The Oregon Trail and The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center

In 2013, Bekah Brunstetter brought her play The Oregon Trail to The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference to be developed with director Geordie Broadwater. This season has seen an incredible number of Broadway and Off-Broadway shows that began their life at this incredible oasis of creativity in Waterford, CT. Broadway World wrote about some of these plays and their journey from development to full productions.

O'Neill Represented in NYC by SIGNIFICANT OTHER, IN TRANSIT and More

The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center celebrates dozens of shows on Broadway, off-Broadway, and in theaters across the globe this 2016-17 season. Projects from the National Playwrights Conference and National Music Theater Conference have moved on to significant productions and even the Academy Awards.

The O'Neill supports writers at every stage of their career as playwright Joshua Harmon, whose show SIGNIFICANT OTHER opens on Broadway March 2, reflects:

"I first went to the O'Neill for a night in 2009, when they invited graduate students in playwriting to come and see the campus. I went back the next year for two weeks through the Kennedy Center, where I got to sit around dinner tables with Alfred Uhry and Molly Smith Metzler and bask in their glow. So when I was asked to come back as a writer-in-residence in 2013, it felt very full circle."

He continues: "By far the most moving part of being there is learning the history of founder George White's dream, to create a space for playwrights to work, and then seeing what has become of that dream: all the playwrights who now gather there each year, and the plaques which bear the names of so many of our country's most important writers, who all came to the O'Neill to work. It's quite moving to contemplate how many writers George White's vision has impacted, and how many audiences have been impacted by the work of the writers who have passed through the O'Neill. I feel very fortunate to have been one of them."

SIGNIFICANT OTHER was developed at the O'Neill in 2013. As the 2013 NPC writer-in-residence, Joshua Harmon worked on a new play titled The Franco-Prussian War, Several drafts and a title change later, the show enjoyed a 2015 sold-out run at the Roundabout Theater Company and is now on Broadway at the Booth Theatre.

UGLY LIES THE BONE by Lindsey Ferrentino was first developed at the 2014 National Playwrights Conference. After a sold-out run at the Roundabout Theatre Company, the show opens at London's National Theatre March 1. This production marks Lindsey Ferrentino's European debut.

IN TRANSIT by Kristen Anderson-Lopez, James-Allen Ford, Russ Kaplan and Sara Wordsworth was developed during the 2008 National Music Theater Conference. Two years after the O'Neill's four developmental readings, IN TRANSIT opened off-Broadway in a Primary Stages production that won Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel and Outer Critics Circle Awards. In 2016, eight years after the readings in the O'Neill Barn, IN TRANSIT opened on Broadway where it is currently running at the Circle in the Square Theater.

FENCES was first developed at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's 1983 National Playwrights Conference. The play went on to win the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 1987 Tony Award for Best Play. Over the course of his career, playwright August Wilson developed six of his plays at the O'Neill. The American Film Institute (AFI)'s Movie of the Year, FENCES was nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay (August Wilson, posthumously), Accepting her award for Best Supporting Actress for FENCES, Viola Davis celebrated the playwright saying: "Here's to August Wilson, who exhumed and exalted the ordinary people."

In reflecting on the tremendous success of O'Neill-developed projects this season, National Playwrights Conference Artistic Director Wendy C. Goldberg notes: "The stories are relevant and their success is a testament to the success of the O'Neill's holistic development process." She continues: "It is always inspiring when we are in a moment like this with so many shows moving into world premiere productions and New York premieres." citing the recent off-Broadway premieres of three NPC shows:

ALLIGATOR, by Hilary Bettis, was developed at the O'Neill's 2012 National Playwrights Conference. The show had its world premiere at New Georges Theatre in November as the inaugural production of The Sol Project, a New-York based initiative dedicated to raising the visibility of Latinx playwrights.

OREGON TRAIL was developed during the 2013 National Playwrights Conference. It had its New York premiere in a Fault Line Theatre production at Women's Project Theater. Written by Bekah Brunstetter, the production featured NPC director Geordie Broadwater and NPC cast members Emily Louise Perkins and Laura Ramadei. The show will also be seen at Chicago Halcyon's Theatre in November.

ORANGE JULIUS, by Basil Kreimendahl, was developed at the O'Neill's 2012 National Playwrights Conference. The show had its New York premiere at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in a collaborative production with PAGE 73. The production featured NPC alum Irene Sofia Lucio and Jess Barbagallo (National Theater Institute faculty).

"For over 50 years, major writers and artists of every stripe have launched their careers on our seaside campus. The number of O'Neill-developed works currently on stages around the world is a testament to the work of our outstanding Artistic Directors and demonstrates the value the O'Neill has in the American Theater." says O'Neill Executive Director Preston Whiteway. "I'm thrilled that these new plays and musicals will be seen by audiences across the country."

O'Neill-developed projects with upcoming productions at regional theaters include:

Zakiyyah Alexander and Imani Uzuri's GIRL SHAKES LOOSE (NMTC '16) world premiere at Penumbra Theatre.

David Auburn's LOST LAKE (NPC '13) at Berkshire Theatre Group

Jeff Augustin's LITTLE CHILDREN DREAM OF GOD (NPC '13) west coast premiere at The Road Theatre Company

Kirsten Child's THE BUBBLY BLACK GIRL SHEDS HER CHAMELEON SKIN (NMTC '98) at NYC's City Center as part of Encores! Off-Center.

Halley Feiffer's I'M GONNA PRAY FOR YOU SO HARD (NPC '14) west coast premiere with L.A.'s Rogue Machine Theatre and Kansas City, MO's Unicorn Theatre.

Jen Silverman's ALL THE ROADS HOME (NPC '13) world premiere for Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park.

Ken Weitzman's HALFTIME WITH DON (NPC '15) will be the 65th National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere

Josh Wilder's LEFTOVERS (NPC '15) world premiere at Boston's Company One Theatre

Daniel Zaitchik's DARLING GRENADINE (NMTC '16) world premiere at Goodspeed Musicals.

Founded in 1964, the O'Neill is the country's preeminent organization dedicated to the development of new works and new voices for the American theater, and named in honor of Eugene O'Neill, four-time Pulitzer Prize-winner and America's only playwright to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The O'Neill has been home to more than 1,000 new works for the stage and thousands more emerging artists. Scores of projects developed at the O'Neill have gone on to full production at theaters around the world. O'Neill programs include the National Playwrights Conference, National Music Theater Conference, National Critics Institute, National Puppetry Conference, Cabaret & Performance Conference, and National Theater Institute - which offers six credit-earning undergraduate training programs. In addition, the O'Neill owns and operates Monte Cristo Cottage as a museum open to the public. The O'Neill is the recipient of two Tony Awards and National Medal of Arts www.theoneill.org.

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Geordie Broadwater in Broadway World

Heading into the final weekend of The Oregon Trail, our fearless leader Geordie Broadwater chatted with Broadway World about directing a play based on a video game he grew up with (but could never beat!).

BWW Interview: Take a Trip With the Director of THE OREGON TRAIL, Geordie Broadwater

by Marissa Sblendorio

For anyone who grew up playing the classic computer game "The Oregon Trail" (especially in computer class, and especially if you filled up your wagon with pop stars and classmates you had crushes on), Bekah Brunstetter's ("This Is Us," Be A Good Little Widow) new play THE OREGON TRAIL, is going to hit all the right buttons.

Directed by Geordie Broadwater (The Flies, And to the Republic), the play stars Jane, a 13 year old girl in 1997 who escapes her life by playing "The Oregon Trail" in her high school's computer lab. Audiences get to watch as Jane grows up and moves through her life while simultaneously watching "Then Jane" and her family navigate 1850s frontier life, traveling down the trail, all under the guidance of the all-powerful Voice of the Game.

Since the show is about to enter it's final weekend, BroadwayWorld was able to chat with the show's director, Geordie Broadwater on all things OREGON TRAIL, and how he never could beat the computer game when he was younger. Check it out, below!

So, what is THE OREGON TRAIL about?

It follows a girl in 1997 playing the computer game "The Oregon Trail" in the computer lab of her school and as she plays, we start to follow 13 year old girl in 1848 on the the actual Oregon Trail with her family, traveling from Independence, Missouri to Oregon. And then the play shifts again and the girl in 1997 is fast forwarded through time by the same video game framing device and is in her adult years, living on her sister's couch. The whole time, she's interacting with the game the same way she's been since she was playing it. And then it follows her struggle with life as an adult as you check back in with the other girl and her family on the Oregon Trail.

What drew you to the project?

Well, the first thing is that Bekah Brunstetter is my favorite people to work with and is a playwright that I admire and would direct anything she ever writes. But, also I remember the "The Oregon Trail" very distinctly from my adolescence. It's something that whenever I mention the play to somebody from my generation, all they do is pause and then say, "Wait, like the video game?" Everyone seems to remember it. The second thing is that when you actually read the play or see it, there's this amazing thing where, of course it's very funny because Bekah has this amazing humor, but there's this gut punch of emotionality in the play that, I think, really surprises you. It sort of takes this whimsical, funny framework of the video game and this 13 year old girl and makes this about what we're doing in the universe in this amazing and powerful way.

Were you a fan of the game when you were younger?

Oh yeah. But, I don't remember ever beating it. And now that I've played it a bunch of more as an adult, I beat it all the time. I feel like a real pro!

Did you play it in preparation to direct this?

Yeah. Thank god you can play it online for free, because I don't know how we would have tracked it down, otherwise.

As the director, did you come up with the way the 2-D game was presented in a 3-D stage? Or, was that a collaborative process involving the entire creative team?

It was was certainly a process involving everyone. We've been working on this play together, Bekah and I, for many years, and we never staged it together, only readings and workshops. So, it was actually very daunting to say that well, we actually had to put it up on it's feet. And we discussed using projections and all sorts of techniques, but, the most important thing we kept coming back to was that the characters of the past in the game had real emotional lives and are people we can relate to, as well. So, removing anything that kept us from caring about them was really important. There's actually an interesting thing with the cast, because we've been workshopping this play for three years at least, we've worked with a couple of actors over the course of three years. So, there's some actors that aren't in the show that was owe a great deal to, who helped shaped the roles over the years. And the two of the actors in the show, Laura Ramadei and Emily Louise Perkins, have been a part of this play for the same three years Bekah and I have. It's great to have this sort of history of development in the room and then also we have these fresh perspectives from the other three actors, so they ask all the questions we might have ignored over the past three years.

You're both and actor and a director. Is there one role you prefer over the other?

No. I'd say that acting is like a wonderful, fun vacation from directing. Directing is extremely satisfying, but, for me, it's a lot more work. Acting is lot of work in it's own, but it's invigorating and, in the end, you're responsible for yourself, where in directing your responsible for everything. I always say that when you're directing, if it goes well, it's everyone else's hard work and talent, but if it goes bad, it's completely your fault. There's not one I like more than the over, but they certainly feel very important to me.

Do you think you would ever do both in one production?

I don't know. I don't think I have enough self awareness as a performer to be able to direct myself.

It's 1997. Alone in her computer lab, 13-year-old Jane finds her escape from the awkward throes of puberty by joining her sister and her unattainable high school crush in a covered wagon headed west on "The Oregon Trail." Under the guidance of the all-powerful Voice of the Game, we watch "Then Jane" and her family navigate the deadly perils of 1850s frontier life, while present day Jane navigates the different but all-too-real dangers of high school, college, and eventually adulthood. Jane soon finds herself in her 20s, unemployed and battling an undefinable lifelong depression, even as "Then Jane" continues to face the tribulations of the trail. With nearly two centuries between them, both Janes face hardships that seem impossible to overcome-until they find one another.

Tickets for THE OREGON TRAIL are available by visiting www.faultlinelinetheatre.org.

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Bekah Brunstetter in Paste Magazine

A couple days before opening night, playwright Bekah Brunstetter chatted with Paste Magazine about our production of The Oregon Trail and the transition from stage to screen.

The Oregon Trail's Bekah Brunstetter On Her New Show

By Alicia Kort

You might remember this early computer game from your childhood. In “The Oregon Trail” game, you helped your wagon party journey across the country to start a more prosperous life. But the obstacles you had to overcome weren’t easy, and you watched various members of your wagon party die of cholera, snake bites and exhaustion. Although this game might have elicited giggles and laughs at the suffering of your fictional characters at the time, playwright Bekah Brunstetter brings the life of the “The Oregon Trail” into reality in her play. She talks to Paste about writing for both the stage and the small screen, as well as, sadness in the 1840s and present day. The Oregon Trail runs through February 12 at the Fault Line Theatre.

Paste: What’s Oregon Trail about? 
Bekah Brunstetter: The Oregon Trail follows, kind of juxtaposes, the two lives of two very different young women. You’ve got one who you meet in the ‘90s, who you meet when she’s [Jane] in middle school, and she’s playing “The Oregon Trail” in her computer lab. We follow her life through her mid-20s as she wrestles with a sadness and a frustration with life that she can’t quite explain. Simultaneously, we’re also following the game that she plays, her game of the Oregon Trail. We’re also following a young woman also named Jane, who’s traveling on the Oregon Trail from Missouri to Oregon with her family. The play is about sadness then versus sadness now and to what extent contemporary life makes space for sadness, because back in 1848 if you’re traveling on the Oregon Trail with your family, you can’t necessarily say that you’re too sad to get out of the wagon in the morning and have to get keep going.

Paste: That sounds very interesting.
Brunstetter: It’s a lot of fun. It’s a fun play about sadness. It’s one of those sadness comedies!

Paste: Where did you get this idea? Or when did you come up with it? 
Brunstetter: I actually had the very, very first idea to write it 10 years ago when I was in grad school. I think I wrote the scene and then I put it away because I wanted to really learn about what the Oregon Trail life was actually like. It’s so funny to me that we played this game in middle school, in which we’re traveling on the Oregon Trail, but we really learned nothing about what it was actually like. I put the play aside for a while because I wanted to do that research. Probably about five years ago, I got a really cool fellowship with a theatre here in town called The Lark. They support playwrights while they research plays, so I decided to revisit it. At that point, I wrote the full draft of the play and actually started to learn more about what life was like for people actually on the trail, and what life was like for women and how people viewed sadness then. I learned a lot about the history of mental illness and how it used to not be a thing. Now, it’s a thing. It all started back then. The two young women’s lives became clear to me first and then I started using the game as a structure, which was just a lot of fun, because I love that game as I think many people did when they were young.

Paste: What were the challenges of putting this show on a stage with the two different time periods?
Brunstetter: The guy who is directing it, Geordie Broadwater, we’ve actually worked on it together in a couple of different readings and workshops, so it’s cool that we’ve tried to explore it more. I honestly have not seen it yet. I actually got into town tonight, so I’m seeing it for the first time tonight. It’s scary and thrilling. I would imagine what’s difficult—and there was a production of this in Portland and the technical elements were amazing—but what’s challenging is keeping the trail stuff real. The family is fjording a river, losing wagon wheels and people are dying. It was important to me that it all felt real. At first, you’re laughing and enjoying the nostalgia of the game and then people lost their lives. It was quite arduous to do this, and I want that to come across too. It’s a play, but how can it feel scary and not just like a middle school history play?

Paste: How does this differ from your other plays and other work? I know you also wrote the upcoming TV series American Gods and This Is Us. How does this compare to that? I know writing for TV must be a totally different beast than playwriting.
Brunstetter: I’m actually writing on This is Us right now, which is a new family drama for NBC. Any TV job, you’re a part of a staff, so you’re helping your boss execute his or her vision. It’s super collaborative, and you’re more of a part of a team, whereas with a play, you’re writing it alone and then it becomes about your collaborators after you write it. With a play, you really need to know what it is that you’re exploring and what it is that you mean to say. That’s on you. You can’t really look to anyone else to tell you that, whereas with TV—until, of course, you have your own show—you’re part of discovering that. I find TV work to be very liberating, because it’s not all on me. They’re both rewarding in different ways. I’d say that this play, which I wrote about five years ago, has a special place in my heart. It’s so fun and insane. It’s one of the more theatrical things that I’ve written. I always write dramedies, but my plays since then have become a bit more grounded and serious, so this play for me is remembering the crazy shit I did in my 20s. I’m now happy to go to bed earlier, but I loved remembering what life was like then.

Paste: This happens before her [Jane’s] 20s, but I heard that Jane’s school crush plays into this a little bit.
Brunstetter: Yeah, there’s a guy when she’s in middle school. There’s a boy, who she likes, that she has an encounter with that she never forgets. You see the trauma that haunts her when she gets older and catches up with her in her adult life. Since in our contemporary lives we’re not traveling the Oregon Trail with our families, other things become our hardships and our traumas. Be it rejection by a boy, a girl or a friend when you’re at that impressionable age at 12 or 13, those kind of events become the things that shape you, imposed to “I saw my mom die of a snake bite.” But they have the same value, so it was interesting to me juxtaposing the hardness of the trail to parts of life now.

Paste: How much of the game does the play incorporate? 
Brunstetter: The game is probably a good 30 to 40 percent of the play. The play follows the structure of a round of the game. If you remember at the beginning, you name the members of the people in your wagon party and you go to the general store to get your wares, you decide whether you’re a farmer or a banker and then you travel the trail. You encounter things and you decide what to do. That basic structure is the structure of the play. It’s the past story and the present story. The option to continue on the trail or not is a huge part of the play. Jane in her contemporary life, that’s the choice she keeps being given. In the play, those choices that are usually just flashing on your computer screen in front of you are actually a character and an omnipotent voice from the rafters that gives her choices and demands her responses. It starts off as a game and becomes something a little more malicious then it’s meant to be. It’s the voice of fate, the voice of time and the voice of life as it chugs on and forces you to deal with it.

Paste: Is there anything you’d like to add? 
Brunstetter: It’s a shitty time. This play is not politically important. I do think that it’s a hell of a lot of fun and we need that right now. It also is about how to keep going, which is also important to think about right now. I hope it adds value to people’s lives at this time, because it really is a fun night at the theatre. It’s only 80 minutes, which is my favorite kind of play. It’s like “I can do this, but I can also do other things!” You can live a lot of life before and after and hopefully have some thoughts about it. I feel like it’s a safe play if you don’t like plays, usually don’t go to plays or have a friend that doesn’t like plays. It’s a nice beginners theatre play.

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The Oregon Trail in The New Yorker

The New Yorker wrote a very nice review of Bekah Brunstetter's The Oregon Trail in their "Goings On About Town" section for their upcoming edition:

Goings On About Town: THE OREGON TRAIL

by Elisabeth Vincentelli

Over the past ten years or so, Bekah Brunstetter has established herself as a sympathetic, keen-eyed chronicler of a flailing American middle class, stuck in tough jobs and straining to make sense of life. Here she turns her attention to Jane (Liba Vaynberg), whom we first meet as a geeky 1997 middle-schooler determined to finish the computer game The Oregon Trail, in which a pioneer family heads west in a wagon. The play then fast-forwards to Jane at thirty, overeducated, underemployed, and mired in depression. Swiftly directed by Geordie Broadwater, the show toggles between our world and the frontier, contrasting the aimless modern Jane with her 1848 avatar (Emily Louise Perkins), who doesn’t have the luxury of wallowing on a couch. Brunstetter clearly has affection for her characters, watching them struggle to grow up against very different odds.

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Bekah sits down with The Interval

Our wonderful playwright Bekah Brunstetter recently chatted with Victoria Myers of The Interval about The Oregon Trail, new play development, and 90's music. The whole interview is excellent.

Check it out:

An Interview with Bekah Brunstetter

Written by Victoria Myers

Yes, the new play The Oregon Trail does mention having to ford oxen across a river. The play, which takes its name from both the pioneers crossing the country and the iconic ‘90s computer game, is now playing at the McGinn/Cazale Theatre. It juxtaposes two girls—one in the 1840s and one from the 1990s to the present—both dealing with depression, but not-quite-clinical-depression. The intertwining of all of this comes from the mind of playwright Bekah Brunstetter. Bekah’s previous plays include Be a Good Little Widow and Oohrah!, and she’s currently a staff writer on NBC’s This is Us. She’s also a member of The Kilroys, which produces an annual list of plays written by women. Currently living in Los Angeles, we spoke to Bekah while she was in New York about her process for writing Oregon Trail, exploring depression, and new play development.

For The Oregon Trail, what was your jumping-off point? Did you start with a visual image, a character? 
For this play, it was the idea of juxtaposing a person who’s sad today with a person who was sad on the Oregon Trail in 1845. The fact that sadness is so different now than it was then. If you were feeling heartsick with your family on the Oregon Trail, you couldn’t say, “I can’t get out of bed in the morning.” You have to go because every day is a struggle to live, whereas now, the way that our lives are set up, it’s easier to dwell in our feelings. I thought comparing and contrasting those two young women in the two times was really interesting. It’s basically the juxtaposition of those two. Also, in terms of images, a girl on the Oregon Trail and a girl sitting on a couch and how vastly different those two things are.

Did you do a quick first draft or a slow first-draft?
I tend to write a first draft really quickly while it’s in my head, and then I spend years fixing it. I wrote this play six years ago. I’ve been workshopping it gradually over the years. Every time I have a workshop or meeting, the actors ask questions and bring their individual selves to the play, and then it changes as different people get their heads into it. The first draft happened pretty quickly.

For a play the way the juxtaposition of the two time periods actually works in three-dimensional space is important. What did you find was the most helpful part of the development process?
I workshopped the play three years ago at the O’Neill Theater Conference with some of the same actors and the same director [as this production]. It was a reading, but we were able to stage it a little bit and see how the two worlds could live together in one space. That’s something that’s hard to really tell until the actors are on their feet. When they’re just sitting there with scripts in hand it’s hard to really get a sense of that, but they were able to move around. There’s Oregon Trail stuff in the play. There’s fording the river and moving down the trail, and it was cool to start to experiment with what that would actually look like. When you’re just typing it, you don’t quite know yet how it’s actually going to go down. I’ll never forget, when I first read Sarah Ruhl’s play Melancholy Play, at one point a character turns into an almond. It’s this beautiful little moment and it’s like, “How the fuck do you do that?” I love that that is what she felt when she was writing the play and then it gets figured out later. So getting in a couple of workshops to start to play with what things actually look like, that feel really hard to stage, has been the most fun.

Did you ever worry about writing things that were hard to stage?   
I try and always follow my impulse, if it feels right or necessary for the story. But the fact of the matter is—and it took me a while to learn this—a lot of times when your plays are being done, you’re not physically there for the rehearsal process. You might not get to see it at all, or you just show up and see it when it’s in the run. So you have to be really clear about what it is that you see and what it is that you want, or it can get lost in the script because everybody’s bringing their own point of view to the play. If you want something to come across, you have to make sure that it is clear. That’s what’s exciting about playwriting. That’s part of the thrill, it’s showing up and knowing that you wrote something, but you have no idea how it’s going to be interpreted. The lights go down and they come up and you’re like, “What did I make?” You don’t really know. I have not seen this production [of Oregon Trail] yet. I just got here this morning. I’m going to see it for the first time tonight. It’s horrifying and thrilling at the same time.

Not being part of the rehearsal process isn’t something that’s come up a lot before. 
I’m in L.A. now because I do television writing. When I was New York-based and doing playwriting, I was here for the first productions of the plays. That’s more typical. Usually you are present, but when you’re not, you do what you can. You Skype in to run-throughs, you talk to the directors, you make sure you’re available to the actors if they have questions, and you do your best. Ideally, you’re there. Especially for the first production of a play. A play changes so much in its first production, if it’s never really been on stage before. The playwright learns so much, the director learns so much, and that’s when the play becomes the thing. Playwriting really has two parts. You’re writing alone, this thing that’s in your head, you’re getting it out. Then it exists, and you need other people. It’s not a poem, it’s not a book. You’re missing that other half, which is the actors and the director and the designers making it come to life. In that first production, you’re figuring out what it is. You don’t really know what it is when it’s just a Word document that you printed. You start to understand what it is when you do readings. That begins to reveal the play to you. But what the play is about and what it looks like and what it feels like doesn’t really reveal itself until it’s in rehearsal. Sometimes you don’t learn what the play is until it’s opening night and there it is, and you’re watching it and you’re like, “Oh, it’s not that. It’s this other thing.” It’s just the process. You have to constantly accept the fact that it’s trial and error. Sometimes you get it right and sometimes you don’t.

Bekah Brunstetter. Photo by Jessica Nash

Are you visual? Do you have strong visual images when you’re writing?
Yeah, I do. That’s usually what helps me understand the tone of what I’m writing. I’m definitely not the kind of playwright who spells out really specifically in the stage directions, “There’s a door here and a window here.” You see that sometimes. I like to be a little more open-ended and a little more vague so that designers have a space to fill in their ideas, but I definitely see specific colors or the kind of space that it is. For me, all plays exist within a dream space, even if they’re real; they’re suspended in space because they’re plays and there’s no way when you go into a theatre and see the stage and see the set that you don’t know that you’re in a theatre. I like embracing that. We’re all here to watch something we staged. We’re not actually in somebody’s kitchen.

For Oregon Trail, did you know what you wanted the tone to be from the beginning? 
Everything that I write is dramedy. I like to amuse myself while I write, but I also like to try and ask big questions, so it usually ends up being a combination of the two. This play has been a journey of making sure it’s not too silly. There’s so much fun to be had with the game because it’s so iconic. You could write for days about characters stuck in that game world, and it’s endlessly fun, but it has to be counterbalanced with the larger questions the play is asking, or it’s a sketch. I think about that a lot. To me, there is a huge difference between a sketch and a play. A play asks larger questions than a sketch. A sketch is a hilarious situation that gets elevated and elevated and elevated towards a punch line and then it’s over, whereas a play hopefully asks the big questions about something related to how to be alive.

What was your process like for working with a protagonist who has issues with depression and being passive in her life, but still making it work within the classic dramatic structure of having an active protagonist?  
It’s tricky. In early drafts of the play, she was a bit more stagnant. But, just to clarify, in my head she’s not clinically depressed. I was trying to explore something slightly different that I feel like even more people feel, which is this sadness that you can’t shake, and that the protagonist finds out is related to something that happened to her ancestor. I think a lot of times when we feel that way, we try and not feel that way. I’m always doing something, and sometimes I’m doing things to mask sadness that I feel. So I’ve been trying to explore that with her. She feels the same, but she’s not necessarily always sitting around talking about it. She’s trying to avoid it, and that’s what makes her active—her constantly trying to not feel the way that she feels. Trying to find some things to occupy her mind, or trying to find something to be positive about, but that moment keeps pulling her down. That push and pull is what keeps it active.

Depression, but not clinical depression, is an interesting place. 
What’s so interesting to me is back in the Oregon Trail days they used to call it melancholia. That was the first time they ever put a name to it, and it was melancholia. Before that time it was just, “Oh, women are sad sometimes.” It was histrionics. It was very much dismissed, and now it’s very culturally accepted to be depressed, to the point where there’s a lot of different kinds. I’m interested in those gray areas between clinical depression and having a bad day, because there’s so much in between there. I think a lot of us now are carrying sadness from things that don’t even affect our everyday lives; it’s just there. It’s interesting to me to think about how society views it now versus how they did [then].

You mentioned ancestral baggage before, and that’s something that’s been talked about and studied a lot more in recent years.
After I read the first draft of the play, one of the actors who was working on it with me sent me this article about epigenetics, which is the whole theory that our ancestors’ trauma is imprinted on our DNA. I thought that was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. Learning that, to me, validated how I have felt, how people close to me have felt. It’s a beautiful idea that we’re carrying those people with us, and everything that they went through has value and adds value to our lives now. I just love that.

I wanted to ask you about the different ages at which you portray Jane, the protagonist. The play ends right before she turns 30, but when it starts she’s 13. 
I feel like everything that happens to you in middle school stays with you for the rest of your life. I still, to this day in my adult life, will notice little patterns in my own behavior—like when I get upset, when I feel rejected, when I feel like I need something—where I can relate it back to middle school. I think that you’re a kid, and then you start to go through puberty and you’re all of a sudden this open wound. Everything that happens to you is huge, and you’re so vulnerable and you don’t know who you are, and you want love but you don’t know what it is, and all that stuff. It’s also when I played the game [Oregon Trail]. So it seems like an interesting place to meet a young woman, and then to see her at her mid-twenties and see that the quote-unquote traumas that happened to her in middle school really did shape who she is as an adult. It’s almost meant to echo the question of the play: how trauma stays as a person gets older. When I wrote the play I was 27 or 28. Now I’m 34, and I do feel so much older. Now I look at that character that I wrote and I want to pat her on the head. The frustration’s very real. I was trying to support myself and also write plays and not get lost. A lot of people feel that way, especially in big cities because you can get lost so easily in everything. Success feels so elusive because there’s so much stuff everywhere.

You use a lot of music in the play, and a lot of ‘90s songs. What was your process like for using music as part of the play? 
I’ve actually done it in a number of plays. I’m sure a lot of people feel this way, but songs rip my heart open and help me access what’s deep in my heart. Certain songs get you there super quickly. They make me cry. I don’t cry when I read, I don’t cry when I watch TV or film; it’s just music. Early on when I was writing my first full-length plays, I would always be listening to certain songs while I was writing, because they would help me lock into what I was writing about. At a certain point, I started transcribing the songs into the plays and creating these song moments where, basically, a character would start singing a song that I felt belonged in the world. Then at some point, the song moment became a thing that really felt like it belonged in the play that I was writing. For this play, the idea of these two girls singing together who could never actually sing together, and the idea that their souls are harmonizing, made me really happy—and just the thought of a girl on the Oregon Trail singing a Bush song was hilarious to me, so it just felt like it belonged. They’re tricky moments because they’re not supposed to be performative. They’re not musical theatre numbers, they’re small and weird. I love those moments the most, but they’re also the moments that I feel the most terrified of because they’re strange.

What’s something that you think can be done to improve the new play development process? 
I feel a tiny bit disconnected from it now since I’ve been away from it in L.A. for a while. Theatres and festivals do a lot of readings and then the play gets heard. Actors read the script, the play gets heard, and then maybe some fancy people come to the reading. A lot of times, I would feel that there’s no next step and the playwright is alone with a lot of questions and new ideas. Of course, the playwright can then go and do a new draft, but there are so many lost plays that get brought to this point and then nothing happens after that. I love it the most when I’m working on a play, and I’ve either been commissioned by a theatre or I’m in the writers’ group of a theatre, and I know that we have a relationship and that they might produce the play. They’re going to do a reading of it, then they’re going to do another reading of it, then they’re going to do a workshop of it, and then they’re going to produce it. That level of commitment is really special and really makes for a greater play because it helps the playwright really focus on the next draft as opposed to, “Well, now who’s going to read my play?” Then, this has already been happening, but more plays by more diverse writers. I’m a founding member of The Kilroys. That’s all that we do, and we’ve seen it get better in the last four years, but still thinking about it, still caring about it and wanting it to just be, “Oh, we have a woman and we have a Black person, great, we’re good.” Really seeing parity in reading series and workshop series and season planning and all of that.

I want to come back to that, but related to the new play development, you were saying before about how difficult and weird it can be when you’re first starting out. Is there anything you think that can be done in the community to make life easier for young writers?
I believe really strongly that nobody owes you a living wage for writing plays. Nobody owes you a living wage for being an actor, necessarily. You’ve chosen your creative path and there’s a good chance that you will end up supporting yourself doing it, but nobody owes you that. I believe really strongly that artists should have day jobs until they don’t need them. For me, I don’t think it’s like, “They need more money.” I think that what they need is more emotional support and actual space in which to do their work. There are four or five really, really good writers’ groups for emerging playwrights in the city, and if you can get into one, agents pay attention to you and go to fancy readings of your work and people commission you and you start to get into the system. But it seems like there aren’t enough spots. We could benefit from a few more of those groups, because when you’re in a group like that, it gives people confidence in this community. You’re meeting once a month, so you have a reason to write ten more pages of your play. You have feedback from the other writers and the people running the program, and you have a physical space to make it. That’s what keeps you writing. I think that if you’re a writer, you’ll always be writing, so it’s not necessarily the act of doing the writing, but feeling good about what you’re doing and feeling like you’re contributing something. Sometimes you feel like, “Why am I doing this?”

Bekah Brunstetter. Photo by Jessica Nash.

As you mentioned, you’re a member of the Kilroys.
I love them. We went on a retreat this last weekend and we sang karaoke for a full 10 hours, it was amazing. Half of it was Alanis Morissette.

What’s something else that can be done to improve equality for women in theatre, especially because it’s 2017—which, admittedly, might be the final year of America, but trying to be optimistic—and we’re still having these conversations? 
We’re planning some stuff for the next couple of years, and I wish I could tell you what, but I can’t right now. I think that we are planning a couple of things that are going to answer this very question. I think it’s about staying focused on what we’re looking for, which is parity. It’s not that difficult. If you run six plays, there should be three women. Period. Really trying to hold theatres responsible by rewarding the theatres that are doing it and keeping the conversation going so that artistic directors are aware of the fact that it’s a problem and they start to want it too. We’re seeing that happen, which is cool. We wanted to do the lists since that’s a useful tool. Every list is, “Bam! Bam! Bam! Here are all these plays that you can program,” and people are really influenced by their peers. We want artistic directors to be like, “Everybody else is doing it, so we want to too.” It’s as simple as that. Also, it’s tricky because I’ve never felt like, “Please program this play just because a woman wrote it.” You still want it to be about the best plays. My hope is that there are enough good plays by women, and it’s still the best work. It’s not like “the diversity slots.” That’s another point of the list: “There’s a lot [of plays] and here are some of the best. There’s a great many, and a lot of them are very good, so take your pick.”

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The Oregon Trail in PXP

PXP is an awesome blog published by the Theatre Development Fund aimed at people new to theatre, particularly young adult audience members. We love the work they do to keep theatre accessible and unpretentious. Additionally, they encourage audience members to submit responses to shows. Selected responses are posted to their blog. Justin Joyce wrote a beautiful piece on his experience seeing our production of Bekah Brunstetter's The Oregon Trail. It's this kind of personal connection that makes the theatre a magical place.

The Oregon Trail - A Little Too Close To Home

By Justin Joyce

What's it about?

Is there a video game you were obsessed with as a kid? You would play it and play it. Now, you rediscover it years later and you pick up right where you left off, reliving the better days of your childhood. Suddenly, you realize that your childhood was so much better than being an adult... but your childhood sucked too. 

That's the situation of Jane when she decides that she is going to continue on The Oregon Trail. 

What'd I experience? 

Enter Name
>Justin Joyce

Enter names of your wagon-mates. 
>Just me, thanks. 

Ok. You have a series of options. You can:
A. Close this page and not finish this article. 
B. Start on the trail.
C. Feel personally targeted by the play you're seeing. 

What would you like to do?
> C.

Ok. Imagine that you are going out to see a show. Your expectations for said show are that it is an Off Broadway show based on the video game The Oregon Trail. Initially, you're expecting that it will be about someone playing the game, with some attempt at making the player's drama coincide with the drama of the people on the trail.

Then, you find yourself face-to-face with the main character of the show, and realize that everything that is terrible for this character (that the Voice of the Game narrates about from above) is a little too close to home. Part of it is the emphasis on how the character has enough privilege that her family can afford to send her college without need for loans, and all the debt that goes with that. It gets worse when the narrator describes how she got a "useless degree" in creative writing (poetry for main character, but it's just general writing for you) because she had enough privilege to waste her family's money on something like that. So now your general anxiety about how acutely you're wasting your life is being pushed just a little bit further, as you've somehow managed to see the one show in NYC that seems to poke fun at your insecurities.

Next, you can: 
A. Talk about the depression.
B. Ignore the depression.
C. Eat spaghetti. 

What would you like to do?
> A. 

Ok. Perhaps the worst part of it is the fact that the character's greatest struggle is such a dumb concept to describe for anyone who has had life handed to them, but you recognize it really well. The way they describe this strange sadness and crushing pain that sits over them fairly constantly, and you're squirming in the audience because they're just a few words off from the way you've always described it. Yet, you see that reflection of yourself in the way she jokes about killing herself, because you remember being there... and are still there sometimes when you joke about all the ways you could die right now, but you don't know how serious you are about it. Sometimes you just say it because after years of talking that way, it is just an automatic response. Other times you really are thinking about it, but those thoughts fade away too quickly for you to ever ask 'why?'

Also, there's the plot line set during the actual Oregon Trail about how damn near impossible it is to really move on from the death of a loved one, and, to be honest, that's a whole other can of worms you're not even gonna open right now.

Now, you can: 
A. Continue on the trail.
B. Continue on the trail.
C. Continue on the trail.
D. Continue on the trail.

What would you like to do?
> B. 

Ok. But it isn't all bad. Despite how tragic the scene is, it's hilarious putting the pieces together when you realize that they're gonna make the "[Blank] has died of dysentery" joke, because that's the big quote everyone remembers from the game. And the show did keep you laughing most of the time, at every nonsensical turn of the dialogue between the characters, you were right there, being jerked around by the non-sequiturs and jokes they rapid-fired at you for most of the show. 

And, in the end, you were reminded of that one thing you learned a long time ago, but it was nice to see other people reflect the same mentality: it doesn't get good. When it's bad, it honestly never gets good. When people tell you that "it gets better", they think that that means that things get good again, but that's never been what you've experienced. It gets better, yeah, but it doesn't get good. And that's pretty okay. Because lots of people are never good, just getting better. 

Sometimes it just takes a good story to get you through the next day. Maybe it's a video game or a book or a movie, a tv show, a podcast, a sock puppet... it doesn't matter. Eventually you find that end screen. And you can say to yourself: I didn't get attacked by Indians. I didn't drown fording the river. I didn't starve to death. I didn't overheat. 

I didn't die of dysentery. 

Once you get to that point, it's nice to look forward and see the next green light, move forward, until you see the big accomplishment...

CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE MADE IT TO OREGON!

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Bekah Brunstetter chats with TDF

Bekah Brunstetter chatted with TDF Stages about sadness, survival, and The Oregon Trail. A limited number of tickets each night are available at a 50% discount to TDF Members. You can find out more over at www.tdf.org.

Life Is Hard, But At Least You're Not a Pioneer

By Josh Austin

A new play blends covered wagons and modern technology

You've named your travel companions, chosen an occupation, and sensibly spent $400 at the general store on oxen, food, ammunition, and winter clothing. You set off west from Independence, Missouri, ready for an adventure. And then – whoops – you get a message on your screen that says you've died of dysentery. So it goes in The Oregon Trail.

Anyone who had a computer in the 80s or 90s is likely to remember this particular game, where players tried to get a group of settlers safely across the country in 1848. Half the fun – and more than half the point – came from the difficulty in completing the journey. No matter how much you prepared, the game insisted, life was always going to be hard.

That theme has transferred from the monitor to the stage in Bekah Brunstetter's new play, also called The Oregon Trail. Presented by the Fault Line Theatre and now in performances at the WP Theater until February 12, it juxtaposes pioneer life with the modern day.

"At the time when I started really working on this [script], I was seeing, in my peer group, a lot of sadness," Brunstetter says. "This feeling of listlessness and a sense of feeling lost and not quite knowing we're on the earth and what our function is, which of course is a common thing in your twenties. The play is about where that feeling comes from and how we deal with it and how that has changed between 1848 and now."

Within the show, the audience meets two Janes. There's Then Jane (played by Emily Louise Perkins), who is travelling the trail, covered wagon and all, alongside her family. There's also Jane (Liba Vaynberg), a contemporary teenager. When we meet them, both girls are unhappy with their lot in life, struggling to understand their place, and dealing with their own sadness and frustration. 

Liba Vaynberg in The Oregon Trail. Photo by Jeremy Daniel. 

Even as present-day Jane enters her mid-20s, the perils both women face, however different, leave them in similar emotional states. Then Jane battles the frontier, while Jane finds herself unemployed and trying to get a handle on her depression.

"I thought it would be interesting to compare feeling that way now versus feeling that way on the Oregon Trail," the playwright says. "If you're on the trail with your family, where every day is a fight to survive, you can't say that you don't want to get out of the wagon in the morning. You kind of have to." 

One scene in particular underscores the emotional intersections between the characters. Jane, nestled under a mound of blankets in an air-conditioned apartment, has been lying around binge-watching some show (probably Planet Earth or America's Next Top Model, according to Brunstetter). After six hours, she's feeling unfulfilled, uninspired, lazy, and sad. All of the emotions, Brunstetter notes, one often feels after lying around for half a day. (There's even a study that suggests binge watching is bad for your mental state.) Meanwhile, Then Jane has been tasked with starting a fire so that her family can eat breakfast. Unable to light the fire, she feels useless and discouraged.

"They're both frustrated," Brunstetter says. "The scope of their individual frustration cannot be more different: 'I need to light this fire so that my family can eat' versus 'I don't know what to do with this moment of my life that's been gifted to me.' My goal is to compare those two."

However, it is not Brunstetter's wish to cast judgement on either one of the women, particularly present-day Jane, whose situation is obviously less dire. "Though we're not necessarily hunting for our food and lighting fires for it, there's still a place for sadness because we're human beings," she says. "And even though our lives are easier, it's going to be a part of the experience."

After all, the playwright adds, it's our ancestors—including the ones who've trekked the trail—that have allowed us access to an easier life. If we remember that as we play the game, the journey can be much more satisfying.

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The Oregon Trail in the New York Times

Check out what The New York Times thought about our production of Bekah Brunstetter's The Oregon Trail.

‘The Oregon Trail’ Traverses Tough Terrain in Two Different Eras

By: Alexis Soloski

Being a teenage girl is the worst! The unrequited crushes, the cascading hormones, the constant threat of cholera. In Bekah Brunstetter’s “The Oregon Trail,” produced by Fault Line Theater, Jane (Liba Vaynberg), a 13-year-old in the 1990s, is playing the titular game — a wildly popular piece of edutainment software that taught a generation of kids about pioneer life — in her school’s computer lab.

Meanwhile, a century and a half earlier, another Jane (Emily Louise Perkins) prepares to traverse the country in a covered wagon. Both Janes are self-involved, a little whiny and burdened with a goody-goody big sister (Laura Ramadei). Only one of them has to worry about whether or not her team of oxen can ford the river.

The play, directed by Geordie Broadwater, is a feisty, formally inventive comedy. As Jane plays the game, the computer voice presents her with increasingly personal choices. Would she like to begin her journey in March, April or May? — “when the sun starts to smolder and your bangs stick to your face no matter what you do, and you are disgusting.”

Ms. Brunstetter, a writer for the NBC show “This Is Us,” has scripted earlier plays — “Be a Good Little Widow,”“Oohrah!”— that include characters who seem to act not according to their own whims and desires, but to set up the next joke. As a consequence the work has felt stilted and sometimes precious.

“The Oregon Trail” is a great improvement, particularly in its nifty first half-hour. In Ms. Vaynberg’s expressive hands, contemporary Jane’s sly humor and cringing embarrassment feel wonderfully real and raw, horrible and funny, as in her woeful description of the onset of menarche: “It’s like when your body starts to tell you the truth about your life.” Her encounter with Billy (Juan Arturo), a sweaty devil-may-care soccer player, is a wincing delight.

After that, the play makes a forward leap to Jane’s thwarted adulthood and becomes a more formulaic piece about whether it’s O.K. to indulge in suffering when you haven’t actually suffered anything. The parallels between pioneer days and the present become more pointed, and the language Ms. Brunstetter uses in the 1840s scenes, which is neither period-appropriate nor playfully anachronistic, starts to irk, as do the sorrows of present-day Jane, who should have been packed off to a therapist years ago.

“I watch too much TV,” this Jane complains. “Nothing is fair.” Well, at least she doesn’t have to worry if she’ll have enough venison to make it through the winter.

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The Wedge Horse in Playbill

Check out the short feature in Playbill today about The Wedge Horse:

Nick Gandiello's The Wedge Horse Premieres Off-Broadway Today

By: Olivia Clement

New York's Fault Line Theatre presents The Wedge Horse, by 2015 Page 73 Playwriting Fellow Nick Gandiello, beginning Jan. 29. Aaron Rossini directs. 

The play will officially open Off-Broadway Feb. 3 at the IATI Theater Mainstage, with performances scheduled to run through Feb. 21.

According to production notes, The Wedge Horse follows siblings Maddy and Bobby in the wake of a tragedy. “Set in Baldwin, Long Island, The Wedge Horse explores the long-term consequences of grief, vengeance, and forgiveness.”

The cast features Ali Rose Dachis (Fish In The Dark), Charlie Thurston (Red Door) and Jorge Eliezer Chacon (Love’s Labour’s Lost).

Scenic design is by Tristan Jeffers, with lighting design by John Eckert, sound design by Chad Raines and costume design by Izzy Fields. The Wedge Horse is produced by Craig Wesley Divino and Melanie Hopkins.

The IATI Theater Mainstage is located at 64 East 4th St., New York. For tickets, visit Faultlinetheatre.

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Young (and Mighty)

Some exciting news came across our (metaphorical) desk today:

Backstage has named Fault Line Theatre 1 of 8 Young (and Mighty) New York Theater Companies!

“…the company is undoubtably on the rise, and known for its socially relevant and provocative works.”

We’re thrilled to share this with our friends in Fiasco Theater and the six other companies producing exciting work in the city.

Thank you to all of our friends, families and collaborators over the past 4 years for being a part of this crazy adventure with us.