Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
‘Characters And Miracles’
Playwright loves the ‘surreal space’ of theater
For the past three years, the University of Arkansas has produced the ArkType New Play Festival at the end of each school year — a way to celebrate the work of the playwrights studying in the UA Department of Theatre’s Master of Fine Arts program. Because covid-19 prevented this year’s festival, What’s Up! is going to be chatting this summer with the program’s current students. This week we’re featuring playwright Lauren Ferebee.
Ferebee is an award-winning author whose plays have been produced throughout the United States. Recently, her play “Brilliance” was part of New York City’s Boomerang Theatre Company’s First Flight Festival. Locally, TheatreSquared produced a reading of her play “Every Waiting Heart.” Next year, her play “Wild Eden” will be produced at the University of Arkansas.
Q: What are you working on right now? Can you tell us a little bit about it?
A: Right now I am finishing up a run of “A Collective Noise” with Less Than Three Theatre, which is an online choose-your-own-adventure Zoom play. I’m simultaneously working on a two-hander play called “Goods” that’s a science-fiction play set in the near future about two women who work as trash collectors in space. I’m hoping by the end of the summer to finish rewrites on my television portfolio, which includes two hour-long original pilots, “155 Charles” and “Gloryland.” These two projects are, respectively, a feminist boho re-imagining of 1950s detective noir and a Southern Gothic college mystery. I love classic mysteries. I’m a big fan of everyone from Dorothy L. Sayers to Raymond Chandler.
I’m also on a research fellowship this summer, so I’m writing a portfolio thesis on my creative and academic work at the university.
Q: How has being in the UA program has benefited your work? What aspects of it have you found most helpful?
A: Having work read frequently is a great motivator to get projects done — you have many milestones to hit, and it really creates a manageable workflow over time. I’m also, as I think most of my classmates would tell you, someone who can really produce pages under pressure. That’s a talent I’ve discovered in graduate school, churning out pages for a deadline and then having people say, “Wow, this is actually pretty good.” I have no internal barometer if something is good or not when I draft; I always say it’s not really my business if anything is good or not until I’m in rewrites, so that kind of immediate feedback is really helpful.
Q: Why are you attracted to playwriting?
A: I love playwriting because I love characters and miracles. I love strange people and unexpected occurrences. I think a lot about the theater as a kind of surreal space, because everything there is so obviously fake, and so whatever happens has these layers of meaning and surreality because we know we are there watching it together. We process it as metaphor. And that’s what interests me, because I think a lot of times people are changed or affected by the unexpected and the divergent — for instance, seeing something impossible happen or something that they understand with their hearts that makes no logical sense. There’s a moment in the online play I’m working on, “A Collective Noise,” in the beginning, where the characters have the audience clap with them on Zoom. And of course you can’t do that, you can’t clap in unison on Zoom, but everyone tries. That discovery is kind of a thesis moment for the play, because to me it is the moment of not being together, in spite of being able to see one another, that characterizes what is possible and impossible for theater right now. It’s just clapping, and it’s awkward, and people laugh and feel awkward, but it’s also like, more than just a clap. It’s a state of being alone, not quite in sync with the world, which I think we’re all feeling right now.