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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What We're Seeing: Orange Julius

Already seen our production of The Oregon Trail? Looking for something to do in the bitter weeks of February? We've got you covered! Our friends at Page 73 are currently running their powerful new play Orange Julius by Basil Kreimendahl at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. We can't wait to catch this production from one of our favorite companies.

January 10 - February 12, 2017
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater
224 Waverly Place
New York, NY 10014

A Little About The Show

Nut grew up in 1980s and 90s working-class America the youngest child of Julius, a Vietnam vet suffering the toxic effects of Agent Orange. As Julius’s health fades, Nut begins paging through forgotten photo albums and acting out old war movies about brothers-in-arms, leaping through time and memory to trace the complex intimacy between father and child, fighting for a mutual recognition before it’s too late.

Cast:

• Jess Barbagallo
• Stephen Payne
• Ruy Iskandar
• Irene Sofia Lucio
• Mary Testa

Creative: 

• Directed by Dustin Wills
• Written by Basil Kreimendahl
• Set Design - Kate Noll
• Costume Design - Montana Blanco
• Lighting Design - Barbara Samuels
• Sound Design - Palmer Hefferan
• Projection Design - Joey Moro
• Prop Design - Raphael Mishler
• Prod. Stage Manager - Nicole Marconi
• Asst. Stage Manager - Corinn Moreno
• Production Manager - Rebecca Key

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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Liba Vaynberg in Stage Buddy

It's been so much fun watching Liba Vaynberg's performance as "Now Jane" in our production of Bekah Brunstetter's The Oregon Trail. Recently, Liba chatted with the folks at Stage Buddy about the unique challenges working on this show.

Interview: Liba Vaynberg on Starring in Fault Line Theatre’s “The Oregon Trail”

By: Auriane Desombre

Starring in Fault Line Theatre’s production of Bekah Brunsetter’s new play The Oregon Trail, the wonderful Liba Vaynberg brings the show’s humor to life with her portrayal of “now Jane,” a '90s middle schooler with an overbearing older sister (Laura Ramadei), a distinct lack of social grace, and an unrequited crush on Billy (Juan Arturo), her neighbor and bus buddy. Stuck in her school’s computer lab, waiting for her mom to come pick her up, Jane passes the time by playing the titular computer game, while its narrator makes increasingly personal comments (would you like to begin your 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”).

Guided by the omniscient narrator of the game, the play takes us through Jane’s mediocre college experience, lackluster first job, and subsequent unemployment, a rut that lands her on her successful older sister’s couch. Besieged by a sadness she cannot define, one that’s been inside her since middle school, Jane rediscovers the Oregon Trail, and turns to it escape the hopelessness of her couch-sequestered life.

As Jane plays, both in middle school and adulthood, the play introduces “then Jane” (Emily Louise Perkins), who is reluctantly joining her family on the real Oregon Trail centuries ago. Dragged away from her beloved home by her father and way-too-perfect sister (also played by Laura Ramadei) after the death of her mother, Jane finds herself struggling to survive on a perilous journey where every choice is life-or-death (and you don’t get to press spacebar for a do-over).

Liba Vaynberg sat down with us to share her experiences at the center of a heartfelt exploration of coming-of-age and depression, doused in nostalgia and biting wit. Her experience with the show began with this production, joining cast members who had followed the play through incarnations in workshops and readings. She said of that introduction to the play, “It’s great to jump into the play fresh, but it’s also great to be surrounded by people who have been working in it for a long time, and learn about it from them.” Part of what made it such a wonderful experience was her work with director Geordie Broadwater, whose approach Vaynberg said helped her bring out the nuances in Jane’s character, especially her struggle with a lifelong, inexplicable but all-too-tangible sadness that follows her from adolescence to adulthood. “Bekah’s description of Jane’s sadness is something I think everyone has felt, at some point in their lives,” Vaynberg said. Her character gets her fair share of that sadness, as both she and then-Jane struggle with finding purpose in their lives, and meaning to drive their actions.

Part of the play’s success lies in its structure, a duality that’s a unique find for the stage. As Vaynberg said, “It’s a common structure in film, where you shoot it separately, and put everything together in front of a computer. In a play, it has to be right there in front of you, and you have to find a way to put the two worlds together on the stage.” The Oregon Trail puts its two stories side by side onstage, moving seamlessly between them without letting one distract from the other. Instead, the experiences that forge Jane in each narrative create rich connections between the two storylines.

Within that unique structure, Vaynberg found a whole new depth to her character and the story through the parallel tale of Jane’s ancestor, then-Jane, as her performance evolved to work as a successful counterpart to Emily Louise Perkins. Despite their vastly different situations, both Janes grapple with similar questions, and the parallels in their internal challenges and familial dynamics build common ground between them. As a result, Vaynberg described her performance as both building from similarity and reaching for differences between the two Janes. “Emily and I have a lot in common, and we’ve become close friends,” Vaynberg said. “But we’re not exactly the same. The Janes’ stories aren’t exactly the same, that would be redundant. It’s informed my performance in that way, by finding ways to be her complement. Like looking in a mirror. It’s similar, but it’s the reverse.” The two certainly find this balance well, their performances connecting the two characters while finding fresh nuances within each story to differentiate them.

Unlike the character she plays, Vaynberg didn’t play Oregon Trail – until she was cast, that is. “It was so addictive,” she said. “I think you can definitely zip through it faster as an adult. You can actually get to the end of the game!”  The computer game is part of a larger nostalgia that characterizes Jane’s middle school experience within the play, which Vaynberg says captures the spirit of that point in time: “With her outfit, Jane’s sister could be in Clueless!” Though certain bits in the show certainly bring up nostalgia for audience members who lived through them (as Vaynberg pointed out, “Things like the floppy disc make people in the audience who experienced that laugh, and everyone else laughs along with them”), but Brunsetter’s writing skillfully encapsulates adolescent Jane’s era, creating a portrait of young Jane’s life that transcends nostalgia to resonate with audiences of all ages.

While Jane’s relationship with her ancestor gives the play its thematic weight, it is Jane’s relationship with her perfect older sister that fuels her character arc. Even though a romantic subplot pops up as part of Jane’s journey, Vaynberg describes it as decisively secondary to Jane’s relationship with her sister. As she says, “Sisters never leave.” This fact underlies the play as a source of support, even if at times reluctant, for Jane.  As the oldest sister in her family, Vaynberg might relate most to Jane’s older sister, but rose to the challenge of portraying the needier younger sister beautifully, portraying the struggle that comes with simultaneous love, frustration, a need for guidance, and a desire to please corrupted by an inability to follow through. Put simply, “There’s a reason, when she hits rock bottom, that Jane ends up at her sister’s house.”

Those relationships at the center of Jane’s life bring the play to new heights, and Vaynberg’s performance captures the meaningful connections throughout Jane’s life beautifully, making The Oregon Trail a must-see play for anyone who’s struggled with finding their purpose, or just really misses their floppy disk of computer games.

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Contest Time!

Can you beat our high score? 
Send us a screen capture like the one here along with the message:

On Facebook: "Hey @Fault Line Theatre, I made it to Oregon!"

On Twitter or Instagram: "Hey @FaultLine_Th, I made it to Oregon!"

Not on social media? That's cool too. Send us an e-mail with a screenshot or picture as an attachment and we'll share it!

Contest closes on February 12, when our production of The Oregon Trail closes. The highest score wins a $50 GIFT CERTIFICATE TO BARCADE.

You can play online for free here: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Oregon_Trail_The_1990

American Theatre Offscript Podcast

If you're a listener of Podcasts, don't miss the shout out to our production of Bekah Brunstetter's The Oregon Trail towards the end of this week's Offscript Podcast. This podcast is curated by the editors of American Theatre and features wide ranging conversations about the arts bi-weekly.

Check out the full episode here.

The whole episode is excellent, but if you're impatient The Oregon Trail conversation begins at 46:46!

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 tech week

Though from the audience, theatre can sometimes appear to be exclusively an actor's medium, every show is actually the culmination of a creative process involving numerous artists and technicians.

A few days before our rehearsals moved from the studio to the theatre, a small army of crew members assembled our set for The Oregon Trail bringing to life a school computer lab, an apartment living room, and the wild expanse of the American west. 

Good thing we had a camera set up, day and night, to document the entire process!

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 in NY Theatre Guide

In this fantastic interview with NY Theatre Guide, The Oregon Trail playwright Bekah Brunstetter discusses the important things, like the best sandwiches and LA spin classes for playwrights.

Discovering the Artist: Playwright Bekah Brunstetter of ‘The Oregon Trail’

By: Megan Lohne

With her previous productions of “Oorah!” at The Atlantic and “Be A Good Little Widow” at Ars Nova, Brunstetter has a playful, earnest, and thought-provoking voice that continues to grow. Last week, I had the pleasure of seeing the latest incarnation of her play “The Oregon Trail” at The McGinn/Cazale Theatre, produced by The Fault Line Theater, now playing through February 12th.

This comedrama, directed by Geordie Broadwater, follows the story of Jane, a 13-year- old in the 90s, and another Jane from the 1830s (played by the delightfully perfect Emily Louise Perkins). While 90s Jane navigates “The Oregon Trail” computer game to fill her lonely afternoon, 1830s Jane traverses the real Oregon Trail, losing her possessions, family, and joy along the way. It’s an honest, funny, heartbreaking piece about earning sadness and our human entitlement to feel things deeply.

Currently writing for the hit “This is Us” on NBC, my old grad school mate took a few moments to answer my questions about success, process, and DUH, sandwiches.

Where did you first get the idea for “The Oregon Trail”?

It started in grad school (with you!) when we had an assignment, I think, to write the first ten minutes of a new play that took place in a very specific location. I’d been thinking about sadness a lot at that point, and to what extent the “easiness” of life now allows us to indulge that feeling, whereas on the Oregon Trail, it was certainly harder to say you didn’t feel like getting out of the wagon in the morning. And so I thought it might be interesting to juxtapose a young woman now with a young woman then, and really have them occupy the same space, like physically and emotionally, and then see what happened.

What is your writing process like/re-writing?

I always begin with the ending, that’s the thing I know first. And so I just try and get there, to that ending. My first drafts are very VERY not meticulous. I just kinda get it all out, and oftentimes the characters sound like each other, and are sometimes arch and not fleshed out. I’m more focused on what I’m trying to say and what the images are and all of the verbal diarrhea of the first draft. I don’t actually fix or figure out my play until I’m in a room with actors, who then really help me figure out fully what kind of humans my characters are.

What’s the first play that made you cry?

Oh man, that is a great question. I think it was “Children of Eden,” which is a musical about Adam and Eve. I was in in it high school – I was a chorus person, I was supposed to be a frog or maybe algae, I was like crawling and sliding around on the floor. And to me the songs are so beautiful, because the characters are trying to figure out what the hell life even IS, what it is supposed to be; they are dealing with temptation, trying to figure out what’s right and wrong. And that really resonated with me at the time, so I cried a lot when I was supposed to be singing, but I guess it kind of worked.

What is most important for you in a relationship with your director?

I need someone I can have a drink with, hang with, and reveal way too much personal information and then THEY reveal two much personal information and then we laugh and feel like not just collaborators, but friends. Someone that I can be myself around, for sure.

Other passions aside from writing?

I love to cook/bake/experiment in those realms. I love reality baking shows and am most recently clinically obsessed with Vivian Howard, an award-winning chef from my home state of NC, who is transforming the food scene down there with her beautiful farm-to- table restaurant in Kinston. I am passionate about making her foods and thinking about what life lessons I can glean from her work ethic. And also food. FOOOOOOOD.

I am equally passionate about spinning. Not in circles. On a bike. Sheila Callaghan went from being my favorite lady playwright to my favorite lady playwright and ALSO my spinning teacher. She teaches at a place in LA and is completely amazing. Sometimes, her classes are half playwrights, and that is always weird and fun.

What has the transition from stage to TV writing been like? If you could give advice to young writers attempting to make the same leap, what would it be?

I’d say it’s been pretty painless because writing is writing, though TV certainly has a different language and set of rules that must be learned. But it’s character, and story, and dialogue, which playwrights know. I really love being a hired hand, helping someone execute their grand vision. I love that it’s not just on me, I love the collaborative nature of it. But I’ve definitely had to learn the form. The structure of a good episode of television, one that is economical, that keeps people guessing, is definitely not something that comes naturally to me, but something that’s been awesome to learn, as it’s helped my plays get tighter.

Very much still learning, though. I have yet to sell a pilot/come up with my own show, because my ideas are all plays and refuse to be shows, but I’m working on it! To young writers: don’t bother with spec scripts, focus on YOUR voice, and write a pilot to a show that ONLY YOU COULD WRITE. Shut out every other show you’ve ever seen, pretend you’ve just been born, and write from that place.

If you could eat a sandwich with any living artist, who, and what would you ask (seriously though, what’s on the sandwich)?

Megan, you are making my day with these wonderful questions. First and foremost, it would be a sharp grilled cheese on wheat bread with sharp mustard and basil and sliced heirloom tomatoes with a little Sriracha to dip it into on the side. Secondly, I would have this sandwich with Sarah Ruhl, and I would ask her what it’s like inside of her head, and how her ideas come to her.

When you think of the word success, what does that mean to you?

Oh man, what a fleeting and elusive word. Even when I’m supposed to feel “successful,” it always feels like whatever I’ve done is not enough, that I must do more. I’ve definitely been redefining it for myself as of late, shaping it into something I could actually find myself feeling. I think for a writer, success is always having a mind that is open and absorbing things and turning those things into stories, characters, and moments. As long as my brain is still doing that, Je suis success.

Biggest accomplishment?

Honestly, after years of kissing the wrong ones and turning them into plays, I somehow managed to land and subsequently marry the kindest, most loyal, most handsome of men. (Aww vomit/sorry I just got married/I’m sorry!)

Five years from now, you will_____________.

Hopefully still be writing, but also surrounded by cake flour. I would also like to have a yard and a window looking over it.

Favorite book/play/movie/animal?

“Love in the Time of Cholera”/”Dead Evan Hansen” is my new favorite/”The Sound of Music”/basic tie between fat cats and fat dogs.

What was the hardest scene you ever had to write?

I’m working on a play right now about same-sex marriage in NC, and those who oppose it — it’s an attempt to humanize those people, but also show how they could maybe change — and every scene, so far, is the hardest I’ve ever had to write.

Who are the first names of the four other members in your “Oregon Trail” Party?

Julien Patton, Gavin Rossdale, Claire Danes, God.

How do you think the game culture shaped the 80s/90s kids?

Well, it shaped us WELL. We are well-shaped. No really, I love that we were kids without cell phones. I think we have slightly less ADD and are good at problem solving.

Finally, what’s your favorite curse word (how could I not ask? – remember, this is a family publication)?

Cheese and Criminy. It’s what my Dad says instead of Jesus Christ. It’s the best.

“The Oregon Trail” is currently playing through February 12, 2017 at The McGinn/Cazale Theatre. For more information and tickets, click here.