Calling all StageSiders, want another installment of StageSide Stories? Oh go on then! This time around we are talking with Samantha Ipema who is the writer and a performer in Dear Annie I Hate You. We talk all about autobiographical performance, talking about trauma through performance and the ability to change and alter a play text when its autobiographical.
Settle in and lets learn more about Samantha and Dear Annie I Hate You. (Tickets and more info available here)
Can you introduce yourself, your play and your involvement in the creation of the piece?
Hi Jonathan, thank you so much for having me. Of course–
My name is Samantha Ipema, I am a writer and performer currently based in London after spending my early career in New York, training as an actor. I own a production company called Wild Geese Productions (the name inspired by Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese poem) which is a new multi-media company that focuses on stories about humanity told via an imaginative lens. We have a lot of fun with it.
My play, Dear Annie I Hate You, is a dark comedy and drama about when I was 20 and was suddenly diagnosed with a life-threatening brain aneurysm during University. My first question when I was told I needed brain surgery was: “Can I still go on spring break first though?” The piece is wild, absurd, informative, and all the fun, messy parts of being 20 and told that you’re possibly dying. But above all, the piece is about an identity crisis and the bravery it takes to go through it and make it out on the other side.
My roles creatively have been as performer, writer, and producer on the piece. Which I will say is quite a lot of hats to wear and I would not necessarily recommend it to anyone unless it’s out of necessity! But, in the same breath, I have the best team I could possibly think of creating this piece alongside me, and working on it from every aspect has been the joy of a lifetime and source of endless learning opportunity along the way. It’s the production company’s first theatrical endeavour and my first venture into playwriting, so it’s all quite exciting to see the responses we received in Edinburgh and from an artistic point of view– to transform it all again.
Dear Annie, I Hate You is an autobiographical play—what inspired you to turn your experience into a piece of theatre?
The impetus for the piece began when I was diagnosed, truly, though I wasn’t a writer or a performer at that point in life yet. But the moment I was diagnosed shifted my entire world–physically and mentally–and became the impetus for the piece and also, the first time I became aware of any ‘inner voice’ or subconscious knocking to be let into my life. I’d been such a busy, self-absorbed adolescent up to that point in life (nothing necessarily wrong with that, just what was the case) that I don’t think I even knew what the term ‘self-reflection’ or ‘identity’ even meant yet. Until, I was literally knocked upside the head and given a diagnosis that forced me to finally pause and look inward at my life.
Besides that, I actually started writing the piece for the first time just because I wanted an A on an assignment in drama school– I wish it was a more inspiring story than that! But we had to do a 5-minute solo piece and I thought bringing my aneurysm to life would be both funny and affecting enough to earn an easy grade. I got a B though, and I’m still bitter to this day even if the lessons I learned turned out to be more valuable.
That’s when the first ‘version’ lived though. Then unfortunately COVID happened, and I believed theatre was going to be gone, so I gave it up. I wrote and developed it as a TV pilot for a while– which is a whole other story about another identity crisis for another day. But one day, after a routine scan, I was scrolling a reddit feed with other individuals who had brain aneurysms and to my shock realized they all called their aneurysms ‘Annie’ as well. None of them ever pointed out how incredible or clever that was– and I had always thought I had been the clever one for naming mine that. But the more I began talking to people in waiting rooms and encounters in life with other long-term or terminal diagnoses, the more I realized how common it was– ‘Hodge’ for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, ‘Mel’ for Melanoma’– and that was when I was finally convinced it was something that needed a platform to talk about.
Writing about personal trauma is incredibly brave—was it a cathartic process for you, or did it present unexpected challenges?
Both, absolutely. And thanks, this is a wonderful question.
I can’t answer this without mentioning my team– as well as the people that have been along this ride before in its many ideas and failed attempts beforehand– because it’s them who have managed to pull this out of me. And yes, in the years of ideas about it leading up to this, in the mad rush to get it ready for Edinburgh, and the initial phase of rewriting it for this run– it’s always been an odd mixture of both.
Writing it for Edinburgh presented challenges that were both expected and unexpected. I knew writing the piece would be difficult in some sense, because it means you must confront the parts of you that you don’t want to have confronted, own up to the mistakes that were made, and admit the pain from the experience– all while trying to make it universally relatable and not about something incredible niche like having a brain aneurysm at age 20! So, it was a lot to bite off and a lot of personal growth you’re asking yourself to own up to. But – and I don’t say this lightly – I had the best team I could ever think of to help bring it out of me in the way I’d hoped and imagined. And that was definitely a cathartic experience. Along with sharing the piece and being stunned to see how others related to it.
Sharing it the first night in Edinburgh was the first time we ever got to run the piece fully–because we had been so busy putting the pieces together–so that was terrifying. Not only having not rehearsed but having to share a piece so deeply about my life that was open to the public to judge whether they liked it or not.
However now, in this new iteration and recreating of it, the process with me and the team has been nothing but excitement and catharsis thus far– for everyone, I believe. We’ve happened upon a new structure that everyone can relate to that feels much bigger, and much more universal than our one before, and it’s already been exciting to see the early responses to it.
So, hopefully, it will be a cathartic experience for all the audience members coming to see the piece, and not just me!
What can audiences expect when Dear Annie, I Hate You arrives at Riverside Studios?
This is going to sound a bit cliche, but it’s true: I would expect to see the unexpected. I think a little game that you can play as an audience member watching this piece is to try to predict what’s going to come next and I guarantee you it will probably be not at all what you’re expecting.
I have the most amazing, zany, and insane creative collaborators working on this piece with me who all love to be surprised by theatre. So, I’m very excited to show everyone what they’re cooking up for this time around.
Secondly, I think they can expect a show that is about much more than a brain aneurysm – it’s about identity, the parts we don’t want others to see or don’t want to admit, and the way in which we return to ourselves after we forget who we once loved that we were.
How did you balance staying true to your real-life experience while shaping it into a theatrical narrative?
Honestly, I really like this question because it’s something that’s not often asked and that my team and I wrestle with on a daily basis. And do you know what? I will tell you a secret: In the process of writing, the unfiltered truth of what really happened has always won out so far, every single time.
That said- in terms of theatrical narrative, there are techniques that need to be utilised to structure a piece that took years to play out into 80 minutes of retelling. And for that – James (the director and dramaturg) and I always start with the heart of the piece and those turning points in my journey and build the structure from there. Was it my denial? Was it my fear? What was the thought, want, or emotion driving that moment that I was clutching onto?
This iteration we’re finding the next layer of that which feels refreshingly theatrical because we can play with memory, with versions of the truth we tell ourselves, with replaying moments and trying to remember what really happened.
But truly, it shocks me daily at how truthful the piece is. It’s what makes the whole thing rather terrifying. But it also surprises me that the more I am honest with the events, the more people seem to relate to them. I’d recommend writing an autobiographical piece to anyone- I think you learn a lot about yourself in the process and why you acted in the way you did.
Was there ever a moment where you hesitated about including something in the play?
Oh my word…we’re still debating things! I don’t know if you’ve heard this from our Edinburgh run, but a big one that caused a bit of fuss was that we had streamed a live brain surgery during the operation section of the play. It’s an opportunity to “look inside my brain” that has been often debated whether it was gratuitous or not.
It’s still something we debate, and I especially used to be hesitant against including because it felt unnecessary to bring an audience through the gore of that. But we also realized that it’s somewhat necessary, because in the heightened comedy and zaniness of it all with Annie, my aneurysm, coming to life in such a playful way– you often forget the weight of the moment and what is going on: that a young girl had to make a life-changing decision that would alter her forever. And that a single slip in that moment would have been detrimental.
Beside that moment, I often have been hesitant to include the friendships I had at that time, because most–if not all–were destroyed by it. But, that is also where an important heart of the piece lies, and is necessary if you’re going to make it about that time in my life. Hopefully I’ve managed to own my mistakes and make myself look like just as much the villain as anyone else. Because the truth is that no one did anything right and it wasn’t anyone’s fault necessarily. Just bad luck.
As both the writer and performer, do you find it emotionally challenging to revisit these moments on stage night after night? How do you manage these moments?
These are such great questions. To answer simply– no. I find it a pure joy because we’ve found what the essence of the piece is. Which is to say it doesn’t feel self-indulgent anymore. It feels like a character–or a version of myself that is fully healed–so it’s only a pure joy to share now.
The longer answer is that this very question is what held us back in our previous iteration in Edinburgh. And that was tiring and difficult for me at times, because we never went to the depths in the writing or performance that we really wanted out of a fear that people would be too concerned for my safety and it would take them out of the experience of the play. But to our happy surprise, we found people were left wanting even more.
Performing the piece is pure catharsis and isn’t meant for me– it’s meant for the audience to experience. And personally, for me, I’m not a performer that likes to hold back. So it was always more exhausting when that wasn’t the case and why I’m so excited to perform this iteration, because it feels better and closer to the truth.
How did you craft the tone of the play? Does it lean more towards raw emotional storytelling, dark humour or cathartic train of thought?
Hm. To that question I would say: it starts with light humor, moves into dark humor, then dips and evolves into emotional storytelling– ending with a cathartic train of thought.
We use a very specific, very cool writing structure called ‘Shadow Structure’. So everything is modelled after the Ego (my character) and the Shadow (my brain aneurysm / subconscious’s character who wants to be let out). It’s helped immensely with the piece and let us go much further and much deeper into each of these tones within the course of the play.
For our first iteration in Edinburgh though, we did it similarly though not with this specific structure. For that, we crafted it knowing we wanted to balance humour and drama, and wrote mostly from “what was the feeling of this moment, and how do we share that feeling with the audience”, whether it was funny or not, and created a ride from there.
Are there specific moments in the show that audiences tend to connect with most?
Yeah, I think it’s the familial love in the piece and the relationship to the guy I was in love with. The family in it is my real family members, so I think that people connect with the authenticity of a family that you completely adore and are simultaneously completely annoyed with. Everyone’s favourite character is Micah, my brother who has Down Syndrome. He’s honestly the star of the play. But don’t tell him, because it will go straight to his head.
But I also think that the young love and the hopes and dreams we have for ourselves that so often get stripped away from us in a moment like this– I think that is very, very relatable. And the ending, too– but I won’t spoil that for you now.
Did you have a particular audience you hoped to reach in mind, when writing the piece?
Always. It’s always been for two groups of people for me: First, anyone undergoing any kind of life-altering experience. And secondly, anyone who’s also undergoing an identity crisis (either in relation to a life-altering experience or not). But the piece is meant to function as an invitation for anyone who is on the cusp of change and asking whether it will be worth it to let that subconscious voice that is knocking underneath in. And hopefully the play is a response to that question as a resounding yes and an offer to hold their hand and admit it’s scary and messy but it’s okay–and it’s actually exciting and it’s brave–to decide to change.
If someone in the audience is going through a similar situation, what message do you hope they take away from your story?
Oh, I hope that they feel seen and feel like it’s okay to just be utterly human about it. To have all of the emotions– laughter, sadness, anger, grief, and then some – and to realize that those are a gift, to be allowed to be that messy.
And then I hope they take away that it is okay to change. That actually, it’s not about staying who you were before this began, but who it can allow you to become.
What excites you most about bringing Dear Annie, I Hate You to Riverside Studios?
First of all, just the opportunity to share this new iteration with a London audience for a 4-week run.
Secondly, I love Riverside’s bar and restaurant and the little river walk outside. It’s the perfect place to spend an evening and hang! So really, just to spend an entire month there will be really, really fun.
Have you made any changes to the script or performance since its Fringe run?
Yes- I feel like I’ve talked about that extensively at this point. Haha, my apologies!
But, yes! And we are very excited about them. I think that the members coming to see the piece who have already seen it from the Fringe, are going to feel like it’s an entirely different play- and yet (hopefully) just an evolution of the same thing they saw beforehand. But it dives much deeper (and much funnier, I think) this time around.
What does it mean to you to see your deeply personal story on stage in front of a new audience?
I think it means what anyone hopes for in this lifetime, which is that my story– my life, what I went through–has been seen. It’s incredible and emotional. There’s something in people witnessing those events that I would wish every person the chance to experience. Because it’s ultimately how we grow and move on from things, isn’t it? Having something seen, felt, and acknowledged. It’s what I hope the play gives back each night– the chance for someone in the audience to feel seen in their own struggles, idiotic choices, or heartbreaking moments reflected and acknowledged on stage so they can have the bravery to move on too. It’s everything you could wish, and I have the best team to do it alongside with. Otherwise, none of it would be worth it if I didn’t have them.
If you could give one piece of advice to anyone looking to write an autobiographical play, what would it be?
Just, do it. Write the first draft like a personal diary to yourself. Don’t worry about structure or all of that other nonsense because it will come. And then if what you wrote makes you want to vomit at the thought of sharing those pages out loud with the world- then you’re probably on the road to something great. Keep going, even before anyone else thinks it’s special.
A huge thank you to Samantha for taking the time to answer those questions, and opening up so honestly. A really great insight into the world of theatre making and performing.
Have your say!
Are you thinking of starting a career in performing? Are you currently training to be a performer? How are you finding the process, and do you have any key techniques, tips or skills to hone? Let me know in the comments and lets get a discussion going!
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