Playwright’s Perspective: Sarah Mantell

I had been living out of a backpack for a year when I began writing this play. It was the last week of my two-month stay at the MacDowell residency and I had just completed my first full play with overtly gay characters. I had made myself a project that year—to surround myself with work by queer artists and see what that did to my brain and my writing. Within a year, I slid myself across the sexuality spectrum. Or maybe un-slid myself is the better term, since I arrived where I had always really been. I donated all the dresses I never liked wearing. In quarantine lockdown a couple years later I also came out as nonbinary. If I’m honest with you, I think writing plays is the thing I do to haul myself from one kind of understanding to another. To make some kind of space for where I’m headed.

I had bits of the play in my head already. The parking lot part. Some of the characters. The crucial timeline of it arrived for me while listening to a sculptor friend at that residency talk about the stories we tell about the future. This is my favorite thing about writing on the road—you pick up pieces of the play wherever you go.

A year later when I was visiting that same sculptor friend, Jami, in New Mexico, her wife Kathy asked me what was queer about the play and I instinctively looked over at Jami for the answer. Kathy was like, “Did you just look at Jami to answer that for you?” And I was like, “Oh yeah. I did.” And she was like, “Why?” And I was like, “Because Jami is a real gay?” Actually, I don’t remember if this is how the conversation went, I just remember being so face-meltingly embarrassed that my blood pressure shot through the roof. 

My point is, I wrote this play to commando-crawl my way out of queer imposter syndrome. I come from the generation that was constantly told we were “10% of the population” and there is something healing about writing a “100%” kind of play. And in trying to imagine some kind of a future where I wouldn’t have to give up big parts of myself to be seen and loved and surrounded by people. For a long time, I couldn’t really imagine any kind of future for myself. Not a good one and not even a bad one. This play was the attempt to imagine either—both—to hold those possibilities at the same time. And to believe that even if there is disaster there might also be joy.

Because plays are both art and a hiring document, I also wrote this play to increase the number of roles available to women, trans, and nonbinary actors in the second half of their careers when so many artists are just reaching the peak of their abilities. The plays we write create jobs, and if we’re lucky, those plays create a lot of jobs. Our industry is made up of the people we’ve bothered to imagine and shuts out the people we haven’t. Part of the reason I’ve had such a hard time imagining a future is that we’ve pushed out a lot of the people who are aging ahead of me. 

Hope is an action, I learned from Rebecca Solnit. Writing this play is the act of me hoping for a better American theater where more people like me exist visibly on our stages. And perhaps for a moment when that is so common that I wouldn’t need to say anything about it to you at all.