Faith: I always get really excited talking to people who do multi-disciplinary, multimedia work, especially involving movement and music. So, you could literally tell me whatever you wanted [and] I’d be like, “This is great.” But we won’t do that because I am somewhat organized. First, I want to reiterate what I said in the email, which is—congratulations on this residency!
Kate D.: So bonkers.
Faith: It’s like, “Princeton money, what does it all mean?” I still remember you talking to us at NTI saying “Yeah, I don’t have a real address.” And I kept that in the back of my mind, because I thought, “That’s gonna be me…”
Kate D. Well, tell you what, you could go from not having an address to having a Princeton email address.
Faith : Cuebig musical number, “It Could Happen to You!” Anyway, to start it off, I would love if you described your artistic practice thus far and what inspires you.
Kate D.: I cut my teeth right out of school, working for Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More. I dabbled a lot in immersive theater, and I always have loved performing, and I’ve always loved writing. I wasn’t accepted to any of the traditional playwriting specific program[s] that I applied for [after] university. And so, I think it wasn’t until lockdown that I was really able to come back to writing and creating for pleasure, rather than being stuck in this perpetual emerging artist pipeline where you have seven jobs and you’re perpetually emerging, [but] never “emerge”. So I think my practice, [if] I had to define it right now in this moment, is going to be telling stories that I have never seen before in ways that that compel and excite and mystify me.
Faith: There’s so much to unpack within that, especially with the MFA pipeline™️, and I am curious, how did we get here? It’s interesting that playwriting was the route that you were going to go down, because I feel like these programs are not really designed for people who want to do a ton of different things…
Kate D.: I’ve always written, but then I got into my first show when I was in middle school and that was kind of it. I also knew I would write for theater, but I wanted to train as a performer. It was really important to me, so that’s what I did. I trained at the Experimental Theater Wing.
Faith: Is that the one where you do a lot of Grotowski?
Kate D.: Yes, lots of the cat, lots of rolling, lots of working outside in and physical work. What was so beautiful about that program is that it’s not an actor factory. It really puts you in touch with your humanity, what matters to you, how you deliver that and how you stand in service of that. I’m grateful that I was in a program that nourished me as a human and as an artist holistically and actually empowered me [by saying], “Yes, you can write for the theater, and also you can perform, and also you can write music, and you don’t have to pick one. You really can do what you want, and you can express yourself in a range of ways. Make the stories that interest you and are urgent and important to you and don’t worry about how that fits into the the canon.” I guess it was less about commercial viability. It was really about making you singular and making you you basically. I think it imbued in me a sense of fearlessness, which was maybe a little bit flagrant at times…That was my experience. And that’s still my experience of making: I just like to make things. I’m still working on speaking about my work in a holistic way.
Faith: Not everything can be easily distilled, and I think that’s where the anxiety comes from. With that, what are the kinds of stories you find yourself interested in and are drawn to? And then, how do you decide what medium the story is going to live in?
Kate D.: Oh, good question. I am really interested in stories about loneliness in this time of mass extinction, and also the theater as a space of magic. The theater as a space of communion, where speaking to animals and plants… we can stage that in its most full bodied, realized way. And, how do I know which medium it should be? It’s very rare that I change mediums. Actually, with a story, I often feel like, when I get the little seed, [the medium] comes with it. I think that’s my intuition. And maybe some stories… I should change lanes! But normally, with the very seed and inception, I kind of have a felt sense of, “Oh, this is a play,” or “Oh, this is a song.” And, I go from there.
Faith: Right, it’s like the thing is telling you what it wants to be, and maybe you don’t know like where it’s gonna take you, but it lets you know, “This is my name, and this is where I would like to live.”
Kate D.: Exactly.
Faith: So… something else that I noticed as I was perusing your website… With Hag, Tulipa, The Apiary and the New York Botanic Garden certification, it seems that in addition to the aspect of loneliness in the work that you’re making, there’s also a sense of earthiness, for lack of a better word. And I’m curious about where that comes from, what role the earth and the body play in the work that you’re creating, and [in] how you see the world.
Kate D.: Well, I had a profound experience in my 20s, when I was studying herbalism, in which we spent a lot of our training meditating with plants, and I had a profound experience of understanding that plants can hold intimacy. That we can have intimacy with plants and with the more than human world. And that was such a revelation for me at the time. It still is, honestly, and I’ve been trying to write about that feeling for such a long time. My horticulture certificate, I think, just deepened my sense of that experience and that communion with plants and landscapes, but also puts it in context of time and seasons. Gardeners see cycles of death and life through many years, and they just have a way of moving through the world. They understand how intrinsic death is to life, and how important it is to be in conversation and how humbling it is. And just being around plants, to be honest, is why those topics and ideas are important to me.
Faith: I want to know what herbalism class this is, because that’s something that I’ve always been interested in thinking about in terms of history and land, and the way that people use plants to heal. How did you come to plants?
Kate D.: I was living with my oldest friend. We had a mutual friend we’d gone to high school with who was training to be a therapist, and she wanted to have this complementary education to her very academic study of the brain and the mind and the spirit. And so found this program in Vermont, and it’s called the Gaia School of Healing. She said, “I want to do this thing. Would you like to do this with me? It’s one weekend a month for a year, and we could all spend time together.” I saw the syllabus, and… it was very intuitive. I said, “We have to do this. I don’t know what this is, but we really have to do this. I feel very strongly about this.” And we did it, and it was definitely a slog driving up to from New York City to Vermont one weekend a month [but] it was profound. It really shifted a lot for me, and I can’t recommend that training with Sage enough. Sage Maurer is the director and founder of that program, and she’s really been such an incredible mentor and friend. Such a gift.
Faith: That is so beautiful and so fascinating. Because I think a lot of times when people talk about the Earth or plays that are dealing with ecology, it’s academic or kind of removed, or like, what will life and society be like for humans? As opposed to: wow, we really love the Earth and have an intimate relationship with it, and the work is sort of sprouting from that soil, as opposed to coming from the intellectualized version of, “Oh my god–climate crisis!” Such a different perspective.
Kate D.: I mean, I don’t think I’m clever enough to be interested intellectually in the hypotheses. I think I’m more in touch with the grief that I feel. I went back to Australia where I was born; I hadn’t been back for 20 years. But when I was a girl, I had these beautiful memories of [how] you would like, check your shoes for spiders, and you would check the corners of your room. There were just bugs and insects everywhere, lizards everywhere. I went back recently, and they’re not there. They’re just not there in such abundance anymore. I feel more in touch with those kinds of experiences. The grief of remembering something from my childhood and not seeing it as an adult. And that’s what I think theater can do very well. I’ve read a lot of terrible, speculative, scientific [stuff], but I think theater can put us in touch with the loss that’s happening around us all the time… How painful it actually is, and how we maybe try to mask that, or hide that, or not be in touch with that, because it is a lot.
Faith: This is really making me think about the way theater (and art in general) has the possibility of outlining these sort of nameless griefs or literal gaps we have in our psyches. And I think so many people are suffering because things that should be in their lives aren’t there. Sometimes, I think we don’t even know we are grieving or that we are existing in this state of loss until we have these small moments of, “Oh, this person is talking about how there’s something that they remember from their youth that isn’t there anymore. What things from my childhood are there anymore?” That hits people a little deeper than the “We’re all gonna die” messaging.
Kate D.: If I see some work and the moral of it is, climate change is bad, I’m like, “Yeah… I know.” I shut down when I see work that is more moralistic. And I’m much more interested in these little gray areas of not just how we’re with ourselves in these times of extinction and loss and grief, but also how we’re with our immediate community, and how we’re with our larger community. That’s what I’m interested in exploring [in] this Princeton project, as well as just so excited to have really rigorous academic support for what I anticipate will be… really a study on grief. So, I’m excited.
Faith: It feels like what you’re interested in is so different from [the idea that] science always has the answer. That science will show us the way. And, science will definitely do that. But, science is created by people, and it’s interesting to think about what is going on with those people.
Kate D.: Yes, I think I put that in my proposal. I’m very excited to speak to scientists as people who may also be grieving. It’s one thing to speculate their ideas, but I’m very interested in how their feelings about these topics might affect their day to day, and how they see it. How is [the] dialogue with their loved ones as a result of what they know? Is it totally bifurcated and totally separate? I’m really interested in that, and I do think that’s not dissimilar to the way that many of us, in this Information Age, know a lot, maybe know too much and don’t know how to hold it. And how do we hold it?
Faith: On that note, I would love to hear a little bit about your project. Obviously, it is at the very early stages of the process, but that, to me, is the exciting part, just to hear a framework of what you’re interested in doing and are not doing. What you’re interested in creating, thinking about, wondering, and what you’re excited about for this process…
Kate D.: This seed of an idea came about the same way as my play The Apiary did, where I found some images online of a space, and I said, “I want to see a play in that space.” I came across the Mars replicator, where they rehearse the missions to Mars way out in the desert. And I saw this room, which is full of red sand where they conduct some of these experiments. And I said, “That is so strange. I would like to do a play there.” It’s surreal. I also love [the] meta-theatricality… You’re rehearsing for something, but the stakes are so different.
The play centers around these two different scientists. An astronaut and a robot are rehearsing for this mission to Mars, but then, this rehearsal gets interrupted by the discovery of fossils. This paleontologist comes to assess their significance. I’m really interested in investigating… When we’re flooded with information about extinction, what does that mean? And how do we put it in a larger context of space and time. I’m [also] interested in the Fermi paradox, for instance. One theory as to why we haven’t met aliens is because there have been other societies, but maybe they’ve gone extinct. So should we be looking to the past for solutions, or should we be looking to the future? And I feel like it’s not going to be that binary, but I wanted to put those voices in opposition to each other.
Faith: Can you explain this paradox again for the non-science people in the back? And by “non-science people”, I mean me.
Kate D.: Essentially, the reasoning is that there’s so many galaxies and that are like ours, there has to be planets have developed intelligent life. Therefore, some of these civilizations must [have] developed features like travel between planets, right? But, we have not seen any evidence of life on other planets. Why is that? There’s a few answers. One is that life on Earth is so complex, it’s not possible [anywhere else]. Another other is that it’s rare. And the other is that extinction is actually an interplanetary issue, that it happens, and we’re just on a different timeline. The idea is that we’re not alone in our wrestling with mass extinction.
Faith: Yeah, I feel like we are perhaps not as singular as we would like to believe, which is both hard to grapple with at times, but also a little bit reassuring. We see extinction on smaller scales with big empires that end up collapsing and dispersing. It kind of gets into what you were saying about being in tune with these cycles of life and death. Maybe we’re just entering the death curve of the cycle. And, of course, it’s terrible when you’re inside it…. I’m having one of those moments where you zoom out and you remember… the Earth is so old.
Kate D.: I’m excited to bring those ideas into more of an interpersonal, smaller, stranger, idiosyncratic play.
Faith: And with this play, how are you thinking about the process of creating? Are you thinking about devising? Are you thinking there will be movement in it? I mean, is your process for writing plays like, generally consistent, or are you anticipating, just new discoveries. I mean, discoveries are always present, but…
Kate D.: I’ve never had so much support on the research end, which is exciting. The way I normally write plays is I will write a very bad draft as fast as I can, and I will get my favorite actors together, and I will say, let’s read this, and then talk about why it’s sloppy and messy and terrible. I try to write faster than my anxiety and keep going and keep going. So that’s sort of my plan for this year, is to get really intense with the research and then set these precocious deadlines for myself to turn something out, because I want to get to that feedback loop as fast as possible.
Faith: We talked a little bit about your curiosities around the ways that scientists are holding all of this information and coping with it and dealing with it–or not. And I’m wondering how you are dealing with it. How you are planning on holding it. I mean, this is a lot to think about, and the world that you’re creating feels really rich and also really intense. So, I don’t know, how does one sit with that and create that work without being like, “Oh, my God!!!!”
Kate D.: I mean, I definitely can turn my brain off. But I think these topics all hold a lot. [You’re] not just sitting in one flat emotion. It’s actually getting into the specific little world that holds a lot of beauty. And I think, even if life is brief, it doesn’t mean that it’s not absolutely prismatically beautiful and arresting and worthy. And so, I think it’s possible because I’m not sitting in one feeling for very long. I’m trying to make worlds that are three dimensional.
Extended Play is a project of The Civilians. To learn more about The Civilians and to access exclusive discounts to shows, visit us and join our email list at TheCivilians.org.
