1. SPEAK LINES ALL GARBLED is a recent play you’ve submitted to the Baltimore Playwrights Festival. What is it about?
It’s about strangers who find themselves seated next to each other during the intermission of a play they’re watching. It’s about the things that come between us, and the things that bring us together. It’s about loneliness and longing and generosity.
2. What was the inspiration for the story, and did the initial story change once you began writing it?
The direct inspiration was my experience as an audience member, seated (mutely) next to a stranger, watching a shattering production of Sarah Ruhl’s “Passion Play,” and having this feeling that she describes in the play wash over me:
Ever get the feeling
That you want to run onstage?
You want to move,
but you can’t?
It’s this horrible feeling,
as though you will run onstage
and speak lines all garbled—
lines you made up yourself?
The lines I eventually made up myself took the form of a variations play; some of the variations did wander rather far afield of the original conception, but the play always found its way back to its roots of interpersonal awkwardness and artifice.
3. What do you find particularly exciting about the medium of theater, and how did you try to incorporate that excitement into your play?
As an audience member and occasional writer, I find myself amazed, over and over again, by the alchemy by which directors, designers, and especially actors transform the bare words on the page into the stuff of life itself. Among other things, my play is a love letter to the theatre and to theatre artists’ miraculous empathetic genius. Hopefully I’ve left enough room between the lines to allow that genius to work its magic on them.