Adaptive Path Newsletter for July 29, 2009

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Paula Wellings’ Interview with Tony Award Winner & UX Week Speaker Sarah Jones

Paula Wellings [PW]: Please let me start by saying that you have the most amazing ability to create and enact characters who are so real and able to resonate with people, and also speak to important issues.

In the design community, we are also constantly in a process of learning and building deep understandings of the people we design for people and then needing to share people’s stories with others, so that together we can make good decisions and be part of  essentially inventing a better world. Your ability to bring people and their stories so powerfully to life fosters an empathy and connectedness for your audience that I wish we could bring to our design meetings and activities.

It was exciting to see your recent performance at TED and emotionally connect with the people and their stories you quite literally brought to life.

Sarah Jones’ TED Talk

Sarah Jones [SJ]: Hooray.  Well, that’s always the goal.  TED is interesting—there are very few opportunities to engage in that dialogue with people who are literally responsible for everything from the lamp by which you read, to the PDA you use.

I remember standing on stage and thinking I owe a debt of gratitude to so many of the designers in this room for everything from gadgets to important architectural innovations or just thinking about technology and – it’s just really interesting to me to stand in a room with people who have such a direct impact on the actual physical shape of our world, at least the manmade aspects, and to a great extent, obviously the natural world as well.

We’re looking to designers to help us get out of the environmental mess that some of us weren’t wise enough to see coming.  So it is really interesting.

PW: One of the things that is really compelling about your work is your ability to create characters that feel like autonomous real people.  When I watch your performance, all of a sudden, I’m like, “Someone just totally changed, and now I’m seeing someone entirely different.” I am curious to know how you learn about your characters.

SJ: Well, I think it’s fair to say my characters meet me halfway. I don’t create them out of whole cloth, although I guess whenever I hear writers say they do, I wonder how because we all are so much the products of our environment and our family background. Whatever our narrative is the result of all of the people with whom we interact on a regular basis. 

But I seek out characters who are larger than life, in part because I grew up around such people.  My family life growing up was maybe still somewhat unusual, although it’s an increasingly common story in our world.  I have a multicultural family, and so some of the characters you meet with me on stage are really people who sat around the Thanksgiving table with me when I was a kid, even some of the less likely characters like Mrs. Lorraine Levine.  She’s very loosely based on a real great aunt who I had.

And that’s a funny thing for people to think—bridging cultural divides just by passing dinner rolls across the table, but that’s what my reality was.  So a lot of my characters come from that.  And hopefully the empathy I feel for every person I meet, and especially the people who are kind enough to share their stories with me, comes form having grown up with people who may not look or sound exactly the way I do, but whom I think of as family, and who often are actual blood relatives.

PW: Beautiful.  I was curious with some of your commission work, like “A Right to Care,” and the UNICEF work, if the process of creating characters for those projects was different or if you somehow had a different approach to research for them?

SJ: Absolutely. Especially considering the most recent work I’ve been doing as a good will ambassador. I feel a tremendous responsibility to UNICEF.  Their goal is to raise awareness of the issues that continue to plague so many of the world’s children.  And as I think about those children’s lives, some of their stories aren’t dissimilar to people I had in my immediate life.  Although, I went to the United Nations School as a kid, I was educated alongside kids from every background.

But as I think about kids who are struggling because of poverty and disease and issues they’re facing that are much more serious than sitting around the cafeteria worrying about what you’re gonna have for lunch. Those are instances in which I really have to seek out people who are living those realities, and also people who do work very closely with everyone from IDP(Internally Displaced Persons) in various countries to people who are refugees, immigrants to other countries.

It’s a very different way to approach research.  However, with the “A Right to Care” piece which is a piece that was commissioned by the Kellogg foundation to look at ethnic and racial and economic health disparities in the US, unfortunately, I didn’t have to look very far at all.  I think even with the same economic background, there are interesting stories.  And President Obama actually talked about this recently.

There are many interesting statistics on how someone from the same socioeconomic background, but different ethnic background or different racial background will have worse health outcomes than a counterpart who is not a person of color.  So that fascinates me to think about the reality that, for example: perhaps mother-in-law Obama, Mrs. Robinson, may have different health outcomes than, say, Barbara Bush. It’s a fascinating thing to think, even at the highest levels in our country, as we become more diverse, we have this reality to contend with.  I wasn’t aware of it, and I’m African American.

I come from a mixed family where I have people from the Caribbean, people from working class backgrounds that are Irish American or whatever those different backgrounds are.  It’s fascinating to think about how much the debate around health that’s so vital, it’s such a  critical issue, and it impacts different people’s lives in such profound ways that I wasn’t even are of, and I’m not just talking about health insurance coverage.

PW: When you’re given a commission like, for example, from the Kellogg Foundation, I am curious to know what the process is like from being given the commission to figuring out what the piece will become?

SJ: Well, this is interesting.  “Bride and Tunnel,” which is a show I did on Broadway and really many of the characters come from that particular show, was originally a commission from the Ford Foundation.  So I have had incredible good fortune throughout my career as an artist to have people in the philanthropic world see my commercial work, like when I do something Off Broadway or even off Off Broadway, and say, “Those characters are of interest to us.  You seem to share some of our ideas, and we think you could help highlight this set of issues.”

And so off I go to write something, for example, on immigrants and what it is to be a new American.  That was Ford Foundation grant.  And in the case of Kellogg, they had very specific data.  And as I said, I wasn’t even aware of a lot of what I learned until Kellogg pointed me in the right direction.  So they were really helpful in terms of research and helping me narrow my focus.  It still was extremely challenging.  The issues that people are facing, whether it’s a – I don’t know – it’s across the board.

So it’s racial and ethnic, but also economic, farmers in rural communities who aren’t people of color, but who deal with certain kinds of health disparities.  All of that is information I wouldn’t have gotten.  I learned about Native American health issues for the first time.  And I admit and I’m somewhat ashamed to say this, but I really didn’t think about Native American health or Native Americans in general in my life.

The foundations are definitely instrumental in helping me gather knowledge.  But then the wonderful thing I’ve experienced is they’re very hands off creatively, and that’s – I feel really fortunate that I have such rich resources on the one hand, and then so few constraints as far as how I wanna approach it and what I think the characters would really say, who I think these people really are on the other hand.

PW: How do you know when you have the people right?

SJ: I usually go and perform them for that community.  So, for example, I – and this is another interesting thing about the “A Right to Care” piece in particular.  I recently performed it on Capitol Hill.  The conceit of the piece, the theatrical device that is used to illuminate some of this information, was that I set it at a congressional hearing.  So it was a funny thing to find myself in the position to actually perform it on the Hill.  And it’s such a strange thing to have these fictitious people with this hearing that I had always imagined— when I wrote it in 2005, frankly, the possibility felt really far away.  This was before Michael Moore’s great film Sicko. This was before – so much of what I know now is trying to address these issues, Kellogg was really at the forefront.

I’m not proselytizing for them or anything, but I think they were really pretty courageous in saying things like, “Hey, listen: There are these racial and ethnic and economic disparities,” at a time when that was not popular.  That was not something that even people in the health field felt comfortable saying because they felt like it was making inferences about race and ethnicity that nobody wanted to look at.  It felt uncomfortable.

And I feel really honored that I was part of it. But I have to say, it was almost surreal to hear President Obama say the word “health disparities” in speech a couple of months ago, and now find myself actually doing this performance where I thought it could never be.  So that’s where I set it.  (Laughs)  I set it in fantasyland and now the fantasy has caught up to my reality.  It’s fascinating.

PW: It’s amazing.  I want to make sure I don’t take up too much of your time today, so I will ask my final question.  Is there an iteration or editing process you use as you develop your characters and your pieces?

SJ: Yes, and this gets back to how I know when someone has ‘arrived in my midst’, and I can really trust the voice of character and know that as I’m writing, the character herself or himself will really vet wherever my creative impulses are trying to take me, and I’ll know what feels right.

I find that performing in front of people from an actual background, so, for example, one of the characters who became a doctor in the piece “A Right to Care,” is based on a real South Asian woman. I toured all over India and performed this character in various places, long before I actually brought her to the stage for the purposes of “A Right to Care.” And it was really nerve wracking at first. The concern is that if I get it wrong, you really can fall on your face in front of an audience that intimately knows what the cultural subtleties and nuances of the character should be. But that helps a lot. That helps with the editing. That helps with really focusing and just honing the character. So I rely a lot on the real people themselves, and they tend to really be generous with me and help me sharpen the work.

PW: Fantastic.  It is so very exciting to hear you talk about your work.

SJ: Thank you.

PW: Thank you so much for talking with me today. I’m really looking forward to seeing you perform and speak at UX Week.

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