Drama Queens, a five-star arts journal focusing on female artists

Debbie Kay Cook Interview by Jen Bush

Ercole and Megara is a deeply personal true story of love and family in the face of a partner transitioning. The staged reading of this compelling piece will take place on May 11^th at Playwrights Horizons Downtown at 6 p.m. with catered meal being served one hour before the performance courtesy of Debbie Kay Cook.  In addition to whipping up delectable meals, Ms. Cook is the script consultant and editor for this compelling piece of theatre.  It was a pleasure to chat with her about this project.

Art is in Ms. Cook’s blood.  It’s no wonder she creates such culinary works of art in the kitchen.  “I come from a family of “artists.”  My maternal grandmother was an amazing dressmaker and seamstress.  My mother was a glass artist, seamstress, and painter.  My father writes children’s books and adult crime novels.  My kid brother is a copper artist/coppersmith.  I played the flute, piccolo, and violin.  Despite the artists in my family, my mother was also a lobbyist, and my father was in broadcast news.  They saw need and rose to meet it.  That makes me a blending of artist, academic, and advocate.”

“As for me, I’m a middle-aged, cis-gendered female.  I’m a parent with a disability.  I’ve been told that I’m an amazing chef.  I was organic and farm-to-table before it was a thing.  I grew up in the Pacific NW.  Spent my summers on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation swimming, fishing, hiking, and camping.  I could always find my center in nature.”

“I moved to NYC twenty years ago.  I was at the lowest point of my life at that time.  That move was supposed to be my “do-over” and fresh start.  I never imagined that I’d find myself where I am at right now.  I went back to college.  I became an advocate for parents with assigned psychiatric labels with an eye on the Child Welfare System and its corruption.  Lastly, I create beautiful food that people want to eat.  At the core of who I am, I have found a need and am rising to meet it.”  

Ms. Cook has always supported her husband, the playwright of Ercole and Megara as a second pair of eyes for his work.  Since this project is so personal with Ms. Cook being a main character in the work, meticulous scrutiny was paramount.  “Lester was in Playwriting 1 with Dr. Kathleen Potts, and E&M was a major part of his work while in that class.  For his entire college career, I was his extra set of eyes on all his papers.  He’s absolutely great about writing for content but his “syntax sucks.”  It also didn’t help that English wasn’t his first language.  He could write a whole paper without line breaks, punctuation, or other niceties associated with proper writing technique.  Therefore, I reviewed his papers because I knew that what he had to say was important and not just in Playwriting 1.”  

“My involvement in the play was more about making sure that my voice was accurately represented.  We would discuss many of the events represented in E&M and then take a few creative liberties for theatrical effect.  I’d ask if what he was putting out there was what he really wanted to share with the world.  I knew that this was personal and didn’t fit inside a nice, neat box.”  

Editing come with its one unique set of challenges that are different for everybody.  “Learning a new computer program (Final Draft) and then finding out that I had to customize some settings just to meet the required formatting for Lester’s course.  No knowledge is ever wasted but I did discover that MS Word has been infinitely easier to use and the crash course on macros has been well worth it.  Other than the physical formatting, the other challenge was the fact that Lester’s first language was NOT English, and that means he’s rather verbose.  There were many times that I had to tighten up what he was saying for clarity.  Think “John’s House” versus “House of John.”  And there were other times I would just ask “what were you thinking” when even I couldn’t decipher what he was writing.  This led to a lot of laughs.”

Being a main character in this true to life play means your life is on display for all to see. That comes with a mixed bag of emotions.  “I don’t know how to feel.  Both of my parents have been in the public eye for most of my life, and by default, so have I.  This led to me compartmentalizing my life – this is my work persona, this is my public persona, and this is my private persona that only a small circle of intimates know at any depth.  Even then, my closest intimates were stratified by how much they knew about me.  E&M kicks open the doors between my various compartmentalized personas, and frankly, it doesn’t matter who knows my kink or how my son ended up in foster care.  I’ve moved from being embarrassed and hiding parts of my life to an attitude of I don’t care if you get offended by my honest answers.  By putting my private life on display like this means that I’m taking a risk of negative judgment on one side by some pretty scary conservatives to idolization on the other side for being an ally.  What I am concerned about is that I might only be recognized as the basis of the character of Megara instead of as the person who actually lived these experiences.”

Ms. Cook wants the audience to come away with a true understanding of everything that the people behind the characters in Ercole and Megara go through as well as what people in similar situations go through.  “I want the audience to understand FtM individuals are underrepresented, and the partners of any person of trans-experience are invisible and forgotten.  There are two platforms here:  Lester’s platform of the experiences of FtM individuals and my platform of the partner’s experiences that are missing from the whole conversation.  Part of that conversation must include the good, bad, and ugly.  While a relationship might survive top surgery and a hysterectomy, it might not survive phalloplasty.  The dominant conversation also assumes that a split is inevitable but in reality, no one truly knows.  I want the audience to know that there are other stories out there than need to be told.”

Feed your body with food lovingly made by Ms. Cook and then feed your soul by witnessing the journey of two extraordinary people in Ercole and Megara on May 11^th at Playwrights Horizons Downtown.