Healing with Hamlet:
An Interview with Olivia Buntaine of Project Nongenue
Trigger warning: This podcast contains some trauma content.
Read-Along Version of Podcast
Marion: Tell me about a moment of healing through the arts in your life.
Olivia: It’s hard to pick a specific one because that’s at the core of what has always drawn me to art making. It’s hard for me to even imagine what making art is, if healing is not part of the process on a big scale and also a very specific scale.
I think my first real moment of understanding why I wanted to be an artist in my life was in 10th or 11th grade. I had just come out. I’d been dealing with a lot of difficult stuff in my young life, and I got to play Hamlet as an angry, 15- year-old queer girl who had a lot to say. And being able to access this legendary character: Hamlet’s such a jerk, and he’s so smart, and he’s so powerful and so selfish. And all of those things are not things women are ever allowed to be. Maybe they’re not the most positive qualities, but they’re really important for women to be able to access. And it was important for me to access them.
And in that moment, it really opened my eyes to how much engaging in artistic practices can allow us to access what we need to move through difficult experiences.
As I grew older, and my writing and directing practices evolved, I have gotten to the point where I write a lot about sexual violence. I have had to, in a kind of cool and transgressive way, start publicly identifying as a survivor of sexual violence because in the work that I make, the whole goal is to provide… We have such a small narrative still of what that looks like. And I think it can leave a lot of survivors feeling alienated and like their story doesn’t count, or it doesn’t line up with what it’s supposed to and all that.
I had a conversation with an editor for a big project I was doing, and she was like: “I’m a little nervous about this storyline. It’s kind of controversial, blah blah blah.” And I was like: “Listen, if someone has an issue, they can talk to me. It’s no secret.”
I write about survivorship because I am one. And because every time I put those words down, I feel an affirmation for my own experience that it did happen and that it was real, and it worked in this way. And then, you know, the profoundness of the fact that even one person could come up and be like, “Wow, I saw that, I saw my story in your story, and I feel affirmed and I feel like it actually happened.”
Marion: And why did that specific editor feel it was problematic? Because it was too hot or triggering a topic?
Olivia: Yeah, yeah.
Marion: Well, that’s the problem. It’s triggering because nobody talks about it and when it weirdly pops up, everybody goes “Ugh!”
Olivia: And people want, even when we’re, you know, starting to make room for marginalized voices, people still want really black and white narratives. They don’t want nuance. They don’t want anything that makes them uncomfortable, because the topic itself is so uncomfortable. So, there’s such a small margin for what you’re allowed to actually talk about when it comes to difficult experiences.
Marion: I honor publications like Slate and others who will float those stories and make a big spread about “A predator in my school or in my college, and this is what really happened.” And I’ve read those spreads and I’ve always gone: Yes, we need to hear this.
Would you say that the Hamlet play happened after the experience of sexual violence and was also, in addition to the whole coming out and breaking out of the gender box, a healing moment where … Let’s say you had an experience that most people would classify as shameful and suddenly you were very visible, stepping out of “I’ve experienced something horrible and shameful” into “I am seen?” I’m just throwing bones here.
Olivia: Yeah, I think that’s definitely true. All of that was happening at around the same time. When we go through hard things, especially in the realm of sexual violence … And also, what it means to come out as a young woman when sexuality is so stigmatized for young women. And so, the process of coming out feels like: “Hey, look at my sexuality.” All of that is like … STOP. The world is telling you to stop talking as much as possible. Like, please hide yourself away.
So, I think playing this extremely bold, and again, narcissistic, angry … like all of these qualities that girls need to be able to be when they’re teenagers. All of that was really helpful for me. And I think, you know, as time went on, I started realizing that I don’t just have to use other people’s words to claim experiences, I can start to use my own.
That’s when I realized that when you write about the hard things that have happened to you, you bear witness to yourself. Even if someone wasn’t there to watch what happened and affirm you, you can now affirm that younger version of yourself by saying, “I saw that, I was there with you. It was hard.” And then, you know, fingers crossed, the next person can read that and be like, “Oh my gosh, this stranger who wrote this text is affirming what I went through,” you know?
Marion: Okay, if you are writing and publicly sharing experiences of, let’s say, sexual violence, then you are performing an act of public healing. Because while your story is unique to you, the feelings, the big feelings you went through are shared by others. And by sharing them publicly, you validate those who read along who are saying: “That happened to me too.” And you give them a chance to be seen and validated. What happened is real and what happened is not okay. Is that part of what you just said?
Olivia: Yeah, that’s definitely part of what I’m saying, and I think also, it’s breaking the silence around something that is supposed to not be talked about. And so, breaking the silence about things in my own life has been really important. And then working collaboratively with other artists who are trying to break the silence on their own things. And then we’re putting art out in the world that other people …
Sometimes I feel like if you don’t make art about something, it almost doesn’t exist ‘cause it just exists in your head and it exists in the experience you had that so often no one else knows about. But once you put it into the world …
And I’m also very mindful that if people are just trauma-dumping into their art, it’s not very good art. It has to still be structured and polished. Art isn’t just about doing your own personal therapy. It could be, but that’s like, you know, art therapy. But when you’re doing it professionally, it’s about creating space for a story that other people can latch onto and that you can hear through.
Marion: I love fiction. Short fiction is kind of my jam. I had a really cool teacher from the Iowa program. And he said, there are three things you want to achieve in your writing: You want it to be sad, beautiful, and funny.
So, if you take a trauma experience and just dump it out and make like this really dark play with people just screaming and suffering, everyone is like, “Oh my God, I can’t even sit through this.” Instead, create something that captures the agony to some extent, but put it together with moments that are beautiful and maybe even funny. And the whole thing becomes watchable and consumable. We can integrate it. We can say, yes, human connection and love is what surrounds us all. And in the middle of connection and love, stuff happens. There are these black blotches of horrible experiences, and we must make them visible within this circle. And I think the beautiful and the funny make that safe circle in which the horrid and the sad can be seen, right?
Olivia: Totally. And it’s also just like that’s life, you know. Something awful happens to you and then the next morning, your tire blows out of your car and you’re just like, well, fuck. Life just keeps being life no matter what. And life continues to be funny and nice, and also just dark.
Marion: Do you have as a final word any advice to young artists who feel drawn to the medium of theater and writing and who feel like: “I have scary things to tell, but I’m so scared and I don’t know how.” Do you have any advice on how to get started with that really scary project?
Olivia: Yeah, totally. I think for writing, I would state the tried and true phrase, write what you know. Always come back to who you are and what you’ve been through instead of trying to be what you think you’re supposed to be or write what you’re supposed to write.
Like what you have, the weirdness and uniqueness and beauty of you – as boring or as unworthy you may sometimes feel – is actually your superpower as a creator. And it’s similar with acting. I mentor a lot of young women and young queer people. I have a theater company called Project Nongenue. And a lot of them are like: “I don’t see my type in the industry. I don’t see who I am in movies and plays or whatever.
So it must mean that I don’t belong.” But in reality, it’s like: You don’t see yourself up there. That’s exactly why you have to keep making work because you’re not the only one who’s like you. And there are so many people who feel moved by your story. It’s time to stop letting the dominant narratives dictate how we feel about ourselves and just start taking up space, as the weirdos and marginalized and beautiful sort of warriors of tomorrow’s stories come out.
Marion: And that’s where intergender casting comes in. Because like you in the Hamlet, just take an unexpected gender, body type, age group, whatever, put it in that role. And if everybody works on this with their best talents, something amazing is going to happen. And this original great narrative is going to be transformed into a narrative that maybe hasn’t been told in that way before. It’s perfect. It all comes together.
We’re landing on the final point that intergender casting is also a form of healing through the arts. Because it invites us to enjoy a classic narrative that maybe we have heard or seen before with a completely different character at its center that wasn’t so visible before. And it heals us all to see that the angry 15-year-old teenage girl is a Hamlet and is tragic and self-involved and important and beautiful and funny and sad and all the things. I think that’s a great landing point. And we should make this … We should make this into a podcast. It’s just so good.