At the PWC this week: Aditi Brennan Kapil

McKnight Advancement Fellow Aditi Brennan Kapil is at the Playwrights' Center this week, working with collaborators Manu Narayan and Radovan Jovicevic on a new musical called Belgrade Remix. We asked Aditi a couple questions:

What are you working on?

A feminist riff on a silent female character in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, a Balkan-South Asian fusion musical with the band Darunam, a play with opera about the 1933 Reichstag Trial, an Orange County-based play that I can't talk about lest I lose my thread, and a comic book based on my play The Chronicles of Kalki. I like multiple projects, I like the intellectual workout of it, and I like moving from one to the other on a thought or an impulse.

Why do you write plays?

To entertain, to move (people, facts, minds, deeply held beliefs, souls), to be in conversation with the world around me, to push performers into territories that expand our idea of what it means to be human, to push directors and designers into re-inventing the art form with every show, to push myself, to create a lasting piece of beauty and compassion that might continue to live after I've stopped, to get to hang out with people who challenge and inspire me daily, to argue, to feel the high of making something, to make a living.

Who or what inspires you?

Brave actors.

What is your writing process like?

I blast music in my ear buds, and I write. I probably stare a lot too. Sometimes afterwards my back hurts, and I'm thirsty, and I have to pee.