01 Nov Megan Cohen Artist Talk

Get to know Truest playwright

Megan Cohen

Megan Cohen’s innovative, offbeat, and captivating thoughts radiate from every play she writes. We wanted to get to know her mind and hear more about her writing and why she’s writing.

Want to hear her newest play in development? Reserve your Pay What You Can seat now. 

When did you write your first play? What was it about & how do you feel about it now?

When I was a kid I wrote a new ALICE IN WONDERLAND. It had… a lot… including MC Hatter, a rapping, dancing mad hatter inspired by MC Hammer. He burned his fingertips on a steaming-hot teapot and shrieked: “You can’t touch this!” Oh, goodness. Canonical roots, audience-accessible absurdism, comedic pacing, existential hazards, why haven’t I changed MORE?

Do you have an established writing process or do you approach each project differently?

Sometimes in the morning, sometimes late at night, sometimes (as with FREE FOR ALL (2019) which closed last week at Cutting Ball Theater) I do 8 or 9 full drafts, writing and discard more than 900 pages on the way to a tight final 64-page script, but sometimes (as with THE HORSE’S ASS (2015) for Repurposed Theatre) my very first draft is exactly what gets onstage, word-for-word. I do write everything like I’m screaming one last message out before being hit by a truck.

What has been your most ambitious undertaking as an artist?

This play! The next play. The more you work at anything the stronger your muscles get for it, so the more you expect yourself to be able to lift, you know?

How has Playwrights Foundation’s Resident Playwrights Initiative helped you? 

This play, TRUEST, wouldn’t be growing the way that it’s growing now without the freedom and resources of this laboratory. After several commissions in a row where I know what company and audience I’m writing for, it feels really wild and anarchic to be making and meeting my own expectations with a play that has an unknown future—where will it land!? It’s my first year as a Resident so I’m thrilled to kick it off with this big, exciting reading.

What was your catalyst for writing Truest?

I saw young male actors doing production after production after production of Sam Shepard’s True West, which has these two big showpiece roles for men—  they’re these two brothers— and they’re both witty, intense, vulnerable, violent, they get to do everything— and they all got to aspire to that and do it. And then they’d have some young woman come in in old age makeup for one five-minute scene where she plays their mom. What’s she doing? What’s she aspiring to? I wanted to see two women in roles where they get to do everything. With each other.

What are you hoping to learn from Truest appearing in the Rough Reading Series?

So much! Audiences are my favorite (and final) collaborator. When you look at the women in this play, what do you see?

What do you want audiences to take away from your work?

There’s a feeling you get after you see something really alive, where you sort of can’t quite sit down because the play is still happening inside you. It’s a little like… have you ever had that feeling where you spend some time with someone you’re falling in love with, and you get up the next morning and you’re just like “HELLO, EVERYTHING.” And you think… I’m sort of nervous… but maybe something is about to change for me? And it’s going to be good? It’s sort of like that feeling… except (unlike falling in love) you got a ticket ahead of time and planned for it on purpose! Or at least, when you got the ticket you hoped it would happen. It happens with visual art, with science, with music, but for me it happens most often and brightest and strongest at theatre. I want my work to make people want to see more theatre.

About Megan Cohen

“In the sui generis mind of theater artist Megan Cohen, silliness intermingles with oh-no-she-didn’t moxie; searing smarts blend seamlessly with surreal reverie and a bottomless capacity for feeling.” -San Francisco Chronicle

Called “a ruthless innovator” (SF Weekly), “funny, erudite, and poignant” (Poetry Monthly), and “one insightful and confident woman with a devilish sense of humor” (Huffington Post), she’s been cited in SF Bay Guardian’s “Best of the Bay” and was honored with a Theater Bay Area “Eye On” Emerging Artist award. Recent artistic partners include Berkeley Rep, The Southbank Centre in London, American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, and The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.’s currently commissioned by Houston Grand Opera’s HGOco “Song of Houston” program with composer Nell Shaw Cohen to write TURN AND BURN, a feminist rodeo opera inspired by the lives of modern-day cowgirls, which will premiere in 2021.

Full production history and expanded bio at www.megancohen.com