This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Leah Walsh: Hi, and welcome to The Compass, the podcast documenting the struggles of life as an artist.

[0:05] Leah Walsh: I'm Leah Walsh. Hi, everyone. My guest today is Jessica Blank.

[0:10] Leah Walsh: She is a multi-hyphenate artist, actor, writer, director, teacher, coach. She has such an incredible grasp of her process and a passion for articulating her approach to storytelling. So I'm very excited to share this conversation with you. She does a lot of her work in collaboration with her husband, Eric Jensen.

[0:27] Leah Walsh: And they have a show they wrote and Jessica directed, running right now at Cherry Lane Theater in New York. It's called Coal Country.

[0:34] Leah Walsh: It's a documentary theater piece with music about the aftermath of the West Virginia Mine explosion of 2010. You can buy tickets at coalcountrymusical.com. It's running through April 17th. And you can look into more of Jessica's work and offerings at jessicacblank.com.

[0:51] Leah Walsh: I hope you enjoy the 183rd episode of The Compass.

[1:12] Jessica Blank: What do I do to keep from going to the dark side as an artist?

[1:18] Leah Walsh: Uh, well define the dark.

[1:21] Jessica Blank: Well, I was gonna say, wrapped up in that is what does the dark side look like most often for you? It can be different for everyone. What comes to mind?

[1:27] Jessica Blank: I mean, it's interesting. I'm a pretty extroverted, positive action-oriented person. And so, in a certain way, the creative work I do as an artist keeps me from going to the dark side as an artist, right?

[1:48] Jessica Blank: Um, like my motto is keep making. Right? So when things get hard, right, as they inevitably do when I feel stuck, or when there's a, you know, professional disappointment that happens or rejection, or we hit an obstacle in making one of our projects happen or whatever, my cure for that is to just keep doing stuff, right?

[2:16] Jessica Blank: It's to, I mean, one of the things that I tell all my clients and students and that I really practice is that making creative work, particularly creative work that's based in collaboration, like theater and film and television, is a huge amount of it is creative problem solving, right?

[2:40] Jessica Blank: Like the making the work itself is a process of creative problem solving. And so if you don't embrace that, then you're gonna be miserable a lot of the time, right? Because we're doing these incredibly complicated complex pro, you know, projects, we're doing incredibly complex things in complex systems with lots and lots of people to make the work happen, right?

[3:04] Jessica Blank: It's more complicated than writing something by yourself or painting something by yourself, right? When we're trying to actually make a collaborative work like a play or a television show, right? So the whole thing is problems, right?

[3:18] Jessica Blank: So if you look at problems as a bad thing, you're gonna be miserable and stressed out and get stuck. If you look at every problem as part of the creative process, and that making the work is the art of creative problem solving, then that's a frame shift, right?

[3:38] Jessica Blank: So when I get stuck and things get difficult for me, I look at how to solve the problem, right? And I embrace that as part of the creative process. Um, if I get hit with a rejection on a project that feels like a huge blow, I get up the next day and I start working on another one, right?

[3:56] Jessica Blank: So I think a lot of places that are pitfalls for a lot of artists I know, for a lot of clients that I have and students that I have, I have a sort of way of framing creative practice that keeps me out of, you know, the whatever the quote unquote dark side is for a lot of folks.

[4:23] Jessica Blank: Um, my own personal dark side creatively, right? Or like the shadow side of that is that I can get very overextended. And I can stay in action mode, even if it's positive action mode, past the point of burnout and exhaustion sometimes.

[4:50] Jessica Blank: And that's something that I have to be careful about because there is a point where no matter how positive the action is you're taking, and no matter how creative it is, there's a law of diminishing returns, right?

[5:03] Jessica Blank: Like at some point I need to rest. At some point I need to allow, at some point I need to create the space for solutions to just show up instead of making them happen myself.

[5:19] Jessica Blank: And that's definitely an ongoing lesson for me and an ongoing chance for me in my own creative process.

[5:27] Leah Walsh: What has your journey been like finding that outlook that you're talking about, about looking at everything as a problem to be solved in a positive light? Has when did you kind of discover that that was what you were doing, or is that how you needed to frame it for yourself?

[5:47] Jessica Blank: I mean, I think if I, I think in a certain way it's how I've always worked. Um, I mean, I can talk a little bit about my own development and journey as an artist and as a multidisciplinary hyphenate and sort of how that evolved, um, because I think it might help contextualize some of that.

[6:07] Jessica Blank: So I started as an actor. Um, I was a theater geek in high school and became pretty serious about it as I was growing up, and I knew that that was what I wanted to do.

[6:19] Jessica Blank: I am still an actor, I love acting. Um, but you know, and acting is the gateway drug to theater and film and television for many people who work in any of those mediums, right?

[6:32] Jessica Blank: Even if we wind up becoming writers or directors or producers, right? Like the thing you can access as a kid is acting, right? Um, and so that's where I started.

[6:42] Jessica Blank: Um, but I have always been an interdisciplinary person and an interdisciplinary creator. I've always written, um, I've always made things and um worked as a creative generative artist in addition to an interpretive artist.

[6:58] Jessica Blank: Um, so in college, I did an interdisciplinary major where I was studying acting and I was studying creative writing, and then I was doing like critical theory on what it means to do both things.

[7:08] Jessica Blank: And I've also always been an activist and very politically oriented as well.

[7:13] Jessica Blank: Um, I came to New York to train as an actor. I studied with Bill Esper um after I finished college.

[7:22] Jessica Blank: And part way through my first year in acting school, I met uh my husband now my husband, Eric Jensen, who also was an actor, and also naturally a hyphenate.

[7:34] Jessica Blank: Like he had a band that had a recording deal with Sony and he was making money working as an illustrator, but also as an actor, and right.

[7:40] Jessica Blank: Um, and this was like back in the day when being a hyphenate was weird, and people would approach us and be like, but what really are you? And we'd be like, Well, we're kind of all of it.

[7:49] Jessica Blank: Um, and we had an idea. A month, we got an idea a month after we met. I brought him to a conference on the death penalty at Columbia University because that's what I was doing.

[8:00] Jessica Blank: And he likes to say that he said yes because he was still at the stage of our relationship where he would say yes to anything I asked him to do.

[8:06] Jessica Blank: Yeah, a little romantic date.

[8:08] Leah Walsh: Yes.

[8:09] Jessica Blank: And we were um in a workshop at that conference about a group of cases called the Death Row 10, which were guys who all had confessions tortured out of them by a particular police commander in Chicago who had been found to have done that and fired.

[8:22] Jessica Blank: But these guys were still sitting in prison, some of them with no other evidence against them besides these quote unquote confessions.

[8:29] Jessica Blank: And um the organizers had set up a phone call from one of the guys in prison and hooked the phone up to a speaker so that for a few minutes he was actually speaking to us in the room.

[8:39] Jessica Blank: Um, and our emotional experience hearing that phone call was so above and beyond the previous hour of like lecture and information that we had heard about the cases.

[8:51] Jessica Blank: And it had by the end of the call, everybody in the room was crying.

[8:54] Jessica Blank: And Eric sort of looked around and he said he was also crying, but he was like, but this is also kind of yes, because we're at a death penalty conference.

[9:03] Jessica Blank: Everybody who's here is already an activist. These aren't the people that need to be having this experience.

[9:08] Jessica Blank: And we started literally writing notes back and forth to each other in the back of the classroom about how do you get around that problem of preaching to the converted, basically.

[9:16] Jessica Blank: Um, we were both really interested in documentary theater. I was a huge Anna Deavere Smith fan.

[9:23] Jessica Blank: Um, Moisés Kaufman at that point was still working on creating the Laramie Project. It hadn't come out yet, but Eric had worked with him and crossed paths and knew about it.

[9:32] Jessica Blank: Um, we got the idea in that conversation to travel around the country, interview death row exonerees and make a documentary play from the interviews, which became our play The Exonerated, which ran for a couple of years off Broadway and toured nationally and had an impact on abolishing the death penalty in Illinois and did a whole lot of things, right?

[9:55] Jessica Blank: Neither of us knew how to do that when we started doing it, right? I didn't, we hadn't written a play before. I didn't know how to find death row exonerees.

[10:04] Jessica Blank: We had less than a thousand dollars in our bank account. We were struggling artists who lived in a rent-stabilized 400 square foot apartment in the East Village.

[10:11] Jessica Blank: Like we didn't have a playwriting agent, certainly. We didn't have any of that infrastructure at all.

[10:18] Jessica Blank: And I, you know, together we figured out how to do what we needed to do in order to create that play.

[10:29] Jessica Blank: And we did it step by step. We messed up along the way, we tried lots of things that didn't work.

[10:31] Jessica Blank: We tried lots of things that did work. And when we found something that worked, we leaned into the yes, which is a phrase that Eric uses a lot, right?

[10:44] Jessica Blank: Of like, oh, okay, that's this thing works, right? We're gonna go there, right?

[10:49] Jessica Blank: We didn't know how to create a script, for example, when we got back from interviewing the people who we had interviewed, we had those interviews transcribed, and we did not even know where to begin turning those transcripts into a play.

[11:03] Jessica Blank: But we were both actors and we had a community of actors and we knew how to work with text in a room as actors, and we had somebody who had offered us space.

[11:15] Jessica Blank: And so we just called up our friends and we said, Do you want to come read these transcripts out loud?

[11:21] Jessica Blank: And we found that we could edit by ear and that we could hear when we heard actors read the transcripts out loud what was not theatrical immediately, right?

[11:33] Jessica Blank: We could hear like certain layers of cuts, like and get so then we went, we would go, we would edit by ear, cross stuff out on the page in the room with actors, go home, enter those into the computer, come back with a condensed version the next day, whatever of our actor community was around to read those the next day.

[11:51] Jessica Blank: We would do that and we repeated it over and over and over again until finally monologues started to emerge.

[11:57] Jessica Blank: And then we did the same thing, juxtaposing those monologues with each other, just listening to hear what worked.

[12:05] Jessica Blank: And we took the same approach to raising the money that we needed to raise in order to travel around the country and do the interviews because we couldn't afford it out of pocket.

[12:13] Jessica Blank: I mean, we slept in the car and it was all on a shoestring, but we still needed to raise some money. We took the same approach, finding a director for the initial readings of the piece. We, you know, we like you find where you can do it and you do that and you see what happens and you look for what works and you lean harder into that. So in a certain way, it would be disingenuous for me to say that I learned how to look at creative problem solving as part of making art because it's just what I did the first time I started trying to make something.

[12:49] Leah Walsh: Yeah, everything you encountered.

[12:52] Jessica Blank: Yeah. And then it's just, you know, we that play had a very long life and was made into a film, and we wrote a book about it. And you know, it was basically we got the idea in 2000, and the book and the movie came out in 2005. So it was like a five-year creative journey, the life of that play. Just must have learned so much. You ended up working in all those different mediums.

[13:17] Jessica Blank: Yeah, it became the model for everything we do. So when we came out of that, we had a methodology, basically. And so then, you know, definitely over the years, I've spent time refining and honing that methodology, looking at how you know, we've directed our first feature, right? So it was like a, you know, in in 2016, it was a process to learn how to apply the same principles to directing a film, running a set, right? It the principles apply in different ways in when I'm running a rehearsal room. Um, so there are different applications and different ways that we've refined things over the years, and then definitely I would say maybe six or so years ago, I really went through a conscious process of learning how to articulate all of these principles when I really started.

Um I mean, I've been coaching sort of casually for a long time, but when I started coaching in a more formal way, and I teach at Juilliard in the uh graduate drama division, um, and I started really learning how to articulate how it is that we do this to other people and pass it on to other artists who are, you know, in the next generation.

[14:30] Leah Walsh: I love that. Um I want there's so many things I want to talk to you about, but let's talk about Coal Country first, just to make sure that we get it in there. I went to see it last night and it was um so wonderful.

[14:40] Jessica Blank: Awesome.

[14:41] Leah Walsh: Yeah, I really wanted to be able to see it before we talked. I had not been to see anything at Cherry Lane in so long. It was like a pleasure to get to go to that part of the city. Do you just want to tell just like a little bit about what it's about for people?

[14:55] Jessica Blank: Yeah, absolutely. So Coal Country is the documentary play, our most recent documentary play. Actually, in a funny way, it's not our most recent documentary play anymore because we wrote it in it opened in the public at the public theater in uh March, early March of 2020.

[15:11] Leah Walsh: That just must have been insane.

[15:12] Jessica Blank: It was pretty wild. Um we had been open for we had a couple of weeks of previews, but we had been open for I believe a week when everything got shut down. And so it's it's no longer accurate to say it's our most recent documentary play because after the shutdown, we actually did a rapid response documentary play for also for the public, which was streamed online called The Line based on interviews that we conducted with uh New York City medical first responders uh in May of 2020.

[15:41] Leah Walsh: Is that st is that available to watch anywhere now?

[15:43] Jessica Blank: Sadly at the time. Um because the contract, the streaming contract that had to be done with the actors limit, it's a limited run. Right. Right. So um it's it's no longer available to be streamed. It should be published fairly soon. Um we've just done a licensing agreement for the script. So the script should be accessible. Um and hopefully there, you know, we wrote it so that it is producible as live theater also. So hopefully there will be productions of it in non-streaming venues as well.

[16:17] Jessica Blank: Um so, but back to Coal Country, because we have wonderfully just reopened at the Cherry Lane. The public theater production um that had been shut down from COVID has been reopened by the public together with Audible at the at the Cherry Lane, and it is a documentary play that Eric and I wrote based on interviews that we conducted in 2015 with surviving family members and survivors of the fam of miners, coal miners who were killed in the 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in West Virginia, which was a terrible mine disaster, mine explosion, um, that many, many, many people believe was completely preventable.

[17:02] Jessica Blank: And in fact, the CEO of the company was prosecuted by the Obama Justice Department and spent a year in prison for conspiracy to violate mine safety laws. Um there were many, many ways in which safety laws were violated and corners were cut um for many, many years that created a situation where that explosion could happen. Um and so the story is really about greed um and corporate greed and what happens when human beings are treated like machinery. Um, and it is also a very deep human story about the people that we met in West Virginia and the families left behind in the wake of these trag this tragedy who are all extraordinary human beings and have really an awful lot to teach all of us.

[17:56] Leah Walsh: Have any of them gotten to see the show?

[17:58] Jessica Blank: Yes. So the families, most of the family members who are portrayed in the show were actually uh, they actually came and saw it at the public right before it was shut down March 7th, 2020. They were there. And there are plans to bring them back to the Cherry Lane as well as extend the invitation more widely because 29 minors were killed. Um the play tells six stories.

[18:26] Jessica Blank: Um so to extend the invitation more widely to family members of all 29. I can't imagine what that editing process was.

[18:37] Leah Walsh: It yeah, obviously, I'm sure you wanted to include every story.

[18:42] Jessica Blank: Yes. And I mean, that's you know, that's a question that we get asked often about our documentary theater work. Um, about like how do you decide which stories, right? We and you know, we weren't able to talk to all 29 families, right? One of the principles that we work with in our documentary work is enthusiastic consent, right? So we want to talk to the people who really want to tell their stories and who feel like they have something that will be healed or helped or liberated or feel good to them about getting their story out there, right? We're not investigative journalists who chase people who don't want to talk to us, right?

[19:16] Jessica Blank: Um, because the human beings at the center of our documentary work are at the center of our documentary work, and everything is about being of service to them. Um so, so but we do usually interview more people than the number of stories that are going to wind up in the play. And uh selecting the stories that will wind up in the play is one of the most difficult parts of the creative process for us because every single story that we hear is completely compelling, and every human being is totally compelling.

[19:46] Jessica Blank: So it's not about like we can't do it, it's not about deciding like what's the most interesting, right? It's it's much more about like which individual stories when we combine them will tell the larger story that we're trying to tell, right? And not double each other, right? And and a host of other aesthetic questions, but um it is really difficult to narrow down. And so, you know, we lean into the process that we discovered with the exonerated, and from the very beginning, we come back from the interviews with transcripts and we workshop all of them with actors and just start listening.

[20:24] Jessica Blank: And there is an ongoing sifting process that happens over an extended period of time. Um that results ultimately in a very sort of condensed essencey distilled work. And then, you know, I think it's worth saying with Coal Country also, Coal Country is a play with music. Um, we knew dealing with the subject matter from the very beginning, you know, Appalachia. You can't you can't tell a story about Appalachia without music being part of it, right? Music is so woven into the storytelling traditions of Appalachia, it feels um sort of neglectful actually to leave that out.

[21:03] Jessica Blank: And as soon as it occurred to us that the play needed music, we immediately thought of Steve Earle, who we knew actually from the exonerated, and we pitched the idea to him, and he was immediately on board. So he he is a genius and he wrote the music for the play, which he also performs in the play, all of which is also collected on his album Ghosts of West Virginia.

[21:26] Leah Walsh: Yeah, the fact that he's playing it himself is just amazing.

[21:29] Jessica Blank: Yeah, he's pretty incredible.

[21:31] Leah Walsh: And I I just felt like the relationship he had with the audience was really beautiful. What do they do the actors only have access to the script when you're rehearsing or do they listen to record are they um creating their own characters from scratch or are they listening to the voices?

[21:49] Jessica Blank: Yeah, that's a great question. So um you know actors uh when they're playing real people always want as much you know material as they can get their hands on right and they want to know all that you put out there.

[22:03] Jessica Blank: Um not much. So you know because it's one thing if you're playing a character who is a public figure, right? And the public has an image of that person already. Like I think about Eric uh played great Yankee legendary Yankee Thurman Munson in a mini series about the 77 Yankees called the Bronx is burning and Thurman is like a he was a beloved person to so many people. So for that process Eric had to gain weight he had to watch a video of Thurman Munson. He had to like get his speech and mannerisms down perfectly right because otherwise he wouldn't be meeting the image that and the relationship that so many people in the audience already had to the real person, right?

[22:46] Jessica Blank: With our documentary work, that's not on the table because we interview ordinary people, right? Who nobody has a pre-existing image of. And one of the things that we discovered early on in the process with the exonerated that was really incredible is another great example of sort of leaning into the yes and seeing what you learn from what happens when you just make your work, right? So like I said, we didn't have a formal workshop process for the exonerated, right? We didn't have an equity contractor funding or whatever. We like just drew on our community and said, hey, who wants to come play with us today and read these transcripts out loud, right?

[23:25] Jessica Blank: Um, and so what we got was different people would show up every day, right? Because people just came as they wanted to and as they were available. And what that meant was that we had people reading the roles who were not necessarily totally right for them, right? I mean, we did know that it was important to have to be sort of racially accurate, right, in our casting and gender accurate in our casting because uh in the early workshops of the exonerated, because it would have been hard to hear otherwise.

[24:02] Jessica Blank: But aside from that, you know, I mean, we had 25-year-old actors reading 70-year-old roles and people who were not right for it type-wise or whatever. Um, and we observed this incredible phenomenon, which was that the people, the actors took on the gestures, the vocal mannerisms, the physicality of the real people without having any information except the words that were on the page.

[24:32] Jessica Blank: And we were able to see from that how much of our psychology is contained in our language, right? How much our language is actually embodied, right? That actually your body will respond a certain way if you are speaking somebody's real words. The language carries so much, right? And so we learned from that that we needed, I mean, because we go through a very heavy editorial process in creating this work, you know, we're distilling 500 pages of transcripts down to a 40-page play, right? But we recognize that it was imperative that we preserve the rhythms of people's language and the uniqueness of how people speak as we did that, because that's what carries so much with it. So we actually really try to avoid letting our actors for our documentary pieces watch video, or sometimes, you know, they'll go Google stuff, right?

And sometimes there are stuff out there, yeah. But everything they need is accessible through the language and the relationship the language has with their bodies. And so if we can keep that pure rather than creating a situation in which actors feel like they need to put on a mask or work outside in, um, I find the process as a director to be much, much deeper for all of the actors.

[25:55] Leah Walsh: What was your experience coming back to the play and rehearsing it with the actors after such a break and after everything everyone's gone through in the pandemic?

[26:07] Jessica Blank: Really profound. Um, I mean, the first table read we were all weeping. Uh, you know, we're not the only play that got shut down by COVID, right? Um, so a lot of artists have gone through this kind of creative trauma. It did feel particularly deep, I think, to me and to Eric and to our company because the play is also a documentary piece that is carrying stories of real people. Um, and we all felt a really enormous sense of responsibility to those people. So to get shut down was sort of doubly painful because not only was there a creative trauma there, but there was an what felt like an abdication of responsibility to real people that but we couldn't help it, right? There was like nothing we could do about it in the moment.

Um, and I think that was really hard for all of us. And so, you know, in keeping with your question about like what do I do to stay away from the dark side as an artist, you know, the shutdown of Coal Country was probably the biggest creative trauma I've ever experienced, artistic trauma I've ever experienced. Um, it was really, you know, knocked me on my back a little. And what I did was I got on the phone right away. I kept talking to Oscar Eustace, I kept talking to our producer Yuvica, I called everybody I could, you know, come up with in our creative community and just kept talking about how do we keep this play alive? What does that look like? What do we do? Right. And the answer to that, obviously, for a very long time was I we don't know.

You know, you know. But whatever yeses I got, I kept leaning into and kept following through on. And actually, one of those very early calls was to Kate Naven, who is the lead producer at Audible Theater, because we knew that the play would work as an audio play. And Kate had also previously been our agent, so we, you know, I had her phone number. Um, and she said, you know, the and this was, I mean, this must have been like April 2020, and she said, you know, that's funny. I was I was about to call you. Um, and so we started talking about doing an audio version of the play back then. It took about a year to come together, but the audio version of Coal Country was recorded during the pandemic, recorded remotely, um, and which was a whole process.

And then when uh the public theater was trying to reopen hoping to reopen the play. And when it came time for theaters to really look seriously at being able to reopen, they didn't have the bandwidth to put the play on in the building. Um, but Oscar was completely dedicated to getting the play back up. And he said, let's look at let's look at how we do this commercially. And because of the relationship with Audible, they were the first person that we called or the first entity that we called, and they got right on board.

[29:31] Jessica Blank: So, um, is it the entire original cast? Almost. There are two, there are two new actors, but it is it is and and I had to restage it completely because at the public we were in the on spoker, which is a thrust stage, and the Cherry Lane is a very different space. It's a proscenium, it's much smaller. Um, so I re-blocked the whole thing, although in a certain way you kind of can't tell. Like it feels like the same show, um, even though it is actually fairly radically restaged. Um, so, you know, we all stayed in touch through those two years of not knowing what was gonna happen next. Um, and so I think, you know, when we were able to all actually come together around a table and read the play again and go back to bringing it back to life.

Um, it was, I mean, it's kind of hard to put into words, actually. It was really extraordinary. We were all incredibly grateful. It was totally moving. It was also hard because for a lot of us, it's our first time back to live theater. Um, fact that you're reopening almost exactly two years to the date when you closed. I know I've been having all sorts of flashbacks to you know what I was doing around that time in 2020. And I'm sure for you guys it was just intensified.

[30:56] Leah Walsh: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, one of the things that really struck me and the other our, you know, the our producers who were listening at the first table read was how much deeper the actor's performances had become over the two years because I mean, because of COVID. I mean, sure, because they had two years to marinate, but really because of what all of us have lived through in relationship to what the play is about. And one of the things Oscar Eustace said to us on opening night, hearing the play again, seeing the play again, is he he's this ri this play really is a ritual, and it's a ritual about grief. It's a grief ritual. And so after these last two years, I mean, we all have so much to grieve, and there's been so little space for that actually culturally for us to collectively grieve because as we've been able to gather again, it's like people are like, okay, let's get back to life, right?

Which, yes, let's. And also, is there any collective space where we can process what we've all been through in varying ways? And I think, you know, that's another thing that has really struck us about the play is that it is there is an aspect of it that is a vehicle for that, both for us as artists and for the audience. Especially the fact that so many of the stories are uh families, that it's a generational job.

[32:30] Jessica Blank: Yeah. And so some of those storylines about losing multiple generations in this one tragedy also draw that line to COVID really clearly.

[32:38] Leah Walsh: Yeah, absolutely.

[32:39] Jessica Blank: Absolutely. And, you know, I think um look, coal mining is a dangerous job. And no matter how closely you follow safety rules, to a certain extent that's always gonna be true, like fire being a firefighter, right? It requires enormous courage and physical courage. Um, and also it does not have to be as dangerous as it was at this mine and at many other mines. The extent of that disaster, many, many people believe was entirely avoidable and preventable. And the the level of destruction that happened. Um, and I think the same thing can be said about COVID. I mean, was it inevitable that we were gonna have a novel virus that was gonna come along and disrupt things? Absolutely. Have there been other novel viruses that have been dealt with very differently from the people in power and the people in charge and the people who are entrusted with protecting us and protecting the public good that have not done anything like what COVID managed to do?

Yes. I mean, if you look at SARS and the or you know, all of that, right? Like there was containment that could have happened, there were safety measures that could have been taken, there was care that could have been taken early on that would have prevented the level of destruction that we've all lived through over the last two years. And um, I think there's an analog there.

[34:15] Leah Walsh: Um, I'm so glad you guys made the um the piece about the healthcare workers, because I'm I'm really curious about what sort of documentation is going to be made over these past two years, because kind of because it's been so drawn out. Um, you know, I I am not at a place right now in my life where I keep a journal consistently or like, you know, people have their Instagram, but like what is going to be preserved about people's everyday experiences of what this was like over such a long period of time?

[34:48] Jessica Blank: So things like that I think are gonna be really important in the future. Especially healthcare workers, because we don't we don't know it's been like in those hospitals.

[34:57] Leah Walsh: No, we don't.

[34:58] Jessica Blank: We don't, and you know, I mean, and a lot of it hasn't been reported on, particularly when we made the line in May 2020, it was not being reported on at all. Because, you know, and and there are, you know, some good reasons for that. There are HIPAA laws, there are privacy laws um that are protective, but it also really insulated a lot of the public from knowing what was going on and created a space in which conspiracy theories and you know, false news could fester and denial could fester. Um, and we were because of the nature of our documentary theater work, we were able to interview healthcare workers anonymously and change their names and camouflage the identities of the hospitals that they worked at so that the truth about what was happening could get out safely in a wider way, um, that still protected patients' privacy. And um, and you know, the stories we heard were pretty mind blowing. And um, I do see that piece in particular because it was made in such a rapid response way, also as a piece of living history.

[36:08] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[36:09] Jessica Blank: And I think, you know, we're all still processing, and probably nobody wants to see a play about COVID right now. Um, and that's totally fine. And they will.

[36:18] Jessica Blank: But I do hope in yeah, at some point, as we have enough distance to look back, that that play will become part of the historical record, and that the voices of the frontline healthcare workers from New York City who were truly heroic will become part of the historical record.

[36:36] Leah Walsh: No, and I'm curious about their experiences now, you know, after they had to go through the second and third waves.

[36:42] Jessica Blank: And I'm that's so interesting that you did it so quickly right at the beginning. But after they were tapped out for a year and a half, like those are also just completely different experiences and feelings, I'm sure.

[36:56] Leah Walsh: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Um I want to ask you about being an artist parent and how you and Eric have kind of balanced your roles as parents and artists, especially since you work together so much of the time. Um how did you guys did you always know that you wanted to be parents, or how have you kind of juggled that part of your relationship?

[37:18] Jessica Blank: Yeah, that's a great set of questions. Um we met when I was I had just moved to New York, like just out of college. Yeah, I had come here to go to acting school. I was like not looking for my husband, right? I had like broke up with my boyfriend to move here, and I was like, woohoo, I'm in New York, right? Um I'm focusing on my art. Um, and of course, promptly, like within six months, met Eric and it was fairly undeniable from the beginning. Um, like I said, we got the idea for The Exonerated a month after we started dating. We started working on that project together immediately, and it was immediately clear that not only were we compatible as life partners but that we were compatible creative partners and that we had work to do together, right? So there was like no marriage proposal really or anything like that. It was like, oh, we're getting married, right? We've got stuff to do.

[38:15] Jessica Blank: Like, let's just get all of that drama out of the way and just get down to business, yeah. Yeah, and like commit to each other because we clearly have things that we're supposed to do together. Um, and so that's always been, we've always been creative partners, like since we've been a couple. Um, it's woven into the fabric of our relationship. And we both always knew that we wanted a kid. Um, but I also, like I said, like I wasn't even looking for my husband when I met him. So I was like, I'm definitely not looking to be a mom yet, right? So just so and he's a few years older than me. So I was like, just so you know, like that's gonna happen, but like not for a while, right? So um, we were together for nine years before we had a kid.

[39:04] Jessica Blank: Um so I will say though that nine years of making art together, I think really prepared us to parent together. I think for a lot of couples, it's a big shock when you have a kid because all of a sudden you're not just a couple having a relationship, but your partner's doing like raising a child, right? Which involves a lot of creative problem solving. It involves a lot of work, a lot of you know, questions about division of labor, right? That like you don't necessarily have to deal with as an ordinary couple just being in a relationship with each other, right? Um, or if you do, it's about like who's buying the groceries and who's doing the dishes, right? Which are lower stakes than when there's a human being involved.

[39:56] Jessica Blank: And obviously, when you have a kid, there's a human being involved, right? So everything gets more intense, more immediate, deeper, more important, and also it's the same principles that we had already been working with through nine years of making work together, right? Like we had already learned how to collaborate effectively towards a common goal that was really, really important to both of us, right? And how to deal with division of labor and how to play our strengths and what principles we believed in in terms of trying to make something real in the world and like parenting is creative work also, right? And so it in a certain way it wasn't a giant adjustment to us to go from being a couple without a kid to being a couple with a kid because we're like oh it's it's kind of all part of the same thing.

[40:54] Jessica Blank: I mean I feel really blessed and lucky that you know neither one of us has a nine to five neither one of us has it has you know so we have we work really hard um we work more than 40 hours a week but there are also a lot of aspects of our schedule that we're very much in charge of um and so I think in terms of parenting that has made things both more complicated and a lot easier right it's like I can I have a producer brain right so I can produce our life right I can figure out or like first AD or stage manage our life right like I can figure out what the schedule needs to be with childcare and how we juggle that with all of our projects and I see that work as creative and I like doing it.

[41:43] Jessica Blank: I like solving those kinds of problems. And you know Sadie has been she's 12 now and she has been part of our projects from the beginning you know she's been she was on set with us when we made a movie she's in the rehearsal room with us often, right? Or like there's a babysitter around you when she was little and couldn't be quiet in a rehearsal. But like, you know, she's grown up with artist parents and she's an artist herself. So we've sort of woven the fabric of all of it together. And I also should say, I don't think I ever would have had a child with somebody who wasn't committed to 50-50 division of labor, right?

[42:23] Jessica Blank: So I also feel lucky in that sense that, you know, both in terms of our work life and in terms of our life life, we've been able to be as egalitarian in our division of labor parenting as we are in our creative work. And so it's, you know, it's all hands on deck all the time. I love it.

[42:41] Leah Walsh: So inspiring to me. Um do you ever feel like you two need to fight for that equal division of labor from outside forces, like uh people that you're working with, schools, people who might try to look at you as a pair and be like, well, the mom's gonna take on more of the child care.

[43:08] Jessica Blank: Let me lean, I don't know, I'm not articulating this question well. You know, there's a lot of people. Has the patriarchy ever tried to unbalance your vibe?

[43:16] Jessica Blank: Well, look, I mean, I think there are multiple questions here, like that, or that's answerable on more than one level, right? Because there are systemic factors where for sure, absolutely that's true. And on a more individual level, like anybody who collaborates with us or works with us in any direct way for any period of time knows that I run shit.

[43:40] Jessica Blank: So and it's kind of unarguable in terms of like the practicalities and the logistics and all of that. Creatively speaking, Eric and I are absolutely equal partners in terms of workload, in terms of creative decisions, right? Like that's all totally equal. But in terms of like how the thing runs, right? Like I run it. So, you know, and if you're around us for any amount of time, that's immediately clear. So, in terms of our immediate collaborators, no.

[44:09] Jessica Blank: Um, but in terms of how the systems that we operate in work, absolutely. I mean, so like one of the things that has always been really important to me is it's it's always been very clear, especially when Sadie was littler, that, you know, childcare is necessary, right? For working parents, right? If it especially, I mean, in any situation, but definitely in the arts, right? And, you know, there's been all kinds of work done on like what happens to women directors when they have kids and the, you know, the burden of child care is put on them, and uh, you know, disproportionately, and there are, you know, lots of people have looked at like how women directors, women playwrights often like fall off the radar for several years, right?

[44:53] Jessica Blank: And part of that is because there's a child care gap, right? Because it's particularly in theater, we're not automatic or independent film for sure, we're not automatically paid enough to cover the number of hours of child care that are needed to run a set or to run a rehearsal room. And so one of the things that I just have done as a matter of habit from the beginning is whenever we get a contract for a job, I ask for a child care stipend.

[45:25] Jessica Blank: Right. Sometimes we get a no, but often we've gotten a yes, right? And it might not be the whole thing, right? But it might, but it's something. And even if the answer is no, I see that as a contribution towards normalizing like this is something that we have to think about, right? Like kids don't just not exist. Like somebody needs to take care of them before their school age while parents are working. And I think, you know, that's something that our industry needs to deal with as a whole.

[46:02] Jessica Blank: And so the more I can do as an individual to sort of normalize that and be like, that's not me being high maintenance or difficult. It's just like this is a factor. Can we talk about it? Yeah. Then I and I think the more of us do that, the more that paves the way, right? For that to become a normalized thing.

[46:23] Leah Walsh: I wanted to learn more about your class at Juilliard, because that was how we had gotten in touch over Instagram when you were posting about it. Um, how long have you been teaching it? And can you tell me a little bit about sure? How you did have you had you taught it elsewhere, or is this a class you designed for Juilliard?

[46:41] Jessica Blank: Um yes and no. Because it's about storytelling structure, correct?

[46:46] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[46:47] Jessica Blank: So I at Juilliard, I teach a class called Story to the MFA drama division students. Um, that is now it started as a semester, now it's two semesters, it's a year-long um part of the curriculum. And I teach the graduate actors story structure as it applies to theater, film, television.

[47:10] Jessica Blank: I mean, story structure is story structure, right? And there are differences in terms of how it applies to different mediums, but it also it's the same set of basic principles underlying all of it, right? And that's now backed up by neuroscience, which I should go could go off on a whole nerdy riff about because it's kind of some of my favorite stuff to talk about.

[47:27] Jessica Blank: Um so I teach them story structure, and then they're all working on an individual project in the class, right? And they and I take them from an idea, right? Whether that's an idea for a film or a play or a solo show, um, all the way through to by the end of the second semester of the class, they have a draft that's in solid shape.

[47:53] Jessica Blank: Um so we go through the whole story building process, and most of my students have most of them are already expert at story because they're graduate acting students at Juilliard, right? And so they've been dealing with story as actors for a long period of time, but most of them are new to writing. Um they're new to working with story from that perspective.

[48:20] Jessica Blank: Um time is weird, so I'm not actually sure how long I've been there.

[48:26] Jessica Blank: Um, I want four years, I think. I want to say that's right. I want to say this is my fourth year. Um, but the pandemic sort of warped all of that a little bit. Uh, it's possible that it's five, but I think it's four. Um, and so when I say yes and no, I I've I've only taught this course in an academic structure in a graduate drama department at Juilliard. I haven't taught it in other acting programs or on a semester structure. Um, but I have a thriving coaching practice um one on one also, and I work with all sorts, I teach this, you know, similar overlapping material to my private writing clients who are at all stages. Some of the I do have like, you know, some actor turned writers that I work with. That's a little niche that I'm in. But I also have, you know, I work with showrunners. I work with, you know, people who are working film screen screenwriters, working off Broadway playwrights.

[49:27] Leah Walsh: Do you enjoy doing that coaching work?

[49:29] Jessica Blank: I love it. I love it. It just sounds like it draws on all your strengths from everything that you've mentioned about being that producer brain and that kind of overarching view. You get to use it.

[49:39] Jessica Blank: Yeah, I mean, it works that part of my brain for sure. And then also, you know, as a writer, I've I have written in individually in a solo way, right? I've published three novels and I but I am not by nature like a solitary, alone at the computer kind of writer at all. I am a collaborative artist and I and I'm the vast majority of my writing is done with a partner. Right. Right. And I also write for television. So sometimes I'm working with a partner, a writing partner and a showrunner, right? Who's also a writer. Um, and so you know, television writing is a collaborative form. And so I I love generating story with people.

[50:18] Jessica Blank: So as a coach, I get to do that too. And it's wonderful because the stakes are lower for me than they are when it's my own work in the sense that like I don't have to get attached to anything. I can give my clients a whole bunch of ideas and then they get to use the ones that they're that they respond to, right? That feel aligned with what they're doing, which is great. And I don't need to like hash out what thing we're gonna decide to do the way I do when I'm working with Eric, right? It's like, okay, we'll take what works, right?

[50:46] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[50:47] Jessica Blank: Um, but I get to be in that generative process with all of my clients. And then, you know, there's also a big, like, you know, like we started out talking about, I am really I I love talking about creative process and I love figuring out how to work through blocks. And to me, you know, my creative process is my spiritual practice. And it has always been that way. Um, it's my personal evolutionary growth practice. It's right. And and so, and I think the creative process is an incredible vehicle for all of that work.

[51:20] Jessica Blank: And so the principles that I've learned over the years in my own creative process and dealing with myself. I I I also am a person who likes to, as you can probably tell, like articulate things, right? And like describe complex systems, right? That's part of the writer part of my brain also. Um so to be able to articulate some of those principles and help shepherd other people's creative processes and show them that like writer's block is not a real thing, right? It's actually this is the phenomenon that's happening to you when you think you have writer's block and it's not actually so mysterious and it's not actually so difficult to overcome. And no, there's nothing wrong with you as a writer. No, you're not lazy, no, you're not stuck, right? Like let's unstick you. Here's 18 things we can do to do that, right? Like getting into that with my students and with my clients is really, really satisfying to me.

[52:13] Jessica Blank: So um, yeah, so privately outside of Juilliard, I work one on one with writers and I also have a comprehensive online course called character-based story structure that is a distillation of my complete story methodology that um I open up for enrollment a couple of times a year. Um, and that's a self-guided thing. And then, you know, I've been experimenting with some combinations of both, right? Like some masterminds where we work through the online course together and I'm giving people guidance and they have a cohort of writers that they're working with, but it's, you know, it's it's more of a group setting than the one-on-one kind of work, um, but less formalized and academic than the year-long thing that I do at Juilliard, right?

[52:55] Leah Walsh: How did you during the pandemic? How did you uh continue to feel a sense of community? Because it just sounds like you're someone who relies on that so much. How did you deal with the isolation or were you doing okay with your family?

[53:10] Jessica Blank: I mean, well, I will say that that was the hardest part of the pandemic for me. I mean, I really am I'm an extrovert, my creative process is collaborative. Um, it's really important to me to be collaborating with people like all the time. Um and so to not be able to gather in a room with people to do that for two years was really difficult. I mean, that that was the hardest part of the pandemic for me personally.

[53:43] Jessica Blank: Um I kept it alive however I could. I mean, I do feel really blessed that my writing partner is also a member of my household. So Eric and I buckled down and did a lot more sort of of that solitary writer writer stuff together than we nor, you know, normally it's interspersed with acting jobs and with a workshop of a play or a production or you know, um, pre-production for a movie or whatever, right? So we go back and forth between like, okay, we're sitting down and doing script work or we're in a room with people making a project happen.

[54:21] Jessica Blank: So we sat down and did a lot of script work. We finished three scripts during the pandemic, three, maybe four. Um we did the audio version of uh Coal Country. We did the street, we put up the streaming version of the line. Um, but we also just wrote some scripts. We wrote two pilots and uh finished a screenplay um and wrote and wrote the line. Um so you know, I kept that collaborative ball in the air with Eric, the two of us together. And then, you know, like everybody, I went online with everything that I could go online with, right?

[54:59] Jessica Blank: So I continued to coach, I continued to teach. I actually used the opportunity at the beginning of the pandemic to do some sort of impromptu live Zoom classes that I might not have had space to do otherwise, but that was fun. I got to experiment with teaching online to groups of people in a way that I hadn't before, um, and found some cool things to work with to bring into you know post-pandemic life, you know. So, you know, I kept it going where I could, and also I'm just so happy to be able to be in a room with people making art again, breathing the same air. It's really, really nice.

[55:38] Leah Walsh: Good. If if you are in a space where you're feeling like really stuck, um, are there any tangible things that you reach for again and again, like a book that you reread or music you listen to or things like that that can kind of inspire you or get you out of it?

[55:54] Jessica Blank: There aren't really external things that I go back to. There is stuff that I recommend, right? Like I talk about the Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Big Magic. I find really useful, and I quote from it a lot when I'm teaching, when I'm working with clients. I go back to the principles that I've learned over the years and that I teach people, right? Which is keep making, lean into the yes. If you're stuck somewhere, turn your attention to something else, right? Like we always have five projects going at any given time, right? So if I get stuck on one, unless I'm on a deadline and I'm forced to push through, we'll just work on another one, right?

[56:37] Jessica Blank: And that loosens stuff up so that then we can circle back to the thing that wasn't working before and hit it from a different perspective, right? So it's like key, it's it's like about staying agile and staying dynamic and looking for the thing that like even if nothing seems to be working, there's some little tiny glimmer of something that is, and just going in there, right? And following that out. And if you do that, it will change the ecosystem around it. It will make things move enough that it unsticks things, right? So that's you know, that's what I do.

[57:10] Jessica Blank: I also dance. Um I think, and that's something that is I think especially like for writers, it's really good to like to remember like you have a body, and like if you move your body, it moves things, it shakes things up, it will, you know, rearrange your cells so that you're looking at things when you're done moving, you're looking at things differently, right? Eric plays music. Um, I dance. He if he gets stuck, he'll pick up his mandolin or he'll pick up a guitar and it'll rearrange the molecules for him in a similar way.

[57:45] Leah Walsh: And then is there anything that you've taken in recently that you want to recommend? Any work of art, another play, a TV show? Whatever it is.

[57:57] Jessica Blank: I don't know. I mean, I recently is hard. Um had a particularly busy couple of months. I have had a particularly busy couple of months, and I've been really immersed in the rehearsal process for the whole country. So I was um yeah, I go back to in terms of just like things that I go back to over and over, I go back to the wire over and over and over. I think it is, I mean, it is an absolute master work. I'm very lucky to be collaborating with two of the with two of the people who are at the helm of that show now.

[58:32] Jessica Blank: And we are so grateful to be sitting at yeah on two separate projects to be sitting at their feet. Um that that show should have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The way that it deals with story structure. I mean, I could watch it over and over and over again and learn so much about directing and acting and storytelling, and and um, yeah, I mean, I could go on and on. So, you know, when when somebody asked me like what's the thing that you go back to over and over, it is not recent anymore, but it is a master work. Um, and I think any every storyteller should watch it more than once.

[59:10] Leah Walsh: Well, thank you so much, Jessica. This was such a delight.

[59:13] Jessica Blank: Thank you for having me. It was great talking to you.

[59:25] Leah Walsh: Thank you for listening to the Compass Podcast. If you find these conversations valuable to your life as an artist and would like to support the ongoing production of the Compass, please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/slash the Compass Podcast. Pledges start at as little as one dollar a month, and anything you can give would be greatly appreciated. Also, if you have a moment, please review and follow in iTunes. Every little bit helps other listeners to find the podcast. The Compass Cover Art is by Kim Miller, music by Brendan Spieth, audio assistance from Monica Choxie, and a special thanks to Frankie J. Alvarez. See you next time.