S1E5: Tidtaya Sinutoke and Isabella Dawis
In this episode, Hayley and Amy speak with new musical theatre writing team Tidtaya Sinutoke and Isabella Dawis. We learn about the development processes for their musicals Half the Sky and Sunwatcher, and we talk about incorporating elements of other cultures into American musical theatre and lessons learned from the pandemic. Scroll down for episode notes and transcript!
Episode Notes
Guests: Tidtaya Sinutoke and Isabella Dawis
Hosts: Hayley Goldenberg and Amy Andrews
Music: Chloe Geller
Episode Resources:
Follow Tidtaya and Isabella’s show Half the Sky on social media for the latest news!
5th Avenue Theater First Draft Commission Program
Weston-Ghostlight New Musical Award (collaboration of Weston Theater Company and Ghostlight Records)
Half the Sky concert at Joe’s Pub (with Musical Theatre Factory)
Learn more about the U.S. fire bombing of Tokyo in 1945
Guest Bios
Tidtaya Sinutoke (she/her) is a Jonathan Larson Grant, Billie Burke Ziegfeld Award, International Theatremakers Award and Fred Ebb Award-winning musical theatre composer, writer, and musician. Born in Thailand and now based in NYC, her compositions draw from multiple genres, combining classical music, traditional Thai/world music tonality, and the complexities of contemporary meters and pop hooks. Composition credits include: Half the Sky (The 5th Avenue Theatre's First Draft Commission & 20/21 Digital Season, Weston-Ghostlight New Musical Award); Sunwatcher (The Civilians R&D Group, Ancram Play Lab, Global Forms Theater Festival), and Dear Mr. C (NYFA’s City Artist Corps Grants, Polyphone Festival, The Crossroads Project). Her works have been developed and supported by the Composer-Librettists Studio at New Dramatists, Yale Institute for Music Theatre, Johnny Mercer Foundation, NYFA IAM Mentoring Program, Robert Rauschenberg Residency, Kurt Weill Foundation, Drama League, Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, and the American Opera Project. A proud member of ASCAP, Dramatists Guild, Maestra, MUSE, and Thai Theatre Foundation. BM: Berklee College of Music; MFA: NYU. tidtayasinutoke.com
Isabella Dawis (she/her) is a Filipina-American playwright and performer. As a librettist and lyricist, she is the recipient of the 2022 Kleban Prize in Musical Theatre, the 2021 Fred Ebb Award, and the 2020 Weston-Ghostlight New Musical Award. She currently holds a Composers and the Voice Fellowship with the American Opera Project. Her musical theatre works include HALF THE SKY (5th Avenue Theatre Digital Radio Play/First Draft Commission, Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, Mu's New Eyes, Theater Latté Da's NEXT), SUNWATCHER (Civilians' R&D, Goodspeed’s Writers Grove, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Ancram Opera House, Tofte Lake Center), and BEFORE THE LAST METER (Atlanta Opera). Isabella’s writing has been supported by the Primary Stages Rockwell Scholarship, the Kurt Weill Foundation's Lotte Lenya Songbook, Musical Theatre Factory, Coalition of Asian American Leaders, and more. B.M. summa cum laude, piano performance, University of Minnesota, with vocal study at New England Conservatory.
Find Tidtaya and Isabella Online:
Tidtaya’s website: www.tidtayasinutoke.com
Isabella’s website: www.isabelladawis.com
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Episode Transcript
(Music)
Hayley: Hello, beautiful people, and welcome to the Women & Theatre Podcast! We're your hosts, Hayley Goldenberg…
Amy: …and Amy Andrews. Grab a cup of coffee and join us as we explore the experiences of women and nonbinary people in the theatre industry.
Hayley: On the pod, we interview people from different backgrounds with varying levels of industry experience and professional roles.
Amy: Our goal is to build community, identify the unique benefits that women and nonbinary folks bring to theatrical spaces, and pool our collective wisdom to break down the barriers we continue to face.
Amy: In today's episode, we speak with Tidtaya Sinutoke and Isabella Dawis, a fantastic new musical theatre writing team. Tidtaya is a Thai-born musical theater composer, writer, and musician who has received a Jonathan Larson Grant, the Billie Burke Ziegfeld Award, the International Theater Makers Award, and the Fred Ebb Award.
Isabella is a Filipina American librettist, lyricist, playwright, and performer. She received the 2022 Kleban Prize in Musical Theatre, the 2021 Fred Ebb Award, and the 2020 Weston-Ghostlight New Musical award.
Hayley: We are here with the incredibly impressive up-and-coming musical theatre writers, Isabella Dawis and Tidtaya Sinutoke. Could you both please introduce yourselves, share your pronouns, and tell us a little bit about how you came to theatre and what you're doing now. Let's start with Isabella.
Isabella: Hi, my name is Isabella Dawis. I am a book writer, lyricist, and playwright, as well as an actor, singer, and musician. I'm originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota. My pronouns are she/her.
I got into theatre through regional theatre, actually. As much as I loved listening to OBC [Original Broadway Cast] albums, as a kid, I was really fortunate to grow up near the Guthrie Theater, which is a real trailblazer in terms of the regional theatre movement in this country. When I was a kid, I was able to experience the history of that theatre when I went to see productions there.
I was very lucky, my parents wanted to expose me to a lot of arts and culture, so they took me to see Shakespeare plays when I was really young, like in kindergarten. So that's where I first became enamored of theatre as an art form. It's been a couple of decades since, and I've been really lucky to make my life in theatre since then.
Hayley: Awesome.
Tidtaya: Hi, I'm Tidtaya Sinutoke, she/her. I'm a composer. I'm originally from Thailand, born and raised in Thailand, and I moved to America when I was in my last year of high school. I grew up all over the places in Thailand, and I lived in Bangkok for like, four or five years of my life. But then we moved out of Bangkok, so I'm actually kind of a country girl. So for me, the exposure to theater is little compared to people who actually live in Bangkok and may have more opportunities. So I actually didn't get to see a live musical theatre performance until I was 17. We saw, like, a tour production of something and that's the first bite of musical theatre.
Hayley: I love that you said that, “the first bite,” what a wonderful way to describe that.
Amy: Yeah, what a great image. What was your first show that you saw?
Tidtaya: It was Grease.
Amy: Love that.
Isabella: Oh my God, I didn't know that! (laughs)
Amy: Amazing.
Tidtaya: I went to Berklee for undergrad here, and I mean, I knew that I liked theatre, but I didn't know what I can do in theatre. So I took bunches of classes all over the place. So everything but writing. And then I moved to New York to work for a year, and then I applied to NYU, and that's how I start writing for theatre.
Hayley: Amazing.
Amy: How did you meet?
Isabella: We met in New York, before I had started really writing seriously. And I actually have Tidtaya to thank for encouraging me to push into book writing and lyric writing. So I met Tidtaya, actually as a performer of her work. We ended up having mutual friends, especially in the Asian American theatre community. So I knew Tidtaya as a creator, and I loved her music. I found it really amenable to the voice in a way that was unique. It was melodic and catchy in a really good way. Her work just stuck out to me. At that time, I was living in New York, and I was really focused on meeting composers and playwrights and helping people workshop their projects.
But Tidtaya’s work always stood out to me, and eventually, Tidtaya actually approached me with the idea of submitting a pitch to the 5th Avenue Theatre, which had just initiated this First Draft Commission program, commissioning the first draft of a new musical. And it's a wonderful program geared towards writers from historically underrepresented communities. You just send in a description of a show that does not exist yet. So I thought, “I can do that, write a page-long description of a show that doesn't exist yet.” And Tidtaya said, “I'd like to write a show about Mount Everest.” And I was like, “Okay, interesting.” And she said, “I want it to be a sister story about climbing Mount Everest. I want it to be an Asian American woman as a protagonist, and she's climbing Mount Everest the year after her sister has died climbing Mount Everest.”
And so that was a really fun concept to pitch. And when we got the commission, it was kinda baptism by fire, for me specifically, that's the start of our partnership.
Hayley: Did you say baptism by fire? Is that what you said?
Isabella: Yeah, because I had never written a musical before. I had written very short plays. I've been writing since I was very young, but just for myself. But I also dreamed of one day writing a novel or something like that. By the time I was in my, like, early or mid-twenties, I had written monologues and a one-act and some short pieces, but never a musical.
There's a kind of rigor and discipline to writing musicals that's very inherent to that craft and paramount to the whole thing holding together. As someone who had been performing in musicals for many years, I knew what it felt like to be in it, to feel the energy going from scene to song to scene to song. I knew what it was like to ride that wave, but when you are actually like…
Hayley: Responsible for creating the wave? Yeah.
Isabella: Yes, exactly. When you're actually the one, like, in the tide pool who's moving the thing up and down, it's like, oh, that's how much effort it takes. That's the pace, that's everything. And Tidtaya was both my collaborator and she taught me a lot, especially that first year that we were writing together. You know, as a writer, you can get caught up in all kinds of things. But in the end, Tidtaya really helped me have our eye on the goal. What was actually gonna work, and what was actually gonna land? And of course, that's like a moving target, it changes, and you always have to adjust as the piece keeps growing and as you keep learning more about it.
Amy: What a way to start a collaboration! That's so terrific.
(Music)
Amy: So the show that you wrote was Half the Sky, which has gone on to have quite a life. Can you talk to us about what's been going on with that show?
Tidtaya: I feel like we've been blessed with a lot of things for this project particularly, because, I mean, we got the commissions. And I think one thing that we both are good at is like, to have a deadline to finish some things.
Hayley: I would say writing does not happen without deadlines.
Amy: Yeah, I would hard agree with that.
Tidtaya: Yeah. So we did have a deadline to finish the first draft of it by the end of 2019. But along that way, we also had, like, other deadlines to help polish and finishing the piece as well. In the summer of 2019, we did a reading of it at Theater Mu New Eyes Festival. And then after that, immediately did a workshop for two weeks and then did a reading at Theater Latté Da for their next festival.
Isabella: Those places are both in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Theater Mu I have worked with for many years, one of the giants of the Asian American Theatre. Theater Latté Da, I also knew the folks there. One of the panelists on the 5th Avenue’s First Draft Commission program, she works at Theater Latté Da. So that was another example of what Tidtaya’s saying, that we've had blessings working on this project.
So that's how basically, six months after we had gotten the commission for the first draft, we were actively workshopping the first full draft. So by the time we delivered the “first draft” to the 5th Avenue Theatre, I think we were on like our sixth draft or something like that.
Hayley: Wow, that is fast and furious. My gosh.
Tidtaya: We did, like, table reads, unofficial table reads twice too. And again, small deadlines help the big deadlines.
Isabella: After the First Draft Commission program was over, we had the privilege of the Weston-Ghostlight New Musical Award, with Weston Playhouse Theater - or Weston Theater Company, now they're called - in Vermont and Ghostlight Records. So that was another workshop, but also a demo recording session at Ghostlight, which was also extremely helpful.
Tidtaya: At the right place at the right time too, ‘cause we recorded on Tuesday, I don't remember the day in March…
Isabella: March 13th, 2020.
Amy: Wow.
Hayley: Talk about blessings. Wow. Getting in right before…
Tidtaya: We went to Vermont on the weekend that the number kept growing up, from like hundreds to thousands. And then we came back, did a presentation of selected scenes and songs and then did a recording, and yeah, who would've thought…
Hayley: What a wild thing.
Isabella: Yeah, that was probably the last time those actors sang with no regard to particulates in the air, the last time they were singing without that on their mind.
So then during the pandemic - when we talk about the journey of this piece, it's a lot of good fortune. We're in the pandemic, we're, you know, kind of bummed, ‘cause we're live theater people. And then the 5th reached out again, and the 5th was like, “Hey, we are doing digital radio plays. Would you be interested in adapting Half the Sky for audio?” We were like, “Yeah! We would love to hear the whole show in this kind of immersive audio format.”
And our director, Desdemona Chiang, Des always jokes that the audio adaptation for Half the Sky has the best set, because it's just all in your imagination. And the play really does have some challenging things about it. Challenging locations, ‘cause it's set on the entirety of Mount Everest, and challenging scene transitions, and things like that. By making this audio adaptation with the 5th, we were really able to explore. Doing that with just sound design was really…
Tidtaya: I mean, even just recording that audio was also like a journey too, because that was also late 2020 and a lot of precautions had to be made. And none of us were vaccinated back then.
Isabella: Yeah, we had our actors recording in New York, the musicians were recording in Seattle, Tidtaya was in Thailand. Did you record as well, Tidtaya?
Tidtaya: I did record the flute, the Thai flute. So when we recorded in New York City, my timing in Thailand was like, we started at 10:00 PM in Thailand, and then we finished at 6:00 AM.
Amy: Oh my God.
Tidtaya: That was actually not too bad. The worst one, I started midnight all the way to 10:00 AM. But all the actors were amazing. I mean, the rehearsal was all virtually on Zoom and they went into the recording studio all together. We were trying to find a recording studio that has like seven rooms, so everyone is isolated. And yeah, I mean, it was such a blessing to have something looking forward in the pandemic time.
Isabella: So we had a concert at Joe's Pub earlier this year with Musical Theatre Factory, which was really fun.
Tidtaya: That was the postponed concert from May 2020.
Isabella: That was something we'd been talking about since before the pandemic and finally, long delayed. And now we're gearing up for the World Premiere production in fall 2023 at Round House Theatre.
Amy: I know Round House Theatre, I grew up there. That was my regional theatre that I went to growing up.
Isabella: So that will be our first production, first production together, our first production of Half the Sky. So it'll be a lot of firsts, and it's gonna be a fun year.
Hayley: I love hearing about the journey of the piece. Do you wanna talk about Sunwatcher, the other big piece that you're working on together?
Tidtaya: Yeah, I mean that one started entirely on Zoom, with different time zones and different countries. It was us with Nana Dakin and Ikumi Kuronaga, who is our producer/cultural consultant. And I actually, I don't think all four of us have been in the same room yet.
Hayley: Wow.
Amy: Wow, that's wild.
Isabella: Sunwatcher is the story of this amazing woman who I read about in the bottom of a Google rabbit hole…
Hayley: Been there.
Amy: So relatable.
Isabella: Yeah, sometimes that's where you find your great ideas. Hisako Koyama was born in 1916 and died in 1997, she lived and worked in Tokyo. She was a solar observer, so she observed the sun every day through a telescope and actually drew its face. So the sun has - what looks like little spots on its surface, they're like electromagnetic storm clouds, basically. Those patterns change in a cyclical way over time. It's kind of an esoteric branch of science, but it actually tells us a lot - not just about how the sun works, but also how what's happening on Earth, how that's connected to the sun.
There are just a few people in human history who have had the wherewithal to actually chronicle what's happening on the sun. And one of them is Galileo, a few other European dudes, and Hisako Koyama. You have to be very tenacious to do this work, because it's really hard to draw the sun, as you can imagine. Trying to track it over many, many days as Hisako did. She did it over 40 years actually, every day. It requires a really keen eye and attention to detail and a kind of artistic sensibility, which she happened to have. And she was not scientifically trained at all. She was not a “professional scientist,” even though she was operating at a professional level. She was kind of quietly flouting societal conventions as a woman in Japan at that time to be engaged in this kind of work.
She was actually a survivor of World War II and some real atrocities, specifically the U.S. fire bombing of Tokyo in 1945, which is still the deadliest air raid in history. Over a hundred thousand people were killed in the course of one bombing. Something that, kind of like Hisako’s story, is not really in our history books and not something that we learn about growing up.
This woman was just really fascinating to us, her obsession with the sun, especially when we kept learning about all these obstacles that were in her path. To us, it invited dramatization because in musical theatre, you want extremely heightened emotion. You want to kind of express this transcendent state that's elevated beyond speech, on a spiritual plane, almost. That's where you wanna get with musical theatre, because it's combining so many storytelling elements. They're all working together. It's really elevated and really heightened. And when we were reading about Hisako, we felt like there was something in her life story that was that powerful.
So Sunwatcher started out as a small counterpoint to Half the Sky, but has just gotten bigger and bigger the more we learn. It draws on the structure of classical Japanese Noh drama, which in essence, has to do with a mortal character that’s providing a bridge to the audience into the world of the immortals or the gods. The mortal character basically helps bear witness to some kind of spiritual being who needs help moving on.
And so in our story, Sunwatcher, that immortal or divine being is Amaterasu, who is the Goddess of the Sun in Japanese mythology. It's kind of rare in creation mythology to have the sun represented by a woman. So it's a story, a love story between Hisako and Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess. It's a story of how you sustain love through all the things that life can throw at you. Both Hisako and Amaterasu, in her own myth, they're really tested. Sunwatcher is still in progress. But yeah, we're hoping to bring it to the stage soon.
(Music)
Hayley: Is there kind of a creative mission or like driving force behind the work that you create together?
Isabella: Our work tends to center Asian female and immigrant voices because that's who we are. And because that's who we are, we can see where that perspective is missing in musical theatre and where we think that it can be used as a source of enlightenment and inspiration and hopefully will be fulfilling for audiences to experience.
Tidtaya’s work also specifically incorporates music from other cultures and traditions outside of typical American musical theatre. That includes not just the approach to the composition itself but also the instrumentation. For example, we actually just returned from a trip to Kathmandu, Nepal, researching for Half the Sky. Tidtaya and I, and our director Desdemona Chiang, and our music director Robert Frost, met with several musicians in Nepal and took lessons with them. And Tidtaya brought back several musical instruments.
Hayley: That's so cool.
Tidtaya: For me, it's a blessing that I grew up outside of America because - I mean, I took piano when I was like five, but then my mom also took me to learn some Thai traditional instruments too. And because I grew up outside of the U.S. - I mean, we still hear like Britney Spears in the Asian continent, but we also get exposed to other source materials of music as well. Like, you know, when I was in middle school, J-pop was a thing. And then when we were in high school, K-pop started introducing itself to Thailand.
So in a way, it was a blessing that I got to taste other musical sounds before I actually know what musical theatre is. And that's a blessing to be part of the musical theatre world. And in a way, I think my perspective of writing songs changed when I start writing for Half the Sky, actually. I realized that we have to write songs for a musical, but in a way, we are also kind of setting up the soundscape of where we are. And that's my job.
So I feel like I'm being a mad scientist for every project, like gathering some instruments, trying to take some of those lessons online virtually. And we still have to figure out how to do that. And also things like, for Half the Sky, it is like learning some traditional instruments and then how to incorporate that with our songs in Half the Sky. The way we write songs in the show, it's still structure - like things like AABA, verse-chorus, it's still existing in some way, but now we are trying to incorporate Thai and, you know, Nepali instruments in there.
And for Sunwatcher, there's so many things to discover. We found a NASA recording of the sun sound, and it kind of - if we’re going into pitch, it kind of gets closer to D. Because the sun sound is D, we make a decision that all the songs that Hisako is singing, Amaterasu is singing, all the sunspots singing are - like, the D has to be in the key, whatever key it's in. But we also have to have some songs that is about war. Then the D cannot be in any of those keys. It has to be a dissonance.
Amy: What a fun puzzle!
Tidtaya: I feel like a mad scientist sometimes. We're doing things that we don't know if it's gonna work, and then we discover some things. It's my task to tell where we are. But also in the same time, I want to also incorporate that into, like, musical theatre writing structure too. So it's a bridge.
Isabella: In different cultures, songs serve a kind of social function and purpose. So, for example, we talk to people from the Sherpa community, and, you know, there are songs for drinking or songs for like, sitting together. There are songs for funerals and weddings and for celebrating and for mourning and songs for praying, songs for times of day, songs that relate to harvest and nature... So as dramatic writers, we can use this as fuel for our show. I'm a big believer in eco-friendly writing. Basically, I'm just adapting, like my work is just adapting. I don't see myself as creatively generating, I'm just repurposing things that already exist.
Hayley: That's a really interesting way to look at it, yeah.
Isabella: If there's already theatrical functions in the music of the people of the culture who we're trying to depict, I should use that. We don't need to start from the ground up. So that's just one example of different ways in which we can expose the audience to different ways of listening.
In Nepali music and Sherpa music, harmony is not the most predominant part of music. Rhythm is really important and melody is really important, and the melody is often just doubled with the voice and instrument. So that's really different than what we normally hear when we go to a musical or when we turn on the radio.
Tidtaya: That's also interesting, because as a person who took Thai traditional instruments, that's something that's normal. It's an interesting thing to know both, and then kind of coming into the middle. There's this and there's that, and how to blend them together somehow.
Isabella: I think there's a sense today that people want to feel like they're pushed or challenged in a certain way when it comes to like, broadening their horizons in terms of the entertainment that they're “consuming.” People want the envelope to be pushed in a certain way when it comes to representation and diversity. These are things that are on people's minds and on people's lips. One of the ways that Tidtaya and I can actually implement that is exposing people to different sounds. It sounds so basic, but that's a way to confront the unfamiliar, which in a way is a lot of what Half the Sky is about, confronting the unfamiliar and the strange. Giving audiences a chance to take that in and to respond to that is actually a really important part of our work and of what we see as our responsibility.
Tidtaya: And also for me, especially for Half the Sky, it is a story about an Asian American woman who is Thai American. And one of the first two songs that we wrote for this piece has, like the bridge of it, basically having her singing something in Thai, and then we’re actually having the ensemble do the translation afterward. But you get to hear something that you may not understand, and then to hear the meaning of it afterward.
Or sometimes, even in the dialogue, some of it bounced back and forth between those two languages. It's different for me because I understand both, but it's interesting to give them the taste of… Sometimes you don't have to know exactly what it says, but you can understand it somehow from either reaction or from the answer or anything. For me, that's something that I'm excited for and proud of the work, and yeah.
Hayley: Yeah, I think that's really amazing.
(Music)
Amy: So I would love to talk about womanhood - what womanhood means to you and how it fits into your identity.
Tidtaya: It's a hard question.
Amy: It is a hard question!
Isabella: Our work is actually very female-centered. Our protagonists are obviously women, but it is coming from the point of view of - in Half the Sky, a sister and a daughter, a woman who relates very much to those identities. And in Sunwatcher, Hisako Koyama is also very much a daughter.
So I think in our pieces, womanhood is bound up with familial relationships, and that's really… It's hard. It's a hard thing to dramatize and it's a hard thing to live, especially for women of a certain age, I think. Our protagonists are not like 16 or 18 years old. When Hisako Koyama first started her work in solar observation, she was in her late twenties. And that also meant something very different in Japanese society in mid-20th century, to be doing something like that in your late twenties as a woman.
The women in our pieces also are not dependent on men. Their relationship towards men and finding a male partner - that's not a foremost concern. Tidtaya and I try to honor our experiences of womanhood in our work, and both Tidtaya and I are believers that being a strong woman doesn't mean copying what a “strong man” would do.
Having an Asian American woman in the role that's typically occupied by a European male colonizer as someone who's trying to climb Mount Everest, we did that very intentionally. Because that character is having to grapple with the legacy of trying to undertake this mission that has been defined as masculine, aggressive, dominating. Having our main character have to confront that, while at the same time dealing with the turmoil that's inside her that has to do with her relationships as a woman in her family, is a really nice bubbly mix for us to play with as writers.
Tidtaya: I feel like I grew up surrounded by women in my family who are their own protagonists of their story, and they overcome the challenge and achieving their goal and their dreams. And that probably, in a way, affects the way we write, the way we see the world, the way we believe that things are possible.
Hayley: Love it. What are you most proud of in your life and in your work?
Tidtaya: I think for me, the proudest thing that I realized in my life is - I mean, I love theatre and I still love it so much, but it took me a while to understand how important the family can be for me. I didn't realize how much time I took away from family because I wanted to write and all this stuff. And I mean, I'm still writing, I'm still doing this full-time, but I'm happy that I finally figured out how to divide time between life and writing. It took me eight years to not be able to celebrate my birthday with my family just because I thought I should be here. And now, I'm in the point of my life where I'm happy to be able to do both. I'm happy where we are right now and very grateful for what we are doing, for all the projects that we're working on. And yeah, I'm excited for the future.
Amy: Love that. What about you, Isabella?
Isabella: I think Tidtaya and I have similar answers. I think one of the things about the pandemic, for us working together, we both kind of bore witness to each other rediscovering these boundaries that Tidtaya’s talking about and taking time for ourselves, spending more time on our relationships that don't have anything to do with theatre. I think we've both been good about encouraging each other to take all the time that we need and want and spend time with our families.
And I think that's what I'm proud of too. What we're doing with our time and how we're nurturing our relationships, inside the theatre industry and outside too. It's really important, and I know that it's going to have a really long-term impact on my life. Theatre can be fickle, and we're just so primed to experience things in such short life cycles. Over the pandemic, I've tapped into kind of a longer approach to how I want to experience day-to-day life. I'm grateful for that.
And I think in terms of our work, what is most fulfilling for Tidtaya and me is the fact that we can see the joy in the people who work on our projects. And that's really special. We're also about to be fully produced. And so I think we'll experience a new wave of sensation when it comes to having many more people experience our work as audience members. We've really been in the weeds in these developmental processes, and it's very gratifying when we know that the people who are working on these pieces that we've put together are finding gratification. It just makes us feel really happy and excited about continuing to write.
Amy: Yeah. That's wonderful.
Hayley: Thank you so much for coming and sitting down with us, you two. It's incredible to hear about your process and your collaboration and everything that you've got going on.
Amy: What a joy. I love women in collaboration with women. It's really something really special, isn't it?
Isabella: It's a good collaboration.
Hayley: Yeah. It's evident.
Amy: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. We really appreciate you taking the time.
Isabella: Thank you so much.
(Music)
Hayley: Thank you for listening to the Women & Theatre Podcast. We’re your hosts, Hayley Goldenberg…
Amy: And Amy Andrews. If you like what you heard, subscribe and give us a 5-star review wherever you listen.
Hayley: You can also follow us on social @womenandtheatreproject to make sure you never miss an episode.
Amy: The music for this show is written by talented Women & Theatre community member Chloe Geller.
Hayley: Thanks for listening, everyone. See you next time!
Amy: Bye!
