At the PWC this week: Kristin Idaszak

This week at the Playwrights’ Center, Jerome Fellow Kristin Idaszak is workshopping Another Jungle, a play about a staged adaptation of The Jungle that turns out to be something else entirely, with director Addie Gorlin, designer Andrew Welken, and actors Anna Sundberg, Sam Bardwell, Cristina Castro, and Michael Wieser. Learn a bit about Kristin in this mini-interview.

Who or what inspires you?

For me, inspiration always starts with my ghosts, the questions that haunt me. We all have them. Many of mine spring from my Catholic upbringing. I come from a deeply devout family, and religion pervaded every aspect of my childhood. I still wrestle with questions about faith, the relationship between God and money, how to find redemption and salvation in a world that often feels bereft of those things. But these questions live in my work very abstrusely.

I start to write a play when one of those ghosts coalesces with something in the world, like flint striking steel. Often that spark is a complicated character. Right now I’m really drawn towards women and genderqueer people in history who were pioneers and troublemakers in their own time, but that history has left behind. Or else it’s something in the landscape – the moon over the ocean in San Diego or the Chicago skyline at sunrise. But really it can be anything and everything. I’m a glutton for inspiration.

What are you working on this year?

I’m writing a play that started as a deconstruction of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. It centers around a young woman who tries to adapt the novel, but fails. It’s an ambivalent love letter to Chicago, as well as my exploration of my grandfather’s story. His parents immigrated to Chicago from Poland. At its core, the play is about the sediment of human history that accretes in a place over time. What happens when you try to go on an archeological excavation of those layers? What gets unearthed that maybe shouldn’t? Where do people go when they feel like interlopers in the place they used to call home?

What do you do when you're stuck on something you’re writing?

Ideally, I go climb a mountain. Mostly because hiking up a mountain is really hard. It forces me to relegate my writing to my lizard brain. And at the top, the perspective – the ability to literally see the big picture – often allows whatever’s challenging me in the work to click into place.

Often, I’ve found that there isn’t a mountain handy. In that case, I go to yoga, or take a walk, or dance it out alone in my apartment. I’ve started learning aerial silks. Writing for me is fundamentally a physical activity. If I’m moving, part of me is writing.

What does your family think you do for a living?

When my brother tells people what I do, he says I write plays with “strong female leads. And colorful language.” Which is a pretty spot on articulation of my work.