Interview with Playwright Sarah Hammond
Author of Northlight’s Interplay Reading: House on Stilts

How did you decide to become a playwright?

Summer camp at UVA Young Writer's Workshop my sophomore year in high school. The fiction class was full and so they put me in the playwriting class. I immediately took to the cadences of the way people talk, the weird ungrammatical skips that betray a person. Writing dialogue can be like scoring music, there's so much in the rhythms. It was a good fit for me, so I'm still doing it.

You have the uncanny ability to deftly mix comedy and drama.  Can you talk about why and how you embrace both genres?

Mostly that's intuitive, but I really just can't see one working without the other. Maybe it's the Southern gothic thing - life is dark but it tends to be hilarious, too. You look at those great big moments in life, there's always something wildly mundane embedded in your Grand Narrative - like when my uncles scattered my grandmother's ashes at the beach, they used a spoon to put her ashes into a conch shell, and the spoon they used was from the kitchen of our rented beach house. After they went to the sea and did their whole ritual - we had mint juleps, it was beautiful - they just put that spoon right back in the dishwasher of the rented beach house, washed it, left it there. So vacationers at that house probably kept using that spoon in their cereal for years and have no idea. Those things happen - oddball things get in the way of the stories we think we're living.

How and where did you develop HOUSE ON STILTS? 

It was a commission for South Coast Repertory, so it was the first play I wrote for a big stage, after aiming for black box spaces with limited budgets. I was so pleased to write a play with a big canvas in mind. It's only four actors, but the set needs a house, the sea, sky - it should feel big, outdoors, like you're looking at a piece of Crooktail Island. I had a pivotal workshop of it later on at New Dramatists, where I'm a resident playwright. I spent a week gutting the script, removing the magic realism, and basically turning it into a whole new play in the course of a week. The actors were working with drastic rewrites from day to day. They were very generous, sank their teeth right into the material, which was enormously helpful to me as I rewrote it. There were two smaller readings with Page73 Productions in New York and the Studio wing of the National Theatre in London. And most recently I had a great workshop in Rochester at the Geva Theatre Center with some of the same actors who did that New Dramatists workshop. Rochester was the first time I got to see the play in front of a general audience, so I did a lot of cutting there. Nothing tells you what isn't working better than an honest audience reaction.

The play’s setting is South Carolina. Where did you grow-up and how did that influence your work? 

I was in Hong Kong and Belgium from ages two to nine, and then we came back to South Carolina - where my dad is from. All the extended family is there, it's very tight-knit. So I spent most of my life in South Carolina, high school, college, it's the place I know best, but those very early formative experiences were in foreign countries. South Carolina is my home in some ways, but not others. I don't have an accent, for example, but most of my writing does. Those Southern voices are the voices I know best, and they come out in the characters. In terms of the theater in America and gathering an audience and so forth, I think it's incredibly important for theaters to do work that doesn't take place in cities or in colleges. Cities are where most of the artists live, but the audience is all over the place, and the lives up on the stage should reflect that.

Have you worked on any plays in Chicago?

I had a one page play that lasted about six minutes in Collaboraction's Sketchbook Festival a few years ago, but that's it. I've seen a lot of Chicago theater and love how character-driven the work tends to be. I'm excited to come visit.