Laura Schellhardt’s got the K of D. That’s slang for “kiss of death” in St. Marys, Ohio (see Schellhardt’s The K of D, an urban legend). And the specter lingers intractably in the Chicago-based playwright’s works, from the Silkie myths of the Orkney Islands inspiring Shapeshifter, to the (possibly) vampire-inflicted terminal illness haunting Courting Vampires, to the estate-sale objects of the recently deceased that stack the shelves in Auctioning the Ainsleys.
It could spell some bleak nights at the theatre if Schellhardt’s characters weren’t fighting back against the dark, fumbling doggedly, often hilariously, toward better lives and better selves. “I’m hard-pressed to see how you can ask those questions—Am I living the life I’m supposed to live? Am I being my best me?—without bringing death into it,” muses this smart, straightforward playwright. “I was originally drawn to gothic because it’s a whimsical way of questioning technology, disease, politics. It tricks you into thinking about something. I’m also fascinated with the supernatural—that question: How do we know what we know? Why do we keep asking?”
“People respond to Laura’s plays,” observes actor Renata Friedman. “And I think that’s because she writes great, great humor in very terrifying situations. She can be very dark and sardonic and cynical and macabre, but that’s always tempered with light and beauty and sweetness and hope.”
The urban legend in The K of D is that 12-year-old Charlotte McGraw caught the eponymous malady from her twin brother’s dying kiss. Now animals are mysteriously perishing, and small-town grudges grow spookier. The solo play’s raconteur must embody the whole town—a pack of kids, weird parents, a ne’er-do-well neighbor and all—in order to relate her story, and, we hope, to find her salvation in the telling. Schellhardt didn’t originally envision a one-woman piece, but the psychological desperation lurking at the story’s root eventually became clear—Charlotte must transform the past into legend in order to move on. The K of D premiered at Washington, D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in 2008 with dynamo actor Kimberly Gilbert taking on the 16 characters, and has been performed across the country, with a new production going up this June at the Adirondack Theatre Festival in Glens Falls, N.Y.
“It’s challenging, of course, but each character has a specific rhythm,” notes Friedman, who workshopped the play at Seattle’s A Contemporary Theatre (ACT) in 2006, where it won a new-play award, and has since produced it under her own auspices in Seattle, at the 2009 New York Fringe Festival and at Seattle Repertory Theatre this past winter; Friedman plans, with director Braden Abraham, to continue to tour the production. “I’ve not encountered another writer with that sense of rhythm, almost like verse, that stays in my head like a song would.”
An attentiveness to tempo, particularly how language’s momentum can power drama, is at work in all of Schellhardt’s plays—but none as explicitly as Auctioning the Ainsleys; which thrusts the audience immediately into a Midwestern auction house, where the enigmatic eldest Ainsley is selling off her father’s remaining goods:
Ladies and gents we have a treat for you today
we have a real treat, yes sir a real treat, yes ma’am a real treat, for you today.
I have here three items once belonging to a man.
Fine man by most reports but where’s he stand today?
Can’t say for certain, can’t say, can’t say, all we know is what we got, and what we got is what he left and what he left is all we got.
“The event of an auction is confusing, chaotic, compelling, theatrical—requires mastery of language and physical form,” says Schellhardt. “I learned something with Ainskys: If you pick a subject matter that demands speed, you get readings that sound the way you want them to. If you don’t, your plays work faster in your mind than they sometimes read. I like a play to feel like it’s always ahead of you a little bit—or at least the language is. I find music-theatre actors do well in Ainskys, because they understand the rhythm and pace.”
“Laura’s very open to listening to how actors talk,” confirms Heidi Kettenring, who originated the role of Avery Ainsley at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto, Calif, last July. “If there are certain lines or phrases that aren’t working, she’ll change it to fit the production at hand, rather than trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. I don’t see that often with writers.” Schellhardt’s collaborators repeatedly point to her lack of sentimentality as she develops new work—including a ruthlessness with regard to cutting and reshaping to serve the story. “She has an incredible ability to cut through,” posits ACT literary manager Anita Montgomery. “She isn’t precious about her work at all. Her vision of where she’s headed is very clear.”
Small towns, often in the Midwest—themselves a sort of American gothic—show up again and again in Schellhardt’s work. (The scribe grew up in Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh and Chicago, but spent summers visiting relatives in rural Ohio.) “I have a lot of respect for small towns,” she says. “I’d love it if there were more theatre in small towns, and I think one way to generate that is to write about them.”
That’s the milieu for Courting Vampires, the tale of the two Archer sisters, one oppressively methodical (she works as a fact checker for their town’s “podunk gazette”), the other helplessly impulsive (her assignation with a new lover has left its fatal mark). The play unfolds in the courthouse of Rill Archer’s mind, as she tries, finds guilty and sentences to death the vampiric figure who’s poisoned her sister. Though Schellhardt wrote Vampires before the current rash of sexed-up bloodsuckers captured the Zeitgeist (it was part of New York City’s Summer Play Festival in 2005 before a premiere at Los Angeles’s Theatre @ Boston Court in 2009), and the play’s monsters are mostly metaphorical, Schellhardt professes enthusiasm “that the world is again becoming obsessed with vampires. A lot of important things can happen within that genre.” She adds: “Gothic, supernatural—those forms come with a palette, a series of structures that you can take on, or not.”
Her newest play, Upright Grand, which is part of Northlight Theatre’s Interplay Series this month in Skokie, III., tackles a father-daughter relationship that stretches across 25 years in four scenes; a piano functions almost as another character. “It’s not stylized per se,” says Schellhardt, “but we’re trying to find how we can make the first scene work slowly, at the pace of a nine-year-old, then pick up speed as we go—the way your life seems to go faster and faster as you get older. And the story should have a musical structure—think stanzas, refrains, codas.”
Both Schellhardt’s fiance and sister are composers, and her two other siblings are actors (she wrote the role of Aiden Ainsley for her brother, and her sister has done readings of Vampires as Nina Archer). She ascribes the familial artistic streak to parents who took the Schellhardt brood to the theatre and raised them around a piano. “If he’d had his druthers, my father would have been a lounge singer,” she suggests, though by trade he was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, while her mother taught English.
Schellhardt has also inherited a strong pedagogical impulse. Directly upon her own graduation from Northwestern University she began teaching that institution’s undergraduate playwrights. Five years later she departed to earn her MFA at Providence, R.I.’s Brown University under Paula Vogel, then went on to teach at Orlando’s University of Central Florida. But after hearing of the re-upped commitment to new-play development by the Northwestern theatre department, now under the head of playwright Rives Collins, Schellhardt returned to Chicago and her alma mater. “A hop and a skip to end up in the job I’d had,” she jokes—but an allegiance to her home city and its students (including the National High School Institute scholars who come to Northwestern for intensive theatre arts training every summer) is deeply ingrained in Schellhardt.
“She’s passionate about what her students are writing—as much as she is about her own writing,” says director Devon de Mayo, who co-teaches with Schellhardt at Northwestern and the National High School Institute, and whose Dog & Pony Theatre Company produced Ainsleys this past November. “She’s excited about the individual voices of students, and knowing them both as young artists and as young people in the world. She becomes a huge advocate for them.”
Whether by chance or design, death persists in Schellhardt’s scripts-in-process. “For a long time I thought I was just writing whatever play I want to write, no thread,” she admits. “That’s a very young, naive way of thinking about writing. Ultimately you’re tapping into something that’s primal, that some people would call the soul, some would call the psyche, and some would call the DNA of your experiences.”
She’s written a history of the electric chair, from the advent of electricity to the first state-certified execution in 1890, while working in residence at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence. (Trinity also produced Shapeshifter in 2009.) “It’s a very American question, that device,” she reflects. She’s also at work on a play that touches on the rash of teen suicides, “which keeps me up at night. I’d like for that to be an hour-long piece that could be taken to schools.” And Seattle’s ACT has commissioned How to Remove Blood from a Carpet, about a crime scene cleaner, whose job it is to clear away the mess bodies leave.
Despite a growing tally of theatre productions in towns and cities across the nation, Schellhardt observes that her plays are not often produced in Chicago. “There’s always this question—do I consider myself a Chicago playwright? Well, I am a Chicago playwright. Chicago used to be—and still is—a highly realistic town, which is troublesome to a writer who is not highly realistically motivated. But I think we’re breaking through.” And Schellhardt maintains that Chicago harbors many of the artists she most wants to work with.
“Artists working here feel themselves as human beings in the wide world first. It’s important to remember that there’s this huge world that doesn’t know theatre exists, or doesn’t think theatre is important. If I can figure out where I fit into that world, then maybe 1 can create pieces that access it. Chicago is a place where you can do that.”
Sarah Hart is a former managing editor of this magazine.
