Life & Work with Stephanie Satie

Today we’d like to introduce you to Stephanie Satie.

Hi Stephanie, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I started as a dancer in N.Y., working on Broadway and National tours, then studied acting for two years with Stella Adler and started working as an actor. It gets messy here, but normal for only sometimes employed theatre artists. I checked coats and hostessed in restaurants, worked for caterers, delivered balloon bouquets, painted faces in department stores, suffered through telemarketing, played Mickey Mouse for kid’s events in department stores until I finally decided to write about my survival jobs in my first solo play, “Duse, Heartburn and Me.” I found that I could write and, as an only child, felt perfectly comfortable onstage, alone with my imaginary friends.

In the mid-1980s, my husband and I joined the mass exodus of actors leaving N.Y. for Los Angeles. I could barely drive. I joined three theatre companies, whoever would take me, started working on TV, went back to school and got a Master’s degree in writing and literature, happily taught at California State University, Northridge, all the while continuing to write and perform solo and non-solo plays, touring theatres, universities in the U.S., Canada and the spectacular Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I also did some TV work. Now, I divide my time between the two art forms and am thrilled that my non-solo play, “The Last Parade,” set in Ukraine in the 1990s as the Soviet Union crumbled, will have its world premiere this January at Interact Theatre, Philadelphia.

During the first 18 months of the pandemic with everything shut down, I lived on zoom, taking yoga, voice lessons, French lessons and working with my writing groups, wrote a few short plays, one of which became a film that was a semi-finalist at the Prague short film festival; another aired on zoom by Women in the Arts and Media Coalition. I made an onstage “comeback” in early 2021, performing and filming “Silent Witnesses, “based on interviews with Child t Survivors of the Holocaust and finished two new plays in April 2020 and 2021 as part of the Dramatists Guild wonderful program, “End of Play,” where you show up and write silently, daily with other dedicated souls.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Smooth? Yes and no. It’s been fun, inspiring and sometimes maddening, but I’ve met and worked with so many wonderful, dedicated artists, especially Anita Khanzadian, who directed and dramaturged three of my solo plays. I also worked with fabulous actors, directors, teachers, and artistic directors. I think really that it’s all a question of perception. Is each rejection personal and devastating or is it just part of the messy process of making art. If we are all dedicated to doing the best we can to bring a play to life or to help a fellow artist on their path; and if we can keep our ego out of it, then, while maybe not always smooth, it is a road worth taking. And yoga helps.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Right now, I am writing and performing and participating in two writing groups – one with playwrights and the other with fiction and non-fiction writers. While I’ve mostly written solo plays – usually docudramas exploring the way refugees and immigrants respond to disruption and relocation – recently, I’ve been writing both long and short multi-character plays. Over the past few years, I wrote a play about assassinated Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya who paid with her life for daring to document Kremlin atrocities in Chechnya; this year, I just finished a serio-comic dystopic play set in Ukraine now, and for a break, I finished a tragic love story play about my good friend, a Jewish special education teacher who married a Flamenco guitarist during the 1960s and lived in a cave in Sacramonte, Spain.

I think I am most known for writing and performing solo plays as I can morph into many characters. I have a good ear for dialects and have studied several languages. “Silent Witnesses,” based on interviews with Child Survivors of the Holocaust, has been an ongoing source of joy for me in that I’ve made many new friends through the process of meeting so many survivors and of sharing their extraordinary stories of bravery with every new audience.

What sets me apart is that I write what I love and what captures me which is different from what captures someone else. There is enough space in the world for all of us to create from our own source of inspiration. We are all unique and not in competition, except when the outside world tries to impose that on us.

I love the “rabbit hole” process of researching time and place and historical context, and then have to let it go and just write.

So maybe we end on discussing what matters most to you and why?
Right now, as we’re tentatively emerging from a pandemic that I feel has changed us forever, I want to be able to hold onto my focus to avoid fragmentation and distraction which is so easy to succumb to. I know time is finite; we lost over two years and haven’t quite returned to any semblance of “normalcy.”I used to practice yoga in a studio 3 or 4 times a week… We were a community. Now I practice at home on my mat, yes with the same wonderful teachers, but alone. I don’t even know if I’d “bother” to drive to the studio if I weren’t still afraid of being in a room with others, all breathing without a mask, and how can you do yoga masked?

I guess I’m craving community events and contact rather than fear. I’m in Paris now, riding the metro, going to restaurants and was in N.Y. for a week beforehand. It feels so good being in crowded places, smiling, watching public displays of athletic skaters on a bridge. In Paris, maybe 5% of people are masked. In NY on the subway, maybe 40%, in theatres, more. I’m still masked indoors and it keeps me both frightened and feeling safe. I want us to be kinder to each other and to ourselves. On a larger scale, I want an end the false narratives without evidence to end so we can stop fearing and hating whoever we decide is “the other.”

I can write, I can act and I can vote. Those are my tools.

In LA, theatre is just beginning to come back, but people are still afraid and so the return is very slow.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.refugeestheplay.com

Image Credits
All photos by Rick Friesen