn’t.” I can’t imagine any other industry where someone is gonna say, “So to be an accountant, you’re really gonna have to exchange sexual favours.” NO!
Amy: Right! There’s a difference between stuff like that happening and having it be an expectation and an accepted part of the culture. That’s really bad.
Hayley: And by putting it that way, those teachers are giving permission. They’re not doing anything to change it. It reminds me of the idea that we need to stop telling women how to “be safe”.
Amy: Yes, instead let’s tell men how not to rape people.
Julia: The scariest part for me is that at one point, I remember saying to myself, “I think I’ll sleep my way to the top, I’m okay with that.” As a teenager - not knowing what the heck I’m saying.
Amy: When it’s presented to you as “This is what you’re going to be expected to do. You don’t have to do it, but if you don’t, you might not get ahead” - then it becomes a conversation with yourself. What am I willing to do to get ahead? What should I be willing to do to get ahead? And it’s often young girls and women having these conversations with themselves. This is not how we should be treating our children.
Julia: No!
Hayley: Definitely not.
Julia: Now, I’ll make jokes. I have a SLUTTY LIBRETTIST shirt. I jokingly call it the “Dress for the job you want to have” collection. That’s me saying, “I get to do what I want with my body.” I think you should be allowed to do whatever you want with your own body, not with anyone else’s body. That’s the message I’m trying to send.
A lot of my work is about my body and other people’s bodies and body dysmorphia. I did a 20-minute opera called Flush: A Mini Opera for the Seattle Opera through a program called the Creation Lab. I wrote it with the incredible Paul F. Stovall. It’s a 20-minute journey of a young woman struggling with bulimia who is about to make herself throw up…and then the toilet starts talking to her. I think it’s important to make space for us to discuss the things that we’re not supposed to talk about. At this point in my life, that's very much about the journey of finding your body.
Eating disorders are the leading cause of death by mental illness. It’s something that people don’t get. “What’s at stake here? Oh, that she’s gonna vomit? Whatever.” People are literally killing themselves to fit a certain image constructed by the male gaze. I want to deconstruct that and figure out why that is, and I want to put these uncomfortable things on stage and talk about them in real life.
Hayley: You have so much to offer this industry because you are so willing to have these uncomfortable conversations with people and in your work. As a woman in theatre, that is inherently feminist. It inspires me a lot.
Amy: I love what you said about talking about the things that we’re not supposed to talk about. That feels like an important and inspiring creative mission that can guide you through your career. I agree that that’s a unique thing that you bring as a woman to the theatre space. In a social space where we’re taught to keep quiet, it is a radical act to not only talk about these things but put them up on a stage in front of an audience.
Womanhood and Its Benefits
Amy: How do you think being a woman has been a benefit to you?
Julia: I’m always actively listening. Maybe not inherently because I’m a woman - but I’m always listening, and when I’m writing, I have the benefit of an almost-therapist lens of: “Why is someone doing this?”
Many years ago, I had a hornet infestation in my apartment. It was horrible, but what came out of it – other than a hundred stories of my roommates and I trying to kill hornets – was “The Bee Song.” It’s about a young woman who sees a bee in her apartment. Then suddenly, there are a hundred bees. Then suddenly, she’s the queen of the bees and they’re there to serve her and destroy everything in her path.
It was inspired by me feeling lost and weak and wishing that I had an army of bees to destroy all of the things that were making my life a living hell at the time…because I didn’t feel like I had the strength inside me to do it. And it’s a weird thought, but here’s this funny thing that maybe everyone can relate to. And I think A) why is this funny? And B) Why is this a coping mechanism? Because comedy is a coping mechanism.
To me, being a woman in theatre, a woman in comedy, a woman in this industry, is finding what’s actually underneath all of the grandiose theatricality that we’re putting on a stage. It’s finding the heart and the brain behind it.
I’ve been told a lot that I present too much, that I shouldn’t dress the way that I dress – I call it “clown-adjacent” – and that I’m very loud. That I’m “too much.” In professional settings, I’ve literally had screenwriters say, “You are not going to get people to listen to you because they are going to be intimidated.”
Hayley: But if a man did that…
Amy: Scary woman who knows her own mind! Hide! (Laughing)
Julia: As a woman, I take up a lot of space. And I want to take up space. I like space. I’m a maximalist. So it’s just finding a way to be okay with that. I go to therapy and I pay a lot of money to be okay with that. I want to make “too much” okay.
Hayley: Do you think a man has ever sat there and wondered, “Am I too much?”
How to Improve the Theatre Industry
Hayley: Julia, what is something that you hope will change for women in the industry?
Julia: I hope to see more stories with “feminine stakes.” When I say feminine stakes, I mean a situation that would be really high stakes to someone in a female-presenting body but may not be inherently scary to a man. For instance, being pregnant, or fearing that you will lose your career by speaking up about inequality. We are starting to tell these stories, starting to see all-female teams and women-led teams, and then a male producer will come in and say, “I don’t get it.”
So my big hope is that women are gonna control the money, and instead of controlling it in the way that they might have been taught by this older male generation, they will do it their way. Women in power, women holding the money and making decisions about what should be on stage. Then it’ll make having difficult conversations like the bulimia conversation easier because we know that we have the support of the almighty dollar.
Amy: As a producer, I’m taking note.
Hayley: I think that what we’re talking about here is actually a new way of doing things. We are creating a space where we’re making decisions in a different way and for different reasons. We’re calling that “feminine” for now. But I think it will serve more people.
Amy: In an ideal world, introducing “feminine” values and ideals into the space is going to make a more egalitarian playing field for everybody. And a space where everybody has room to feel heard and to talk about the things that are important to them that aren’t talked about. That’s really exciting.
Hayley: As a white woman who is around a lot of other white women in my community, I find that we have all of these shared negative experiences. And then I think about the women I know who hold less privilege – black women specifically, and women of colour in general. If I have to do so much emotional labour on a regular basis, as a cisgender able-bodied white woman, there are so many people who share those experiences and face so many more challenges because of the intersection of their identities.
Amy: Ideally, when we make more room for some of us, we make more room for all of us. That’s definitely the aim.
Creative Work/Life Balance
Amy: Julia, how do you think about balancing your creative work with the rest of your life?
Julia: I’m incredibly lucky because I have a very supportive familial structure. My mother and I were having a conversation the other day, and I was like, “Thank you for supporting me,” and she goes, “I wouldn’t support you if I didn’t actually think you could achieve this.” She said, “I’d love you no matter what, but if this wasn’t the thing, I would be helping you find the thing.”
I grew up knowing what I was good at. I know that if I put my mind to something, I’m going to achieve it. That thing is not math, that thing is not science, and that is okay. I kind of know what I want familial-y. I know I wanna be a mom one day. It’s something that has always been very important to me. But I’m also really excited to create things that aren’t from my uterus.
Final Thoughts
Hayley: Julia, what does being a woman mean to you?
Julia: I enjoy the power that I have as a woman. As someone that doesn’t feel powerful most of the time. There’s something really powerful to me about my body, my brain!
The best thing about being a woman - I can sum this up in a quick little story. My grandmother had breast cancer young, in her thirties. And I know that I have to be careful – check for lumps, everyone! So I find a lump and we go to the doctor, and I’m making jokes, as I do, because I’m terrified. And I said to the doctor, “If I have to get surgery, I don’t know what I’m gonna do, because my boobs are my best assets.”
Both the doctor and my mother said, “Hold the phone!” And the doctor said, “You’re hilarious, your brain is your best asset!” And my mother said, “Stop being an idiot, your brain is your best asset!”
So the best part about being a woman is that I have other women around me who can see past the dumb things I say about myself because I’m insecure, or scared, or sad. Most of the time, I say the worst things about myself, or I will be the worst person to myself. And it’s amazing when other women are able to look past that and see what’s going on inside.
I’m so lucky that I have other women that can help me. And that I can help other women do that.
Amy: The thing that you love about being a woman is other women. That’s beautiful. That’s what this project is all about.
Hayley: HELLO! Being in community together.
Amy: Yeah, so let’s all lift each other up.
Julia: And let’s all check for lumps!
