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Thanks for joining me for Making Conversation, where every week I interview an artist in his or her 30s, who is doing work I find important, and has something illuminating to say about what it means to do what we do as we are now.

My name is Chelsea Marcantel, and my guest this week is Trish Harnetiaux. Trish is a Brooklyn-based playwright whose work has been performed and developed at the Incubator Arts Project, Soho Rep, The Cherry Lane, The 13th Street Theatre, The New Jersey Rep, and more. Her plays include How to Get Into Buildings, Welcome to the White Room, and If You Can Get to Buffalo. If You Can Get to Buffalo premiered in February at the Incubator Arts Project in NYC.

In 2008, Trish received her MFA from Mac Wellman’s playwriting program at Brooklyn College. She has been a recipient of the Himan Brown Creative Writing Award and a finalist for the Kesselring Prize, the Heideman Award, and the 2011 SLS Fiction Fellowship. In 2011, she co-created the production company Steel Drum in Space. Her short films, including the just-released You Should Be a Better Friend, can be found at www.steeldruminspace.com and her playwriting at www.trishharnetiaux.com.

Trish Harnetiaux; photo credit: Jacob A. Ware

CHELSEA: Good morning, Trish! How are you?

TRISH: Hey, I’m great! How are you doing?

CHELSEA: I’m doing pretty well. I think spring has finally come to Appalachia.

TRISH: Oh my God, here too. It’s like it’s beautified in Brooklyn today, for the first time. Ever, actually.

CHELSEA: {laughing} In the history of Brooklyn.

TRISH: Yeah, yeah, pretty much.

CHELSEA: Well I’m so excited to talk to you today. You’re the first female playwright I’ve interviewed, and as a female playwright myself, that’s very exciting.

TRISH: Yeah!

CHELSEA: But when I asked what labels you use to describe yourself as an artist, you said that you don’t really like labels. So I will try not to put you in a box.

TRISH: No, that’s okay. I guess I just, uh, I feel like I do a lot of things, but yes, I am a playwright. That is a label. But, I don’t know, it feels like, in this day and age people identify with so many different kinds of creative outlets—I’m not sure. You know what I mean?

CHELSEA: And the more you can do, the better off you end up being.

TRISH: Yeah.

CHELSEA: The more versatile you are.

TRISH: Yeah. I mean, I definitely—I am a female. I am a playwright. That is true. But I just do lots of other things, too.

CHELSEA: Right. Among many things. So, speaking of Brooklyn, are you, uh, making art in the same place you were in your twenties? Do you think you’re in the right geographical location to make the art that you’re making?

TRISH: Yeah, you know, it’s funny. Um, “yes,” I think, is what I would say about that. But definitely not without consideration for where I am. I mean, I’m definitely aware that, you know, I choose to live in a really, really expensive city. But I think up until, at least, this point and the foreseeable future, um, what the city kind of brings to me as an artist outweighs the need to, you know, pull together a life here and have it be more expensive than, you know, say, Spokane, Washington.

CHELSEA: Right.

TRISH: Or a different kind of town. So I think, yes. You know, and I love it, and I definitely need to get out of it for stretches of time in order to come back and really appreciate it. But, um, I love it here. I love Brooklyn. It’s great.

CHELSEA: You’re originally from the west coast, correct?

TRISH: Yeah, I’m from Spokane, Washington, actually. {laughs}

CHELSEA: {laughing} Oh, so you know what you’re talking about.

TRISH: Yeah, I do, I do. And it’s not a bad city. And it’s changed so much since I left when I was seventeen, you know? But, yeah, I grew up in Washington State, then I went to college in Seattle, at UW (University of Washington). And, uh, I love Washington State. It’s great! I go back quite often, actually.

CHELSEA: Yeah. Um, how does the work you’re making differ today from the work that you were making five or ten years ago?

TRISH: I mean, I think that I have a lot more outlets than I had back then, and you know, I was thinking kind of deeper about that question, and one of the things that I did is when I was thirty, I went to graduate school, you know. And that completely kind of changed my core group of artistic people that I knew, in a really great way. And, I think, really opened my work up to a lot more… I would say kind of experimental work, but I just started working with a lot, you know, a lot of different theatres, seeing a lot more downtown work. And I was really fortunate to study with Mac Wellman at Brooklyn College, and my, you know, people I went to school with were amazing. And so that was a big kind of two years there, in my really early thirties, that I think kind of opened me up as an artist. And allowed me to be a bigger risk-taker than, say, I was in my early twenties, when I just trying to figure out, you know, what the hell I wanted to write about, and you know, why I wanted to do it. So yeah, I think that it’s a lot different. And then, I’ve started to work in kind of different media in my thirties, too, you know, doing some filmmaking.

CHELSEA: Mm-hmm.

TRISH: And doing the comedy stuff with Steel Drum in Space. So all of that has evolved in the last, like, three years, actually. So I’m kind of excited about that. I think there’s definitely been an evolution for the better.

CHELSEA: Yeah. Absolutely. I think that, um, when we were speaking about this before, you said that you’re more interested in breaking rules than following them now, which I find to be my experience as well, having just turned thirty. Again, going back to Brooklyn, um, what percentage of the time do you get paid for your work, and how do you solve that puzzle of making ends meet, living in one of the most expensive cities in the country?

TRISH: So, I think that, um, {laughs} I sort of laugh when you say “get paid for your work.” I think that as a writer, I’m also a producer, too, you know? And definitely get involved with my own work in many ways. No one’s giving me money to write plays. {laughs}

CHELSEA: Right.

TRISH: And it’s very rare that that happens. And so I would say that, you know, making a living as a playwright doesn’t really exist for more than, like, three people in the whole world. So it’s never been about that, and I’ve never had any, you know, illusions of grandeur that, “Oh, someday I will be able to be a playwright and make this all happen.” That said, I do a lot of speechwriting, and I write for live events, and programs, and award shows, and stuff like that. And so, the skillset kind of has taught me—getting into the “how do you make ends meet”… I’m basically an accidental consultant for live events. And I executive produce, and produce, and take on various roles depending on what the event is. So that’s how I pay the bills.

CHELSEA: Right.

TRISH: But more often than not, I’m investing in my own work as a theatre artist. And trying to make something happen.

CHELSEA: I think it’s really important to be the person who takes responsibility for production of your own work, and not just waiting for some sort of ‘gatekeeper’ to open the door to you, because that might never happen. I have found with my own writing that if I am in a position to be able to get it on its feet, and not wait for someone else to sort of bestow a production upon me, then that just… That doesn’t make me any less of a writer, to be the person who’s also got to wear the business hat.

TRISH: Oh, I one hundred percent agree.

CHELSEA: You know, that doesn’t make me any less creative.

TRISH: No, I think it actually, I mean… For me, I could never write a play and then just send it out and, like you’re saying, hope somebody likes it. I mean, I just… A) I don’t think the world works like that.

CHELSEA: {laughing} Right.

TRISH: And B) I also, as a playwright, having for years and years developed new work, I find that I make the biggest discoveries when I’m in a room with actors, and smart people, and you know, directors. And I’m not… That’s why this is a collaborative art form. And they’re there to make the work better. And I think that’s very much… I could kind of never imagine not being involved in an initial production of a new play that I wrote. It seems that it would be ripe for misinterpretation.

CHELSEA: {laughing} Right. Yes.

TRISH: {laughing} Even though, you know, you try to bulletproof it… I just obsess over tone.

CHELSEA: Mm-hmm.

TRISH: And this is my own constant struggle, is how to convey the exact kind of right tone on a page, so it does one day stand alone. You know, constantly looking for what that nuance is, as a writer, on the page.

CHELSEA: That’s just… I feel the same way. You know, I always say that what I like about being a writer is not sitting by myself, staring at my computer. I like being in rehearsal. Well, switching gears to something, um, over which you would have more direct control, let’s talk about Steel Drum in Space, the comedy website you created with Jacob A. Ware and Anthony Arkin. You make these hilarious short films, and the tagline—which I love, and wish I had on a t-shirt—is “Dealing with the Issues of Tomorrow, Today, with Yesterday’s Science.” I want to talk about Steel Drum in Space, and how it came to be, and how it fits into your identity as an artist.

TRISH: First off, I think we probably should make t-shirts with that logo on it.

CHELSEA: {laughs}

TRISH: Really good idea. Um, but no, about two years ago, Jacob and I decided that we wanted to make a short film. And, uh, we wrote the script for it, basically, the first draft of it, like standing in line at Shakespeare in the Park in Central Park.

CHELSEA: {laughs}

TRISH: And then we got… You know, Jacob had just done a short that Tony Arkin had directed. And thought he was the bee’s knees and all that. And so basically we decided that we wanted Tony to be in this film. And so, this was, you know… Jacob had come from Chicago, and had a lot more experience than I did in both the world of comedy, and the world of making videos, even, and short films. And he’s an actor, performer, and funny guy, all that kind of stuff. And so basically we kind of spent the next month just putting together this shoot, and, uh, it was great. And just kind of calling in filmmakers, and people that had different skills. And we shot this film that Jacob was in, and Tony, and this great actress Emily Davis, and then spent like the next three months editing it—Tony ended up editing it. And we just decided… like, we all had the best time ever on set, and so Tony and Jacob and I kind of, you know, finished the film and then decided that we wanted to keep it going.

CHELSEA: Mm-hmm.

TRISH: And so, Steel Drum in Space was born out of that. And it was really a shared sense of comedy that the three of us had. And then also, we all kind of brought to the table something different that worked really well. And we realized we could actually… With all the superpowers we each had, we could make things happen. And it was really exciting. Because I, as you probably know… It’s really fun to sit there and generate a lot of ideas, but actually getting down to work and following through and making stuff happen’s a whole different ballgame.

CHELSEA: Right.

TRISH: So that was the birth of Steel Drum, and then we started making… So, we did the short film, that went to a couple film festivals, and it’s called You Should Be a Better Friend. And we’re going to release it online I think next week. {Note: The film is up! Check out the trailer and link to the entire short film below. It is hilarious.}

 Click here to watch the full short film.

CHELSEA: Oh great!

TRISH: Yeah. And I’m really excited for the greater world to be able to see that, because they haven’t, other than, like, the occasional film festival here and there. So basically after that, we’ve made, I think, thirteen or fourteen videos at this point. We’re in production for our new one; that will be shooting in the next couple weeks. And, yeah, and we’re also kind of putting together a pilot with everything that we have so far.

CHELSEA: To see more videos, you can go to SteelDrumInSpace.com, and you have a YouTube channel, too, right?

TRISH: Yes, we do. Which I think is just “Steel Drum in Space.” (click here for YouTube channel)

CHELSEA: Right. If you search for it on YouTube, you should be able to pull up the videos there as well.

TRISH: Yes.

CHELSEA: Awesome. So how does making the videos, how does making work with Steel Drum in Space, sort of affect you as an artist, and make you think differently?

TRISH: I think in a couple of different ways. Uh, I think that obviously the medium is totally different, and what you can do—I mean, I’m going to sound like an idiot right now—what you can do with the storytelling device of the camera just kind of opens up the world to possibilities in this sort of magical way. And so it makes you think differently about, you know, how you tell a story. And so to me there’s been—again, in the last couple years—starting to try to think now about the medium being a lense. It’s been exciting to see how, you know, all these new ways kind of push boundaries with everything. And also with the comedy, I mean, again… The aesthetic that Jacob and Tony and I have is not a very mainstream aesthetic at all. You know, it’s very kind of subversive comedy. There’s probably a wide section of people that wouldn’t even think it was funny. Often what we find funny is just sort of like, masked horror.

CHELSEA: {laughs}

TRISH: About how awful, you know, existence is.

CHELSEA: Right, absurdism.

TRISH: Yeah, exactly. And to me as a playwright, that’s always been something that I’ve been drawn to, is creating a world that you recognize, but is off-kilter, and there’s something very different or wrong or unrecognizable in this recognizable world. And so I think that with our sort of collaboration, it’s great to have these guys and for us to work all together, because we keep pushing each other in different ways.

CHELSEA: Mm-hmm. Awesome. Yeah, I’m excited to find out more in the coming weeks about your pilot, and to watch the movie, and to keep watching the videos, which are so funny. I mean it’s my—that’s my brand of humor, too.

TRISH: Oh, good. Of course, right? Because you’re a Chicago girl, aren’t you?

CHELSEA: I am, I am. That’s how I know you, is through Jacob. He was in a show I directed in Chicago, and then we just kept in touch while working on stuff. But yeah, that whole sort of like, “Everything is so bleak, we should just laugh at it” is absolutely my brand of humor as well. Um, you also just closed a new play at the Incubator Arts Project in New York, called If You Can Get to Buffalo.

TRISH: Yes.

CHELSEA: And the description of the play is fascinating to me. The central question of the script is: “How much are we responsible for the things that happen to us online?” So tell me about the play, and why you were interested in making work about the early internet.

TRISH: So, the play has been a labor of love for like the past four and a half years. It kind of started when I found this article in the Village Voice from 1993, called “A Rape in Cyber Space.” And it’s this incredible article written by Julian Dibbell, who’s actually also from Chicago (click here to read the article).

CHELSEA: Oh!

TRISH: He was actually one of the leading tech writers of the time. And it basically talked about this early, early online community called LambdaMOO, which was the, like, earliest version of a chat room, an online chat room.

CHELSEA: Mm-hmm.

TRISH: And they had created this virtual mansion that was completely text. So it’s kind of like this early Wikipedia version of a chat room, that had the architecture of a mansion. Like, you entered through the coat closet, people hang out in the living room, all just through description and words.

CHELSEA: Uh-huh.

TRISH: Very much about language. And so basically, the people kind of created this world, and it was this utopia for a while, and was very exciting, obviously, and unprecedented. And then it all came crashing down when one of the members in the society, of course, figured out how to overwrite the code, and he went in and kind of created this havoc one night in the living room. He assumed the identities of other people and created these really awkward and violent sexual situations. And it basically made this online community question itself, and… In a society that had no rules, and was kind of state-of-nature, it forced them too… Because people were upset. Some people were upset, some people though it was funny, some people were like “well, this is what you get.”

CHELSEA: Yeah.

TRISH: There were varied reactions. And ultimately they decided to kick him out. And they kind of slowly became this democracy, and lost that kind of free spirit of the initial utopia. So that’s the long answer. It’s a very kind of complicated meta-meta—it’s about an online community. And then the play takes the article, and takes some characters from the article, and it also takes a subsequent episode of Charlie Rose that aired a couple months after the article. The author of the article, Julian Dibbell, had gone on Charlie Rose, and he was on there—you know, he has multiple guests sometimes—with another guy, with this author from the New Yorker, who was there because he had written one of the very first articles via email, interviewing Bill Gates. And there was a discussion on this episode of the show about what happened. So I took this Charlie Rose episode, the idea of it, and kind of mashed it all together with all of that, with, you know, fabricated online scenes of the actual world itself, and created this exploration of this incident that happened.

CHELSEA: Yeah.

TRISH: And that was the play that we did at the Incubator Arts Project in February.

CHELSEA: Oh, man. It sounds amazing! I hope that I get to see it one day; it’s fascinating to me.

TRISH: Me too, me too. It was a long, long, long time in development because I kept… It was really hard to find a way in. I don’t think that it’s very easy to put the internet onstage or even the idea of it.

CHELSEA: Right.

TRISH: It just kept, again, coming back to tone. And like, not wanting to pander to a modern-day audience that’s going to walk through the door, having, you know… What I like to say is, “having the answer to how the internet ends.” Like, how we are now, twenty years after this incident, when a lot of things were unimaginable at that time, because there was no precedent. And we spent the next twenty years… The internet, you know, blows up, and then all of these social problems take main stage, in real life now.

Photo from IF YOU CAN GET TO BUFFALO. Pictured: Rob Erikson.  Photo credit: Brendan Bannon.

CHELSEA: Yeah.

TRISH: We like to say this is kind of like an origin story.

CHELSEA: Mm-hmm.

TRISH: And really, it does… And I don’t think there’s an answer to that question which, you know, you had mentioned and which I’m very interested in, which is, “Yeah, who is responsible?” If you can get up and walk away from your computer at any time, is it the responsibility of the person on the other side of the computer? I think that’s an ongoing question that should be open for debate.

CHELSEA: Yeah, I uh, I remember reading an article when I was in college, about a man that had been arrested because he had been trapped by one of these people that poses as an underage kid a chat room, but is really like a police informant who tries to lure predators to a location where they can be arrested.

TRISH: Uh-huh.

CHELSEA: And his defense was like, “Well, I didn’t do anything.” And the police’s stance was, “Well, you had planned to.” And then the debate in that article was like, “How is this really a crime? No one was hurt.”

TRISH: Right.

CHELSEA: Is it a thought crime, because he was thinking he wanted to do this thing? There was never actually a real child in danger. And there was no answer for that, either. That article really stuck with me, because it was sort of like, “We don’t know what to about this. This is a whole new frontier of what is a crime and how can we be safe, and we just don’t know.”

TRISH: Clearly there’s a lot more responsibility these days, you know, put on people who are misrepresenting themselves online, and there’s more systems in place, but in my opinion, it’s just like—the amount of restrictions are so tiny, it’s still like the wild west.

CHELSEA: {laughs}

TRISH: But I’m really really happy with the production we just did. I’m really proud of it. And hopefully it will find another home someday.

CHELSEA: Fantastic. Yeah, I hope so, too. I would love to get the chance to see it. So, moving on to a kind of bigger-picture question, I just was reminded, because there was this article in HowlRound recently called The Art of Never Giving Up (click here to read the article), and I was reminded by this article about Marsha Norman’s article from a few years ago in American Theatre, called Not There Yet (click here to read the article),in which she says “The US Department of Labor Considers any profession with less than 25% female employment, like being a machinist or firefighter, to be untraditional for women.” When you consider the fact that only 17% of plays that are produced in this country are by female playwrights, then that makes being a playwright like being a firefighter, essentially, in as far as how traditional it is, and how successful women are supposed to be allowed to be at it. So, um, and this is the state that I’m in, too, so I’m really curious to know, what sustains you as an artist? Why do you keep writing and making work?

TRISH: I mean, I think that’s a great question, and I think that the answer to that question, for me, just keeps changing all the time. I’m always really obsessed with whatever the current project is I’m working on, and I think that’s for a reason, and I think it kind of relates to what you’re saying. I think that there’s something about working on something that’s really important you to at a time, that then sustains you, if you do project-oriented work like this. Which is writing scripts and developing them. So I think it’s the fact that it keeps changing, and I can change with it. And to me the bigger question is, “How do you want to spend your time?” Do you know what I mean? {laughs}

CHELSEA: Right. No, I know exactly what you mean.

TRISH: “Well, I guess I choose to do this.” Because it makes me… It makes my brain hurt, and it makes me think more, and it makes me continue to ask questions that… uh… I mean, I kind of what to say that make me a better person, but that sounds really stupid, so…

CHELSEA: I don’t think that sounds stupid!

TRISH: No! But like make me, you know, more aware of life in a way. I just don’t quite know what else I would do, except maybe now I’d be a firefighter.

CHELSEA: Yeah, now that you know that it’s just as easy as being a playwright.

TRISH: Yeah.

CHELSEA: On a numbers level.

TRISH: What’s so funny is that I feel like I know a million female playwrights, and I think it’s… I know tons and tons and lots, because my friends are female playwrights that are amazing. And I hope that there is… And I don’t know if that’s because I’m in New York and there are a lot of people creating work here that I see, but… You know, I don’t go to Seattle, or Spokane, or you know, California and see a lot of, you know, regional plays by women being championed. I do in New York. Because I know a lot of those people that are creating that work. But, yeah, I do think there needs to be more opportunity out there, because… I’ll tell you this: having just done this play at the Incubator, and I did my first—my first and my last—IndieGogo campaign, and really kind of put everything I had into this show, and it’s kind of tapped me out. You know, I don’t really think I’ll be producing a big show like that forever-slash-for many years.

CHELSEA: Mm-hmm.

TRISH: And, um, I think about that, and it’s like, well, hopefully there’ll be some support in other ways that can come into it.

CHELSEA: No, no, I’m right there with you. I mean, I self-produced a big play in 2010, and I have not done it since, and I do not have any plans in the immediate future to go through that again.

TRISH: I mean, it takes a lot—I feel like I’m still in recovery. And that said, kind of going back to what we were saying earlier, the good thing is you can work and develop a script without going bankrupt, and I don’t mind doing that. You know, doing a workshop, or putting together a reading.

CHELSEA: Right.

TRISH: That kind of stuff is fine, but clearly what goes into a full production that’s professional, and you’re working to get people in the world to come see it, and come review it, that’s a whole different thing. And a whole different level of commitment of the producer, especially when it is your own work.

CHELSEA: Yeah. And it’s also… for me the thing was, yeah, I could try to be the marketing person on this, but I don’t have the training in marketing. I could try to be the, you know, the art director, but I don’t have the training in art direction. {laughing} Aren’t there people out there who’d be better at his than me, that I could find or someone could send me?

TRISH: {laughing} Yeah.

CHELSEA: And I think that’s the major thing about having outside support, is that then you can do things you want to do, and you can oversee everything, but like, how many people come to see the play is not dependent on how good I am at marketing. Which is not very good.

TRISH: Completely, yeah, exactly. It takes a village.

CHELSEA: Yes. I wish that I had that village and someone else would pay them. That’s my ideal.

TRISH: I know, I know. I’ve been super fortunate that I’ve gotten, like, fellowships at places Yaddo, or MacDowell, and have been able to go away and write. And that’s been really, really important to me. Like, I’m going upstate this summer to the Millay Colony, and like, that sort of nurturing on the ground level for writers, is invaluable.

CHELSEA: You sort of get the best of both worlds: having a room of one’s own, and then also the village, too.

TRISH: Yes, yep, exactly. Yep.

CHELSEA: So what is your big artistic goal for the next year, or even the next decade?

TRISH: You know, I think that, um, focusing on the next year, I am going away this summer; I’m going to write a new play, which I’m excited about.

CHELSEA: Oooh!

TRISH: Yeah, very excited. It’s this idea that I’m just going to kind of take notes on until I go, I think. And then try to write it all there. Which sounds like fun to me. {laughs}

CHELSEA: {laughs}

TRISH: Because right now, I’m kind of finishing up a pilot, like a one-hour cable pilot deal. Because I’m trying to bridge that gap and maybe, you know, and try to do some TV writing for a while.

CHELSEA: Mm-hmm. Cool.

TRISH: And I say that like it’s… That’s like winning the lottery, right? Getting a job on a premium cable show? But, I’m going to kind of gun for that for the next year or so.

CHELSEA: Uh-huh. Well, it was so lovely talk to you today, and I’m so glad that we made this happen. And I’m really excited to see the short film on your website next week, and this upcoming stuff on Steel Drum in Space, and hopefully this new play sometime in the future.

TRISH: Absolutely. Thank you so much. It was great, you know, talking to you and seeing your reading in New York a couple years ago, when you were here and we met and I wish you all the best in your work.

CHELSEA: Thanks a lot! Thanks for making conversation.

TRISH: Of course.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Making Conversation. I hope you’ll join me again soon for another chat about making art in our thirties. You can download and read transcripts of past episodes by clicking here. You can also find this podcast on iTunes (click here).

My guest today was Trish Harnetiaux, and you can find out more about her plays at www.TrishHarnetiaux.com. You can also see the sketches she’s written, and the original short film You Should Be a Better Friend, at www.SteelDrumInSpace.com. Our music is composed by Miles Polaski, and my name is Chelsea Marcantel. And now I’ll leave you with a little bit of humor from Steel Drum in Space.