Interview witH
Shakina Nayfack and Laura Savia

The following is a lightly-edited transcript of a conversation between Williamstown Theatre Festival Artistic Director Mandy Greenfield and Chonburi International Hotel & Butterfly Club Director Laura Savia and Playwright Shakina Nayfack. To listen to the conversation, click play, above.
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Shakina Nayfack The play Chonburi International Hotel and Butterfly Club started as a love letter to a remarkable community of women that I met while undergoing my gender confirmation surgery in Thailand and stayed in a hotel where a lot of other women going through the same process were staying. We met and befriended one another and kissed in the lobby and shared stories in each other's hotel rooms, and I wanted to capture the beauty and the magic of that in a piece of theatre that felt like a classic play with a setting and style that was familiar and beloved but with characters, whom we've never seen take that stage.

Mandy Greenfield Laura, talk about when you met this play, what happened for you.

Laura Savia When I first met Chonburi International Hotel and Butterfly Club I fell in love, on the spot. Full stop. I encountered the play at a reading, and I was completely engrossed immediately by the story of this vibrant group of transgender women readying themselves for or recovering from gender confirmation surgery at a hotel in Chonburi, Thailand. I found this setting to be completely transportive. I could feel myself in that hotel lobby, looking at the grand staircase, watching people eat breakfast together in the lobby as new guests enter through the front door, and I was invited into the experience through the eyes of the central character, the newcomer, Kina.

Mandy Greenfield So it would not be wrong then to encourage our listeners to imagine the curtain rising on an extraordinary hotel lobby in the opening chords of our Sonic landscape.

Laura Savia The grand staircase, the elevator that's constantly opening and closing, the front door that jingles every time a new guest comes in, the clunking of suitcases. All of these things are brought to life by our brilliant sound designer Joanna Fang, and I'm confident our listeners will be able to picture it all. It's that immersion in that classic hotel lobby that helps us find the universal through the very very very specific in this particular play.

Shakina Nayfack Emmy Award-winning trans Asian American Foley artist, Joanna Fang.

Mandy Greenfield I agree with you about the power of sound and the power of voice. Can you talk about how the process of making the plays sonically helped our company and helped you as a playwright explore that territory and explore the divide between when we see ourselves and see a body and how we experience someone's interiority?

Shakina Nayfack The first thing I asked myself was, "How can I let everyone know what's happening?" And that meant the physical action on stage with elevator doors and door chimes and luggage carts that Laura mentioned, but also what was exciting to me was that I felt, in working with this wonderful cast, many of whom have been working with me on this play for a number of years, that it was in there already, and we just had to bring it out. Sometimes through stopping to reread a scene multiple times with different intentions that Laura would give us. Other times just giving the actors the freedom to bring their own experience to the words that I had written and allowing them to spill forth with a kind of deep truth that only the actor really knows, but we could taste and sense in the delivery.

Mandy Greenfield I've thought a lot about how this play, in particular, which takes place in a hotel in Thailand, where a group of international women come together to recover from gender confirmation surgery, and the idea that someone sitting in a hotel in Thailand, having that experience can access this work of art suddenly, is thrilling. This play feels so vital and so alive in this moment.

Shakina Nayfack To your initial point about the timeliness of this story, we're all stuck in our hotel rooms right now, that is the nature of life in 2020. And so the fundamental isolation and incapacitation that comes from, Kina's experience at the top of the play, is echoed in what almost everyone is feeling in quarantine in some way, waiting for this to end, not knowing how to get through it, suffering in immeasurable ways. So the fact that we can bring a sisterhood to all of the folks who feel trapped at home alone in this time, a sisterhood that's focused on healing and on finding the fullest expression of your being in the face of, in spite of, and along with all of the difficulties that life presents. That's what people need right now, so I'm so glad that it worked out in this way. And then the fact that the lens by which we're asking folks to look through for that healing is a community of recently post op trans women from around the world, and there's no previous angle into that community. This will be the first time that people get to take this look and listen into that world, and for folks to find a universality in that experience is really radical.

Mandy Greenfield I want to pause on a word that each of you has offered to Kina, in particular, and that is healing, and the degree to which I think we, and all theatre makers, do feel as though part of our job right now, is, through the work of making art, through the work of making theatre, helping each other, seeing each other, helping our culture see itself. Catharsis, which is at the core of drama as we know it, changes hearts and minds. We are moved to a new place. What is your hope for this play? How can it move and change its audience?

Laura Savia I hope a lot of things for our listeners. I hope they laugh a lot. Shakina is a brilliant comedic writer and actor. And like all great writers and actors of comedy, with that comes great pathos. Once we are joined, in heart and through laughter, to these 13 characters, my hope is that then we continue on the ride. As we move through the first and second act of the play, of course it's not all comedy. There are real ups and downs, there are real challenges that Kina is faced with. And I believe that by the time those challenges really arise, we will feel kindred with her, in part because the play reveals itself first to us as a comedy.

Shakina Nayfack I always feel whenever I see a great play, and that final moment happens, there's this gasp that escapes my chest, and in that breathtaking moment, I feel that something has been lifted from me, and I feel grateful. I hope that this play can be an offering like that. I really want to take folks on a journey that frees them. I really believe that sound as waves carry vibration that has the ability to penetrate the hearts and minds of the listener, with all the intention that's imbued within it. So I hope the play lands on people and lands in people, and that happens in a good way.