Artistic Statement
All of my plays are—and I say this in the least goth way possible—about death. (No offense to goths. Devotion is powerful in all forms. I’m just talking about an obsession with death that is less expressionistic.)
On my 26th birthday, I announced to my friends that this was the year I would make a play. It’s funny how terrifying it was to say it, since I had been helping to make plays—other people’s plays—for 20 years at that point. But I knew I was talking about telling a story that only I could tell. I could feel this two-headed embryo growing inside me. Head one said, “You have to tell this story,” head two said, “You have no idea what this story is.” Scary.
I didn’t make a play that year. What happened instead was that my boss at the restaurant where I worked was diagnosed with ALS, and I made the decision to turn toward that problem, and that ended up being the most impactful decision of my life up to that point. In the year-and-a-half that I ended up spending walking the path toward death next to Carol, everything that was not that fell away, including the artifice of perfection that had been stopping me from telling my stories.
In the years since Carol died, I have written four full-length plays and they are all fundamentally about the precariousness of life, and the gift of awakeness that being near death can give us. Sometimes the death is literal, like a woman asking her lover to euthanize her in The Cut, sometimes it’s figurative, like the divorce ceremony in Undo. Always the real death is the death of someone’s ability to kid themselves about who they really are. People often tell me that my plays make them cry. Maybe the tears are borne of empathy or memory, but I’m pretty sure it’s contemplating that death—the death of the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves—that does it.
My closest collaborator, Erin Kraft, has written that I have an “eye for untold stories.” It makes me think of my (and her) former boss, the late, great, Jerry Manning who, when he was Casting Director at Seattle Rep, used to advise actors that one approach to preparing an audition was to “make the other choice.” I think he meant that an actor with good script analysis skills could calibrate the approach that most actors might take—you could call this the “right” way to do the scene—and then they could try to do the best version of that thing, or they could make the “other choice,” and maybe show the director something they hadn’t thought of yet. I guess I have carried that possibility into my writing. I like the other choice—a story no one else would think or want to tell, or an alternate way into a story that everyone has tried to tell.
Alongside the awareness that I will die, this dedication to the other choice is what keeps me awake as an artist. I was asked to speak to a group of high school playwrights, and I talked with them about what it means in this moment in history to be devoted to stories. I told them that, in a way, cell phone addiction has made it easier for them to stand out and succeed as artists—all they have to do is look up. Just look up. Listen carefully to what’s happening in the live world around you; cultivate what the brilliant writer and solo performer David Schmader calls “good noticing.” I told them that this noticing, filtered through their own, irreplicable brains and turned into stories, could be their gift to the world.
Here are a few of the things that my irreplicable brain likes to put in plays: laughter through tears, intergenerational stories (so far, I haven’t written a play without at least one character over 60, which makes me a bit of an odd ball in my age cohort of writers), ritual, family, crisis, booze, swearing, the poetry of everyday talk and imperfect expression, “unlikeable” female protagonists, and love—love above all else. I haven’t written a play that is not a love story. But I like to write the kind of love stories where someone will talk to me about the play for 10 minutes and then go, “Actually, when you think about it, it’s a love story,”—stealth love stories, let’s say.
I said earlier that caring for Carol while she died was the most impactful decision I’d made up to that point in my life. I’ve since made two as impactful: getting married, and giving birth. Although accepted wisdom formulates artist and parent as opposing identities—possibly balanced, but never successfully combined—my experience has been different. I wrote my first full-length play in the first months of my son’s life. Sore, leaking, with one ear tuned to the baby monitor, I wrote for him, not in spite of him. I wrote—I write—so that he will see what it means to be afraid and do things anyway. I write to stay awake and aware that my life and my talent are gifts not to be wasted, for him, and for Carol, for Jerry, for my grandparents and lost friends and all of my beloved dead. Okay, that last thing was kind of goth.
On my 26th birthday, I announced to my friends that this was the year I would make a play. It’s funny how terrifying it was to say it, since I had been helping to make plays—other people’s plays—for 20 years at that point. But I knew I was talking about telling a story that only I could tell. I could feel this two-headed embryo growing inside me. Head one said, “You have to tell this story,” head two said, “You have no idea what this story is.” Scary.
I didn’t make a play that year. What happened instead was that my boss at the restaurant where I worked was diagnosed with ALS, and I made the decision to turn toward that problem, and that ended up being the most impactful decision of my life up to that point. In the year-and-a-half that I ended up spending walking the path toward death next to Carol, everything that was not that fell away, including the artifice of perfection that had been stopping me from telling my stories.
In the years since Carol died, I have written four full-length plays and they are all fundamentally about the precariousness of life, and the gift of awakeness that being near death can give us. Sometimes the death is literal, like a woman asking her lover to euthanize her in The Cut, sometimes it’s figurative, like the divorce ceremony in Undo. Always the real death is the death of someone’s ability to kid themselves about who they really are. People often tell me that my plays make them cry. Maybe the tears are borne of empathy or memory, but I’m pretty sure it’s contemplating that death—the death of the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves—that does it.
My closest collaborator, Erin Kraft, has written that I have an “eye for untold stories.” It makes me think of my (and her) former boss, the late, great, Jerry Manning who, when he was Casting Director at Seattle Rep, used to advise actors that one approach to preparing an audition was to “make the other choice.” I think he meant that an actor with good script analysis skills could calibrate the approach that most actors might take—you could call this the “right” way to do the scene—and then they could try to do the best version of that thing, or they could make the “other choice,” and maybe show the director something they hadn’t thought of yet. I guess I have carried that possibility into my writing. I like the other choice—a story no one else would think or want to tell, or an alternate way into a story that everyone has tried to tell.
Alongside the awareness that I will die, this dedication to the other choice is what keeps me awake as an artist. I was asked to speak to a group of high school playwrights, and I talked with them about what it means in this moment in history to be devoted to stories. I told them that, in a way, cell phone addiction has made it easier for them to stand out and succeed as artists—all they have to do is look up. Just look up. Listen carefully to what’s happening in the live world around you; cultivate what the brilliant writer and solo performer David Schmader calls “good noticing.” I told them that this noticing, filtered through their own, irreplicable brains and turned into stories, could be their gift to the world.
Here are a few of the things that my irreplicable brain likes to put in plays: laughter through tears, intergenerational stories (so far, I haven’t written a play without at least one character over 60, which makes me a bit of an odd ball in my age cohort of writers), ritual, family, crisis, booze, swearing, the poetry of everyday talk and imperfect expression, “unlikeable” female protagonists, and love—love above all else. I haven’t written a play that is not a love story. But I like to write the kind of love stories where someone will talk to me about the play for 10 minutes and then go, “Actually, when you think about it, it’s a love story,”—stealth love stories, let’s say.
I said earlier that caring for Carol while she died was the most impactful decision I’d made up to that point in my life. I’ve since made two as impactful: getting married, and giving birth. Although accepted wisdom formulates artist and parent as opposing identities—possibly balanced, but never successfully combined—my experience has been different. I wrote my first full-length play in the first months of my son’s life. Sore, leaking, with one ear tuned to the baby monitor, I wrote for him, not in spite of him. I wrote—I write—so that he will see what it means to be afraid and do things anyway. I write to stay awake and aware that my life and my talent are gifts not to be wasted, for him, and for Carol, for Jerry, for my grandparents and lost friends and all of my beloved dead. Okay, that last thing was kind of goth.
←
Holly Arsenault
Artistic Statement
All of my plays are—and I say this in the least goth way possible—about death. (No offense to goths. Devotion is powerful in all forms. I’m just talking about an obsession with death that is less expressionistic.)
On my 26th birthday, I announced to my friends that this was the year I would make a play. It’s funny how terrifying it was to say it, since I had been helping to make plays—other people’s plays—for 20 years at that point. But I knew I was talking about telling a story that only I could tell. I could feel this two-headed embryo growing inside me. Head one said, “You have to tell this story,” head two said, “You have no idea what this story is.” Scary.
I didn’t make a play that year. What happened instead was that my boss at the restaurant where I worked was diagnosed with ALS, and I made the decision to turn toward that problem, and that ended up being the most impactful decision of my life up to that point. In the year-and-a-half that I ended up spending walking the path toward death next to Carol, everything that was not that fell away, including the artifice of perfection that had been stopping me from telling my stories.
In the years since Carol died, I have written four full-length plays and they are all fundamentally about the precariousness of life, and the gift of awakeness that being near death can give us. Sometimes the death is literal, like a woman asking her lover to euthanize her in The Cut, sometimes it’s figurative, like the divorce ceremony in Undo. Always the real death is the death of someone’s ability to kid themselves about who they really are. People often tell me that my plays make them cry. Maybe the tears are borne of empathy or memory, but I’m pretty sure it’s contemplating that death—the death of the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves—that does it.
My closest collaborator, Erin Kraft, has written that I have an “eye for untold stories.” It makes me think of my (and her) former boss, the late, great, Jerry Manning who, when he was Casting Director at Seattle Rep, used to advise actors that one approach to preparing an audition was to “make the other choice.” I think he meant that an actor with good script analysis skills could calibrate the approach that most actors might take—you could call this the “right” way to do the scene—and then they could try to do the best version of that thing, or they could make the “other choice,” and maybe show the director something they hadn’t thought of yet. I guess I have carried that possibility into my writing. I like the other choice—a story no one else would think or want to tell, or an alternate way into a story that everyone has tried to tell.
Alongside the awareness that I will die, this dedication to the other choice is what keeps me awake as an artist. I was asked to speak to a group of high school playwrights, and I talked with them about what it means in this moment in history to be devoted to stories. I told them that, in a way, cell phone addiction has made it easier for them to stand out and succeed as artists—all they have to do is look up. Just look up. Listen carefully to what’s happening in the live world around you; cultivate what the brilliant writer and solo performer David Schmader calls “good noticing.” I told them that this noticing, filtered through their own, irreplicable brains and turned into stories, could be their gift to the world.
Here are a few of the things that my irreplicable brain likes to put in plays: laughter through tears, intergenerational stories (so far, I haven’t written a play without at least one character over 60, which makes me a bit of an odd ball in my age cohort of writers), ritual, family, crisis, booze, swearing, the poetry of everyday talk and imperfect expression, “unlikeable” female protagonists, and love—love above all else. I haven’t written a play that is not a love story. But I like to write the kind of love stories where someone will talk to me about the play for 10 minutes and then go, “Actually, when you think about it, it’s a love story,”—stealth love stories, let’s say.
I said earlier that caring for Carol while she died was the most impactful decision I’d made up to that point in my life. I’ve since made two as impactful: getting married, and giving birth. Although accepted wisdom formulates artist and parent as opposing identities—possibly balanced, but never successfully combined—my experience has been different. I wrote my first full-length play in the first months of my son’s life. Sore, leaking, with one ear tuned to the baby monitor, I wrote for him, not in spite of him. I wrote—I write—so that he will see what it means to be afraid and do things anyway. I write to stay awake and aware that my life and my talent are gifts not to be wasted, for him, and for Carol, for Jerry, for my grandparents and lost friends and all of my beloved dead. Okay, that last thing was kind of goth.
On my 26th birthday, I announced to my friends that this was the year I would make a play. It’s funny how terrifying it was to say it, since I had been helping to make plays—other people’s plays—for 20 years at that point. But I knew I was talking about telling a story that only I could tell. I could feel this two-headed embryo growing inside me. Head one said, “You have to tell this story,” head two said, “You have no idea what this story is.” Scary.
I didn’t make a play that year. What happened instead was that my boss at the restaurant where I worked was diagnosed with ALS, and I made the decision to turn toward that problem, and that ended up being the most impactful decision of my life up to that point. In the year-and-a-half that I ended up spending walking the path toward death next to Carol, everything that was not that fell away, including the artifice of perfection that had been stopping me from telling my stories.
In the years since Carol died, I have written four full-length plays and they are all fundamentally about the precariousness of life, and the gift of awakeness that being near death can give us. Sometimes the death is literal, like a woman asking her lover to euthanize her in The Cut, sometimes it’s figurative, like the divorce ceremony in Undo. Always the real death is the death of someone’s ability to kid themselves about who they really are. People often tell me that my plays make them cry. Maybe the tears are borne of empathy or memory, but I’m pretty sure it’s contemplating that death—the death of the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves—that does it.
My closest collaborator, Erin Kraft, has written that I have an “eye for untold stories.” It makes me think of my (and her) former boss, the late, great, Jerry Manning who, when he was Casting Director at Seattle Rep, used to advise actors that one approach to preparing an audition was to “make the other choice.” I think he meant that an actor with good script analysis skills could calibrate the approach that most actors might take—you could call this the “right” way to do the scene—and then they could try to do the best version of that thing, or they could make the “other choice,” and maybe show the director something they hadn’t thought of yet. I guess I have carried that possibility into my writing. I like the other choice—a story no one else would think or want to tell, or an alternate way into a story that everyone has tried to tell.
Alongside the awareness that I will die, this dedication to the other choice is what keeps me awake as an artist. I was asked to speak to a group of high school playwrights, and I talked with them about what it means in this moment in history to be devoted to stories. I told them that, in a way, cell phone addiction has made it easier for them to stand out and succeed as artists—all they have to do is look up. Just look up. Listen carefully to what’s happening in the live world around you; cultivate what the brilliant writer and solo performer David Schmader calls “good noticing.” I told them that this noticing, filtered through their own, irreplicable brains and turned into stories, could be their gift to the world.
Here are a few of the things that my irreplicable brain likes to put in plays: laughter through tears, intergenerational stories (so far, I haven’t written a play without at least one character over 60, which makes me a bit of an odd ball in my age cohort of writers), ritual, family, crisis, booze, swearing, the poetry of everyday talk and imperfect expression, “unlikeable” female protagonists, and love—love above all else. I haven’t written a play that is not a love story. But I like to write the kind of love stories where someone will talk to me about the play for 10 minutes and then go, “Actually, when you think about it, it’s a love story,”—stealth love stories, let’s say.
I said earlier that caring for Carol while she died was the most impactful decision I’d made up to that point in my life. I’ve since made two as impactful: getting married, and giving birth. Although accepted wisdom formulates artist and parent as opposing identities—possibly balanced, but never successfully combined—my experience has been different. I wrote my first full-length play in the first months of my son’s life. Sore, leaking, with one ear tuned to the baby monitor, I wrote for him, not in spite of him. I wrote—I write—so that he will see what it means to be afraid and do things anyway. I write to stay awake and aware that my life and my talent are gifts not to be wasted, for him, and for Carol, for Jerry, for my grandparents and lost friends and all of my beloved dead. Okay, that last thing was kind of goth.