What would you do if you were held captive with one other person and had no idea what day it was, how long you’d be there or what the future held?
Award-winning playwright Winter Miller has written a play that explores those very questions. “No One is Forgotten” just finished its Off-Broadway run at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in New York City and Miller is now looking for other venues to present it.
The play examines intimacy, surrender and the will to live. It’s the story of Lali and Beng, who are being held “somewhere” — they don’t know where in the world they are, how long they’ve been missing or if people are still looking for them. So, Miller also explores the relationship they develop over time.
Miller said she wrote the play based on the time she worked as a journalist. She worked at a few different news outlets including the New York Times. She said the idea started flowing when in 2002, journalist Daniel Pearl was decapitated by his captors.
“I thought it was horrible,” she said. “A journalist was killed just for doing his job, just because of someone’s distaste for America.”
Miller said that moment in history seemed to change people’s perspectives. She said it got people paying attention, taking notice of what was going on in the world.
“Any time I read a story about people being kidnaped or held hostage, I wondered what they were doing to pass the time. I wondered how they felt,” she said.
Miller said years after Pearl was killed, she took a writing workshop and started working on the story.
“We wrote our plays and professional actors came and read them,” she said. “I had really planned on writing a romantic comedy, but this idea kind of took over.”
Instead, Miller wrote “No One is Forgotten.”
“It happened very quickly, very simply,” she said. “I just got out of its way. I let it tell me what it wanted to be.”
It became the story about two women in a cell with nowhere to go. When performed, the audience surrounds the stage on all four sides, she said.
Miller knew where she wanted the play to go and how, so she not only wrote it, but produced and directed it.
She said if people take anything away from it after seeing the play, she hopes it’s that freedom of the press is extremely important — without it, we find ourselves in an incredibly dangerous place — and that relationships, whatever they are, are complicated.
“Relationships aren’t just about the collective of people in them, but the individuals in them,” she said. “Where does one person begin and the other end? How do you keep your autonomy?”
Born in Montague, Miller is the daughter of Al Norman of Greenfield. The 45-year-old was raised in and around Greenfield until she moved to Pennsylvania with her mother when she was 12 years old.
Miller said she started writing plays about two decades ago. Before that, she did some acting and worked as a journalist.
“I acted through high school and college,” Miller said. “My dad always wanted me to do journalism, so I decided to do it and make him happy. It made me happy, as well.”
Miller graduated from Smith College in Northampton, where she worked for its newspaper, and then, started working for different newspapers after college, including the New York Times.
“I needed a way to support myself and do a job that felt meaningful to me,” she said.
Miller moved to New York City and got a job as an NBC page — she wore a uniform and gave tours to tourists.
“It wasn’t my favorite thing,” she said. “After six weeks as a page, you could apply for placement on an NBC show, so I applied. I got a spot on Dateline for three months, and then it was back to being a page.”
Miller said she bluffed her way up and landed a stint at Fox, which she kept for two and a half years.
“I basically quit acting and eventually became a news clerk (after Fox) at the New York Times,” she said. “I was surrounded by super smart people.”
Miller said that didn’t last long, though, because her heart was with acting, so she quit the Times to get serious about acting and got a waiter job.
“I did off-Broadway things,” she said. “It was miserable, though. I once had a dressing room in a basement that I shared with rats.”
That’s when Miller started really getting serious about writing and taught herself how to write a screenplay. She eventually enrolled in a master’s program to learn to become a playwright.
“I had known someone when I was in my teens who went to Columbia University to learn playwriting,” she said. “I applied with a screenplay I had written, which I reformatted to become a play. I was shocked when I got in in 2000.”
Miller got her master’s degree three years later.
“While I was there, I worked on the weekends as a New York Times news clerk, again,” she said. “I also did some copyediting for a business publication.”
After graduation, Miller went back to the Times as a floating clerk and did some substituting on the op-ed desk.
“It was the coolest place to be,” Miller said.
Miller worked with New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof, who wrote about everything from human rights to women’s rights to health and global affairs.
After her time with Kristof (2004 to 2007), which she said was amazing, she turned back to playwriting. She said it was much like journalism because in both professions she was interested in the truth and the authenticity of the narrative — both asked the “five Ws” (who, what, when, where and why), she said.
In 2007, she applied for and got a job at Variety as its film reporter.
“I knew nothing about Indi films,” she said. “I was honest about that, and the person who hired me said I’d learn.”
She left that job when she realized her voice had become what Variety wanted it to be, not her own. She had been hired because they had said they loved her voice.
“Even though it was good money, I left,” she said. “I did some freelance writing, but the recession hit and there just wasn’t much work.”
Later in 2007, her play “In Darfur,” a story about three people at a camp for internally displaced people in Darfur, was produced. The story follows an aid worker’s mission to save and protect lives, a journalist’s pursuit of a page-one story and a Darfuri woman’s quest for safety. A portion of the royalties was donated to an anti-genocide organization, and the play got good reviews.
Kristof, who had covered Darfur as a journalist, wrote, “It’s an excellent poignant play,” while Samantha Power, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, wrote, “A riveting and haunting play.”
“After that play, I figured that’s how life was going to be — I’d write plays and they’d be produced,” she said. “But it didn’t exactly happen that way. I became a nomad. I couch-surfed and attended writing retreats. I just kept wondering how I was going to make a living at this.”
In 2010, she enrolled in a program in California called Radical Aliveness Core Energetics. She became a practitioner after she graduated from it.
“It wasn’t just about the mind, but the body as well,” she said. “I was still a playwright, but I wanted to become a practitioner.”
Miller, a member of the Obie-winning collective 13 Playwrights, finished the program and started taking teaching jobs. She still teaches in colleges, graduates schools, after-school programs at high schools, anywhere she is asked. She said she also teaches aspiring playwrights, helping them with their works. Some of it is done on Skype.
“That pays my rent,” she said. “Then I’m less stressed and can concentrate on writing plays.”
Miller said her latest play was completely crowdfunded.
“Theaters wouldn’t commit, so I took matters into my own hands,” she said. “Three-hundred and fifty people made this play a reality.”
Miller said she has written other plays she’d like to see produced — one is about abortion, so she said it’s quite timely.
“The best I can do is keep doing my best,” she said. “Until then, I’ll keep teaching and writing and see where it all takes me.”
For more about Winter Miller, visit: www.wintermiller.com.
Reach Anita Fritz at 413-772-0261, ext. 269, or afritz@gmail.com.