I Interview Playwrights Part 387: Jon Kern

photo by RJ Tolan
Jon Kern

Hometown: New York (Manhattan)

Current Town: New York (Brooklyn)

Q:  Tell me about We in Silence Hear a Whisper.

A:  We in Silence Hear a Whisper tells the story of a young refugee girl trying to survive in Sudan as she’s pursued by the malevolent Man on a Horse. To do the Hollywood thing, the play is No Country for Old Men meets Alice in Wonderland meets a Nicholas Kristoff NYT column on the genocide in Sudan. My first ideas for the play came in 2004, when I was reading those Kristoff columns. I didn’t begin writing the play until 2008 when I had a deadline for an EST/Youngblood reading. I wanted to see if I could write about something as soul crushing as genocide while still having the elements of good entertainment: humor, action, and empathy. An older draft of the play is responsible for my being awarded a Van Lier Fellowship at New Dramatists, which basically stopped me from quitting play writing. It’s very gratifying to see the play finally get produced [thanks to Red Fern and Melanie Williams] after many, many, many rewrites.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I’m presently working on rewrites for my chopsocky multi-ethnic identity play Tapefaces: Legend of a Kung Fu Master – Season 1 DVD with the director Sherri Barber for Ars Nova’s ANT Fest. I’m waiting around as my agent shops my best full-length Modern Terrorism, or They Who Want to Kill Us and How We Learn to Love Them, which is its own kind of Beckettian work. Currently, I’m helping the playwright Carla Ching hone her play The Sugar House at the Edge of the Wilderness as dramaturg/drinking buddy. Soon, I’m to begin developing a new play with the Civilians R&D Group on internet addiction. I also have an outstanding [as in late] Sloan Commission, which makes it hard for me to look EST’s Graeme Gillis in the eye. And my agent wants me to work on this comedy about a college football so he doesn’t have to try to sell chopsocky multi-ethnic identity plays to a wary off-Broadway community.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  The hardest I ever worked in school – elementary or high school – was on crafting jokes. And I was a nerd. I used to have to double bag my textbooks in two brown Macy’s Cellar bags because my backpack was already packed to the ripping point. The first instance of hard work was in 5th grade, when for parents’ day, I wrote a commercial sketch for Billy Bob’s Bar-b-que Sauce, a parody of the Folger’s crystals commercials where they would surprise customers with the reveal that the coffee they ordered was in fact Folger’s! Replace “Folger’s” with “Billy Bob’s Bar-b-que Sauce,” add a bunch of kids doing over-the-top Southern accents, and you get the idea. It was this moment that I first knew I wanted to be a writer. The second instance of hard work was in senior year of high school when I stayed up all night crafting comedy bits from The New York Times articles for a presentation on The Daily Show. Many years later I found out a friend of mine didn’t believe I wrote the jokes. Accusations of plagiarism: the highest of compliments. From these two experiences I realized the only thing I can conceive worth spending hours and hours of energy and effort to do well is entertaining other people. Everything else, such as making money or being an adult human being, seems unimportant.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  “Theater” is not a monolith. There are many different kinds of and forms of theater going on, each with their own specific issues to address. I’m not sure there is a single panacea for the multi-faced commercial art known as “theater.” If I had to reach, the one thing I can think of that applies somewhat universally is the lack of well-executed sword fights. Sword fights have been exciting entertainment for millennia. Anything that wishes to label itself as “theater” could stand a few more sword fights. I too am guilty of this.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I could give a list of famous names [Chekhov, Pinter, Churchill] or slightly less famous names [Lloyd Suh, New Dramatists], or seem sentimental and say my parents, whose self-dramatizing nature and emotional neglect truly helped to create most of my characters’ voices. [I love you, Mom and Dad!] But instead I choose to interpret this question with the answer, “My favorite theatrical superhero is Nightcrawler: he could teleport, his appearance made him an outsider, and I believe he quoted from Shakespeare a couple of times in the Alan Davis run on Excalibur.”

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I fell out of my front row seat from laughing when I saw Quinn Bauriedel, Geoff Sobelle, and Trey Lyford’s Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines at Here Arts Center. I also loved, and still think upon, the Foundry Theater’s production of Ariana Reines’s Telephone. The connecting thread between these two shows is lost on me, and I’m inside my own head.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Learn to cook. It saves you money, and makes for better parties. Also, don’t be afraid to ask people for assistance, even if you feel they are more successful than you, and don’t get discouraged if they say no. Even when they say no, they wish they could say yes.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  We in Silence Hear a Whisper runs from October 5 - 23 at The Theater at the 14th Street Y, 344 East 14th Street, produced by Red Fern Theater Company. For tickets and showtimes and other such details, go to here: http://redferntheatre.org/p_we_in_silence_hear_a_whisper.asp

Tapefaces: Legend of a Kung Fu Master – Season 1 DVD will be a part of Ars Nova’s ANT Fest on Nov. 15. You can get tickets, and see a disturbing photo, here: http://www.arsnovanyc.com/index.php/lineup/149-tapefaces-legend-of-a-kung-fu-master-season-1-dvd

Carla Ching’s The Sugar House at the Edge of the Wilderness runs from November 8 - December 4 at The Connelly Theater, 220 E 4th St., produced by the Ma-Yi Theater Company. To found out more about this play [which I am proud to be associated with], go here: http://www.ma-yitheatre.org

I Interview Playwrights Part 386: Sylvan Oswald

Photograph by Geoff Green -- geoffgreen.com

Sylvan Oswald

Hometown: Philadelphia

Current Town: Brooklyn

Q:  Tell me about Nightlands.

A:  NIGHTLANDS is the story of two women, a working-class Jewish housewife and an African-American astrologer, whose unlikely bond is tested on the eve of Philadelphia’s 1964 riots. It’s highly fictionalized and stylized but based on the story of how my grandmother learned astrology – she actually studied in the 1970s – but it was still somewhat scandalous. She went on to have her own radio show and teach a bunch of people who are still practicing writing horoscopes for newspapers and such. She made a set of teach-yourself-astrology instructional tapes (soundtrack: “Neptune, the mystic” from Gustav Holst’s The Planets) and sent all her grandchildren astrology tapes on our birthdays – telling us about the months ahead. She’d say amazing things like “make sure no one is trying to hoodwink you.” One or two of her lines made it into the play.

Her teacher was a brilliant woman with expertise in all manner of spiritual subjects including Kabbalah. As part of her apprenticeship, my grandmother would drive her teacher to these astrology conferences in Atlantic City. Can you imagine the sea air, the deep talk. That scene’s for the film adaptation if I could be so lucky.

In writing the play I wrestled a lot with how, as a white writer, to tell this story in its period, with all its taboos, racial strife, and repression, while creating nuanced and complex characters. I spent a lot of time thinking about framing and historical inaccuracy because I was less interested in portraying repressed states than in dramatizing their upheaval.

The production I’m building with Tamilla Woodard, our designers, and New Georges has a feeling of suspending the characters in space and time. It’s set in “a memory of North Philadelphia,” so there’s that sense of that one chair from your grandparents’ house, it’s nubby fabric, and not the whole house. That one radio. Her skirt. Sound and light refract as if reaching us across generations.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  A new play called PROFANITY. I put some of the process images up on my new site (sylvanoswald.com) even though the play is still in the works. It’s about some real estate agents in Philadelphia in the 1950s who are selling land that doesn’t exist. It’s based in part on my shyster great uncles and the neighborhood where my mom grew up, the Logan section of Philadelphia, where all the houses sank into the ground. It’s the last play in my mysteries trilogy with SUN RA and NIGHTLANDS. I’ve been doing all this thinking about self-fashioned spiritualities and how they can be alternately nationalistic, violent, or queer.

I’m also working on a music-theater piece called ZOETROPE with Alec Duffy and Mimi Lien. It’s a song cycle about the increasing boundarylessness of our lives as the realization continues to dawn on most of the country that being an imperial power may be a bad idea – and of course the searchability of all our selves online contributes to this feeling of privacy and sovreignty turned inside out. Living rooms appear in offices, kitchens appear outside, groups of people sleep in the same bed. It’s a cast of seven people, a range of ages, races and ethnicities, and genders. They sing tuneful songs that, if you listen closely, don’t quite make sense. Kind of Gertrude Stein meets musical theater. We’re inspired by Robert Ashley, Meredith Monk, and Einstein on the Beach.

Also, I wrote a very dark and strange play during a recent silent retreat led by Erik Ehn and the Pataphysics crew down in Texas. It was 107 degrees most days.

Q:  Tell me about Play A Journal of Plays.

A:  Jordan Harrison and I started PLAY A JOURNAL OF PLAYS in grad school at Brown in part to process all the incredible experimental writing we were encountering. The other part was suddenly realizing that as emerging artists we were in this awkward bottom-of-the-totem-pole position where we had to ask for things and send away by mail and wait to be anointed or something and that just wasn’t going to be very satisfying or pro-active. Completely out of our control. So we wanted to emerge with an offering of sorts. We wanted to emerge participating, contributing. Already giving.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  In no particular order: Gertrude Stein, Suzan-Lori Parks, Adrienne Kennedy, Paula Vogel, Erik Ehn, Mac Wellman, Jordan Harrison, Karinne Keithley, Anne Washburn, Big Dance Theater, Dan Hurlin.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Emotionally truthful, aesthetically rigorous, politically risky, underrepresented voices and viewpoints, ethically engaged in its choices, visually tuned, physically virtuosic.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Don’t wait for something to happen to you. Reach out. Show up. Make friends and take care of them. Make mentors and take care of them. Turn off the internet. Don't rush to understand your writing.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Come see NIGHTLANDS directed by Tamilla Woodard produced by New Georges at HERE running Oct 5-29, opening night Oct 10!

I Interview Playwrights Part 385: Mickey Birnbaum

Mickey Birnbaum

Hometown:  Los Angeles.

Current Town:  Los Angeles.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  A play about backyard wrestling, and another one about the American Revolution that's kind of a cross between "The Romans in Britain" and "Our Town." I'm also starting up as an MFA student this month to earn a writing degree and hopefully embrace the life of an academic in my non-existent free time.

Q:  How does your film work inform your playwriting and vice versa?

A:  The world keeps getting more visual every day, so we better speak its language. When I started writing plays I purposely used movie rhythms -- short scenes, impossibly epic settings -- especially because I am usually trying to write for a relatively young audience that would just as soon be watching movies on their iPhones. Then for a while I got ornery and wrote things that looked marginally more like standard plays, with some unity of time and space. Now, I'm ready to go back to exploding time and space. As far as the film work goes, I'm trying to migrate into more of a TV sensibility, where story flows from character, and language trumps visual.

Q:  How would you describe the LA theater scene?

A:  The most talented people I've ever come across, and some of the most generous and supportive. This being such a big city, full of nooks and crannies, it's sometimes hard to find or just reach some of the best companies doing the most ground-breaking work. Like, it's weird to find a stellar production in a well-equipped waiver theater in a mini-mall on the eastern stretch of Anaheim, but so it goes. Sometimes I think if the community were more centralized, it would thrive more, but who really knows? In any case, theater artists who persevere in the face of a failing economy, public apathy, and lack of institutional support are heroes, as far as I'm concerned. Or maybe that's just the definition of an artist in America, unfortunately.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  One of my earliest memories is being four years old and standing outside the LA County Courthouse, and my mom telling me I had a new name. She had fled cross-country out of spite to prevent my dad from having visitation after their divorce. She wouldn't talk about him thereafter. It took me 35 years to find him. He was a great guy. A couple years after that name change, my mom and her date (who became my step-dad) took me to see Bob Barker's Marionette Theater. Those are kind of like the north & south poles of my life.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  Realistically, I'd like to see the larger, more successful institutions nurturing smaller companies and writers with promise. Unrealistically, I'd like to see new plays in every theater in the country, playing to packed houses.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  The usual thugs, Miller, Pinter, Beckett, Thornton Wilder above all. More recently, Franz Xaver Kroetz, Howard Brenton, Philip Ridley, Martin McDonagh, John Steppling, and about a million others. All my colleagues are better writers than I, and thank god I have the opportunity to learn from them. At the risk of playing favorites, Jacqueline Wright's the most fearless playwright I know, and an amazing actress as well. I've worked with her a lot, lucky me.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Where narrative & non-linear collide. Where there is deep, deep feeling. Where realism and surrealism mesh. Where I don't know where the stage ends and I begin.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Read Shakespeare. Find a playwright/teacher to learn from, someone whose lineage you want to follow. Think of them as a Shaolin monk, and you the apprentice. Renounce the world, it will not reward you for wanting to be a playwright, and embrace the art. Raise a family, Dig in the ground. Recognize you are mortal. Do not try to write for film or television until you are in your forties and have a voice that is unassailable by the influence of idiots. Be original. If you want to be a genre writer, go immediately to film or television, do not pass go, do not collect the two hundred dollars you would get for your play. If you can't go on, go on. Kick against the pricks. Fail, as often as possible. Be vulnerable. Eat well and exercise. Learn to rest in contradictions. Negative capability is your friend.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Find me among more illustrious company at www.dogear.org.

upcoming for Adam

Hi all,

I have a web series being taped this fall called Compulsive Love that I'm really excited about.  If you can spare a few bucks, I'd really appreciate it.  Every cent helps.  http://www.indiegogo.com/Compulsive-Love-1#team

Next a reading of Elsewhere in Houston Oct 3: http://www.mildredsumbrella.com/mu/Mildreds_Umbrella.html  (this will be the 7th or so reading.  We did a production in Florida a couple months ago that went well and there will be a NYC production this winter.)

A production of Fat Cat Killers in Philly starting October 26.
http://www.flashpointtheatre.org/

More shows coming up I don't have dates for yet-- 2 in LA, 4 more in NYC, one in Las Vegas, one at a college in WI, and one probably in Istanbul.  I'll let you know more when I do.

I Interview Playwrights Part 384: Jeff Talbott

Jeff Talbott

Hometown: Kimball, Nebraska

Current Town: Sunnyside, Queens, NYC

Q:  Tell me about The Submission.

A:  Hm. The Submission is a play about a guy who has a lot to learn. Hopefully. It's a play about where we are right now and conversations we should be having about how we can maybe be in a better place. Hopefully. It's a comedy for awhile, and then not a comedy at all. It's a play about a friendship and a play about being young and sure that you're right, sure that you're a good person and sure that the world is going to get all of that. And learning that none of that is 100% true. Or true at all. Hopefully.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I just finished drafts of two new plays, one is a workplace comedy (comedy? hm. well...) about how little we know each other, and the other is a comedy about Alzheimer's and how we build a family. I am taking notes on something new that I think is about high school teachers. And something that I think will be about adoption. At least right now I think that's what they will be about.

Q:  How does your acting inform your writing and vice versa?

A:  I think acting informs my writing in a lot of ways, but probably the purest way is I write fairly blankly about what I think an actor is doing. I only write what they say (for the most part - obviously I have opinions about how it gets played out, and I use stage directions when I need to, but sparingly). Because my favorite part of being an actor is making up the story in my head, privately - so as a writer I want to make sure there's a strong template so an actor can do that - can interpret - without a heavy hand from me. Same for the director. It's fun to watch people figure out their own way in, and then to get to respond only if it seems to not be helping the story. And writing influencing my acting? Hm. I think it has made me much more aware of how hard every single syallable is to get right, so I try to honor that as an actor. I was always a big verbatim guy, but writing has only strengthened that.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  Wow. I dunno. I guess I'll tell this one. When I was in high school, we did The Odd Couple. I played Felix. I come from a very small town, and we had limited resources with which to produce plays. So the entire set was made up of furniture from the drama club coach's house (it's important to note we had a different drama coach each year I was in high school - it was a job nobody wanted). We did two performances and at the end of the first one we were all in the cafeteria and I realized the coach/director wasn't there, so I went back to the auditorium to get her and found her sitting on the set, in the middle of her furniture, quietly weeping. And she said to go back the party, she'd be there later. I think what that taught me is that there's a cost to what we do, and I try to honor that, or remember it, when I do it. Or it could've just been that she (a) missed her funiture, (b) hated us, (c) hated her life, (d) hated the play or some combo platter of the above. But in retrospect for me, I made it a life lesson about what we do. Not because I'm deep, just because I never forgot it.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  It would cost less to see (and pay more to do).

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Gee. I have so many. Ibsen was great. It's easy to love Chekhov, but I love Ibsen as much. Less subtle but a lot of punch. If you don't know Little Eyeolf (nobody does), you should. Wow, that guy was great at what he did. I dunno. There are so many great people doing this, and some of them are my friends, so I hate to name names right now - because I'd leave somebody out and I'd feel bad. So I'm sticking with Ibsen for today.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  The kind that doesn't bore me. I see a lot, and there's nothing I hate more than middle-of-the-house theatre. You know the kind. The kind that doesn't swing for the fences, just swings to get on base. I'd much rather see a terrible, awful, unendurable failure that is trying to do something than a safe, boring nothing that only wants to please.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Write. It's the most uninspired advice in the world, only because it's good advice. Write. And get friends together to hear what you wrote. And then go home and write some more. It's hard, and lonely, and you should try to make it communal when you can. Listen to people, decide who's smart in your life and listen to them. And then go home and write some more. See plays. See as many as you can. And then go home and write some more. And drink a lot of water, because it's good for you.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  The Submission, now through Oct 22 at MCC Theater performing at the Lucille Lortel Theatre on Christopher Street.

I Interview Playwrights Part 383: Deborah Brevoort

Deborah Brevoort

Hometown:  Juneau, Alaska

Current Town:  North Bergen, NJ (New York City, really…)

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  Crossing Over, a hip-hop musical set in Amish Country, with composer Stephanie Salzman. The Comfort Team, a new play about military spouses, commissioned by Virginia Stage Company; Steal a Pencil for Me, a holocaust opera based on the book of the same title, with composer Gerald Cohen; and Embedded, a one act opera inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, with composer Patrick Soluri.

I’m finishing up the above four projects and am starting to do research on two new plays that will be set during the Revolutionary War period: Campfollowers, about the battle of the sexes between George Washington and the wives of his troops at Valley Forge, and another play about Martha Washington, for Virginia Stage.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  I was born into a family of singers. My parents performed in a Gilbert and Sullivan opera company; my brothers were musically talented. I was tone deaf. I write, because I cannot sing.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  I would make it illegal for any non-profit theatre company to extract future percentages, (i.e., participate in the future earnings) from the new works they produce. They get tax exempt status to do this and it hurts playwrights. Plus, the practice is just plain wrong.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Tennessee Williams; Lorraine Hansberry; Paula Vogel; David Greenspan; Charles Ludlum, Stephen Sondheim.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Virtuosic theatre. Theatre that is bold, theatrical, daring, moving, ruthless and inventive. I love theatre that makes use of style and form. I’m not a huge fan of naturalism or realism, but then again, Lorraine Hansberry is on my list of heroes. But she was ruthless (You know what? I just love theatre—in any style--if it’s done really well!)

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Don’t give up. It’s the most discouraging thing you could ever choose to do, but it’s possible to make a way in the world for yourself and to cobble together a living. We have enough businessmen and bankers in this country. We need artists. We need you. So write. And don’t stop. Ever.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  If you’re an opera buff, come see Embedded, my Poe opera on Nov. 10 at the De Menna Center for Classical Music.

If you’re in Spain, go see my play The Women of Lockerbie in the Catalan language (Les Dones de Lockerbie) in a wonderful production by Teatre la Dependent in Carcaixent at the Teatre Don Enrique.

And if you’re in Denmark, go see The Poetry of Pizza at the Kalundborg Theatre Society in Kalundborg

Final plug: The Comfort Team will open the Virginia Stage season in Sept 2012, so if you’re in Norfolk, don’t miss it!

 

I Interview Playwrights Part 382: Robert Askins

Rob Askins

Hometown: Cypress, Texas

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q:  Tell me about your show coming up at EST.

A:  I wrote this play called Hand to God. It’s about a Christian Puppet Ministry. It’s kind of a horror/sex/religious/comedy/grief play. Margery, played by Geneva Carr, runs the puppet club and her son, played by Steve Boyer, is the star. A while back her husband and his father died. They ain’t doing to well with it. The boy Jason is trying to be good but starts acting out with the puppet. Margey is trying to keep it together too but then bad boy in the club starts making passes at her and… well the puppet gets possessed and… I ain’t gonna spoil it but there’s blood and sex and a burning church.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I wrote a post-apocalyptic kind of Lord of the Rings, kind of Wizard of Oz thing. It’s called Pig Shit and the Frozen City. I’m doing a reading of it this Sunday with Jose Zayas at E.S.T. I’m working on a musical called Dave Koresh Super-Star. I also am putting together a psychopharm coming of age story called Adderal tm.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  Rent. Real Estate is expensive. Manhattan is stupid. If we was somewhere else where the theatres didn’t cost so much to build run or rent we could do more shows and try more things and make more shit we didn’t know would be good and then the surprise hits would feed an energy and maybe theatre would be on fire again.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I love Sarah Kane. Edward Albee made me want to do this. My Aunt Sally is amazing she builds puppets in Waco, Texas and keeps going it in spite of it all.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Genre mixing high wire acts. Sexy violent dangerous work. Stuff that ain’t been work shopped to death. Plays with a pulse. I want to be there where the feeling is. The feeling that made me want to get into this. That feeling like you don’t know what’s gonna happen and everything is up in the air and if we can just get to the next scene everything is gonna explode, fly apart in the best possible way.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Write. Write. Write. Don’t think too much. Don’t plan too much. Take classes from playwrights. Take what you can and then write. You gotta write through your shit. Write through your influences. Write through what you know is hot and keep on writing. Don’t look at the success around you. Don’t look at who is getting the money or praise. When you sit down try and empty the barrel. It is you and the page my friend. You and the page. If you make it great. If they like it great. But in the end you’re writing for you kid and you better be loving what you do.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Come see Hand To God. Opening October 24th Closing November 19st at the Ensemble Studio Theatre.

We’re reading Pig Shit and the Frozen City at EST tomorrow Sunday September 18 @ 6 o’clock with my group Write Club.

On the October 8 I will be doing the first episode of my site-specific brunch serial called All the Little Fishes about working at a Greek restaurant at the Greek restaurant I work at. There will be food and unlimited champagne. The restaurant is Kellari Taverna 44 between 5 & 6 avenues.

Also right now I’m acting in The Tenant with The Woodshed Collective. It is great site-specific fun.

And I have a part in a webseries called The Share written by Emily Chaddick Wiess. Look for that soon.

I Interview Playwrights Part 381: Paul Cohen

Paul Cohen

Hometown: New York City

Current Town: New York City

Q:  Tell me about the Tenant.   How did you all collaborate on this project?

A:  There wasn't a ton of collaboration that I know of between playwrights. There was one very general meeting early on with all of us, but after that we just took our assigned tracks and wrote them, and then the Woodshed Collective took these tracks and formed them into a cohesive whole. This actually made it a lot more fun to watch, because most of the play was completely new to me both times I went to see it.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I've got a play that's been called Untitled Genocide Comedy (that won't be the actual name) that has been bouncing around for a while, and almost got done a few times. There's one based on a Henry James short story. There are various others at various stages of development.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  In second grade a friend of mine yelled "Vaginas" in the middle of class. Out of nowhere. It actually didn't get a huge laugh, and I didn't think it was funny, but I did think it was a good thing to say. I still like that he went plural rather than singular with it. I guess I learned a lot about the power of words (he wouldn't have gotten in as much trouble if he'd used a different word) and about the power of performance (he wouldn't have gotten in trouble at all if he'd whispered "vaginas" quietly to himself.) Years later (maybe fifth grade) I asked him why he'd done it. He said, "Man, times were different."

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  It would be good if people wanted to watch plays, especially new plays. Let's say 160 million people watch television in the United States on an average night. I would make it so that a quarter of them would want to watch a play (the other 120 million would still watch TV.) This brings up some serious logistical problems, but we'd deal with them.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I like good writing and good acting.

Q:  If you had to compare Adam Szymkowicz to a bird which bird would it be?

A:  The Golden Eagle: majestic and cunning.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  For at least a year work a job that is illegal (doesn't have to be drug-dealing, but something like that.) The situations are inherently dramatic, with lots of vivid characters, plus all the regular officeplace politics. Also there are many excellent writing/theater programs in prison, especially in New York and Massachusetts. I'm pretty sure Tony Kushner killed a guy--but that's taking things too far.

I Interview Playwrights Part 380: Stephen Karam

Stephen Karam 

Hometown: Scranton, PA

Current Town: New York, NY

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I’m finishing rewrites on Sons of the Prophet, a play that will have its New York premiere in October at Roundabout Theater Company. It’s a dark comedy about a guy coping with chronic pain. More generally, you could call it a comedy about human suffering. It explores the particularly messy portions of our lives – the times in which you find yourself coping with multiple life issues, and before any of them can be resolved – two more show up on your plate.

I’m also working on the libretto to a chamber opera with music by Nico Muhly called Dark Sisters, which runs Nov. 9th – 19th in NYC before moving to Philadelphia in June 2012. I’m also starting to re-write an absurdist farce that takes place in an abandoned hospital called Girl on Girl. The play scares away most people but I’m hoping mount a small production downtown, maybe self-produce with wildly talented friends.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  When I was fourteen, and completely closeted, I entered my public high school’s talent show and sang “Last Night of the World” from Miss Saigon in front of the entire student body. Earnestly. With a karaoke tape I purchased with my birthday money. I had thick plastic glasses, mild acne and baggy dress pants. So. That happened. In a more metropolitan city/town it would have been a coming out party. But this was Scranton High School, where I was merely identified as being a tremendous dork. Before I went on stage, I was somehow not burdened by the reality of how I appeared to everyone else. Afterwards I was. I began to take life - and myself - way too seriously. Now I’m trying to get that bravery back – not the courage to belt Bui Doi – but generally speaking, to take more risks as an artist. I mean, it’s only a play.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  The major non-profits would offer health insurance to writers they produce on their mainstage. The receptionist at a non-profit gets access to insurance, but playwrights aren’t afforded the option of coverage even for the year their play is running. Everyone shies away from this question because it’s tricky - playwrights aren’t staff members, nor do we work a set number of hours a week – so there isn’t an easy solution. But if the non-profits don’t step up to the plate and care enough to make this a priority, I think they’ll receive less and less high-quality plays since many of the best writers are spending 9 months a year writing for television so that they can meet basic financial needs and be able to see doctors.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Williams, Chekhov, Wilder, Shakespeare, Churchill, Orton, Craig Lucas, Paula Vogel, Tony Kushner, Robert Wilson; a handful of newer voices whose work has excited me recently: Melissa James Gibson, Young Jean Lee, Dan LeFranc, Keith Bunin, Annie Baker.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Any kind that moves me. I like being moved. Laughing out loud. I like being scared. I like dance/movement driven work. I like not knowing what’s going to happen next. Feeling like I’ve been gut-punched, it’s all good.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Do whatever works for you.

My path in NYC was anchored around a day job that had nothing to do with writing or the arts. For around 7 years I had a permanent 30-hr/week job at a Canadian Law Firm working as a legal assistant. It was a good fit and gave me health insurance. I could leave the job behind when I left the office. It left me the headspace and the energy to create. I opened four plays in seven years in three different cities during that time. Using vacation days!

That being said, most of my colleagues have gone the MFA route. I’m sure I would have loved that experience; I still think about going someday – I love the notion of having the space and time to dream big while also having some sort of solid mentorship. I missed out on all that.

Read as many plays as you can get your hands on. Experience as many other art forms as you can, don’t just read/see plays. I’d also remind writers starting out that many exciting new plays get rejected by subscriber-based theaters. A rejection is not always a reflection of the quality of the work, but sometimes a reflection of the kind of play the subscription-based theater favors.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:

--Sons of the Prophet http://www.roundabouttheatre.org/offbroadway/sonsoftheprophet/

--Dark Sisters http://www.darksistersopera.org/

I Interview Playwrights Part 379: Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig

Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig

Hometown:
I'm not really of a place. But I hope to be someday.

Current Town:
Austin, Texas.

Q:  Tell me about Lidless.

A:  It's a work of speculative drama imagining the consequences of the United States government authorizing the use of the female body in the 'War on Terror,' and specifically, to make a Muslim man stop praying.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I spent the past ten years working on my 'artistic' muscles if you will, and focused too much on that at the expense of other components of what I consider to be a healthy, balanced, vibrant life. The 'writing' work will always be done - I know how to be alone in a room and spend thousands of hours growing an idea into a literary work. What I know less about and am working on is how to not become too cynical or despairing when the work I am doing has a lot of darkness, and how to grow in and maintain human relationships over time. A lot of the theatre-making process is similar to a nomadic childhood - a really intense finite period, and then dispersal. A wise man once told me that you can't make new old friends.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  I would bankrupt all the media conglomerates and support the emergence of a truly independent media. Then theatre producers wouldn't have to rely on a single reviewer to make or break their shows and could be much braver and bolder in their programming.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  He's not exactly a hero because he is also cynical asshole, but Edward Bernays was a pretty amazing manipulator of the masses and stager of street theatre. I love the way Ariane Mnouchkine works and wish there was a Cartoucherie in Austin.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  The kind where systemically oppressed people realize they are performing their oppression in a ritualistic fashion, stop doing that, and build an alternative.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Try thinking of yourself as an ecosystem that has it's unique needs and features. Understand what this ecosystem needs to grow and sustain itself over time - not weeks or months, but years and decades. You might have a daily writing practice and largely monastic life. You might travel and do other work for nine months of the year and then have a really focused and intense three months of writing. Try lots of different practices and ways of provoking yourself and expanding your frames, writing, and rewriting. Let go of what isn't working and hold on to what is. Don't think someone else's bizarre idiosyncratic writing ritual is going to work for you - but try it just the same. And stop doing what isn't helping you.

Read "The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property" by Lewis Hyde to get an idea of the range of economic relationships an artist can have to their work. Spend some years outside your culture of origin. Long enough for it to start to seem alien and for its rituals and identity-constructions to seem as constructed as anything you might make for a performance. Pursue a life of downward mobility. Try to be as little a wage-slave as possible so you can spend as much of your time thinking, reading, writing and interacting on your own terms for your own reasons. Don't be afraid to spend two or three years on a play before showing it to anyone. Don't try to be too much of a careerist about it - your work will suffer.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Lidless, the play I described above, is having its New York premiere at the Walkerspace September 20 - October15, produced by Page 73 [www.p73.org] and directed by Tea Alagic. I am honored to collaborate with such an amazing group of theatre artists, and can't wait to see what we collectively create.


www.francesyachucowhig.com

Compulsive Love

We're trying to raise money right now in order to film a web series I wrote.  If everyone who sees this gives three dollars, I'll be funded.  Do you have three dollars to spare?  For 50 cents more, Kevan Tucker the director will kiss you.

http://www.indiegogo.com/Compulsive-Love-1


Compulsive Love loves IndieGoGo from Tim O'Neill on Vimeo.

I Interview Playwrights Part 378: Karen Smith Vastola

Karen Smith Vastola

Hometown: A small town in upstate New York

Current Town: New York, NY

Q:  Tell me about Buried Words.

A:  I began work on the play while in Columbia MFA program. It had a reading at Rattlestick Playwright’s Theatre. More revisions. There was more developmental work done (revisions) at the terraNOVA Collective playwrights group. Accepted by 2011 Fringe Festival. Rehearsed for three weeks under the direction of Johanna Gruenhut. More revisions and new scenes added. It started as an imagined conversation between two grown women remembering childhood events with a mother who evoked a mixture of fascination, fear and anger. These three emotions fuel their imaginations. Ultimately it became about these same two women as children reconsidering the violence of both parents towards themselves and each other through the acting out of past events.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  Most recently, I began work on a play set in a long distance train ride across the US. Time, home, references...are suspended for its travelers. Within a small, crowded space travelers are forced to deal with issues of class, race, and each other’s very different needs. Conflicts, outright clashes, possibly understanding may develop. I am also revising two plays for younger actors. The first called Useless Inc. includes Coco Chanel, Ayn Rand and a time-traveling mannequin set in the old Hollywood and Paris in the early 1900’s. The second is a very loose adaptation of the Pinocchio story set in World War I.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  A hardscrabble life where one of the options was voluntarily asking for safe haven in an orphanage three blocks from my house. A strict Catholic education that put the both the fear of the retributions of sin and the belief in miracles which kept me on the straight and narrow until I could leave town. A sister who held an imagination and sense of adventure that symbiotically entered my being.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  A national theatre system that is subsidized by the government, similar to the one in Great Britain, so that all classes of people could afford to buy a ticket and artists who wanted to make theatre could have a place to practice, It happened once in this country as part of WPA in the 1930’s. It put a lot of people back to work, and more Americans across the country, in every region, saw more theatre, then they had ever seen before. Also, an end to all bias- gender, race, sexual orientation, religion and age. It‘s written into the laws for government funding, but a lot of folks ignore it and few challenge those who control the choices. Sorry that’s two things. Writers can’t count.

Q:  
Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Behn, Calderon, Everyman, Schiller, Durrenmatt, Beckett, Genet, Pirandello, Wilder, Williams, O’Neill, Wilson, Pinter, Kane, Bond. Still with us heroes: Albee, Churchill, Kennedy, Guare, Ruhl, Parks, Fornes, Kushner, Adams, Hare, Eno, Gibson, Moses, Machado, Stuart, Koteles, Szymkowicz, Walker, Walsh, Lawson, Cohen, Vourakis, Swedeen, Empfield, Wallace and Wertenbaker.

Q:  

What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Committed. Intense. Truthful. Highly theatrical. Highly Imaginative. Ideas that abound. Anything directed by the Peruvian director, Gisela Cardenas, the French director, Mnouchkine or the American director Johanna Gruenhut. Theatre Complicite, Elevator Repair Service. Abbey Theater, The Civilians, Performance Lab 115, Flux Theatre and watching plays written by all of the previously mentioned theatrical heroes.



Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Write. Write alone and with a weekly group of writers whose opinions you value. Attend Grad school if you can afford it, become homeless, but gifted, and then apply to grad school for scholarships. Send your plays out. Befriend members of your own tribe- actors, directors, stage mangers, etc. If theatre companies don’t want to do your plays, produce them yourselves – on the street, in churches, your studio apartment. Never give up - life for most is long. Believe in your work and keep people close who love you and also believe in your work. Any art is a difficult choice. Persevere and Revise!



Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Go see my play Buried Words at the Kraine Theatre, 85 East 4th Street- August 15, 20, 24, 27 & 28. It’s part of the International New York Fringe Festival.

I Interview Playwrights Part 377: David Grimm

David Grimm

Hometown: Born in Oberlin, Ohio

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  Trying to start a new play. Just got back in town from workshopping two new plays: one at Portland Center Stage’s JAW Festival, with director David Esbjornson. It’s called TALES FROM RED VIENNA. The other at the Huntington Theatre in Boston, with director Peter Dubois. That one is about the Hays Production Code in Hollywood in 1934 and its called THEY DON’T MAKE ‘EM LIKE THAT NO MORE. I’ve also been working on my first musical for the past two years with Harry Connick Jr writing the music and George C Wolfe attached to direct. Trying to develop a couple other musical projects. Oh and adapting an old pre-code movie for the stage for drag queen, Varla Jean Merman.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  For six formative years of my upbringing, I lived in Israel. When I was in the third grade, I developed a crush on Karen, one of the popular girls. I desperately wanted to be her friend. To be accepted. To be one of the cool kids. I was terrified of approaching her, for fear of being rejected.

Somehow, I got it into my head that the ideal way to share my feelings with Karen would be through writing her a note, rather than in person. I’m not sure why but I blame my education in classical literature.

Anyway -- I wrote the note and, during recess, slipped it onto her desk. Immediately I ran outside and did my best to act nonchalant and casual. However, I soon became aware that the popular girls had gathered like swarm of buzzing bees, whispering together heatedly and pointing in my direction. Had they all read my note? My face flushed with shame but I kept up the act.

Back in class, Karen had vanished and no one seemed to know where. When the teacher (a particularly sadistic young woman in a mini-skirt, platform shoes, and a beehive) inquired as to Karen’s whereabouts, one of the nastier girls chimed in with sing-song cruelty: “David left a note on her desk and she went home crying.”

Crying? How could that be? Had my words of affection and adulation been so traumatic to her as to bring her to tears? Was the prospect of my friendship so horrible to contemplate? What had I done?

Cruella (I don’t remember the teacher’s name) sent me out to find Karen and bring her back.

Standing at a dusty crossroads in the middle of nowhere (the town was still being built and carved out of the dry desert land), I had no idea in which direction Karen had gone. I returned to the classroom a failure. A shamed failure, at that. But Cruella wasn’t done with me. Having failed to bring Karen back, I was to stand before the whole class (40-45 students) and tell everyone what horrible thing I’d written to her to cause her such distress. I stood there, but wouldn’t speak.

That was the first time I realized the power of the written word. It was also the first time something I’d written got me in trouble. I’ve been doing some version of that ever since.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  Only ONE? Well then, I’d change the ticket prices to make it affordable. I hate that theatre in America is the privilege of the upper classes, as opposed to the art of the masses. I hate that it speaks to one socio-economic bracket and ends up saying the same thing over and over to them, preaching to the choir.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Marlowe for putting free verse on the stage; Shakespeare for eclipsing him; Moliere for poking at hypocrisy; Wycherley for doing it in English; Wilde for his wit; Orton for his naughtiness; John Guare for making it American.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theatre of language and ideas. Theatre of scope and ambition. The collective theatrical imagination gets smaller as the filmic imagination expands. Why is this? Of course, there’s the economic considerations, but is that the complete answer? Have we put a price tag on our imagination? What a shameful turn of events if that is so.

I love theatre that dares. I love theatre that has epic size and consequences and good stories. A feast for the ears as well as the minds and the eyes.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Read plays.

For quite a few years now, I’ve been teaching playwriting. Yale School of Drama, Brown University, Columbia University, and now at the Dramatic Writing Program at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. It continues to amaze me how poorly read so many graduate playwriting students are. This past year, I had a student who had never read a play before being accepted into the program.

Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Writing a play is not only a communication between artist and audience, but between the writer and his/her fellow writers. It is a response to what has come before. The more you read, the more you understand what others have tried, and the more there is to respond to. Read plays, dammit.

I Interview Playwrights Part 376: Claire Moodey

Claire Moodey

Hometown: Erie, PA

Current Town: Brooklyn

Q: Tell me about < the invisible draft >

A: < the invisible draft > is a play I describe as a radio play silent movie. There are two characters: Our Man of the World, a silent movie, and the Girl with a Backpack, a radio play, who interact in a space between reality and its representation. Their scenes blossom into stop-motion animations inspired by Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. So what that boils down to is a non-narrative multi-media exploration of human experience, specifically the necessity of translating that experience in order to communicate. How's that for a mouthful?

I first started daydreaming about doing a project based on Calvino's book almost four years ago. When I first thought about the piece, I believed it was an art installation with some meandering actors or puppeteers of installation pieces not unlike Punchdrunk's Tunnel 228 which was in an old Tube station in London a couple years ago. About a year and half ago, I started writing and suddenly a lot of text started to congeal around the same set of ideas and then move further away from Calvino's book. Voice & Vision Theater, headed by Jean Wagner, has been incredibly supportive as I've developed this, my first play. Jean suggested I take a class with playwright Lisa d'Amour and then set me up with Saviana Stanescu through V&V's new mentorship program. These are both artists whom I admire and respect tremendously whose input on the show has been invaluable.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  This show has been pretty much consuming my time in the last couple weeks, but I have a some other ideas which are itching to get out. One of them has to do with color theory and Schubert, which is all I want to say about it just yet! I'll be headed up to Vermont for the last week of performance at Bread and Puppet Theater this summer after closes, which I am looking forward to, and I hope to do some more performing and lighting work this fall.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  I first got into theater when I was about nine and my brother Sam, who is now puppeteering in my show, was an Oompa Loompa in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" at the Erie Playhouse. I went to see the show and spent the time really jealous that I wasn't onstage and humming along with Willy Wonka's song "A Touch of Magic". I had a huge crush on Willy Wonka and then auditioned with my brother for "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" a couple months later and have been hooked ever since. I'm not sure what that story says about me, but I think it is funny!

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  I would make it less expensive-I think as humans we need art, we need forms of expression and play which theater makes available in a unique way. When this medium is inaccessible due to cost, I think audiences disengage, the work suffers, and we all miss out on an opportunity to come together as a community and participate in a ritual of culture, which helps us to digest our world and lives on several levels.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Samuel Beckett, JoAnne Akalaitis, Mabou Mines, Dario Fo, Dimiter Gotscheff, Christoff Marthaler, the woman who played Emilia Galotti in Thalmeier's production, the list goes on...

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I am most excited by watching theater in languages I don't entirely understand. Or understand near fluently, but not quite. It opens you up to rhythms and the musicality of the stage, the imagery in a different way; I think differently when not using English and that has the possibility of making me more acutely aware of some visceral responses which sometimes I ignore. This is also part of my interest in highly physical clown and puppet theater. I like the experience to be immersive in some way, whether or not that means you walk around and interact with the players is irrelevant.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Write a lot, dream a lot, and don't be afraid to ask questions of just about anyone. Both seek things out and let them come to you. That's what I tell myself anyway! Any advice for me?

Q:  Plugs, please:

A: < the invisible draft > opens tomorrow at Theater for the New City's Dream Up Festival and plays through next Saturday, the 20th! My stellar team of collaborators and the staff at TNC have been working tirelessly on what I believe is a beautiful production. Jonah Rosenberg has been working on the project with me for about nine months, brainstorming and engineering the sonic world of the Girl with a Backpack, played by Briana Pozner. Lotte Marie Allen, a print-maker and animator, joined the project this past spring before the workshop at Theater for the New City's Scratch Night and her vision has been invaluable to the development of the visual world of the play. Both of them are outstanding artists, as is Matteo Paoloni, the Roman actor playing Our Man of the World who has helped generate a lot of ideas in rehearsal. And this summer, Milo Cramer, Harriett Meyer, and my brother Samuel joined as puppeteers. They have been crucial as we've constructed and learned to operate the set, which is made of old moving maps.

375 Playwright Interviews (alphabetical)

Rob Ackerman
Liz Duffy Adams
Johnna Adams
Tony Adams 
David Adjmi
Keith Josef Adkins   
Derek Ahonen
Kathleen Akerley    
Zakiyyah Alexander
Luis Alfaro
Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro 
Lucy Alibar
Joshua Allen
Mando Alvarado 
Sofia Alvarez 
Christina Anderson  
Terence Anthony
Alice Austen 
Elaine Avila   
Rachel Axler
Jenny Lyn Bader
Bianca Bagatourian   
Annie Baker
Trista Baldwin
Jennifer Barclay 
Courtney Baron
Abi Basch 
Mike Batistick 
Brian Bauman
Chad Beckim
Nikole Beckwith 
Maria Alexandria Beech
Kari Bentley-Quinn 
Alan Berks
Brooke Berman
Susan Bernfield
Jay Bernzweig
Barton Bishop
Martin Blank  
Lee Blessing
Jonathan Blitstein
Adam Bock
Jerrod Bogard
Emily Bohannon
Rachel Bonds
Margot Bordelon
Deron Bos
Hannah Bos
Leslie Bramm
Jami Brandli
George Brant
Tim Braun
Delaney Britt Brewer
Jessica Brickman  
Erin Browne
Bekah Brunstetter
Monica Byrne
Renee Calarco   
Sheila Callaghan
Darren Canady
Ruben Carbajal
Ed Cardona, Jr.
Jonathan Caren
Aaron Carter
James Carter 
David Caudle
Eugenie Chan 
Clay McLeod Chapman
Christopher Chen
Jason Chimonides  
Andrea Ciannavei
Eliza Clark
Alexis Clements  
Alexandra Collier
James Comtois
Joshua Conkel
Kara Lee Corthron
Kia Corthron  
Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas
Erin Courtney
Cusi Cram
Lisa D'Amour
Heidi Darchuk
Stacy Davidowitz
Philip Dawkins
Dylan Dawson
Gabriel Jason Dean
Vincent Delaney
Emily DeVoti
Kristoffer Diaz
Jessica Dickey
Dan Dietz
Lisa Dillman
Zayd Dohrn
Bathsheba Doran
Anton Dudley
Laura Eason
Fielding Edlow
Erik Ehn
Yussef El Guindi
Libby Emmons
Christine Evans 
Jennifer Fawcett 
Joshua Fardon
Catherine Filloux   
Kenny Finkle
Stephanie Fleischmann
Kate Fodor
Sam Forman 
Dana Lynn Formby 
Darcy Fowler  
Kevin R. Free
Matthew Freeman
Edith Freni
Patrick Gabridge 
Anne Garcia-Romero
Gary Garrison 
Madeleine George
Meg Gibson
Sigrid Gilmer 
Peter Gil-Sheridan
Gina Gionfriddo
Michael Golamco
Jessica Goldberg
Daniel Goldfarb
Jacqueline Goldfinger
Jeff Goode
Christina Gorman
Craig "muMs" Grant
Katharine Clark Gray
Elana Greenfield   
Kirsten Greenidge
Jason Grote
Sarah Gubbins
Stephen Adly Guirgis
Lauren Gunderson
Laurel Haines 
Jennifer Haley
Ashlin Halfnight   
Christina Ham
Sarah Hammond
Rob Handel
Jordan Harrison
Leslye Headland
Ann Marie Healy
Julie Hebert 
Marielle Heller
Amy Herzog
Ian W. Hill  
Andrew Hinderaker
Cory Hinkle
Richard Martin Hirsch
Lucas Hnath
David Holstein
J. Holtham
Miranda Huba  
Quiara Alegria Hudes 
Les Hunter
Sam Hunter
Chisa Hutchinson
Arlene Hutton
Tom Jacobson  
Laura Jacqmin
Joshua James
Julia Jarcho
Kyle Jarrow
Rachel Jendrzejewski   
Karla Jennings
David Johnston
Nick Jones
Julia Jordan
Rajiv Joseph
Aditi Brennan Kapil
Lila Rose Kaplan  
Jeremy Kareken 
Lally Katz
Lynne Kaufman
Daniel Keene 
Karinne Keithley 
Greg Keller
Sibyl Kempson 
Anna Kerrigan
Kait Kerrigan
Boo Killebrew
Callie Kimball
Alessandro King 
Johnny Klein 
Krista Knight
John Kolvenbach 
Andrea Kuchlewska
Larry Kunofsky
Eric Lane 
Deborah Zoe Laufer 
J. C. Lee
Young Jean Lee
Dan LeFranc
Andrea Lepcio
Victor Lesniewski 
Steven Levenson
Barry Levey
Mark Harvey Levine  
Michael Lew
Alex Lewin  
EM Lewis
Sean Christopher Lewis
Jeff Lewonczyk
Kenneth Lin
Michael Lluberes
David J. Loehr 
Matthew Lopez
Stacey Luftig
Kirk Lynn
Mariah MacCarthy
Heather Lynn MacDonald 
Laura Lynn MacDonald
Maya Macdonald
Wendy MacLeod 
Cheri Magid
Jennifer Maisel
Martyna Majok  
Karen Malpede   
Kara Manning
Mona Mansour 
Warren Manzi 
Israela Margalit 
Ellen Margolis
Ruth Margraff
Sam Marks
Katie May
Oliver Mayer
Tarell Alvin McCraney
Mia McCullough  
Daniel McCoy 
Ruth McKee
Gabe McKinley  
Ellen McLaughlin 
James McManus
Charlotte Meehan
Carly Mensch
Molly Smith Metzler
Dennis Miles
Charlotte Miller 
Jane Miller  
Winter Miller
Lin-Manuel Miranda
Yusef Miller 
Rehana Mirza
Michael Mitnick
Anna Moench
Honor Molloy  
Alejandro Morales
Desi Moreno-Penson
Dominique Morisseau 
Hannah Moscovitch 
Itamar Moses
Gregory Moss
Megan Mostyn-Brown
Kate Mulley 
Paul Mullin
Julie Marie Myatt
Janine Nabers
Peter Sinn Nachtrieb
Brett Neveu
Don Nguyen   
Qui Nguyen
Don Nigro
Dan O'Brien
Matthew Paul Olmos 
Dominic Orlando
Rich Orloff
Marisela Treviño Orta
Jamie Pachino
Kristen Palmer
Tira Palmquist
A. Rey Pamatmat
Kyoung H. Park
Peter Parnell
Julia Pascal
Steve Patterson
Daniel Pearle 
christopher oscar peña
Brian Polak 
Daria Polatin
John Pollono 
Chana Porter
Craig Pospisil
Jessica Provenz
Michael Puzzo
Brian Quirk  
Marco Ramirez
Adam Rapp
David West Read 
Theresa Rebeck
Amber Reed
Daniel Reitz
Molly Rice
Mac Rogers
Elaine Romero
Lynn Rosen
Andrew Rosendorf
Kim Rosenstock
Kate E. Ryan
Kate Moira Ryan
Trav S.D.
Sarah Sander
Tanya Saracho
Heidi Schreck
August Schulenburg
Mark Schultz
Jenny Schwartz
Emily Schwend
Jordan Seavey
Christopher Shinn
Rachel Shukert
Jen Silverman
David Simpatico 
Blair Singer
Crystal Skillman
Mat Smart
Alena Smith
Tommy Smith
Ben Snyder
Sonya Sobieski  
Lisa Soland
Octavio Solis
E. Hunter Spreen 
Peggy Stafford 
Saviana Stanescu
Nick Starr
Deborah Stein
Jon Steinhagen
Victoria Stewart
Andrea Stolowitz
Lydia Stryk
Gwydion Suilebhan  
Gary Sunshine
Caridad Svich
Jeffrey Sweet
Adam Szymkowicz
Daniel Talbott
Kate Tarker 
Roland Tec 
Lucy Thurber
Paul Thureen
Josh Tobiessen
Catherine Trieschmann 
Dan Trujillo
Alice Tuan
Jon Tuttle
Ken Urban
Enrique Urueta
Francine Volpe
Kathryn Walat
Michael I. Walker 
Malachy Walsh
Kathleen Warnock
Anne Washburn
Marisa Wegrzyn
Anthony Weigh   
Ken Weitzman
Sharr White
Claire Willett
Samuel Brett Williams
Beau Willimon
Pia Wilson
Gary Winter
Bess Wohl   
Stanton Wood
Craig Wright
Deborah Yarchun
Lauren Yee
Steve Yockey
Kelly Younger
Stefanie Zadravec
Anna Ziegler