Allan Appel Photo
Jafferis in his make-believe elevator, and unstuck.
In writing a play about a man stuck in an elevator, Aaron Jafferis, who infuses his work with social-justice messages, faced a challenge: How to be a writer unstuck, so that imagination soars up to the higher floors while he stays true to himself and his values. Or, in other words, how not to leave art stranded on the bottom floor.
The play is Stuck Elevator, a musical with book by Jafferis and music by Byron Au Yong. It’s being presented at the Long Wharf’s Stage II from June 20 to June 29 in conjunction with this summer’s edition of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
It’s the latest step in a career that’s taking off for homegrown New Haven playwright Jafferis.
The playwright in one of Long Wharf’s dressing rooms.
The play, seen in a bare-bones workshop production at Arts & Ideas two years ago, is entirely sung, either in rap or more traditional modern operatic modes. It is based on the true story of a Chinese deliveryman, called Guang in the play, who was trapped in a Bronx elevator for 81 hours.
Among Guang’s other ways of being stuck in the world: He has to repay $60,000 to smugglers who got him to the U.S., the land of opportunity.
After its well-received world premiere at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, the play now comes home to New Haven for its East Coast premiere.(Click here for a Huffington Post review.)
That arrival in the Elm City has a lot of significance for a playwright who grew up in New Haven in the era of gangs like the Latin Kings. Jafferis has much to say about drug-fueled violence and dangerous paths and temptations for young people.
Before he went up to the elevator on the Long Wharf’s second floor, created by four wooden posts, where his cast had begun rehearsing, Jafferis talked with the Independent about the artistic challenges facing a playwright intent on conveying a social message in his work.
“This is particularly exciting to have the show in New Haven. The community-based work and [my] a larger life as a playwright, it connects the two parts of my life,” he said. Jafferis continues to teach at his alma mater, the Educational Center for the Arts. In 2007 Bregamos Theater Company in Fair Haven produced his play about gang violence, Kingdom.
Joel Perez who plays Marco, Guang’s co-worker, and Naya Chang, assistant director.
Jafferis acknowledged the tension that exists between the didactic urge and the pull of the imagination.
“As I worked on [Kingdom], the piece became less about George Bush, and more about the characters,” Jafferis said.
A Dangerous Line
At age 37, Jafferis is a thoughtful man who has obviously mined the material of his own life deeply but also linked it to what he has learned in the graduate musical program at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, from which he graduated.
“[It’s] a dangerous line I walk when I write something political. You make the characters less human,” he acknowledged.
In Stuck Elevator, Jafferis said, the only “facts” he and his collaborators worked with came the bare newspaper reportage, including the 81-hour ordeal, and the huge debt owed to smugglers.
A page of “Stuck Elevator” script undergoing revision.
From that they’ve taken off by creating four other characters besides Guang, the stuck man; these all appear on the stage as characters created in the feverish, then by stages breaking-down mind of Guang.
“In Stuck Elevator we have a character who’s a worker. He’s just a guy, not an activist. We’ve tried to follow his desires and needs more than me and Byron’s. What we’ve found is that as Guang pushes up against the things in his life keeping him stuck, most immediately the elevator, and then beyond, the focus of his desire to change his circumstances begins to widen.
“He then begins to question more fundamental issues than why did the elevator break, which, in turn, are political. He arrives at them by pushing against what he needs, what keeps him stuck. It feels organic,” Jafferis said.
If Guang or the play doesn’t get to a message, that’s fine with him, Jafferis added.
Jafferis said he has made some changes in the show in order to deepen character and advance story. He cited the song “Atlantic City.” in it Guang sings of a fantasy of getting rich and solving his problems by hitting the jackpot at a casino.
“It was purely a fantasy. It was fun, not too substantive, and didn’t push the plot forward,” Jafferis said.
In the New Haven production that song has been reimagined and juxtaposed with the character’s evocations of who he was or wanted to be — a writer/poet, it turns out.
The result: “There’s more tension, struggle between who he was, and is.”
I asked Jafferis if the process of creating Stuck Elevator led to any surprises for him, or if the characters went off in unanticipated directions, usually a good sign.
“What was surprising? He [Guang] found both rage and forgiveness, that those both can exist simultaneously both toward himself, and this country,” he answered.
Next Up: Mass Shootings & Chaining
Yourself To The White House Fence
Jafferis and collaborator Yong appear to be going great guns. Jafferis comes out of a hip hop and rap tradition; Yong, from the more formal and experimental music side. They met on the common ground of the musical in graduate school.
They’re planning two more works together, a trilogy in all, of which Stuck Elevator is the first part. The other two may well make being stuck in an elevator seem like childish material.
All three deal with an Asian-American who becomes the target of a media blitz, and who is in a situation that all Americans fear.
Well, being stuck in an elevator certainly qualifies. Next Jafferis/Yong are going to bring us fear of being in a mass shooting and then fear of exposure as a homosexual.
Jafferis described the next installment titled Trigger, an oratorio for 32 voices. Those 32 voices will be the voices of the 32 killed by Seung-Hui Cho at the Virginia Tech massacre in April 2007.
The third play is tentatively titled Fall Out. It will focus on West Point Lt. Dan Choi, who earlier this chained himself to the White House fence to protest the military’s don’t‑ask-don’t tell policy.
While those ambitious projects germinate, Jafferis said in October his How to Break is going to be staged in town in a revival production. It’s based on his experiences being a writer in residence at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital. There’s break-dancing aplenty, but teens are learning to do it while their bodies are indeed breaking down.
“I’m passionate about problems I, and New Haven, have. They will come out in plays that I write,” Jafferis said as he packed up and got ready to join the rehearsal in progress.
Jafferis said increasingly he is directing his more didactic side to his solo performance work, like hip-hop poems.
Then he made what seems like an important distinction: “I think plays are more suited to arguments , whereas a hip hop poem is an argument [single].”
I can't wait to see it! I have known Aaron since our Edgewood years. His intelligence, creativity and curiosity have served him well on his path to becoming a Playwright. Proud of you Dude! Keep reppin' the Elm as properly as you do.