With the Volt Festival, playwright Karen Hartman comes home
“I’m feeling a tremendous sense of visibility,” playwright Karen Hartman said. “And it’s not when I expected to be visible.”
Visible through a Zoom window, Hartman was speaking from her Brooklyn home the morning after the world premiere of her play “New Golden Age.” Just a few days before, two of her other plays, “The Lucky Star” and “Goldie, Max and Milk,” had celebrated their New York premieres, as part of Volt, a new festival from 59E59 Theaters. (All three productions are being presented simultaneously through June 12.)
Hartman, 51, a playwright with a robust career in regional theater, described being chosen as the inaugural playwright for Volt as “transformative.” The festival, intended to run yearly, is meant to highlight a midcareer artist whose work has seldom been seen locally.
“It was really important that the playwright not be a usual suspect,” said Val Day, the artistic director of 59E59, who dreamed up the festival. “It had to be somebody who was more
widely produced in the regions, who had a fairly large canon of work, which deserved to have eyes on it in New York.”
Hartman fit the bill. Raised in San Diego, she studied literature at Yale and then enrolled at the Yale School of Drama. Shortly after graduation, several theaters produced her play “Gum,” including New York’s WP Theater, then known as Women’s Project. Reviews were mixed, and while she soon became a regular in the regionals, subsequent New York productions proved rare. In one week, Volt, which Hartman described as a “three-night Hanukkah,” changed that.
“It has transformed my own story about what has been going on with my work all these years,” she said.
“The Lucky Star,” which premiered in 2017 as “The Book of Joseph” and is presented here by the Directors Company, animates a trove of real letters written by a Polish Jewish family in the early years of World War II to the one member who escaped to America. “Goldie, Max and Milk,” from 2014 and produced here by MBL Productions, describes the unlikely bond between a queer single mother and an Orthodox Jewish lactation consultant in Brooklyn. “New Golden Age,” produced by Primary Stages and structured like a Greek tragedy, imagines the dark consequences of an extremely online future as two sisters struggle to connect in real life.
In a spirited hourlong chat, Hartman discussed her career and her plays.
These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Q: How did you become a playwright?
A: This displaced New Yorker named Deborah Salzer started the California Young Playwrights Festival, an offshoot of the National Young Playwrights Festival. She started it when I was 14 years old. I acted in the first season. Then I was like, “Oh, I could write a play.” I got kind of mainline drugged as a playwright very early.
Q: Not long after you finished grad school, regional theaters began to stage “Gum.” The Women’s Project staged it, too. What was that like?
A: I felt very excited and kind of raw. It’s a vulnerable thing to write about anything personal. And that play is about policing the sexuality of girls and women in a violent way. I’d written that play very swiftly, in my last year of graduate school. But it had come out of some real-life people ... so it was a thrilling level of potential responsibility.
Q: You went on to have a thriving career in regional theater, but you had far fewer productions in New York, although you live in New York.
A: Most writers don’t get their plays done at all. I’ve worked with amazing people and been asked onto incredible projects. But in this sense of the cultural conversation, New York is an amplifier. So if I’m a mission-driven person, and my mission is to amplify voices, especially those of girls and women, and I myself am not amplified, then I am not doing my job.