Q: What draws you to the work of Chekov?

A: I love his plays, in all their elegant, awkward brokenness. They speak to me — which I don’t always think is a particularly healthy thing. They are just such brilliantly constructed comic dramas about the difficulty and ridiculousness of getting through the struggles of everyday life. There is something about the way his people are so horribly stuck in their own issues and dilemmas that I find really moving. They are almost all trying to be their best selves and move forward in their lives, but most of them are failing at that most of the time. There is love and loss and longing and pain… but not a lot of hope. Because to have hope, you have to be able to imagine a realistic path forward towards what you want, and too many of his characters lack that essential skill. This harsh reality makes the plays extremely fertile playgrounds for engaging, frustrating, well-intentioned people striving endlessly to get that they want… and making very little progress progress. I find this kind of story sad, funny, and achingly human.

Q: What are you looking forward to with the Cygnet version of Life Sucks?

A: I so enjoyed the version Robby and his whole team did of my play Stupid F**king Bird some years ago, I’m eager to see how he —

and this unique, dynamic cast and design team — will reimagine the play for right now. The play is asking big, hard questions about how we live our lives in difficult times. So how the real world feels to the actors and the audience at this particularly moment really matters. The reality is, this play is very different from when I wrote it in 2015 because the world is so different. The issues that are most active in the minds and hearts of our audience will be very different. I will be eager to see where that leads the production, and how it will land with Cygnet audiences.

Q: How has the pandemic altered or reinforced your own opinion on whether Life Sucks or not? Has it influenced your rewrite of the play this time around?

A: Since I am answering these question while being sick with COVID, it certainly sucks a little right now! But no, not really, I guess I believe that life is complicated… and that we all live a lot of our lives standing at the corner of Suck and Not Suck, and have to choose which way to go every day. But sometimes those choices don’t feel like choices at all, and sometimes they can be incredibly fraught. So I think the pandemic has just put one more challenge onto an already endlessly complicated playing field.

It has been fun to do some rewrites from hearing these marvelous actors, but I would say about half the rewrites are because I hear things different in the world now because of social/political realities, and about half is simply because I have gotten older and had had new experiences, and I am hearing conversation with actors that are brining up fertile territory for further exploration. I never think my plays are ever really “done”. At some point I just have to stop, and it gets performed or published, but the world lives on in me, and it is always a pleasure to get to go back and tinker around some and spend some time with new version of old friends, which is how I think about the folks who occupy this play.

Q: Which character do you most identify with?

A: Oh, the age old question! I might as well be honest, I identify in significant ways with nearly all of them. This is a very personal play for me, and there is a lot of me in it, lurking behind certain aspects of nearly every character, so it’s honestly an impossible question to answer.