Q: How did you get into playwriting?
A: I first tried playwriting in high school and have done so off and on ever since. I have dabbled in a lot of different creative pursuits including board game design and screenwriting, but returned to focus on playwriting in recent years as some of the more mysterious aspects of the business and networking end of playwriting have either become easier or at least more accessible.

Q: When you’re writing, what does an ideal day look like to you?
A: It’s always different, depending on what I’m writing for. Do I have a deadline? Am I just writing on my own? Do I have to turn something into a writing group? Having deadlines, even just for informal writing groups, definitely helps me create incentives to write that sometimes are hard to find when I’m just writing for myself (to theoretically shop around after it’s completed).

Q: How do you define your creative process as a playwright?
A: Sometimes I have an assignment I’m writing towards, a challenge with requirements. That’s usually true of short plays that I write as part of some challenge or another. For full-length plays the field is more open unless you’ve been commissioned to write something (and so far I have not).

You can write anything that you can envision and that you think you can get someone to produce. That’s not necessarily easier to do. Sometimes constrictions and limits make you more productive. For my successfully completed full-length plays, I’ve allowed myself to think of one topic or aspect and write disconnected scenes around that. Approaching it from different sides. My play Repossessed stemmed from a 10 minute play, around which I wrote different scenes from the world of the play until I had enough to assemble into a full-length narrative. The overall structure I worried about later.

Q: What was your initial inspiration for writing Last Ship to Proxima Centauri, and what fueled you throughout the writing process for your play?
A: Last Ship to Proxima Centauri is a sci-fi play about exploring a new world, but its roots were when the crisis of the day was the refugee crisis in the early days of the Trump administration, and the inhumanness that Americans treated (and still treat to this day) refugees. I imagined a scenario in which Americans may be the ones seeking refuge and set it in a world far away, many years in the future.

Q: Tell us the first four words that come to mind to describe your play.
A: Too applicable to today

Q: Why did you select those four words?
A: Writing dystopian stuff in these last few years has been something of a head trip, as the worst-case scenarios you put on the page have sometimes been overtaken, sometimes amplified, very occasionally negated by current events. So many random choices I made in the writing process now look like I put it in to make it “ripped from the headlines”. But no, it’s just a case of today’s world becoming more conflated with fictional dystopias. I’d be very happy if the state of the world improved and stopped giving my play more resonance.

Q: What playwrights have inspired your body of work? And why?
A: Stoppard and Pinter were the playwrights I first responded to when starting to read plays in high school. Stoppard for his cleverness and invention, Pinter for his mastery of minimalism and mood. Within that range you can find an approach for many theatrical situations. I also like to cross-pollinate across different media, bringing in sensibilities of TV or comics or movies into playwriting. I like to write things in one media which use the strengths of another: a novel that feels like a comic book, a play that feels like a movie, a screenplay which feels like a podcast.

Q: Who are some current playwrights you would recommend to those interested in new plays?
A: If you like Last Ship and decide that you want even more fabulous onstage sci-fi dystopias, go check out Scott Sickles and Amy Berryman. You could make a very depressing but awesome season of theatre from our collective works.

Q: What new projects are on your horizon?
A: I’m a part of a writer’s group run by The Pulp Stage in Portland, OR, who holds a weekly writer’s session where we workshop new plays in various pulp genres (sci fi, suspense, horror, etc.) to present online. We’re about to take the step of writing a serial play series as so far we’ve done only one-off short plays. Other than that, I’m actually searching for something to work on that’s full-length in scope. Trying to find something that I can convince myself can and will be produced by others if I finish it. I moved to the West Coast last year and laid low for the most part because of the pandemic. Now is probably the time where I branch out and try to network with the Bay Area new play community.

About PlayFest 2021

Immerse yourself in the world of new plays as The Basel-Kiene Family joins City Beverages in presenting PlayFest 2021! This year’s new play festival features six groundbreaking new works that will be presented over the course of two weekends, November 5 – 14, 2021.

Learn More