It’s unfair to compare the two experiences, but my brain can’t help it.
While the Rushing workshop was all about resolving the distance between the play that was in my head and what I put on paper — and eventually the stage — the Voyagers workshop was all about creating distance between what I thought this play was and what this play actually wants to be.
Read MoreThere are four plays about the Voyager mission.
The first one is mine, but it clearly wasn’t the first one. Because to be first implies that I completed a draft before anyone else. In November 2016, full of pain and only just finally being able to crawl out of bed — I was freelance, or “freelance,” and in more pain than I had the right to be in — I reconnected with Maureen Monterubio. She wanted to submit something to the Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway Short Play Festival, something with a bite of hope, something to get us moving and creating.
Read MoreI went to a photoshoot this morning.
It was a photoshoot for a secret secret project that I can tell y’all about next month. It was a photoshoot for a play that makes me want to scream and laugh and read and share and keep working and keep working and keep working. But all of these thoughts and feelings and joys and frustrations come from working on the script, conversing with the characters, being alone in my apartment as I type into the void that is my computer.
Read MoreI’ve been working on Voyagers since November 2016.
Maybe you’ve heard me talk about it. Maybe you’ve sat down with me as you try to share good news with me and all I can talk about is how the play isn’t working. Or how hard it is for me to write about hope. Or how little hope I was willing to share with my audiences. Maybe you came to the staged reading in September 2017, an event that coincided with my birthday despite my desperate drive to ignore the celebration. (My director Maureen brought cupcakes to rehearsal. Everyone sang. I loved it.) Maybe you were in the staged reading. Y’all wouldn’t recognize it today.
Read MoreThe photo above is deceiving.
It’s a stock photo, of course. I like the idea of it: throwing out the old to make literal room for what works. In my reality, my cuts are digital. I tuck old drafts away in a different file, a different folder, a hidden section of my playwriting software. When I cut something that’s in a notebook, I keep that page in tact. I revisit my notebooks once a decade, it seems, so there’s no danger that the cut idea will bury it’s way into my line of vision and go from being a bad idea to a bad idea that just doesn’t work.
Read MoreVoyagers is a play about NASA and discovery and science! It’s a play about the first photos of Jupiter and the songs that make up The Golden Record and the disembodied optimism of Carl Sagan and every ounce of energy that female scientists and engineers have put into the space program over the last 40 years.
It’s also a play where women repeatedly and deliberately eat in front of each other for more than 200 pages of text.
Read More
