Blog Posts

Bogliasco Fellowship

4/20/2018

For the past five weeks, I've been in residency in Italy as a Bogliasco Foundation Fellow, working on a new play that follows a group of young women working at a roadside coffee shop in a small Massachusetts town. The play is a coming-of-age story about women on the verge of independence, struggling to grow up in a country that gives them fewer and fewer options, as they dodge the dangers, misogyny and setbacks women face in a world where success and safety are not guaranteed. It explores themes I've been investigating for the past few years, but it pushes me out of my comfort zone in terms of style. I'm still discovering this play.

The Bogliasco Foundation is located in a small fishing town just south of Genoa. Fellows are given time and space to work on their projects. We stayed in a beautiful villa overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, chatting over delicious dinners and drinks every night. I would work late into the evening, when the villa quieted and everyone went to bed, and I would desperately try to cast my mind back to Boston and this group of young women.

Theatre for One Masterclasses at UArk

2/1/2018

Next week, I am heading to Fayetteville, AR, to teach two playwriting workshops for students, faculty and guests at the University of Arkansas. The goal of these classes is to familiarize the UArk community with the unique Theatre for One experience ahead of the university's ArkType New Works Festival, in which several new Theatre for One pieces will be debuted, including a new monologue by myself. I will be incorporating elements from workshops masterminded by Christine Jones for Theatre for One and other immersive experiences, as well as from playwriting classes I have participated in or taught over the years.

Details:
Theatre for One Masterclasses
Department of Theatre, University ofArkansas
February 8: 11-1pm and 3:15-5:15pm

ArkType New Works Festival
University of Arkansas
April 20-29

Utility Published by Yale Press

9/29/2017

As part of the Yale Drama Series Prize, Utility has been published by Yale Press with a foreward by Nicholas Wright. The play tells the story of Amber, who has two jobs, three kids and an 8 year old’s birthday party to plan. As Amber struggles with a tiny avalanche of day-to-day setbacks, she finds this life has made her a stranger to the person she once was and the person she thought she would be.

"Utility is a remarkable play: beautifully written and effortlessly powerful,” said Wright. “At every moment the happiness of human lives is put at risk: is there any greater dramatic theme?”

Also available from Amazon or from local bookstores, including Harvard Bookstore here in Cambridge

Double Double: Radcliffe Public Lecture

3/30/2017

Next month, I'm giving my Radcliffe Fellow presentation at the Knafel Center, where I will be discussing the work I've been doing during my Radcliffe year and presenting excerpts from two works-in-progress (as well as a surprise at the end). My primary project this year has been a play I'm calling Double Double, an exploration of folkloric witches, 21st century feminism and female spaces. The other project is a play about the dangers women face in their engagements with men and the role of unthinkability in the restructuring of the narrative of self.

Details:
The Knafel Center, Radcliffe Yard
April 12, 4pm
Light refreshments immediately following

Updated 4/20/2017
Because my presentation couldn't be filmed (I incorporated readings of works-in-progress with actors), here is an excerpt from the text of my lecture:

This year, I worked on two plays. One is a play about witches, and the other play that isn’t about witches but I wrote it while I was consuming all of that material about witches. So both plays to me are influenced by this research about witches, overtly and less overtly. I think a lot about one particular quote from Stacy Schiff’s book “The Witches: Salem 1692,” which came out a couple years ago, in which she says “Though confined to the home, women were the geographically mobile ones in New England; they were the strangers who came to town.” That quote was hugely inspirational for both scripts I worked on this year. In both plays, the main characters are women who have come to town, who are outsiders and strangers, suspicious and suspect. I like the conflict inherent in that quote’s portrayal of women as both housebound and wandering—you can expand that metaphorically as well, this idea of ambivalence as it pertains to one’s self-identity in relation to one's perceived role in society and to one's individuality.

Both plays are deeper investigations of the kind of work I’ve done for the past ten years which has become more and more about highly naturalistic, subtle portrayals of women in specific settings—geographical or situational. This is the small niche I'm working in, but theater can be anything. A play can be about a post-apocalyptic world where characters are buried in sand and our hero is the personification of fear and everyone speaks in monologues to the audience. Naturalism, which I focus on, is different. Naturalism is similar to what other art forms call realism. Naturalism is directly representational. A room is a room, a mother is a mother, animals are played by animals and people are played by people.

I consider my work to be hyper-naturalistic, which takes the properties of naturalism in theater—realistic dialogue, familiar settings, a close study of human behavior and psychology—and combines these with a realistic rendering of the passing of time. Many of my plays start well before the action of the drama begins, and often the scenes continue for a while after a big reveal or after the crux of a scene is accomplished. I do this because I’m interested in the particular rhythms of conversation, of specific locations, of certain types personalities, of different kinds of families, etc. When you consider time and rhythm as components with equal importance to character and action, you can create a sort of eeriness that functions particularly well in theater. While my plays are feminist for many reasons, I consider prioritizing these two properties of theater a feminist act as well. Doing this subverts the traditional and masculine structure of theater, upending rules about drama that go all the way back to Aristotle.

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Bogliasco Fellowship

Theatre for One Masterclasses at UArk

Utility Published by Yale Press

Double Double: Radcliffe Public Lecture

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