tania_and_angela

(Tania Katan [right] with Angela Ellsworth)


At the recent edition of the Southwest Arts Conference at the Chandler arts center, PHXated was sitting with an old friend from high school.

Now, you don’t get to choose your oldest friends.

As it happens, she’s a Mormon, and once or twice we’ve exchanged some words given her active opposition to gay marriage.

She thinks it’s a threat to what she calls traditional marriage, and that Mormons are being persecuted for their beliefs on the subject.

I’m a bit more reality based; I know that both of her contentions are ludicrous, and that history will rule that she, and her church, were bigots.

Call PHXated a radical, but he finds it hard to understand religious groups that go around persecuting minorities.

You’d think that members of these ostentatious religions would for appearance’s sake if nothing else institutionally be on the side of the opppressed, the despised, and the vulnerable.

But no.

Still, as I said, friends are friends.

Anyway, we were chatting at the conference waiting for the lunchtime entertainment, which was going to be a monologue from the local performer Tania Katan.

Katan manifested, suddenly, on stage and began speaking in rapid-fire fashion. She’s short, and almost wiry; but her tousled hair, outsized glasses and manic energy create a compulsively watchable presence on stage.

She immediately started talking about Proposition 8, the Mormon-funded, anti-gay-marriage ballot initiative in California.

The setting, again, was Chandler, close to heart of the Valley’s Mormon center.

I’m paraphrasing here, but Katan said something to the effect that after Prop 8 passed she felt like going to the nearest Mormon temple, flipping it off and yelling fuck you.

But then she decided that such an approach was counterproductive.

“So I married a Mormon girl.”


I’ll always be thankful to Katan for that perfect moment.

As it happens, she did, in effect, marry a Mormon girl; her partner is Angela Ellsworth, the noted local artist.

Katan’s one-woman show, Saving Tania’s Privates, opens at the Little Theater at the Phoenix Theater on Thursday. It’s the first time the show has been staged in Phoenix; previously, she’s taken it to Edinburgh, Seattle and Philadelphia.

It’s a memoir about a lot of things, but mostly about her two battles with breast cancer, the first at the unfathomably early age of 21.

PHXated has been carrying on an email exchange with Katan. Part one is below; the second will be posted tomorrow.

You can see Katan’s web site here.

I’m including a video preview of her show at the bottom of this page.

Figuring out how to buy tickets on the Phoenix Theater’s site is a chore and a half. Here’s where you need to go.


PHXAted: Can we talk about writing for a bit? What were your earliest favorite writers? Was there a point at which you decided that’s for me? What’s the first thing you wrote?

Tania Katan: My academic career started at [Scottsdale’s] Tonto Elementary School. And when you attend a school named after the stereotypical sidekick of a masked white man, well, just surviving is rigorous enough, but reading, no, I didn’t do any of that.

I spent most of K-4th grade in Learning Disability classes, where reading wasn’t encouraged as much as shutting up. So instead of losing myself in the world of Huck Finn or Little Women, my connection to text and escapism was found through television and films. Woody Allen, Gilda Radner, Joan Rivers, and Tracey Ullman were some of my favorite writer/performers growing up.

I think it’s when I saw Gilda Radner jumping around on a couch as the spastic Girl Scout from London, England, with no shame, like she was proud to be in Learning Disability class, like her being different was what granted her total freedom; that’s when I realized that I desired to have that kind of freedom, that I wanted to express myself like that.

My first large, comprehensive piece of writing was a book, a novel, based loosely on my own story entitled 16, Dateless and Jewish. I wrote it when I was 16, dateless and Jewish. I just found the entire manuscript, in a folder that has BOOK written in fading blue ink with doodles that I made and quotes written all over it.

The manuscript has beautiful misspellings, white-out smudges, fading typewritten letters. For some chapters I used an even older method of writing—that’s right a feather and ink. When I’m super famous I’ll have the whole thing published as is.

PHXated: What’s your writing process? What was it like originally? Has it changed? Particularly in your current genre, the memoir, it’s an intensely personal effort, isn’t it? Do you work with someone to shape ideas and improve the theatricality?

Tania Katan: The initial process of writing memoir involves vomiting up as many memories/ideas/ themes as I can, then picking through the vomit to find chunks of clarity, stories, and threads that start to connect the pieces, make them part of a larger whole. Yeah, puking, that’s the biggest part of the process, good thing I get motion sickness.

I have a posse of friends who are authors, screenwriters and visionaries, that graciously read my work and offer honest and clear feedback.

PHXated: You are so mean to Mormons.

Tania Katan: Um, I think you’re projecting. I’m the one who married a Mormon. I love Mormons!

Seriously, I have two types of women that I go crazy for: Mormons and Jews. Any woman who plans her next meal before finishing the meal she’s eating, is, well, sexy. Whether she has a one-year supply or just eager to eat her next meal; I like my ladies hungry and prepared.

(Part two is tomorrow.)

Here’s the trailer for her show: