Slaves of Silence

Playwright Julie Marie Myatt is having the most successful year of her career: After struggling off and on in the business for twenty years, she’s about to be the most heavily produced playwright in the country. Over the next twelve months, five of Myatt’s plays will receive world premieres at heavy-hitting regional theaters. One of them, Boats on a River, is playing at the Dowling Studio at the Guthrie Theater right now.

Boats on a River is the result of three years of research about the child sex-slave industry. Set in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, the play offers fresh insights into the efforts and ambitions of aid workers who are trying to free children enslaved by sex traffickers. Myatt visited Cambodia twice and interviewed the people who work at the aftercare shelters. She also volunteered at a counseling program for sexually abused youth in Los Angeles.

What’s so special about Myatt’s work that it’s attracting so much attention? For one thing, she’s a female voice addressing specifically female issues that male playwrights often don’t touch and certainly haven’t experienced themselves. “I do write a lot about sex,” says Myatt. “But it’s definitely more fun to be having sex than to be writing about it. I think my interest in it is more sociological and cultural than it is necessarily the back pages of City Pages. I’m not interested in presenting that world onstage.”

The world she presents onstage in Boats is not entirely depressing, given its subject matter, but it’s not glossed over either. “This is something no one wants to talk about unless Lifetime [TV] does some heightened thing on sexual abuse,” says Myatt. “People would rather not talk about what’s happening in the world or [they want to] sensationalize it.”

Michael Bigelow Dixon, the soon-to-be ex-director of studio programming at the Guthrie, is directing Boats. Dixon has helped hundreds of emerging playwrights get their start, and the money that funded Myatt’s lengthy research and writing process came from a new program at the Guthrie, funded by a $700,000 grant from the Bush Foundation to pursue experimental programs. “The travel idea is unique,” explains Dixon. “The idea arose out of discussions in the literary department. Basically, [this] was the programmatic response to the question, ‘What can an institution do for playwrights that playwrights can’t do for themselves?’”

The Guthrie allocated funds to eleven playwrights—Myatt, Charles Mee, Kevin Kling, and Naomi Iizuka among them—that allowed them to go anywhere in the world to research ideas for plays, no strings attached. Boats is the first full staging of a work to come out of this innovative program. Iizuka’s project, After a Hundred Years, will be produced in the studio in June of 2008.

Despite the intensity and horror of her subject, Myatt was taken with Cambodia. “I think the people are really wonderful and amazingly resilient,” she says. “Their first impulse is to smile. It’s just amazing. Every time I came back to America, I thought, ‘Why aren’t Americans so smiley? We have a lot more to smile about here.’ ” May 19–June 10. 818 S. 2nd St., 612-377-2224

Reach Jaime Kleiman at jaime@jaimekleiman.com