citizens. She was teaching people what respect was, what professionalism was. She was teaching people how to think for themselves, how to think creatively, to have confidence in themselves as creative people in whatever they were doing. She was a brilliant, effusive, strong woman who was unafraid of authority, who was challenging always people’s set ideas. She was a dynamic individual. So, I just started doing plays with her and taking her classes, and it was a place where I felt comfortable. But I had a lot of other interests. Coming out of high school, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go into a training program. Patty was always very realistic with people about what a life in the arts entailed and what it meant. And so I went to Colorado College for a year to explore my other interests. I was always a kind of outdoorsy person, and I wanted go and experience that and be in a place that was close to nature. I was a summer start at Colorado College. They used to fill out their summer program by sending a percentage of their freshman class early to school in the summer. So, six weeks after I graduated high school, I was on campus. And then you have the fall off. While I was there that summer, I met a theater company that was doing a workshop there, , and we got along well. I had nothing to do in the fall. So they said, “Hey, why don’t you come work with us?” So, my first semester of college, basically, I was working at a professional theater in downtown in New York City. It was an incredible theater that was full of different kind of performers. And I was learning to do everything: lights, stage-managing, etc. And I was meeting a lot of people. And yet still I went back to Colorado, and I thought, “Okay, I guess I’m going to go back to school now.” But I got into a couple of plays, and I just realized during that spring semester that all my energies were
going to the theater. I had all these other interests but I was kind of letting them go, and I was putting all my energies into the theater. So, not wholly satisfied with the theater program at CC, I decided to transfer. And so I transferred to NYU the following fall. Patty had always been a proponent of physical training in theater, and she used to talk a lot about Grotowski and his work, and we would do some work in that vein. She knew about this Experimental Theater Wing; a lot of people had come out of our high school and gone straight into this program. And so I already knew a couple people in the program. When you get to NYU undergrad, you have a lot of different schools that farm you out to different programs. There’s a Strasburg Studio and there’s an Experimental Theater Wing, and there’s Atlantic Theater, and then there was Adler, and there was a musical theater program. And so there were all these different programs. Most of the time, they place you—by audition or how they need to fill out the numbers or however the matrix of the way that they do it. I don’t know what it is. But I said specifically I want to come here, and I want to go to the Experimental Theater Wing. They placed me there, and so that’s how I kind of decided that this is going to be a career. MS: You mentioned that this past year you’ve been doing more writing and producing. I’m just curious. Can you talk a little bit about what inspires you—books, plays, things like that? AP: Definitely seeing work inspires me. I think there’s just no substitute for that, for just seeing what people are doing, what images are coming, what other people are interested in. It doesn’t really matter what you’re seeing. There’s always something to be gleaned from it. What in- 155 -
spires me is what’s happening in the world—trends, conversations that are happening. There’s always something that’s sort of caught fire, that people are talking about. I was really excited when Amherst approached me about this play about public education because it’s part of what’s happening. It’s sort of one of those lightening rods, like Gross Indecency was. When Oscar’s trial started, it started all these things, an explosion of conversations about their values, about their laws, about where they were as a culture. Public education is one of those hotbed issues, where you start talking about demographics and education, you start talking about money and economics, and you start talking about values and teachers and relationships. It’s all of this stuff, and people get really passionate really quickly about their school and charter schools and what that means for their kids and it really is at the forefront of what people are talking about right now. That excites me. That really excites me. It makes us question what our values are, and when you do that in the theater, I think it really creates a lot of sparks. It’s motivating to make work about something that is really important to people and what people are talking about. JF: We have about ten minutes left. Gabriela or Sarah, do you have any questions? Sarah Kuhl: I had a couple, actually. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the reaction of the people in Laramie when you first came to the group’s being there. Did you have to negotiate sort of being very formal and taking lots of notes and recording and things like that versus just trying to carry on natural conversations? I was also wondering what their response has been to the production and the media surrounding it and all the attention that