In the summer of 2024, Monk Parrots produced Pearls for Spurs, a new play by Gates Leonard about a dysfunctional Texas family severing ties after moving to a trailer park in Florida. Drawing on her own experiences, Gates wrote and acted in the premiere production in New York City, which was directed by her father, Luke Landric Leonard. Longtime friend, colleague, and cast member of Pearls for Spurs, Jennifer Skura Boutell, interviewed the father-daughter duo about what it’s like making theatre as a family and the discoveries that surprised them.
Jennifer Skura: Thank you for meeting with me today. Why don’t you introduce yourselves and tell us where you are?
Gates Leonard: Thank you for having us. I’m Gates Leonard. I’m in Bennington, Vermont at Bennington College, and I’m the playwright of Pearls for Spurs.
Luke Landric Leonard: And I’m Gates’s father. I’m Luke Landric Leonard. I’m the artistic director of Monk Parrots, and I was the director and set designer for Pearls for Spurs. Oh, and I’m in South Korea where I teach experimental media and performance in the MFA program at Seoul Institute of the Arts.
Jennifer: What time is it for you right now, Luke?
Luke: It’s 6:52 a.m. right now. And it’s a beautiful morning,
Jennifer: For Gates and I, It is 5:52 in the evening, and I am asking y’all these questions from Atlanta, Georgia. So Gates and Luke, how long have you and your family been making theatre together? And based on Monk Parrots’ mission, how did you decide to make Pearls for Spurs this latest project?
Gates: Well, that depends because you and mom have been making theatre longer than I’ve been around.
Luke: As a family, let’s see. I moved to New York in 1995, and the first play that Natalie, Gates’s mom, and I did together in New York was actually in 1996, while I was still an undergrad at Brooklyn College. That was the very first play that I ever wrote. It was called Desiderata. It was directed by Gates’s godfather, Andrea Paciotto, who is also on faculty here at Seoul Arts.
We played angels that had fallen from the sky and fallen to earth, and it was a verse play, and it had some music in it. So we have decades of working together as a family. Then Gates was born in 2003. She started acting at two years old when we put her into a film we were making. But I think the three of us began making theatre when we came back from Austin, Texas. I did my MFA in directing at the University of Texas at Austin. That was 2010 when we came back to New York, and then we went and did a crazy performance art piece at Dixon Place called The Art of Depicting Nature as it is Seen by Toads. That was basically an hour-long Meisner exercise we put the audience through. Gates had a small role in Toads, so she started performing in Monk Parrots shows when she was seven years old. Then we made Gay Rodeo By-Laws in 2011, which you were in, Jen, and designed a lot for that show as well. And we still have many of those set pieces. Here I Go at 59E59 Theaters, Bum Phillips at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, and Love Fail, among other things. So…fourteen years as the family of Monk Parrots. Soon to be fifteen.
Jennifer: That’s back when it was called DTX.
Luke: That’s right. DUMBO Theater eXchange in Brooklyn. Well, that started in 1999. I think 1998 was the first DUMBO arts festival that we participated in. DUMBO was our home, and we wanted our own theatre space because we’ve always produced new material, things that weren’t mainstream. We’re always following our instincts and our energy when we’re making theatre. So we had to produce our own work and we eventually found a space and we started a theatre. We turned a garage into a theatre. What is that? Thirty years ago?
Jennifer: Yeah, almost thirty years ago.
Luke: What is happening? How is time flying this fast?
Jennifer: Monk Parrots only does original work?
Luke: We mostly do original work. In 2018, we did the New York premiere of Gabriel Jason Dean’s Terminus at Next Door at the New York Theatre Workshop, but oftentimes we are just starting from scratch.
