So, 12 months ago you were commissioned to write a play. From scratch.  How did you get started?

I really wanted to write something about women. About women taking care of women, the good parts and the not so good parts, the scary parts, and the ways a woman can be constrained and limited by being a woman. My play Dairyland is about a woman, very definitively about a woman, but it focuses on her relationships with men. And in writing that play I thought, “Here I am. A female playwright, being directed by a female.” It’s about a woman, but the cast ended up being two woman and three men.  And it was really interesting to sort of step back from that and say what happens if I sort of write a play for five women? What happens if the only people you see on stage are five women?  What does that story mean? What is that story like? What are the limitations of that story? What does that story lack? What does that story have that some of those other stories can’t possibly have? 

 

You’ve written other plays set in Wisconsin.  How did that emerge as a setting or theme for Every Good Girl? In meeting and talking with Miranda, Christianne and Amy, I was struck by the fact that they're all artists living and working in New York City but that they were all from Kansas City, Missouri. That immediately struck a chord with me, because I’m originally from Madison, Wisconsin. So there was something about this: from the Midwest, trying to make a life for oneself in a larger cosmopolitan area, moving away from home and then being pulled back to home to sort of look at some things from your past in order to move ahead with your future. And that’s a theme that I keep returning to in my writing. So, I thought, okay, I understand who these women are, on a kind of poetic level, or gut level, or even just a Midwestern level. If I write something that feels incredibly personal, something that’s almost like a diary entry, something that I would like to do as an actress myself onstage, I’m gonna be in the zone. 

 

How did “other misremembered things” become part of the play’s structure?

Over the last 8 years, I have spent a lot of time with Alzheimer's disease, and learning about dementia. Not just learning about the disease itself, but also about the caregivers. The different facets that the disease takes on and the horrors of early onset. As a culture it’s something that we are really terrified of largely because there is a lack of understanding about what the disease is, and how the disease works. In my experience, I’ve observed that it can be even more terrifying for the people that surround the disease than it is for the person with disease itself. And it’s something too, that feels inherently, theatrical. Like spending time around people with Alzheimer's, or who have early dementias, you start to realize there is a kind of language that develops. It’s very specific to each person, very specific to their experience.  But as a theater artist it’s very clear to me...you’ll hear these little catches of things..they’re poetry. I mean it's a disease that really can lend itself to the theatrical. In addition, there is an educational mission.  

 

Was there something challenging or exciting that attracted you to this project? 

I have so much faith in these four women, and their ability to be go-getters. And I think they’re doing something that’s really unique and new. I think more and more people will start to commission work for themselves and to commission new plays. I just really makes a lot of sense.  Especially with the discussions about gender parity in theatre and making opportunities for women. It’s a really exciting time, and it’s a really exciting way to make that kind of work happen. You see something that you want to have in the world and instead of wishing that there was more of it, you actually go out and make that work happen; these women are facilitating the production of that work.