Suehyla El-Attar
@suehyla in her new home she purchased with her partner.
-Theatre-
What you are about to read is less then a third of my 4 hour conversation with Suehyla. The privilege of her giving her undivided attention, admiration, and advice to me for even a minute is something I feel utterly unworthy of. That is how much I respect and admire this woman.
I feel a special connection with my writer friends at the moment. We are observers. We are sometimes good at looking around us and processing in unique ways the things we feel and see. I was so excited to hear the incredible, enlightened, and succinct way she sums up this time to bring me comfort and clarity to the insanity I was feeling.
But, like the rest of us, she is at a loss, which is a comfort in its own way.
Interviewed 7.8.20
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Casey: So first and foremost, how are you doing?
Suehyla: I'm good. I mean, I literally just want to be like, "I'm fine. I'm fine." I don't have anything to add. I think I have all the same worries everybody else does — probably less worries than most people do.
Casey: No, no no! I'm just curious, you know, about your day-to-day. I mean, you have this new house. You have a really great distraction.
Suehyla: We had a really great distraction with the house, and also the ability to carry it through has been great, and it already feels like home. We already feel like we've lived here a long time. Last night, actually, (my husband) Pat said, "I can't tell if it's a sign of how comfortable we are in the house or if it's a sign of the pandemic and time is not what it used to be." I guess maybe it's both.
I worry a lot. I can't always put words to the worry. I worried before. I think that the worry is just — and I said this in the play that I wrote, "The Doctor, the Devil & My Dad." There's a moment where somebody asks, "Can you conceive of death?" and one of the characters goes, "I can't. I think every time I try to conceive of death, it's like trying to suck a frosty through a straw." A Wendy's frosty — everything just goes squish sound,* you know? So I don't know anything. I can't even try to assume anything. It's literally the sanest I've felt because my brain doesn't have anything it can do. There are too many holes for it to try to fill. So therefore, my brain goes, "I'm just gonna stop. I can't even try to imagine what's coming, so we'll just do the day-to-day, and this is how we stay sane.” Day-to-day, day-to-day. Find where you can donate money. Find where you can help. Check on friends. Do this. And work when you can.
Casey: Is the simplicity of just worrying day-to-day freeing in any sort of way?
Suehyla: Sure. Again, quoting another bit of literature — there is a Stephen King novella called "Rage," and it's about a kid that takes a classroom hostage. At the end of one of the chapters, he says, "I think that the reason people scream when they're falling off from a tall building is because as you’re hurling to the ground, it's the sanest feeling in the world because you realize there's nothing you can do. You can't grab onto anything.” So I think, yes. The simplicity of this is, "This is what I can do right now." I still have friends that I talk to. I'm doing fine. I adapt quickly for survival. That's the only thing that bothers me.
Casey: Why does that bother you?
Suehyla: Because I think that I will accept a bad situation quickly and find a way to survive through that bad situation without attempting to find a way to make it better.
Casey: Sure. There isn't really anything we can do to make Covid better. Obviously, you bought a house, but what else have you been doing in quarantine?
Suehyla: I have been doing theater. I have managed to be lucky enough to still be a part of that. Lauren Gunderson and the Alabama Shakespeare Festival approached me in May, and I did "22 Homes." … The prompt was "Home" and they asked 22 playwrights to write pieces, and then the playwrights were allowed to choose actors to perform their pieces. Gunderson was kind enough to choose me, and hers is called "The Cat." And I videotaped it and everybody did their own. Cynthia Barrett also did a piece. It's all video. You can watch it, and all the videos last somewhere between five to eleven minutes long.
I have a couple of writing projects that I've been working on. I did something for Write Club at one point in time. And there's a bigger script that I'm working on. There's also the one-woman show that I'm working on, which I will be workshopping with Lisa Adler at Horizon Theatre, hopefully next week, and I just got done doing a Strange Shapes project called "To Whom It May Concern," which was an immersive, theatrical, auditory experience.
Casey: What's it like to create during this time? Because that's a lot.
Suehyla: It's the same.
Casey: Really?
Suehyla: The only thing that's different is that I really feel like I am not a visionary. I think what I am discovering is I'm having to pull most of this stuff — most of it coming from me. I miss collaboration because collaboration was easier for me to navigate than just to be on my own. I would say the hardest one was the Strange Shapes project, to come up with something on my own and then do all the editing on my own. That was hard.
Casey: Do you think your pandemic experience will affect your work going forward?
Suehyla: I don't know yet. There's no way for me to know. Then again, it might be the fact that I am unable to see that. It might be that in order to survive through this moment, I am locked down and focused on the steps in front of me. So until we get to the other side and I can turn around and look behind me and go, "Oh, I see how that made that different." It's the frog in the boiling pot of water. I can't tell. I just can't tell. I just need to survive through this moment to get to tomorrow then get to tomorrow. And then maybe in several months when we're actually out of this, I can look back and go, "Oh, I think maybe I got stronger there."
This is the first time in my life (that I) actually have a dedicated space for me to create, and that in of itself is kind of amazing. Instead of fighting to push sensory stuff out, I now have a place that it's already pushed out. I'm really left alone to myself with my own energy. So I'll be interested to see how that goes. And that's because of the house, and not even necessarily the pandemic.
Casey: It'll be a look back and be like an, "Oh, my goodness" kind of moment.
Suehyla: Always. I used to these to make the joke that if I were a superhero, I'd be Delayed Reaction Girl. Delayed Reaction Girl!
Casey: You cry like 20 minutes after a thing.
Suehyla: Yes! I'm almost a sociopath in the fact that I understand the response I'm supposed to have, and I give the response that most people would expect, and then I leave. Then a couple of days later, I'm like, "Oh, my God! I just realized." Everything's delayed. So I feel bad. I said I would do this interview and then I feel bad because I'm like, "Maybe you should talk to me in a year."
Casey: I wonder, what you miss? I know we miss theater and our work, as we were doing it before, but what else do you miss?
Suehyla: The freedom to make plans. The ability to understand exactly what is right and what is wrong and what we're able to do. I do make the joke that I do miss sexually transmitted diseases because they were easier to avoid. Like I just think, "Oh my God, will we be able to shake hands?" I just miss feeling OK inviting someone into my home. I miss feeling okay taking a picture of myself with friends without worrying if I have my mask. Even though I have my mask with me, if I don't have it on in this photo will it give the wrong message? Will people think that I don't take this seriously enough?"
I think it really comes down to — I just miss being able to connect with other people and make the plans. I miss planning ahead and knowing what that looks like. But there's a lot of this that, as tough as it is, part of me goes, "I still think it's a gift." If you talked to me in the first four weeks, my Fitbit told me that my heart rate had gone down by like ten points — my resting heart rate. I was like, "Oh, I'm relaxed," because suddenly all the things that were like, "You have to be here," everything got canceled and there was nothing happening. So you could wake up in the morning and deal with things that would not normally be able to be dealt with because you had deadlines for these other things. I will say that, despite Covid, I am always gonna be a person who's late because I have been late to almost every Zoom meeting.
Casey: Do you have any new habits or rituals or sort of sacred spaces in your house that you want to maintain as you go into the post-quarantine world?
Suehyla: I'm learning about gardening. I have never been able to grow a plant.
Casey: You've got big sunflowers out here.
Suehyla: Yeah. I think I got really lucky by the person who gave them to me. But, yeah, trying. I'm trying to learn how to envision a home, especially one that's long-term. Purchasing is so much different than renting, and I don't know that I understand that concept yet. Except that like, yeah, look at those sunflowers.
Casey: You can dig up the dirt in the front and no one's gonna care.
Suehyla: No one's gonna care. I mean, I did that anyway at the rental, but yeah. I'm learning to take risks with plants simply to find what works and what feels good and what feels like an accomplishment — discovering how to do that and truly be visionary in it. That's it. I've always loved outside. My depression goes away when I'm outside.
Casey: What will you take out of this experience?
Suehyla: The immediate thought that I had as a response was — even though it should have been self-evident as long as social media has been going on — I am now really wary of people. And not because of contagion, but because of these strikingly opposite ideas that everybody actively carries out, and even seeing that within my friends and even within the family.
I know people better now. I see friends in a different light from choices that have been made and the way they have behaved in sometimes dismissive nature, shaming natures, bullying natures. And we're all liberals, so we're all supposed to be on the same side. So I take away the exposure of who they are in a time of crisis.
Casey: What do you hope that the world takes out this time?
Suehyla: I will never understand why no one wants to be nicer to other people. What do I hope the world gets out of this? I don't know, but I hope for it every day that it has more empathy, it has more compassion and it has more positive action toward humanity. It's the same thing I wish for every day. I don't know how to change. I don't know. I guess I just wish in journalism. That's what I wish! I wish to God we had leaders that were in power and that the world would understand we need someone to give us a unifying idea so that we understand how to take care of each other, instead of the press giving us dribs and drabs and being caught up in every panic idea, I just wish the press would be better. I wish journalism would be better in helping us understand how to navigate what is happening. They were in a position of power the whole time and they have wasted it. They have wasted it. They could have said, "The CDC doesn't have answers." They did not have to give as much time to individuals that didn't know what was going on and only created panic or created misconceptions. I understand that journalism is not supposed to have a judgment on what is right or wrong, I just wish they had been —
Casey: But in a capitalist country it absolutely does. Our journalism isn't a free press, it's a press for the highest bidder.
Suehyla: That's what I would want for us to come out of Covid. I would want better journalism — out of Covid, out of Black Lives (Matter), out of the protests that happened. I found out from Topher (Payne) that people overseas, their press reported a difference between the protests and the riots. Whereas the press here in the United States combined and conflated the two. I just want better information. I want access to more accurate information and people who will discern it more carefully instead of just giving it to us to create panic. So much so that we can't even hear the right stuff.
Casey: We're in a world where information is getting to us as quickly as it ever has.
Suehyla: And it's not any more correct.
Casey: It's almost probably less correct because it's coming out too fast.
Suehyla: What I want for the world is better journalism.
Casey: That's a great answer.
Suehyla: I want better. I want better information. It just would have been so great.
The fact that you have you walk into a space and somebody is like, "I don't have to wear a mask because I'm not sick. People are asymptomatic. I'm fine." OK, so I don't understand how to navigate this conversation!
Casey: That's what asymptomatic means!
Suehyla: Right. But you understand that that's a risk. I think the strongest meme that I saw come out was that the biggest mistake they made in regards to the masks was saying, "You have to wear them to save somebody else." That was never going to work in this country.
Casey: People don't care about other people.
Suehyla: I mean, the the coincidence of the shootings of black people happening with the Covid pandemic and us saying "Wear masks." I'm like, "OK, so we're watching people being treated poorly, and then you're saying you have to wear a mask to protect other people. What do we think is going to happen here?" I also just love the poetry of the world in the sense of, we have people who were pro-choice for abortion, and the people who were anti-choice are most likely the people that also don't wear masks — I think we can make that assumption safely — who then scream, "Don't tell me what to do with my body," so that they don't have to wear a mask. And you go, "Oh, I'm sorry, is this bothering you?" But on our side, we're saying literally, "You have to wear it. You have to wear it." They should have navigated that better. They spoke to the public poorly from the beginning.
Casey: Do you think they'll change?
Suehyla: I have to hope it will because that is what I think makes change happen. Thinking it will change means that you think it's already in progress. Hoping it will change means that you will do what you can to make that happen. So I hope it will happen. I hoped a couple of years ago I would be able to buy a new house. I didn't think I would. And then I had to figure out what to do to make that hope real. So I hope. I hope. I hope. That's all I can — it's not all I can do. It is part of what I do.
