This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Jeryl Brunner: From Shakespeare to Schwartz, from Fawcy to Alvin Ailey, from Santham to the Burrellis, from McNally to Faye. It happened to the greats, it still happens every day. When lightning strikes is the moment you know when lightning strikes, where you're meant to go. You can stand in Chalureka. Do whatever you like. You'll never forget the moment when lightning strikes.

[0:30] Jeryl Brunner: This is Jeryl Brunner, and you're listening to When Lightning Strikes. Eisa Davis is a playwright, actress, and singer-songwriter, a Pulitizer Prize finalist. Her newest play, Girls Chance Music, made its world premiere at the Vineyard Theatre. On the first day of rehearsal, Eisa sat down with me to discuss the production, which was inspired by the music school she attended in Berkeley, California, when she was a teenager, and the profound ways that the experience shaped her life and artistic journey.

[1:16] Eisa Davis: So this play is inspired by the music program that I went to from age 10 to 17 in Berkeley, California, where I studied classical piano. I studied musicianship and theory and composition, and it really just laid the groundwork for who I have become as an artist, not only as a musician, but also it's infused all of my work as an actor and as a writer. And so when Pam McKinnon, who's the director and also the artistic director of ACT in San Francisco, she came to me eight years ago when she first came into that role, and she asked if there was a play about the Bay that I wanted to write. This was the first thing that came to mind because San Francisco, right across the Bay from Berkeley where I grew up, she wanted to really forefront those Bay Area voices in her first year.

That was one of the first things that she did, and she's done that in the entire tenure that she's had over these eight years at ACT, really just being able to give those voices of writers and artists who are from there. So I wanted to write about this because I love music. I love music, and some of my happiest days were spent in these summer mornings and practice rooms, playing music, you know, playing WC, playing Bach, and then singing gospel and, you know, Foray requiems and so on. So it's really about that love, and I said it now because I wanted it to be charged with what teenagers experience now, and I made it an all-girls school as opposed to the one that I went to, which was co-ed. But that's what inspired this play, just a deep love for the Bay and for this music program that I experienced.

[1:45] Jeryl Brunner: That's so beautiful. What is it about the Bay that you adored so much? How did it nurture you? And give me a specific example of something that was so special about something you did at the school.

[3:43] Eisa Davis: Yeah. So I would say that the Bay is this really powerful cradle of culture and of counterculture. Radical thinking of all kinds in the arts, in the political realm. That's what I was really nurtured by. And I was really nurtured by the natural world in the Bay Area. By the trees, by the mountains, by the ocean, by the personality. To feel that you're part of, you know, you have much more of an outdoor life there. And to feel that you're part of this bigger experience of existence is something that I think is huge when it comes to what makes someone who is from the Bay Area. And so some beautiful things that happened when I was at the program. Really, it's sort of hard to say because I really loved pretty much everything that I did there.

Specific things would be just practicing and singing with the chorus. There was a really beautiful moment once where every morning at nine, that was the first thing that we did, is like the entire program would get together and sing. Everyone had to sing, and everyone had to learn to play piano, even if you were a saxophonist or you played drums. Everyone had to sing and play piano. And so we would get together and sing, and I remember there was this one morning we were singing in the big recital hall that has, I don't know, maybe like could have 700, 800 seats. And there was a huge organ in, actually a couple of organs, massive organs. And we had these, our teachers, some of whom were the founders of the program, were so passionate as they conducted us and made us, you know, sing with like our full souls.

And I remember this one time where we all finished this note, and even though we had stopped singing, the note was still hanging in the air because it was vibrating in all of the pipes. The organ. And it just was so special to know that that's what we were doing, that we were part of something bigger, something that just kept rippling past our own individual voices. So it was moments like that, and just being able to play beautiful, beautiful repertoire. I mentioned Debbie C and Bach, but also, you know, playing Schumann and playing Chopin, playing Beethoven and Brahms, and you know, we did a lot of jazz as well and experimental music. So that's another thing that this play was really inspired by, which is that I, in my later years, have started to become much more, I started to hear music differently, and I started to hear more experimental, more contemporary music.

People who sometimes work in the jazz tradition, people talk about free jazz and so on. But being able to hear the patterning and to hear the sense in that, often people think, oh, this is so experimental, you just, it's just like Pollock, right? Jackson throw it on there and that's it. You know, people think about that with music. But of course, as we know with Pollock, tremendous amounts of technique goes into that. And that's the same thing that is here with music. So I try in this piece, the integration of improvisation, the integration of structured chants or aleatory music to really bring out the power of whatever it is that the actor or the musician is feeling in the moment that can be a form of communication with the other actors.

[7:55] Eisa Davis: So it's a number of girls. Yeah, four. So the simple plot is that in some ways there isn't quite a plot. It's just that it's one summer at this music school. There are four students there, them presenting students. One is a drummer, one is a singer, one plays woodwinds, and another plays piano. And it's about their relationships with each other, their collaboration with each other musically, and also just about the pressures that are landing on them from outside of the school, you know, whether that's just things going on in their personal lives or just all of the natural and man-made disasters that we deal with on a daily basis. And how that really lands on a teenager's psyche, you know. So it's really about if you think back to really pivotal moments that you had as a child, as a teenager, when you're really kind of determining what your identity was and how you were gonna go forth into the world as an adult. What the play is doing is it's kind of depicting those moments for these characters.

[9:08] Jeryl Brunner: And what inspired your family to put you in the school?

[9:12] Eisa Davis: Oh, well, my grandmother was the first person who got me taking piano lessons with the church organist. And then I continued to take piano lessons, and I really just kind of caught into it, and I think my family could see that, and they understood the importance of arts education in creating a well-rounded person. And so they just kept me in piano lessons. Sometimes you start kids with that, and then they'll just sort of not be interested, and they'll want to play basketball instead, or maybe they want to draw, or maybe they are not interested in anything. They just want to wander around. But here you are, I really, really loved playing, and they could tell, and so they just kept looking for opportunities for me to be able to continue my instruction in piano.

[10:05] Jeryl Brunner: You're so prolific. Can you talk about your process, especially writing this piece?

[10:11] Eisa Davis: I work perhaps more than I should. I think I love what I do. You know, I've been writing plays since I was a child, and I've been writing now musicals, working on Warriors with Lin-Manuel, and also writing for the screen. And so I think that I really love to explore character, characters who aren't me. I try to understand the world a little bit more through writing about it, writing about things that haunt me or that I have questions about or things that I just truly love, love, love, like in this case. So I think when you say prolific, it's really just that I'm just really trying to follow the sound, as we say in the play. Just follow the urges that are really there for me as an artist.

[11:09] Jeryl Brunner: Because I think of all the worlds you entered, you created, and what do you hope people take away from the pieces?

[11:17] Eisa Davis: I really want people, of course, to really fall in love with these characters in the way that I have and enjoy the characters' love of music. And then I'm really hoping that people will think back to those moments that they had as a teenager and think about where they are now in life and just be able to track that passage, that journey. I think that that's so far in the production that we had in San Francisco, that was something that was really powerful that I heard from so many audience members. Someone told me, I haven't played the flute in 20 years, and after your play, I went home and I played the flute. So I'm just hoping that it just really unlocks perhaps some impulses, some artistic joy, you know, that people may have.

[12:14] Jeryl Brunner: Is there anything you'd want to tell that child who was at that school now?

[12:20] Eisa Davis: You know, all the things you've done now or what a great question? I would just say it still can be as fun, ecstatic, and powerful even now that we think about childhood as being innocent and then we get, you know, so jaded by this time in life. But I think that the purity that I felt there, I would say thank you to that child for really leaning into that joy and having that be such a powerful compass for me to get to where I am.

[13:12] Jeryl Brunner: It's beautiful. Can I just ask you what you love about the Vineyard?

[13:16] Eisa Davis: Oh gosh, I mean well. Such beautiful and pathbreaking work. Paula Vogel, who wrote How I Learned Drive, Decent and all of her incredible plays. She has been a champion for me since she first read my play Bull Rusher, and because she was on the Pulitzer jury that year, she was the one who made sure that it was recognized. And for that, I am always thankful to her, and I'm thankful to her stewardship of me along with Daryl Roth in creating this inaugural commission, which Girls Chance Music is the product of.

[13:54] Jeryl Brunner: Well, so much congratulations. I can't wait to see it.

[13:57] Eisa Davis: Thanks so much.

[13:58] Jeryl Brunner: Have a great day!