The few samuel d hunter1/6/2024 ![]() But when I was sixteen or so, I fell in love with poetry, and I found a copy of some Amiri Baraka plays in the stacks at the University of Idaho library while looking for an Allen Ginsberg biography. I did a little theater in high school and some community theater, but for a long time the most contemporary play I had encountered was Arsenic and Old Lace. ![]() I think I didn’t even know that playwrights still existed. I actually first started writing plays when I was a teenager, which is weird because I didn’t really have much of a context for playwriting growing up in a small town in Idaho. I usually begin with a kernel of something-could be a character, or a single line of dialogue, or a setting, and I try to let the play naturally grow out of that idea rather than begin with a thesis statement. But the sort of happy unintended consequence of that is that now, years later, I think I’ve realized that what I’m doing really isn’t about anyone play, it’s about a larger body of work made up of all these plays that connect to one another in certain ways.Īside from that, I guess I don’t really sit down and detail what questions or themes I want to explore before I begin work on a play. Early on I started writing plays that were primarily set there, but it wasn’t really a conscious decision. I think the other obvious common theme in all of my plays-though it’s really not much of a theme-is that they’re pretty much all set in Idaho, where I grew up. It wasn’t really until I used my writing to explore ideas I was struggling with in my real life that I finally started to find my voice. As a young writer, like a lot of people, I was sort of writing beyond the scope of my abilities-taking on way too much, too many big grand themes, too many formal gymnastics. I think in the beginning these themes in the plays that you identify here were just things I was struggling with myself, more as a human being than a writer. What other common threads pervade your works, and what questions are you interested in exploring with your playwriting? Your plays are typically set in banal, nondescript environments and explore themes such as loneliness and human connection. He holds degrees in playwriting from NYU, The Iowa Playwrights Workshop, and Juilliard. A native of northern Idaho, Sam lives in NYC. He is a member of New Dramatists, an Ensemble Playwright at Victory Gardens, a member of Partial Comfort Productions, and was a 2013 Resident Playwright at Arena Stage. A published anthology of his work, including The Whale and A Bright New Boise, is available from TCG books. His work has been developed at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, the Ojai Playwrights Conference, Seven Devils, and PlayPenn. His plays have been produced in New York at Playwrights Horizons, Lincoln Center Theater, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Clubbed Thumb and, and around the country at such theaters as Seattle Rep, South Coast Rep, Victory Gardens, Williamstown Theater Festival, The Old Globe, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Denver Center Theatre Company, the Dallas Theater Center, Long Wharf Theatre, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a 2014 MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship, a 2012 Whiting Writers Award, the 2013 Otis Guernsey New Voices Award, the 2011 Sky Cooper Prize, the 2008 PONY/Lark Fellowship, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Idaho. Hunter’s plays include The Whale (Drama Desk Award, Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, GLAAD Media Award, Drama League and Outer Critics Circle nominations for Best Play), A Bright New Boise (Obie Award, Drama Desk nomination for Best Play), The Few , A Great Wilderness , Rest , Pocatello , Lewiston , Clarkston, and most recently, The Healing and The Harvest.
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