At the PWC this week: Ryan Campbell

This week at the Playwrights’ Center, Jerome Fellow Ryan Campbell is workshopping Dead Ends, in which the lives of two men are irrevocably changed when a catastrophic flood wipes out much of their small north Houston suburb. Ryan is collaborating with director Amy Rummenie and actors Michael Wieser and Billy Mullaney. Learn a bit about Ryan in this mini-interview.

What does the Jerome Fellowship mean to you as you transition to post-grad school life?

The Jerome Fellowship allows for a fantastic transition into post-graduate school life. I wrote ten drafts of plays during grad school (and many more fragments of unfinished plays) and the Fellowship gives me the time to take several of these drafts and continue to work them towards their final iterations. I am also able to work on new ideas as they come up throughout the year, for which I am so thankful. Additionally, the Fellowship helps me to invest deeper into the network of artists that I’ve been fortunate to find over the last few years while also allowing me to foster new connections with artists in Minneapolis and beyond. Put all together, the Fellowship means that I can continue to be an artist.

Some of your work ties together ancient stories/themes and current events. What emerges from these explorations?

Mainly that many of the core issues that we face in society today have already been faced by our ancestors. And though our society is quite obviously very different from that of, for example, the ancient Greeks (and in many ways, thankfully so!), the core issues of being alive remain the same: issues of family, of love, of sex, of war, and on and on. There are no final answers to these questions—it will always be a process of negotiation and evolution (and sometimes revolution)—but there is a comfort in knowing that our struggles have been looked at before, have been felt before, and that we today are a part of a larger human community that spans through generations and times and places that we can barely even conceive of now. And so to take ancient stories and themes and to reinterpret them is to remind ourselves of our connections to the past while simultaneously separating ourselves from it and grappling with the questions of life in our present moment.

Why do you write plays?

To think out loud.
To feel less alone.
To help others feel less alone.
To criticize.
To comfort.
To question.
To entertain. 
To empathize. 
To be serious.
To be silly.
To celebrate.
And ultimately, to find and sustain community.