Listening to the Girls of Generation Z: Using Ethnographic Dramaturgy in Laura Schellhardt’s Digging Up Dessa

The Lay of the Land: Introduction and Synopsis

According to playwright Luis Alfaro, less than 5 percent of all plays for young audiences have a female protagonist. In response to this deficiency, the Kennedy Center’s Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA), in association with Washington, D.C.’s Women’s Voices Festival, commissioned Laura Schellhardt’s Digging Up Dessa as part of a widespread effort by the community to foreground more stories of girls. To craft this particular female protagonist, Schellhardt was invested in hearing directly from girls coming of age at that peculiar moment of the post–2016 election United States, when calls for female resistance were mingled with rising “men’s rights” movements. The girlhood of that particular moment needed to account for both calls to STEM fields and heightened awareness of sexual harassment in male-dominated disciplines; the presidential election of a man who espoused sexual harassment; and the resistant demonstrations by millions of women. And so, as dramaturg for this project, I adopted a method heavily informed by ethnography.

In their work on performance as a form of critical ethnography, performance studies scholars Dwight Conquergood and Soyini Madison emphasized the importance of dialogic performance, stressing that the critical ethnographer in a host culture is a co-performer rather than simply a participant-observer. Dialogic performance must be a mutual exchange between researcher and subject. Abiding by the adage “Write what you know,” playwrights seek out people who and experiences that will expand what it is they know.

This search becomes particularly crucial in the field of TYA, where there is a generation gap between the adult artists creating the play and the (mostly) young audience members watching it. Surprisingly, however, ethnography is rarely employed in TYA, which is currently dominated by adaptations of popular children’s books (Chapman). It is all too customary for the first children consulted in the process of making a play for young audiences to be the opening-night audience. This lack of input is particularly problematic, given what historian Robin Bernstein calls “a central problem in the field of childhood studies: the relationship between young people (‘children’) and the cultural construct of ‘childhood’” (23). Notably, while adults (including adult playwrights) construct childhood as a period of “innocence” meaning “obliviousness to history and race” (19), this view is at odds with the lived experience of juvenile humans. Moreover, Bernstein demonstrates that it is part of a larger social project that normalizes racial injustice by hiding it in the trappings of childhood. Rather than relying solely upon what Bernstein calls the “half-remembered, imagined” childhood of adult memory (24), Schellhardt and I decided to incorporate actual children into the script-development process from the beginning, especially given that the play depicts a young female of color who aspires to be a scientist.

Although by no means an ethnographic study, Digging Up Dessa used many of the tools from this practice, such as interviews and participant observation, to research and represent Gen Z girlhood. In this essay, I demonstrate how this method of ethnographic dramaturgy resulted in a representation of girlhood characterized by a fierce desire to contest dominant ideologies not only of gender, race, and class, but also of vocation and virtuosity. The girls who inspired Dessa are girls of color who demonstrated both a heightened awareness of social obstacles and a particular reverence for values like tenacity and persistence. In short, girls like Dessa are prepubescent but political.

A brief synopsis of the play’s multilayered plot is useful to understand how interviews shaped both characterization and story. Digging Up Dessa catches the 12-year-old protagonist at a tumultuous point: just a few months after the car crash in which her father Jonathan was killed and in which she sustained an intracranial head injury. The crash was actually the result of Jonathan becoming catatonic while driving, a symptom of depression. Dessa, however, did not know of her father’s condition, which her mother Esther had carefully hidden from her. As a result, a confused Dessa blames her...