Sheila Callaghan’s plays have been produced and developed with Soho Rep, Playwright’s Horizons, South Coast Repertory, Clubbed Thumb, The LARK, Actor’s Theatre of Louisville, New Georges, Woolly Mammoth, and Rattlestick Playwright’s Theatre, among others. Sheila is the recipient of the Princess Grace Award for emerging artists, a Jerome Fellowship from the Playwright’s Center in Minneapolis, a MacDowell Residency, a 2005 Cherry Lane Mentorship Fellowship, the Susan Smith Blackburn Award, and the prestigious Whiting Award. She has received grants from NYFA, NYSCA, and the MAP Foundation. Her plays have been produced internationally in New Zealand, Norway, Germany, and the Czech Republic. She has been commissioned by Playwright’s Horizons, South Coast Repertory, The Playwright’s Foundation, Clubbed Thumb, and EST/Sloan. Her full-length plays include SCAB, CRAWL FADE TO WHITE, CRUMBLE (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake), WE ARE NOT THESE HANDS, DEAD CITY, LASCIVIOUS SOMETHING, KATE CRACKERNUTS, THAT PRETTY PRETTY; OR, THE RAPE PLAY, and FEVER/DREAM. She has taught playwriting at Columbia University, The University of Rochester, The College of New Jersey, and Florida State University, and she is currently on the faculty at Spalding University's MFA program in creative writing. Sheila is a resident artist at HERE Arts Center and a member of the Obie winning playwright’s organization 13P. Sheila is also a resident of New Dramatists. Currently, Sheila is a writer on the Showtime series The United States of Tara

Check out Sheila’s plays,
available from Samuel French

Ayravana Flies, or A Pretty Dish
Crawl, Fade to White
Dead City
Scab
That Pretty Pretty; or, The Rape Play
We Are Not These Hands

Q & A with Sheila Callaghan

Q: Your plays, such as CRAWL, FADE TO WHITE, SCAB, and WE ARE NOT THESE HANDS, often focus on female characters as they try to make their way through strange worlds. Can you write a little about how you create your characters and the worlds that they inhabit?

A: In all three I was exploring abandonment in a way... in CRAWL FADE a mother and daughter deal with the sacrifices the mother had to make so her daughter wouldn't suffer the same fate she did. In HANDS two girls living in a fractured dystopia have to fend for themselves in the absence of parental guidance. And in SCAB, a young woman whose father has just died is dealing with complicated emotions arising from the entrance into her life of her stable, bookish, sexually enabled roommate.

Stylistically however, all three plays are vastly different. CRAWL FADE is a dreamier, impressionistic play. I was working with colors, textures, saturation—a much more painterly vocabulary. HANDS is a more lyrical, grittier piece... at the time of the writing I was interested in the effects of globalization on third world countries, as I had just finished a tour of some very poor towns in China. And SCAB is the most realistic of the bunch, loosely based on an experience I had when I moved to LA as a grad student years ago.

Though I don't really focus on the struggle of women per se... I just happen to be a woman, and that often colors how I see the world. I get irritated by the fact that male protagonists written by male playwrights are rarely described as having "male journeys"... they just have journeys. There's a ton of scholarship out there about this so I won't bore you, but basically I never set out to write a lady play about a lady navigating a strange world. I've written male protagonists navigating strange worlds too, when I'm feeling particularly butch. For example my play LASCIVIOUS SOMETHING opening at the Women's Project next spring has a male character at its center... though his world is not inherently strange. It becomes strange at the arrival of a mysterious woman from his past...

Q: Your play DEAD CITY was inspired by James Joyce’s ULYSSES. What sparked your initial interest in this iconic book? How did you approach the process of adapting it?

A: Having been a literature major back in college, I was always obsessed with long, thorny, linguistically challenging novels, and I gravitated toward folks who had similar sensibilities. Then the Modern Library published its top 100 books of the century, and as my friends and I checked off the titles we had read, the number one title--Ulysses-- remained unchecked by all of us. So we set out to read it. We assigned little term papers to each other so we would get through it (such nerds). We made it through, but just barely. I knew if I wanted to get anything out of it I'd have to go back through it with a more scholarly approach.

So I decided to use my Playwrights' Horizons commission to make a play from the book. I followed the schema Joyce used as a framework for his work, and set it 100 years in the future (2004) in NYC instead of Dublin, with the genders of the main characters reversed. The play started as a sort of peppy, integrated romp, but then Sept. 11 happened and the play changed. It became a love letter to the city I was estranged from, as I was in Minneapolis on a Jerome Foundation residency. I tried to write a pretty faithful adaptation as far as character and story, but thematically it is very different and hopefully has a life quite apart from its Joycean beginnings.

Q: THAT PRETTY PRETTY, OR THE RAPE PLAY deals with the hyper-sexualized representation of women in the media (and elsewhere). To that end, you make great use of repetition and variation in the play, having men & women say the same lines at times. How did you develop that idea?

A: I'd love to say I had a specific approach, but it was purely instinctual. I wanted to investigate how our reactions to absurdly violent material changed based on how we view the genders of the aggressors. I also wanted our experience to be visceral rather than intellectual. To this end I kept the writing process very raw and frayed.

Q: When and/or how did you know that you wanted to create plays?

A: I don't know I ever made a conscious decision... I loved writing, period. I wrote plays and prose and poetry and songs. I read my poetry at open mikes, I was in a band, I acted in other people's plays, I had a few false starts at novels, I wrote screenplays, etc...

I kept writing with the sure knowledge that someone someday would tell me to stop and do something real with my life. But no one ever did. Not yet, anyway... I think playwriting settled early on with me because it involved the most people and therefore was the most fun to do.

Q: What inspires you to take on a new project?

A: I don't like to do things I already have done. I get bored pretty easily. If the last thing I wrote was an intimate family drama, my next enterprise will be a six hour multi-media epic. I am also writing for a Diablo Cody's series on Showtime right now, and I just finished a feature film and am working on a TV pilot. I want to have a zillion things to fail at, because I feel like if I ever get it totally right I'll die a little.