Holding things together
a conversation between New York activist artists Monica Hunken and Josh Bisker.
In this dispatch from the anteroom, Monica Hunken and Josh Bisker met in their hometown of New York to talk about Monica’s new solo show “Good Day Sunshine,” which will premiere next month at the Open Works Festival in Sheffield, directed by Melissa Chambers. Long time members of New York’s activist community, Josh and Monica talk about the interplay between trauma and protest, the challenge of maintaining a balance between speaking truth to power and personal wellbeing, and the cosmic role art plays in holding things together.
Monica Hunken (MH)
Hello! it is August 23rd 2026. We are here in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.
Josh Bisker (JB)
We are outside in New York City, so we can hear ambulances, airplanes, gun shots, big crickets, and mosquitoes. So, hey Monica, tell us about your play?
MH
It’s about a woman named Pippa, who’s an activist in New York City. It all happens in one packed day, on Valentine’s Day, the 14th of February, which happens to be one of the coldest and hardest and bitterest months in New York.
JB
Longest month. Fewest days, longest month.
MH
Pippa’s volunteered to deliver Valentine’s scones, like a singing telegram, via bicycle to raise money for a social justice organization which is not named, and there’s this whole undercurrent of a protest movement happening which is also unnamed and censored.
But these deliveries happen throughout this day that gets increasingly chaotic. She’s broke already and unable to feed herself, she’s dealing with a lot of stress and is getting involved in lots of difficult situations, and each delivery is kind of a different look at helpfulness and compassion for other people, and the limits to that and the challenges in that. And also, she’s dressed in a sun costume that gradually disintegrates as the day wears on.
JB
Zooming out from the plot, what would you say are some key words that this play is about, what are the feelings that are motivating you to bring it?
MH
Human utility? What makes a human actually useful. How much capacity do we have and should we have to feel compassion for strangers in the world and the larger suffering in the world. What is actually helpful and what is not? What is just adding more suffering? The word compassion comes from compati, which means to suffer with. So this is…
JB
Greek?
MH
I think so, or Latin. And this is something as an activist organizer and as an artist I have struggled with a lot, as you know. So I decided to tackle it. I’ve never really tackled activism in my plays this head on, and I’ve never set a play in New York before either.
JB
Can you tell the good people where the name Pippa came from?
MH:
Yeah Pippa is the name of my bicycle. Pippa Luck Lightning is her whole name actually.
JB
You’ve been riding this bicycle for ages in New York City.
MH
Yes, I’ve ridden her around the world, through the Middle East and she has survived a lot, just like me.
[Laughter]
JB
So speaking of activism and bicycling in New York City, why this show? Why right now? Where did it come from?
MH
We’re in this historical moment in this country where fascism is rising and many people are being newly activated, newly politicized and freaking out. There’s a new huge sense of urgency about immigration, our rights, our privacy, climate change, fossil fuel extraction. I too feel this urgency but I’ve felt it for the past 25 years as a direct action organizer so as I’m getting older I'm trying to assess, what of the urgency that I've had and held onto for so long is useful now, and how can I reckon with this political disaster that we’re facing in an effective way. So it’s partially my way of reflecting on that. And also on my pathological compulsion to help and to be of use, and to disrupt injustice.
JB
One of the things I really like about your plays is the way that you explore large concepts by zooming in on the individual navigating the systems around them and it sounds like this play is also oriented around this one character. Do you play other characters also throughout the play?
MH
Yeah I play a lot of characters, because she meets a lot of people while making deliveries. Each character kind of teases out more about this question of helpfulness and what is helpful. There’s this older woman she delivers to, Vivian, who’s a little racist, a little prejudiced who actually comes back later in the play and Pippa has to see how she can forgive, or hold someone accountable. And there’s Kurt Vonnegut, who appears to her in a kind of fever dream in a jail cell after she gets involved in a protest and gets arrested. She’s hallucinating because she’s starving. And there’s this couple that are young and in love and make her sing a song and devour the scones in front of her. There’s all sorts of characters throughout. And she’s kind of being challenged and learning from each of them.
JB
When I describe your works sometimes to other people I get stuck in the inaccuracy of the term ‘one person show’. It’s like a one person show with a cast of thousands.
[Laughter]
How is this show different than other ones you’ve put on?
MH
Well it’s completely fictional, well, not completely, it’s very fictional. In this play I don’t really have the luxury that I have in a lot of my plays which are more explicitly autobiographical, where I take time to bring the audience along and talk with them and tell stories, as myself. In this show it's kind of like this jet taking off and it just goes goes goes, and I feel like it's gonna be a lot more abstract and surreal and physical and visceral. And I'm working with a great sound designer, Chad Raines. This is the first time I’ll have sound almost throughout. We have this sort of pulsing soundscape of percussion sound. So, yeah it’s more of a visceral world. And the character goes through a physical transformation which I don't want to give away but…
JB
No spoilers, no spoilers.
MH
Well, to not give it away, there’s a motif where she's listening to this podcast about fireflies and synchronous flashing as she’s biking so there’s this whole theme of light and insects and trying to connect. And she’s dressed as the sun you know, which will burn out, and the fireflies will die once they connect so it’s kind of a dark tale in a way, but I like it.
JB
A dark tale full of light.
MH
Yeah, exactly.
JB
What makes you excited to bring this show to England?
MH
Sheffield is a cool town. We’re premiering it at Sheffield Theatres near where my director Melissa Chambers lives. Melissa and I have worked together for many years, and she’s developed this play with me. We have a long relationship. We used to be in a theater company together in Brooklyn called International WOW and then Melissa directed one of my favorite plays that I did, The Wild Finish.
JB
That is also one of my favorite plays of yours.
MH
Aww. Thanks. And we’ve done other projects together. She’s moved to England so we haven’t gotten to work together as much over the years. But as I've finally been able to produce a new work, I wanted to work with her on it. The north of England was like the birthplace of industrial music, electronic music. Sheffield’s a town with a long history of activism, of battles for worker’s rights. and I feel like it’s a good place to have this show start and especially to connect to my old friend and collaborator, Melissa.
JB
I'm so excited to see it. I've been involved in a bunch of your shows and we’ve been activists in the streets together for most of our adult lives and I know that this show has its origins in some ways in some of the particular New York City activities we have done. Crumby spokes is one of them. Can you tell us about Crumby Spokes and how that experience led to the genesis of this play?
MH
Crumby spokes is the inspiration for the organisation Pippa is volunteering for in the play. It was started by a mutual good friend of ours, Lizzie Hurst. It’s this charming volunteer effort of delivering scones via bike on Valentine’s Day, raising funds for a local social justice organization. The volunteers all make and wear beautiful hand crafted costumes for the deliveries.
So, two years ago, not through any fault of Crumby Spokes, which I really love, I was just having a really difficult time in my life. I had just gotten back from Jenin in Palestine where I was working with The Freedom Theater with my company Al Límite Collective. And we’d been attacked by Israeli forces during a feminist theater festival.
JB
You were bombed in place?
MH
Nearby was bombed and the building was shot at while this Palestinian actress, Salwa Nakkara was performing her show. The power got cut off and she asked us, should I keep going? Should I do the show? And we all thought we were gonna die so we’re like, “yes please go if you can.” So we took out flashlights and our phones and lit her and she performed the rest of the show fully, beautifully, amazingly and suspended us for a moment while we’re hearing this boom, boom, crashing, shooting outside, and then she finished.
There were a lot of children in the audience so some of the adults started trying to play games and do arm wrestling and things for the kids to get distracted and have fun. Then they slowly started to find ways for us to get out in little small groups. There were a lot of international people there for the festival, and they were worried about us, and did everything they could to keep us safe.
And so we got out, and we were in a car driving away while shots were flying, and we survived. When we got back to the states, we got back on October 6th. Then a day later, October 7th happened.
JB
God.
MH
So we were there right before, feeling that tension mounting. And it was awful. In the West Bank. So, a few months after that, I did Crumby Spokes, in February. I had been protesting in the street nonstop for Palestine, and trying to advocate for our friends out there, theater makers who were tortured and imprisoned just for creating theater and creating a space for people to express themselves and to feel closer to their freedom. I was in a dark and depleted place in my life, but was really compelled to deliver the Valentines scones anyway, even though I’d also just had a relationship of my own end abruptly and inexplicably. I had barely any money at that point, and I was genuinely not able to feed myself. But I wasn't going to eat the scones.
JB
That is Greek, man.
MH
I pulled over at one moment, I had just gotten hit by a car in the middle of the ride, and I voice-noted a whole idea of a movie based on that ride. Then I forgot about it and then came back when I did an artist residency and I was like, "Oh, that's a really good vehicle to talk about my life! Like, about something that I've struggled with my whole life.
JB
A bicycle getting hit by a car in the middle of a charity ride is a good vehicle for talking about the lives that we lead.
[Laughter]
MH
Yes, yeah, yeah. It's a good container for that. So that's what it is. The better a container you give yourself, the more freedom you have. Like the memories can go in and out: of refugee camps I've worked at, war zones I've been in, but it stays disciplined inside the trajectory of the bike ride.
JB
Do you feel like the theater making and the art help you metabolize this duress and trauma of the experiences that you've undergone?
MH
I hope so. I teach theater and I train people in direct action. I feel like teaching things helps me understand things more, and I feel the same from performing something. If I can figure out a way to communicate it to an audience and give it away to them then we can find a way to share this story together. And by doing that, it lifts some of that weight. It makes this kind of cosmic connection of holding things together.
If I can figure out a way to communicate it to an audience and give it away to them then we can find a way to share this story together. And by doing that, it lifts some of that weight. It makes this kind of cosmic connection of holding things together.
JB
Yeah, I think that activism in New York is so strange to me in some ways. I feel like we don't often let ourselves partake in or stand up for the beauty that helps give our lives meaning. The beauty that is lost to fascism, the beauty that is lost to systems of oppression. And instead we are angry in the streets, and we shout and we fight. I feel a real sadness about that. I feel like we miss the point a lot by orienting solely around our outrage. Your theater works often do a different thing, they help us nurture our outrage inside of a context of beauty. That's also a thing I remember from that year, from 2023/24. I don't know if it was December or January of that year, but we did the artists' march for Palestine starting at the steps of the New York Public Library, and you and others arranged a huge contingent of artists and theater makers to parade through the theater district in New York City, through Broadway and in front of all these different theaters that were currently showing works and protests, and we had stagings of different readings and songs and activations in front of a variety of different theaters. I remember…
MH
… Edward Said's daughter, Najla, being on your shoulders to give her speech! It was a good moment. That was a good moment!
JB
I loved that event and doing that march with you. I felt like it really restored some of that infusion of beauty and orientation around beauty and art, like hand in hand with our outrage. Is that something that you are consciously focusing on in your theater work? Or that you feel like undergirds it in some more subtle way?
MH
That’s exactly what I always struggle with with activism.
so much of the activist work that I do is blockading something, stopping something, being up against something. And if you think about what it means somatically, psychologically, to be in contradiction, to be against something to actually put your body in the way of something over and over and over again. That's such a painful thing to do,
and sometimes it helps and sometimes it's good. Like I'm all for direct action. I know it works. It's one of our tools. It's not the only tool, though, and I think that I've used it as the main tool for so long that I have sometimes mirrored what I'm fighting against, which is a lot of the time an extractive culture. I fight so much against fossil fuel extraction, and for immigration justice. A lot of the activist work is martyrdom, it is sacrificing yourself. It is demanding from other people to put their bodies on the line, to allow themselves to be eaten by the machine, because it's so much bigger than us. So, to create something is so hard. It's such a difficult thing, but it's so necessary in the fight against fascism to get ourselves into imaginary ways of thinking.
Artists, especially, need to be on the vanguard to show people what is possible and how we can dream into the new beginning. I've found that I've been struggling a lot more over the last few years to create theater. I'm not as in touch with my intuition. The more I've done activism, the less I've been in touch with my creative spark and spirit because I've been so saturated by this extractive culture.
JB
It's really challenging, I think, to deal with the guilt of being not in the mouth of the machine. I think that for people who are, all things considered, relatively privileged and safe, that many of us struggle with a guilt complex about that, and it directs our activism towards self-sacrifice, towards a kind of masochistic Joan-of-Arc-like throwing ourselves onto the sword points, and I don't know that that is always the thing that serves our cause the best. It's very harrowing to see activist comrades put themselves in the same jeopardy that they are trying to save others from. I really rejoice in theater and other activist works like this. I have also been a Crumby Spokes participant and have also had a terrible Crumby Spokes ride, but I think that the silliness of it is actually important for its own sake. It's not only resistance, it's the evidence of what the resistance affords us all, what we all should be entitled to. You kind of can't defer that too much, to be like, “no, I'm only free after everyone's free.” You also have to embrace the freedoms that we have now. Otherwise, it's deferred forever because this is a project of the ages. I'm really grateful for every time you turn towards theater. I think it brings life back to you, and like you said, shares it with other people.
MH
Totally. I’m also aware that I've developed a lot of sternness from organizing for so long.You do tend to get into this militancy. Like there was this book about joyful militancy, and Adrienne Maree Brown talks about emergent strategy, and pleasure activism and things like that. So there's a lot of people trying to push back against that sternness and taking ourselves so seriously. Because while it is fucking serious, like people are dying in droves around the world, a lot of the people that I've spent time with in refugee camps, in impoverished places, those are some of the funniest people in the world. You know, they want to laugh, to celebrate, they want to dance. I feel like people don't always benefit from you forcing yourself out of your own joy because you think of other people suffering. As long as they have the ability to laugh and have joy, they want it for themselves, and they want it for you too.
JB
Writing this play, have you felt your own choices change, your own patterns change, in terms of that martyrdom drive? What’s happened with you in that sense?
MH
I feel I couldn't write this play if I wasn't already on the journey to a kind of self erasure. This past year was really hard. But in that space, I was like, okay, this is like a big chapter change now. What do I want to pursue now, and what do I want to dedicate my life to? I kept feeling each time I would show up at a protest that my body would reject it. I would feel so much anxiety come up, whereas what I normally would feel going to protest was calm, like this is exactly where I belong. Which is a trauma response really. It's about getting so used to adrenaline and chaos and to violence that your body just taps into that, and feels more easeful there.
But I’ve felt the opposite of that recently. And I really want to just be an artist. I really want to make art. Like, I'm not aiming for catharsis from this. But I feel like, hopefully by exploring this live in a theater in a creative way, people will have space for that too, to reflect on their own traumas and secret pains and see Pippa as a creature who suffers like them. “What do I need as a creature who suffers in this world?” Cause we all do. That's what it all comes back to.
JOSH BISKER Josh Bisker is a queer artist and activist with a background in urban planning. His work explores the intersection of spatial design and social liberation in New York City and beyond.
MONICA HUNKEN is an award-winning performer, writer and activist who creates autobiographical theatre. Her solo shows have been produced in New York, Australia, the Netherland’s, Norway and Glastonbury among others. She is Co-Artistic Director for New York based Al Límite Collective. She is a lifelong cyclist, having ridden solo through over 20 countries while also being a devoted activist, teaching and leading creative direct action workshops in NYC and abroad. She trained at the NYU Tisch Experimental Theatre Wing. www.monicahunken.com
GOOD DAY, SUNSHINE by Monica Hunken, directed by Melissa Chambers will premiere at Sheffield Theatres, UK on September 28th. More information HERE.
Photography: Cultural Resistance March: Ash Marrinaccio and Ken Schles, The Wild Finish and Good Day Sunshine: Hunter Canning, Mount Rushmore: Ken Schles. Street Theatre Workshop: Asmaa Khali
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