Artistic Statement
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Madison Fargo
Artistic Statement
I am not an easy person. I am complicated and woefully ambitious and tunnel visioned. I am also an excellent collaborator, a hard worker, and a fiercely resilient and resourceful person. My intensity and tenacity shows through everything I do, making for equally intense and exciting art.
I am a working class person. I work two jobs, fifty hours a week, and somehow never have any money. I write mostly late at night, after I get out of my second job. I’m very tired. Capitalism kills creativity. It eats at your soul. I do believe that I am a unique talent. I take every rejection letter I receive (and there have been many) with a grain of salt, because I believe in the power of my work.
I want to make art that feels like tying a loose tooth to a string and slamming the door.
My work relies on the codependent relationship between Comedy and Tragedy. The so-sad-it’s-funny, coupled with the so-funny-it’s-sad. I’m a car crash you can’t look away from. I’m that sensation on the back of your neck when you feel as though you’re watching something you shouldn’t be.
I write difficult characters surviving in decaying societies. Often young people, they do not know or understand the “good old days” they long for. They and the worlds they inhabit are highly influenced by commercials, social networking, and pop culture. These can be survival tools. These can be weapons of mass destruction.
My plays are often family dramas, though never in any sort of conventional way. Good Samaritans, my first play, deals with a devoutly Christian mother and son as they navigate a crisis of faith in the presence of a young man they both desire. A more recent work of mine, Tiny Dead Things, concerns a group of children, all raised in the same post-apocalyptic cult, as they confront their own horrific truths.
I write for people drawn to the surreal and the strange. I don’t write for the faint of heart, or for someone looking for a casual, comfortable viewing. I write the taboo, the off-the-wall, the brutal and the visceral. I write for a generation that feels lost, and displaced. A generation that feels like they are running out of time. The climate crisis is a very real element in all of my work, despite the world of the play.
Above all, I want to tell stories that remind us of the abject beauty and abject horror that is the human experience.
I am a working class person. I work two jobs, fifty hours a week, and somehow never have any money. I write mostly late at night, after I get out of my second job. I’m very tired. Capitalism kills creativity. It eats at your soul. I do believe that I am a unique talent. I take every rejection letter I receive (and there have been many) with a grain of salt, because I believe in the power of my work.
I want to make art that feels like tying a loose tooth to a string and slamming the door.
My work relies on the codependent relationship between Comedy and Tragedy. The so-sad-it’s-funny, coupled with the so-funny-it’s-sad. I’m a car crash you can’t look away from. I’m that sensation on the back of your neck when you feel as though you’re watching something you shouldn’t be.
I write difficult characters surviving in decaying societies. Often young people, they do not know or understand the “good old days” they long for. They and the worlds they inhabit are highly influenced by commercials, social networking, and pop culture. These can be survival tools. These can be weapons of mass destruction.
My plays are often family dramas, though never in any sort of conventional way. Good Samaritans, my first play, deals with a devoutly Christian mother and son as they navigate a crisis of faith in the presence of a young man they both desire. A more recent work of mine, Tiny Dead Things, concerns a group of children, all raised in the same post-apocalyptic cult, as they confront their own horrific truths.
I write for people drawn to the surreal and the strange. I don’t write for the faint of heart, or for someone looking for a casual, comfortable viewing. I write the taboo, the off-the-wall, the brutal and the visceral. I write for a generation that feels lost, and displaced. A generation that feels like they are running out of time. The climate crisis is a very real element in all of my work, despite the world of the play.
Above all, I want to tell stories that remind us of the abject beauty and abject horror that is the human experience.