Swamp Driver Monthly – containers
4/19/26
When I moved to NYC in fall 2021, I decided I wanted to purchase a Serious Playwriting Book to mark what would (hopefully) be the beginning of my career. I ended up leaving the Drama Book Shop with a collection of interviews titled Fifty Playwrights on their Craft, compiled by Caroline Jester and Caridad Svich.
One interview question that the book asks is “How much do you consider where the play is going to be staged when you begin the writing process?” At the time of first reading, my answer was something along the lines of “not one bit.” I spent my days trawling Play Submissions Helper and NYC Playwrights, feverishly firing off scripts to open submissions at companies whose work I’d never seen and whose venues I’d never set foot in. I tried to keep my settings and the implications of any stagings as broad and universal as possible, and gave no thought to audience size or makeup and how these might affect the intimacy of the experience.
Looking back, I realized I actually referenced this exact question from Fifty Playwrights on their Craft in my in my entry from April 2025! Even in the time since then, I’ve begun factoring in how both the physical space and the social/organizational dynamics of the presenters will impact the shape of the play earlier and earlier in my writing process, to the point that I now never start a project without thinking about what its ideal home might look like. what if everyone lives continues to be a particularly extreme example of this: in its first draft, it was written to be staged in but also literally take place in some intangible ideal of an off-off-Broadway theater; in the years since, I have rewritten it very specifically around the physical container of The Tank. (See the diagram below!) I recently got back from workshopping the play in a college theater venue that was architecturally very different from The Tank, and being there really helped to bring home just how much my relationship with that space has informed the text.
If I never have the opportunity to actually present the play at The Tank, the locational specificity I’ve worked so hard to cultivate in the script—the exchanges shouted through the booth window, the way the awkward layout of the backstage bumpout allows one character to overhear a conversation between others without being seen—will need to be scrapped. But, if we do get to do the show there, I really do think it will all pay off tenfold and make the experience excitingly unique.
We have our venue set for our next (soon-to-be-announced!) GAC production, and I’ve been keeping the height and depth of the space in mind as I continue tweaking that play—while also keeping in mind the resources we have available to us at our scale of production. I’ve found that this kind of physical and institutional familiarity can only be gained through experience, and there’s something liberating in acknowledging that.
INSPIRATION/CONSUMPTION
Things I watched on a screen:
The Seat, a Netflix Documentary about F1’s youngest current driver, Kimi Antonelli.
The Japanese Grand Prix, where Kimi won his second race in a row and became championship leader at the tender age of 20.
Forbidden Fruits by Lily Houghton and Meredith Alloway, adapted from Houghton’s play Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die and directed by Alloway.
Finished Season 4 of The X-Files! S4 and the first half of S5 have had some real bangers!
Things I watched on a stage:
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee off-Broadway, where Ali was selected as a guest speller and performed brilliantly! Look at her up there!
Baby Butcher Choke for Free, my buddy Leah Plante-Wiener’s latest unhinged creation.
Red Bull’s Titus Andronicus, which was somehow even gorier than I imagined.
Cold War Choir Practice, which was absolute brilliance and left me buzzing.
Castle Door by Walker Caplan and Matt Romein, which was a technologically-informed genre-melting delight.
My sweet Willow Funkhouser’s production of macbitches at LIU Post! I had the chance to drop in for a rehearsal early-ish in their run and had an amazing time meeting her cast and seeing how incredible she is at working with the actors. I am so proud and even more grateful. :)
Things I read:
Started Surviving to Drive by Guenther Steiner, one of my favorite F1 personalities.
I’ve also started cracking into Industrial Society and Its Future (aka the Unabomber Manifesto) for research. I am trying to read a bunch of manifestos so that I can then write one for a character in a play—if you, dear reader, have any favorite off-the-beaten-track manifestos that I should check out, let me know!
I’ve been getting a lot of mileage from a fascinating tome known as The Horn Book: A Girl’s Guide to the Art of Love (1901). Based on a French book published in 1860 under the title Instruction Libertine, the book takes the form of a dialogue between two young lovers as the man very, very thoroughly educates his female companion on the finer arts of lovemaking, including describing sixty-three different sex positions in vivid detail. Let’s just say that it has given me much greater license to get more colorful in my language with benevolent. One of the more bonkers entries can be read below:
SUBMISSION/REJECTION/AFFIRMATION
I have officially been rejected from Juilliard. Womp womp! In all seriousness, I was definitely disappointed but not entirely heartbroken. I definitely experienced a bit of self-doubt in the aftermath, but I wasn’t too shaken for long. Back to it we go!
Also got my rejection from Premiere Stages at Kean University for the 2026 Premiere Play Festival.
I was also rejected from the Leah Ryan Fund.
Affirmation-wise, a project that I thought would languish indefinitely has picked up a bit of momentum. It’s still not a done deal (and very well may never be), but it came at the right time and gave me a much-needed boost.
Also, my buddy Maddie Hindes made a uQuiz that helps you determine which macbitches character you are and I have never felt fancier or more famous.
GENERATION/COLLABORATION
I shared my first set of pages in the new writers’ group I’m a part of! I was nervous as hell and a bit starstruck, but I was proud of the work I brought in and happy about the response it received. Shoutout to D.B. for reading for me (in a French dialect, no less) and giving me a very lovely pep talk before we went in.
I had the chance to sit in on a Zoom rehearsal for my play the after wife before it received a reading with Peninsula Players in Door County, Wisconsin. Super fun to get to share work with folks back in Wisco and dive back into this play!
Also got to sit in on Zoom reading of my play queen of the blacktar plains held by some friends in Chicago. I learned a bunch, but I’d forgotten just how difficult it is to ascertain anything about the pace of a play when it’s read over Zoom. Hoping to have the chance to hear it-in person soon!
Nina and I have started breaking a screenplay together, and it’s been a total blast to be co-writing together again for the first time since our sojourn at Art Farm. She helped figured out how to solve this particular story’s “crisis of protagonist”—a problem that’s had me stumped for literal YEARS—in the course of one afternoon. Feeling very lucky and grateful for her insights. This is why I love collaborative art forms!
what if everyone lives had its workshop at Wesleyan! The process was intense and a bit of a whirlwind, but I had an awesome time collaborating with director Ryan Dobrin at his alma mater (which is also where my parents went to school and got together).
I’ve been drumming up a script for the next round of Fucked Up Play Fest. Katie Orenstein will be directing my chaotic 10-minute play for this zany downtown drinking game, and it’s been lovely to work with her.
I’ve been penning a short film for a college comm department to hopefully produce this fall! Fun stuff.
I’ve been exploring a new version of my play Martha the Last—I’ve finally figured out how I want to incorporate the ecoterrorism angle I’ve been toying with on and off. Here’s hoping it comes together (and that I don’t end up on any government watchlists with the research I’m doing).
Until the next nineteenth,
Sophie