Holly Arsenault’s play, Underwater Weather, will be presented November 3, 2024 at ACT’s New Works Northwest festival as a special collaboration with ACT’s Young Core Company (YCC).
What are the unique challenges and opportunities of writing plays for an ensemble of young artists?
I want them to feel seen, and I want to ask questions that interest them, and I want to write parts that feel fun and rich for them. I don’t approach making a play with this ensemble any differently than I would approach co-creating with any other group of artists. I do think teenagers are in many ways the best of us, and so I see any opportunity to be in community with teens and absorb a little bit of their perspective and magic as a gift.
What does it mean to collaborate on the creation of a play? What’s your role as the playwright?
I think my job is to listen to my collaborators and to process what I hear into a script. At our first meeting, I told the ensemble that writing is listening, and I’m trying to hold that idea in my mind as I work. I didn’t begin the process with a really fleshed out idea of what the play would be. Instead, each time we meet, I listen listen listen, and then I go back and write, and then I bring those pages to them and they read and respond, and so it’s a gradual process of finding the play together.
Why this play now? Or, what are you most curious to discover in Underwater Weather?
As the parent of a person who is coming of age in this calamitous time, I’m really interested in how hope is created and destroyed. My work pretty much always talks about families, and activist movements are really rich territory for exploring family dynamics. And my YCC collaborators have expressed a strong interest in having an intergenerational conversation around climate change.
What do you hope artists and/or audiences will take away from the experience of this play?
I hope that audiences will feel like watching this play was a worthwhile use of their time and attention. I honestly just want them to be glad that they made the effort to share a live experience with other people. I hope that our work can reveal some deeper truth, but I’m pretty sure that can only happen if I do my job well, and that’s writing a captivating play. And yes, okay, I also hope that it will make people think more about whales.