Artistic Statement
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Anne Welsbacher
Artistic Statement
My plays find stories in ordinary people—often Midwestern, usually hard-headed, frequently women. Their battleground is typically within the family, where maximum damage can be wrought, but where, too, the best work can happen.
My creative eye has always pointed to my own Midwestern turf—Nebraska, Ohio, Minnesota, Kansas. My playwriting, like soup, simmered for a long time before coming to the table. I experimented in many creative genres: theatre, music, fiction, nonfiction, one early script for garnish. The elements blended and stewed.
But the playwriting kept bobbing to the surface and finally took over when a particularly potent story—given to me via a concert by the sublime Cleveland Orchestra, and viewed through the lens of a revelatory family announcement—grabbed me and refused to let go. The stoic people who populate my unremarkable, middle-class Midwestern life clamored to the surface and spoke. They had so much to say, these seemingly ordinary folks, that written prose didn’t serve. They needed the collaborate artists who make plays to speak for them.
I adore Large Plays and almost always begin with Large Ideas. I gasp at the horrors of existence, the never-ending cruelties imposed on the weak, the poor, the unempowered, those many who pay and pay—with sweat, blood, vaginas, war—for the pleasure and amusement of a few. I want to throttle (possibly save) the world with epic tapestries.
But the characters who come out of my keyboard always nod politely to me and then move back over to the plays they wish to inhabit. They are people coping with feelings of powerlessness, even within their own families (SHELLSHOCK, ROAD TO ROUEN); lovers and professionals and the men who abuse, deceive, and rob them (“Skates”; RADIATING LIKE A STONE; PARDON MY DUST); daughters grieving for people they have lost, or are losing (LAST CHANCE LIQUOR; “Terminal”; “Pillow”). And—in all of my scripts—the miracles, large and small, that derive from all human interactions, and that play out best on the miraculous, limitless soul of the stage.
My creative eye has always pointed to my own Midwestern turf—Nebraska, Ohio, Minnesota, Kansas. My playwriting, like soup, simmered for a long time before coming to the table. I experimented in many creative genres: theatre, music, fiction, nonfiction, one early script for garnish. The elements blended and stewed.
But the playwriting kept bobbing to the surface and finally took over when a particularly potent story—given to me via a concert by the sublime Cleveland Orchestra, and viewed through the lens of a revelatory family announcement—grabbed me and refused to let go. The stoic people who populate my unremarkable, middle-class Midwestern life clamored to the surface and spoke. They had so much to say, these seemingly ordinary folks, that written prose didn’t serve. They needed the collaborate artists who make plays to speak for them.
I adore Large Plays and almost always begin with Large Ideas. I gasp at the horrors of existence, the never-ending cruelties imposed on the weak, the poor, the unempowered, those many who pay and pay—with sweat, blood, vaginas, war—for the pleasure and amusement of a few. I want to throttle (possibly save) the world with epic tapestries.
But the characters who come out of my keyboard always nod politely to me and then move back over to the plays they wish to inhabit. They are people coping with feelings of powerlessness, even within their own families (SHELLSHOCK, ROAD TO ROUEN); lovers and professionals and the men who abuse, deceive, and rob them (“Skates”; RADIATING LIKE A STONE; PARDON MY DUST); daughters grieving for people they have lost, or are losing (LAST CHANCE LIQUOR; “Terminal”; “Pillow”). And—in all of my scripts—the miracles, large and small, that derive from all human interactions, and that play out best on the miraculous, limitless soul of the stage.