M
y favorite part of the Lark was how I was always coming into contact with other writers I had never met before, who were at different stages of their career, but all committed to growing together as artists. Whether it was through fellowships in which we met every few weeks over the course of a year, or intense one-week retreats when we met daily, I learned so much about playwriting through sharing pages with people whose ways of writing (and thinking) were completely new to me.
All these happy experiences occurred in the same few rooms in Midtown Manhattan. Never did I imagine that something born out of the Lark would take me overseas. But it so happened that while I was meeting other American playwrights, the Lark was also developing relationships with counterpart institutions in other countries, facilitating the exchange of playwrights across borders. The Lark’s international programs had the same core belief that drove the national ones: that writers should learn from each other.
In 2022, John Eisner founded Peacedale Global Arts, an organization dedicated to continuing those international partnerships initiated by the Lark. My own relationship with Peacedale began when they asked me to participate in a writing workshop in New York in which American and Portuguese playwrights read each other’s work. The next year, I was invited to repeat the experience, but this time in Portugal. Exchanging work with Portuguese writers led to long discussions of our respective countries’ complicated histories, fractious politics and asking ourselves how theatre fit into this landscape. And while there was a lot of commiserating, we were able to remind each other of the joys that theatre gave us in the first place: being able to create shared spaces for our communities and being able to speak to those communities in our own language.
Right now, as I write these words, I’m in Targu Mures, a city in the Transylvania region of Romania. Again, it is because of Peacedale that I am here. I’m leading a one-week playwriting workshop for a group of students studying at the same theatre school, some writing in Romanian and some writing in the minority language of Hungarian. I can’t wait to find out what I learn from them.
