Hello from the studio!
This week, I’ve been thinking about what happens when we give creative work somewhere to go: back into conversation, into a room with other people, or simply onto the calendar.
So, three acts on a sunny Thursday in October from my studio at Chases Garage. I’ll be walking on Short Sands Beach after I send this out!
ACT I: TEN YEARS LATER
Ten years ago, I began She Will Lead, a documentary theatre project about women, leadership, ambition, and the stories we tell about who gets to lead. Over the last decade, the project has grown from a one-act into Good Lazy Woman — and until we’ve got a female president, it seems it’s just going to have to keep going, whether that was my intention or not.
Sometimes projects gain a life of their own.
On October 29, I’m returning to the project's original home, New Hampshire Theatre Project, for She Will Lead — Ten Years Later.
But before I do, I want to talk to you.
I’m looking for people willing to have a short conversation with me about what has changed in the last ten years — in your civic life, your relationship to leadership, your ambitions, the compromises you’ve made, the things you thought would be different by now.
You don’t need to have been involved in the original project. You don’t need a particularly active voting or political life. I’m interested in the lived experience of the last decade.
What did you imagine ten years ago?
What happened instead?
What do you understand now that you didn’t then?
If you’d be willing to talk with me, I’d love to hear from you.
Act II: GETTING IT OUT OF MY HEAD
Earlier this week, I invited a group of artists and audience members into my home for a cold reading of my new play, Scattering.
There is something wonderfully exposing about hearing a play this way.
No production. No design. No rehearsal period to hide behind. Just some chairs, some food, actors encountering the words for the first time, and a handful of people willing to sit with a play that isn’t finished yet.
Lately, I’ve been particularly interested in the relationship between research and theatrical form.
Research in a play doesn’t always need to arrive as information in dialogue. Sometimes it shouldn’t.
In Scattering, I’ve been researching the physics of sunset: golden hour, civil twilight, nautical twilight, astronomical twilight, and finally night. That research has begun to shape the structure of the play itself — how time moves, what disappears, what can no longer be seen, and even where dialogue falls away altogether.
The research gets embedded in the dramaturgy.
That feels exciting to me.
And none of that work happens in isolation. A play needs people willing to show up while it is still becoming itself.
Thank you to Susan Poulin, Emily Karel, and Matt Racine for putting the play on its feet, and to everyone who came to listen, talk, eat, and sit in the gathering darkness with us.
I’m not rewriting Scattering immediately.
It gets to sit for a while. The idea has been with me since a sunset in Vermont in 2021 caught my breath, at a time when I was grieving the loss of my friend and artist buddy, Cait Giunta.
The play has taken five years to get this far. So, there’s no rush
Act III: WHAT ARE YOU NOT MAKING?
There’s probably something you’ve been meaning to make.
A play. A book. A performance. A workshop. A business idea. A project you began six months ago and haven’t opened since.
Maybe you know exactly what it is, but you keep putting everything else first.
I’ve recently begun creative advising with an artist who has been carrying a project for some time, and I’ve loved watching what happens when he finally gives the work dedicated attention.
My job isn’t to tell another artist what their project should become.
It’s to help them hear what they already know, ask the questions that move the work forward, create some useful structure and accountability, and get the thing out of the realm of “someday.”
This is one of my favorite kinds of work.
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So, if there is a creative project sitting quietly at the edge of your life saying, Are we ever actually going to do this? — perhaps this is your invitation. Let's make create more beautiful things in the world!
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Until next time,
MAKE CREATE MORE
Imagine and rehearse change together.
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