Write On!
Ask Susan Soon He Stanton what she does for a living, and she’ll likely say that she invents conversations for imaginary people. Which isn’t untrue. As a writer for the stage and screen, her job is to imagine scenarios and let her characters work things out. But it goes deeper than that. Playwriting is the art of empathy; Stanton has to wrap her mind around a story, whether it stems from a political headline or a photograph or a real-life incident, and ask herself: How could anyone experience or endure this situation? How do I feel about it? What would I do? “When I don’t have an easy answer or an answer that I can quickly articulate, it nags at me until I finally write it,” Stanton says.
Although this usually means in the form of stage plays, Stanton became a writer for HBO’s Succession when the television show began in 2017. Last September, Stanton won an Emmy Award for her work as a writer and producer on the acclaimed series, which netted four Emmys (including Outstanding Drama Series and Best Drama Series Writing) out of a record-breaking 25 nominations. Around the same time, she wrote episodes of other shows, including HBO’s horror-comedy The Baby, Hulu’s Conversations with Friends and Modern Love for Amazon Prime Video. “Some projects you spend time working on never see the light of day, which is the sad nature of the business. Then there are other shows and writers rooms that do come to fruition and I can share, which is really exciting,” says Stanton.
To be fair, she’s got a really good track record. Born in ‘Aiea, Stanton grew up with a poet father and a passion for storytelling. “My grandfather would have people over at his house all the time. I was always at these big family dinners so I became very comfortable around people and being kind of a fly on the wall.” When she was five, Stanton would put on plays for her family using puppets made from popsicle sticks (“heavy on imagination, light on craft,” recalls the playwright) and her brother would charge their parents admission and for sodas from their refrigerator.
In her early teens, Stanton began taking playwriting classes at Honolulu Theatre for Youth. The nonprofit also accepted new plays from local writers, with the chance of getting produced. “I don’t think I felt like anyone had taken me seriously before as a writer so it became a real challenge to create something that would be considered,” Stanton says. The play she wrote at age 16 while in HTY’s writing group became part of her college application when Stanton applied to New York University. She was accepted into NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and received her BFA in Dramatic Writing. At NYU, she wrote a play which helped land her in Yale’s School of Drama, where she earned her MFA.
Meanwhile, she worked stints at odd jobs — at a publishing house, a restaurant, writing for magazines — and attended writers’ workshops and residencies at the Sundance Institute’s Theater Lab, New Dramatists, and others. “The thing is figuring out a way to keep writing and pay your rent however you can manage it. I had a flexible schedule so I would take off a month for a workshop, then come back. It precludes you from having a normal type of salaried career,” she says.
Stanton’s plays began getting produced regionally throughout the United States and internationally, as well as in Hawai‘i, at HTY and Kumu Kahua Theatre. Some of her stories are fictional — like The Underneath, which follows a man searching for his missing brother in a (particularly murky) downtown Honolulu. Others, like Untitled TMT Project, tackle real issues, such as the controversy surrounding the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea. While flying between New York and Hawai‘i, Stanton began stopping in Los Angeles for meetings with different film and television producers. Her writing had attracted the interest of executives at HBO; at the same time, British writer and producer Jesse Armstrong was looking for a staff writer who could write comedy and drama for the show he was developing, Succession, about a wealthy family fighting for control of the global media conglomerate founded by the family’s ailing patriarch, played by Brian Cox.
“Probably the most sensible thing would have been to write a television pilot and submit that as my writing sample. But I felt like my strongest pieces of writing were my plays,” Stanton says. “I got recommended to Jesse, we had a relatively quick Skype call after he read my play, and two weeks later, I moved to London to work on season one.”
When writing on Succession, Stanton spends six hours a day discussing plot points and character story arcs in the show’s writers room. Due to the technical nature of the show, which deals with corporate raids, asset swaps, and other financial power plays, Stanton and her fellow writers also spend time studying finance, litigation, you name it. “I’ve never been part of a writers room with the same level of research. We had a plot involving Senate hearings so one writer read a massive 500-something page hearing transcript. I did a lot of research on cruise scandals, high-end weddings, and a number of other topics.”
Stanton’s come a long way from popsicle sticks. But her commitment to storytelling hasn’t changed. “When I was growing up, I thought maybe getting a gold star was important or that there was a certain path you had to take. But the most important thing is just writing or making something. You can shoot a film on your iPhone and send it to a festival. You don’t have to wait,” says Stanton. “It’s been a journey taking myself seriously and getting other people to, as well. I think either being younger, or maybe looking younger than I was, or as an Asian-American woman, I wanted to get into the room; I want to be a contender. I want to tell my stories and have them matter.”