Artistic Statement

Artistic Statement

July 30, 2019: I just want to add here that imagining my plays as part of a season of at least half of the plays by female playwrights has changed the plays I write. Another reason to say “no, thanks” if offered a production in a season that is not at least 50/50; it would miscontextualize my play.

July 5, 2019. An Essay: What do I know?

By Christopher Carter Sanderson

I can’t stop writing for the theatre. I’ve been doing it all my life. As a child, hilariously, later spectacularly unsuccessfully in High School, and then right out of college an adaptation I wrote was produced. It was notorious! I was hooked. And yet… my own voice sang backup on adaptation after adaptation. Only recently, since my diagnosis with a disability, have I begun to sense what I “know” as an original playwright. The incident that disabled me was the setting for my first truly original work, a musical, which was produced wonderfully for FringeNYC. It left me feeling that I had not gone deep… not challenged myself enough; that in a way the milieu had again taken a foreground to what I really needed to say. An intervening novel, published, pushed me further out of my comfort zone and into that elusive thing: what I really “know” as a writer. I couldn’t stay there, though, in the world of the narrator and the omniscient, the world of the silent reader. As much as loved it, it was safe. And what I know as a writer is not safe. The place I live as an artist is a place of painful, fleeting knowledge, and slow, dawning truth dug up from a past that always threatens to doom the future… and then slips away. It is a place of hurtful mistakes made even with the best intentions. It is a place that shows me my country isn’t really two unrelated poles or “sides” warring with each other but, rather, one family tearing itself apart. That musical I wrote lacked that: the family deeply loving, and deeply flawed. In therapy for my disability, I was first able to speak about being raped by my brother when we were children (he was later in and out of institutions his whole adult life). Things came up and presented themselves as things I know and can speak from. They’ve shaped two plays so far. That voice that had developed singing backup has begun to sing out. Working with Shakespeare so much, maybe too much, developed a taste for my Southern Gothic doom and gloom to have happy, light moments—even funny moments. There’s something about laughing together in the pain that is a native part of what I know. And I’m always wondering: What do I know?


"The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past." -- William Faulkner in Requiem for a Nun.

"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power." - Oscar Wilde

"'Brother against brother' is a slogan used in histories of the American Civil War, describing the
predicament faced in families (primarily, but not exclusively, residents of border states) in which
loyalties and military service were divided between the Union and the Confederacy. There are a
number of stories of brothers fighting in the same battles on opposite sides, or even of brothers
killing brothers over the issues.” – Wikipedia

“What time erases and memory mocks...” – From Red Cotton, song by Elvis Costello