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My name is Kim, last name is El, it’s spelled E-L, and my birthday is November 18th, 1958. I started acting in my senior year at Schenley High School. My first play was “Guys and Dolls.” I was an actor in it, and I also was a student director. I liked acting because I was pretty much to myself as a young child, and when I started acting, the first time you hear that applause, and everyone’s clapping and jumping out of their seats because you did something, that gives you a rush, and acting gave me a sense of “Yay, I could do something positive,” and so those applause make me want to keep doing it.
When I wrote my first play, I want to say it was in 1990s, so it was about 15-20 years ago, and when I wrote the play, I didn’t think that it would be produced. My first play, I wrote with KL Brewer. He’s another playwright in Pittsburgh and it was called “The Poet’s Corner,” and it got a lot of good reviews. It was about poets in Pittsburgh. I’ve been able to write grants to pay for my own productions of shows. I received a $10,000 grant from the Heinz Foundation to do my one woman show, “Straightening Combs,” and people have seen that show and so what other people want to do it? Someone asked me, “Could they do it in Atlanta?” I wrote 11 one act plays and six full length plays. That’s 17 plays. And I’ve had ten of those plays produced here in Pittsburgh. One is called “The Sunday God Gave Me,” and it’s about domestic violence, about a woman who, from the age of eight, her and her girlfriend, age of 18 and then she’s 28 and she’s severely beat up by her husband, and her husband gets killed. “Straightening Combs” is a one act play. I played seven different females. I play myself as a young child, I played my great grandmother in her 80s, I play a prostitute who lived in Elmore Square, I play my mother, I play an abusive man, I play a sorority sister. And so, all of these people I change on stage. I take wigs and clothes off in front of the people, and what I like about this play is that African American women as well as white women love this play because they could relate to it. People thought “Straightening Combs” was a play about hair and it’s about straightening out your life, and the actual original title is “Straightening Combs and Other Things that Changed My Life”, because in the play, my mother says, “You have to straighten your hair. You don’t want to have woolly hair and look like a woolly sheep.” And that’s my natural hair. That made me think, what other things did I change in my life? And so, it caused me to have a very low self esteem. I wrote the play so that women would seek assistance with psychiatric help. So, the play dealt with mental illness because I have a history of having clinical depression and post traumatic stress disorder from witnessing some violence in the Hill District, and as a child growing up, I had a low self esteem. So that play was, for me, to write that so that women like myself would seek psychiatric help. Writing plays is like going to therapy for me. When I write a play, I can hear the voices in my head, and I write those down, and then it becomes a story, and sometimes they’re my life stories, like the story about abuse. So when I write those stories down, it’s therapeutic for me.
August Wilson is a Pittsburgh playwright who lived, born and raised on Bedford Ave. right down the street from here. And so, reading his works where he talks about the Hill District, and he talks about the ’82 Lincoln, and he speaks about Wylie Ave., and when I started reading his plays, I was thinking, “that’s where I live.” And I said, “I can write a play like that,” and so I have written some plays, most of them set in Pittsburgh, that it says that it’s a story about someone in Pittsburgh, about homelessness or about domestic violence, or about kids growing up, and August Wilson inspired me because he let me know that the Hill District was a place that you could write about. When I met August Wilson, I did meet him a while ago, and I was coming from Duquesne University, he was at the Crawford Grill, and I said, “Mr. Wilson, I want to be a playwright. What advice would you give me?” And he had this big cigar in his mouth, and he took it out his mouth, and he said, “Write.” I didn’t understand that then. But I understand that the advice for any playwright is to write. I write every day. If you text, you write. If you’re emailing, you write. And if you want to write a story, write it, and don’t let anyone’s attitude or opinion change what you do. Besides the one where he said write, he said, “write what you know,” and the reason why I write about the Hill District is because I know about the Hill District, but when he said “Write what you know,” if you know about basketball, write about basketball. If you know about cooking, write about cooking. If you know about anything that you feel you’re an expert on, or that you can tell that story, then tell that story, and that’s why August Wilson’s plays are probably really well known because he writes in Pittsburgh’s voice. When I write, I write the way we speak, he writes in the attitude and the atmosphere of Pittsburgh and the Hill District. And so, when August Wilson said, “Write what you know,” I think that’s one of the best things that would help me in my writing, and it would help other people as well.