*Best Life* actors (left to right) Ayesha Jordan and Erin Anderson. Photo: Melisa Tien.

Melisa Tien
Feature Article / New Play
How to Live a Best Life, With Melisa Tien
The Brooklyn Rail
March 2021

Excerpts from The Brooklyn Rail’s “How to Live a Best Life, With Melisa Tien” by Matthew Paul Olmos:

I first met playwright, lyricist, and librettist Melisa Tien when she was co-facilitating the writers’ group for Rising Circle Theater Collective, which developed and produced original work by artists of color. Since then, through our seven-year residencies at New Dramatists and the weeklong silent playwriting retreat led by Erik Ehn, I’ve gotten to know Tien’s sly wit and unassuming pushback against rules, establishment structures, and art that looks through a lens of privilege.

I recall standing with Tien in the East Village after a performance of a play which would later become a massive hit. Though we both enjoyed it, there was something off about it for us, and we were both trying to hone in on our disconnect, when she precisely named it: “It’s sorta rich, white progressives patting themselves on the back.” In Tien’s own work, she strives to identify and call attention to different kinds of privilege because, as she says, “To acknowledge one’s own privilege is the first baby step in being able to include and assist those without it.”…

In Tien’s play Best Life, which performs at JACK through April 5th, we get to almost deconstruct what it means to have a real conversation in our current, ever-polarizing world. In the play, a wealthy white woman named Sheryl is pulled into a conversation with a poor woman of color named Lourdes; however, Lourdes has the power to rewind their conversation whenever Sheryl fails to truly see where Lourdes is coming from. In the play, Lourdes simply has to say “Go back” when she needs to rewind…

While the play finds humor and playfulness through its theatrical device of rewinding time, the intricacy of reasons why Lourdes chooses to call out “Go back” are embedded in a socioeconomic divide. According to Tien, “The play’s structure reflects the recursive nature of the race and class conversation in the US at large; it often seems to go around in circles and requires superhuman effort, patience, and willingness before tangible progress can be made.”…

The term “living your best life” is an identity concept which seems rampant on social media—this idea that whatever we might be doing with ourselves, living one’s “best life” is completely in our own hands; it is a readily available utopia should we choose to live it. For Tien, this play came from the process of seeing this concept of a “best life” against the backdrop of the “real racial and economic divides” which were being heavily reported in the media while she was writing. “The play became a way for me to think more deeply about what it means for a person to live their best life, and the factors that affect a person’s ability to live their best life.”

Best Life by Melisa Tien, directed by Ken Prestininzi, presented by JACK, plays March 21 – April 5 (18 Putnam Avenue, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn).
Read the entire article here.

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Melisa Tien
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