The April 23 edition of The Dramatist LIVE starts out with Ten Questions LIVE featuring Marsha Norman. Through her answers, Marsha shares some gems and insights into her writing process with declarations such as “if you can provide a keyhole into some world that nobody has ever seen, that’s the play that will get you the notice you finally deserve.”
Next, our co-hosts speaks with Sam Buggeln, artistic director of The Cherry Artists Collective, and playwright Saviana Stanescu. The Cherry Artists Collective commissioned Saviana and six other playwrights to write an original play for an online festival called Felt Sad, Posted A Frog and other streams of global quarantine. This is Saviana’s first time writing for a virtual medium, so, following the old adage to “write what you know,” she wrote about a Zoom birthday party because she had recently attended one.
In the final segment of this week’s episode, Todd London hosts an online roundtable with Liz Duffy Adams, Franky D. Gonzalez, Leah Nanako Winkler, Marsha Norman, and Gwydion Suilebhan, addressing the questions of who is writing now, and what their new writing environments are like. Panelists share their motivations for writing, which ranged from finding “control and structure” in the writing process to wanting to outrun death to creating a legacy for their young child.