This interview is the third in a three part series. Whitman junior Tara McCulloch is interviewing the three Instant Play Festival visiting playwrights for her independent study in Gender Studies and Playwriting. Read Part 1 and Part 2 of the series on the blog. 

Following are excerpts from a conversation between Tara and visiting playwright Scot Augustson.

Tara: Is there a feminist theatre? If so, what does it look like?

Scot: I’m gonna answer that just for Seattle because that’s my home and that’s the one I know the best, and it’s gonna be yes and no. And mostly the theatres that I’m concentrated on are sort of the smaller, more independent ones, not necessarily the Rep and the regional ones, and whereas there’s not necessarily like a formal school that you might associate with like the late Sixties, with you know the sort of radical and didactic stuff: however, when I go to list my favorite playwrights in Seattle—like without even saying “Who are your favorite female playwrights?”—my favorite playwrights are women, and they are Elizabeth Heffron, Kelleen Conway Blanchard, Kerry Healey, and Maggie Lee. And so there’s (and again, these are the people who aren’t getting paid any money) a lot of women writing in Seattle, and I think if you ask them they’d be like “Oh, yeah, I’m a feminist.” So their work isn’t necessarily didactically feminist: however, it’s strong intelligent women expressing their voices in a huge variety of ways from, you know, drawing on some political stuff. So I think there is. You can almost see that as sort of like the next generation of feminist theatre, where it’s just about women’s voices being heard, and I think that’s the definition of feminism. So again, it’s not overtly political—some of them are—but I think it is. There’s a strong scene—again, in the places where nobody’s getting paid—you move up to the Rep and ACT and those numbers don’t look as good, but yeah.

Tara: Thank you.

Hear Scot Augustson share his work Thursday, September 24th at noon in the Acting Classroom HJT106.

Scot Augustson is a Seattle-based playwright and a returning IPF instructor. He is the creator of the puppet troupe Sgt. Rigsby and His Amazing Silhouettes. He is a member of the Sandbox Artists Collective and Printer’s Devil Theatre. 

Tara McCulloch will be interviewing the three guest playwrights visiting Whitman this fall as part of the Instant Play Festival (Sept. 26-27.) She will ask each of them the question, “is there a feminist theatre?” Each playwright visits for one week, teaches class for IPF writers, and shares a reading of their work.