Swamp Driver Monthly – 5/19/24
collab
This month, I’ve been particularly grateful for the messy, miraculous journey that is collaboration. There’s something so exciting about diving in new folks that who inspire you to stretch yourself in ways you never have; and there’s something so special about looking around and realizing that, over hours and weeks and years, you’ve built such a tight creative rapport that a raised eyebrow or an inarticulate flapping gesture communicates an artistic impulse that is immediately understood.
I was recently on a Zoom call with an actor who asked me how he could be most helpful to me as a collaborator. I wish that at the time I had said, “This!!! Exactly this! By communicating! By asking me to express how you can support and facilitate my process, and helping me to understand how I can do the same for you. You are going to go up onstage to say a bunch of words I wrote and participate in the pantomime of rabbit birth and that is simultaneously the silliest and sacredest thing I can imagine! We are young and scrappy and nobody is making a living off of this so the least we can do is be decent to each other and as accommodating as art and circumstances allow! We are together in this, the difficult, glorious pursuit of theatermaking!”
I wanted to work alone, I would’ve been a novelist. But I like bright minds to bounce ideas off of and dynamic bodies to shift in space and choreographers to sculpt and refine their movements and directors to diamond polish and composers to weave together a whole new dimension of the world and teach me show me delight me inspire me push me and lift me—and, in my greatest dreams, I want what I write to lift up all of my collaborators, too. If I’m going to make something, I want to make it together. I want to be someone that people want to build worlds with.
INSPIRATION/CONSUMPTION
Finished the Fallout TV show and damn damn damn it was so good. (I miss when Fallout games were as well written as this show.) Between this and TLoU, are we in a golden age of TV video game adaptations?? I’ll take it.
Ali and I also watched the end of Season 6 of Buffy and I spent most of it sobbing in her lap. I do deeply get why Season Six is controversial, but nothing has ever captured the feeling of emerging from an intense depressive episode the same way that this show does for me.
Leading up to our most recent music and movement workshop, I went back to listening to a ton of Joanna Newsom. Her lyricism strikes me down where I stand every time.
I am very much not a podcast person, but I listened to Vulgar History’s episode on Mary Toft recently while working. It was very fascinating and made me want to barf.
Leah and I have started playing Until Dawn—her for the first time, me for the second time. Apologies to my neighbors for our cathartic full-throated midnight screaming.
I finally finished reading Never Let Me Go, and so me and Ali watched the movie adaptation to celebrate.
I went to the New York premieres of my dear Sarah Groustra’s Insertion with Fishmarket Theater Co. and my friend Laura Winters’ play All of Me with The New Group. Hooray!
Also caught the incomparable Michela Murray in Lillian Mottern’s Koi-Coy at Columbia!
I have still not recovered from the viscerally vile experience that was Leah Plante-Wiener’s gutbelly (also at Columbia).
I was fortunate to get to attend (and participate in a talkback for!) Macbeth (an undoing) at TFANA!
Also caught a really lovely reading of my buddy Seth’s play Styx and Stones with Tier 5 Theatre and of my cherished mentor Jeff Talbott’s Fuzzy at Open Jar!
Ali took me to Here There Are Blueberries at NYTW.
Nina and I saw Lempicka. Had some fun and learned a lot—both about the painter herself, and about musical structure.
SUBMISSION/REJECTION/AFFIRMATION
I will be very real. I don’t think I made a single script submission this month. But I’m not getting down on myself, because I have instead been drafting and editing and sending invites and press releases and contracts and applications for cunnicularii. I’ve existed much more in producer mode than playwright mode when it comes to submissions recently, and that’s unlikely to change until the production has opened. I’m hoping to get back on my grind soon!
Got rejected from the EST/Sloan Commission. Womp womp!
One of my earlier overtures to Milwaukee Rep resulted in a meeting, which was a really lovely experience. We ended up chatting a lot about the viability of certain kinds of new work in New York versus in the regional theater circuit, which was very interesting. I’m always trying to reconcile my desire to make work that can be sustained by audiences in my somewhat conservative home state with staying true to my own artistic taste and aesthetics.
Nina and I were interviewed for the Stage Whisper podcast! Keep an eye out for our episode in a few weeks.
GENERATION/COLLABORATION
I unexpectedly ended up conceiving and writing a new one-act two-hander set in a Wisconsin parking lot. And then I unexpectedly realized that maybe it’s a site-specific show that needs to be performed in a Wisconsin parking lot. Current title is Asphaltdel.
I got to Zoom into the first rehearsal of Nuclear Summer at UW-Stevens Point, my beloved alma mater. I’m so very excited to be boots on the ground in Wisco this fall to work through revisions with this team.
I finished the TV pilot version of The After Wife for my pilot revision class! Phew.
I figured out that Martha the Last is actually maybe about ecoterrorism? Looking forward to continuing to explore this angle.
We had another movement and music workshop for cunnicularii, and I got to be in-person at this one and geek the hell out over the harp. I’m so deeply obsessed with this team.
Also made my first visit to Materials for the Arts to scrounge up cunnicularii props and was blown away! What a magical wonderland!
I’ve made some cunnicularii revisions inspired by discoveries made in the movement workshop—and also discoveries I’ve made through taking care of Moon, our beautiful foster boy. He makes an excellent writing buddy.
Until the next nineteenth,
Sophie