A Candid Chat with Playwright Cory Skurdal

Sticks and Stones* is a path-breaking play by Cory Skurdal that addresses issues faced by the LGBTQ community. I was first introduced to this play last year when I attended a staged reading organized by CATCO and I'm very fortunate to be cast as one of the characters in the world-premiere of this award-winning play. The play revolves around Janice, an arts critic, who writes an unfavorable review of the works of Kylie, a transgender artist. Kylie responds with a blog post outing Janice as a closeted lesbian, following which Janice threatens to sue her for defamation. In conversations with their attorneys, with ghosts from their pasts, and with each other, Janice and Kylie battle barriers of age, gender, culture, and politics as they seek to comprehend each other and their very different lives and identities. I had the opportunity to meet Cory recently at the newly opened Short North Coffee House and speak with him extensively about his writing and how this particular play took shape.

EARLY LIFE AND EXPERIENCES

Cory grew up in a small town in Western North Dakota in the 70's in a rural state and a conservative community. "It was a difficult time for me, but the experience of being bullied as a gay person helped form my interest in writing. I haven't been back much, I went back for my mother's memorial. I don't have many relatives left that I'm connected to, so there's no reason to go back. I would say it was a good place to come from, it's not a good place to go back to."

Cory went to college and law school there, but knew right away that he didn't want to practice law. He always liked libraries, so when he found out about a program that allowed him to study and work in a law library he applied, got accepted, and went to Seattle for a year. After that, he applied to law schools all over the country and eventually got hired at Ohio State. He met his partner Bob, who was a second year law student, through his colleague who introduced them. "September will be 27 years - we haven't killed each other, we've thought about it, but we haven't killed each other yet!"

After a 2-year stint at Boston, Cory moved back to Columbus but couldn't find a job in his field, he worked for a non-profit for a few years, and then decided to start writing. In 1996, he started working on his first play Catspaw which was a murder mystery thriller, and started sending it out to writing competitions. Catspaw was a finalist in two competitions nationwide and also won a competition at a theatre in Oklahoma city which was later produced by them in 2001. "I got to go out there and see my first play that I had ever written - that was really exciting!"

After that, Cory went through a period when he didn't write for a long time, until his mother's demise which prompted him to start writing his next play The Present Moment. "It was sort of an examination of my life, growing up with my parents. It's not exactly true to life and traces a brother and sister's story - a brother who's gay, and a sister whose old boyfriend from college comes back to town who happens to be a reverent Christian, so it's about the clash between all of them."

Evolution Theatre Company produced The Present Moment in 2013. In 2014, Evolution Theatre had a festival for short plays and Cory's next play Consider The Source, was produced by them as part of this festival. "I've been produced fairly regularly the last couple of years in Columbus from Evolution Theatre Company which is very gratifying. I have also been involved with Evolution - I got on the board, I have been helping them and I really want them to succeed, because they are doing good work, and are now at a point where they are starting to attract a lot of excitement and attention, as is my play Sticks and Stones which is currently being produced by them."

STICKS AND STONES

Cory received a notice in late October 2014 about CATCO's Playwrights Fellowship competition. "I thought I should do this because - oh why not! I had this idea for a long time about a lawsuit of defamation. When I first started considering the idea, people at that time still thought being gay was defamatory and I thought maybe I'll write about that. But then life and things changed so radically in the next couple of years, that being gay wasn't really defamatory anymore, so I put that on the back-burner. The idea came back to me after I got the notice from CATCO and I thought well, lets see where this goes. It's the fastest I've ever written any play. CATCO wanted 20 pages by the end of December. I thought I can at least do that much and then see where it goes!"

THE CHARACTERS

Cory started writing the play in November 2014 and knew that one of the characters would be an arts critic who was a closeted gay person, "I wasn't sure who the other character would be, I thought that well, it cant be another gay person, because that would be just two gay people. Then everything started to bubble up with the transgender community across the US, and that just resonated with me and I thought as gay people were marginalized by straight people and others, straight people are marginalizing transgender people, and gay people are marginalizing transgender people too!"

About 5 years ago, Cory and his partner went to the national HRC dinner in Washington DC and at that point there was a non-discrimination act being considered in Congress. HRC decided to go with the version that didn't include the transgender community and members of the community picketed the dinner. "All of those things about the transgender community were going through my mind, and I started to create this character. I didn't know much about the transgender community, I started doing research online, I tried to reach out and talk to people without much success, but the character of the transgender woman Kylie started to develop."

The arts critic Janice was originally intended to be a male, but when Cory started to write him, it didn't feel right, "He was really kind of tedious and whiny, so I thought lets change this out, I started to write Janice and boom! She just jumped right out of the page, she is just flesh and blood right from the start, angry and disappointed and the conflict between the two characters seemed to gel as well."

Cory got 20-25 pages ready by the end of the year and submitted them to CATCO. He had no idea how long the play would actually be and continued to write the rest of it all the way through January, until he finished it. "I hadn't heard anything back from CATCO at this point but at least I knew I had finished it. February came and went and March was slipping past, I heard from them around late March, early April that I was a finalist and they said now we need the other pages. I was done so I submitted the rest of the play! By late April, they let me know I had received a fellowship - it was probably the most money I have ever made off of any of my plays - $5000 and a staged reading!"

Following that, auditions were held and they found the cast, rehearsals began in May, and the staged reading was held in the month of June. "It was kind of electric, it really came off well as a staged reading, we had more people come to that staged reading than we expected. It was packed, there were about 150-160 people, we had a talk-back after the reading and the feedback was very encouraging. Everybody seemed to be captivated by the play and the characters, one woman said - I don't think I took a breath from the moment it started till the moment it stopped!"

EVOLUTION OF STICKS AND STONES

Sticks and Stones continued to evolve after the reading. In the original play, the judge was a more prevalent character, and Cory felt that some of the comments by the judge got awkward at the reading and at one point provoked a laugh that wasn't intended, "It was a very tense moment, people needed a chance to step back from all the drama so they laughed, but that's not what I wanted. So I took a lot of the lines from the judge explaining concepts to the audience which I felt didn't need to be explained and gave them to Janice and Kylie in the scene towards the end where they are coming back and forth at one another, fighting about what these concepts mean. This is one of the most powerful scenes in the play right now."

Cory also tried to meet members of the transgender community. He spoke to Liam Gallagher from Stonewall Columbus, "Liam gave me a very good insight. Originally I had called Kylie's blog 'Buckeye Genderqueer', and Liam said that's two different things - 'genderqueer' and 'transgender'. That's something I didn't know. I have learned an awful lot about vocabulary and nomenclature in this community. I also met with Lana Moore who is going to be the Head of the Pride Parade this year who read the play and gave me feedback, she is a transgender woman who just retired from the Columbus Fire Department after 30 years of service, and she transitioned on the job about 10 years ago. We also reached out to Trans Ohio which is a state-wide organization, and met the new co-chair Melissa who was very supportive and agreed that Trans Ohio would come and do talk-backs after the performances on three nights."

Director Joe Bishara and Cory were also trying to find an actress to play the role of Kylie's transgender friend Charisse. "In the reading, Charisse was simply a voice and we thought it would be interesting to have an actress on stage and we went back and forth on that. I talked to people after the reading and some of my friends said yes, you should certainly have an actress on stage and others said just the opposite, that having just a ghost voice was much more powerful."

Joe and Cory reached out to an African American transgender woman to play the role of Charisse. "She seemed interested initially and then she suddenly wasn't anymore. The three of us met, she had a variety of reasons for not doing the play. I wonder if some of it was age-related, she's quite young and had very definite opinions about how things were. She eventually came around to the idea that this was a pretty good play, but she didn't want to participate in it. I think it was primarily the character and her relationship with Kylie - she said at one point that she objected to what she saw as a transgender white woman coming to the rescue of the transgender African American woman and she didn't want to be the rescued transgender woman. That being said, that's an interpretation of her own because when I wrote the play I never specified any sort of ethnicity for either Kylie or Charisse. We parted amicably and I invited her to come to see the play, I hope she will."

TRUSTING THE DIRECTOR AND THE ACTORS

When some of his earlier plays were produced, Cory didn't get to see them or be involved until they were actually performed. "With Sticks and Stones, I've been able to be a participant all the way through. Joe involved me right from the start - from the reading all the way through to the staged play. It is very clear that it's his play and he'll let me comment, he won't necessarily take my comments, but he's been very amenable. It has been a good experience for me to step back, let go and realize more and more what a collaborative process this is. Yes, I put the words down on the page and they hold a deep meaning for me, but then you let that go and somebody else grabs it, somebody of talent like Joe and he is pulling out things that I may have put in there but didn't realize it. I think that's true for the cast too, they are drawing from their own experiences and making these characters their own, which is fine with me because why would anyone do this play if they couldn't bring any of their creativity to it? I've learned how to distance myself and how to let go."

WATCHING THE REHEARSALS

When asked about what he experiences as a playwright during rehearsals, Cory says "When it flows, and it flows more often than it doesn't, I feel - wow this is really powerful, not just what I wrote but also how Joe is making it happen and how all of the actors are creating their characters. I always cringe a little bit when the actors deviate from the line that I wrote. I have worked on this and lived with it for a year and a half, it just resonates within me and when someone departs from it, it's kind of jarring. But again, if you get the sense of what I put on the page, its not that big of a deal. Slavish devotion to words is not necessarily a need."

Cory picked non-specific gender names for some of the characters such as the attorneys Kendall and Dana. He envisioned the director and actors going in the direction they wanted, and he wanted that kind of freedom for them. "For instance, when you were cast as Kendall Grey, I knew that you would do a different interpretation from what Joe Dallacqua did and that was fine with me. I thought this is going to be fascinating because I have seen a male play the role and how a male would react and now I've seen as a female how you react, particularly to the come-on sequence. It's really interesting to see that the dynamic is different, and it's really gratifying to see actors make the characters their own. I think you and Staley have made that scene your own. This is resulting in a quality piece that has everybody engaged, all of the actors seem to really care about the play and the character and that's really a positive thing and I'm happy with it!"

SEEING HIMSELF IN THE CHARACTERS HE CREATES

Cory does see a reflection of himself in the characters from most of his plays. After the staged reading of Sticks and Stones a friend of his came up to him and said "Janice is you!" Cory agrees that Janice does capture a fair amount of where he came from and who he is. "She is older than I am but she grew up in a very conservative environment with no support and nowhere to express her feelings, so she clamped down and became this ball of anger and hate. I was fortunate in that I handled it, met people, got support and became something other than that. She does channel the anger, the fear and resentment that I had and maybe still have to a certain extent, maybe you never get rid of all of that."

Cory writes a lot about parent-child relationships and a friend of his thought that his take on familial relationships was too negative for her, "She had a different life experience than I did. I write a lot about families, and brothers and sisters, and parents and children. The scenes where Janice and Kylie have dialogues with their parents are based on true life experiences of what I have heard from other people or from what I've read. When I was writing the play, it was around the time that a young transgender woman walked out in traffic in Cincinnati and killed herself. I did some research on her and a lot of what she experienced with her parents is seen in the play, particularly  in the dialogue between Kylie and her parents."

Cory believes that there is a distinct difference between Kylie's relationship with her parents and Janice's relationship with her parents. "I hope people will understand that with Janice, neither parents are supportive and Janice has nowhere to go, nowhere to turn. With Kylie, her father is clearly impossible but her mother refers to her as "she", and she is supportive I think that is something Kylie has that Janice never had. Also, Kylie is growing up in a very different society than Janice did. There's hope for Kylie and there's support for Kylie which Janice never had."

A TRANSGENDER ACTRESS TO PLAY KYLIE JONES

Cory always wanted a transgender actress to play Kylie, but they couldn't find one for the reading given the amount of time they had. For this production Cory was very keen on finding the right person. "It was kind of a challenge if not for you introducing us to Staley, I don't know if we would have been able to achieve what we wanted. I thought it had to be a transgender actress who would understand this character and be able to play it truly, plus if we have people from the transgender community come to this play and they don't see a transgender actress playing that role they're going to say this is not real, this is not true, this is not my life. So it was very important. It's been very gratifying working with Staley, she understands this character deeply and plays her so well."

Cory also spoke about Staley's comment that she thinks she has a deeper understanding of where Janice is coming from, "I think Staley experienced some of what I did growing up - the lack of support, the hurtful things, the bullying. She sees that happening to Janice and can understand how Janice got to be the person she is. Kylie does have sympathy for Janice, but think about this - if you had somebody say such savage things about your work, your work that is so important to you, wouldn't you be very rigid and uncertain of them and unwilling to engage with them? Wouldn't you be nervous about them, or feel anger toward them and the fact that she could potentially be sued by this woman too. It's all this that makes Janice a very fierce and angry enemy for Kylie. I think it's a hard thing to see the humanity of somebody like that when they are being so cruel to you. But Kylie gets there eventually as she talks to Janice and tries to reach out to her but gets snapped back at, and she says: You're a heaping pile of hate, maybe mostly you just hate yourself. I think she sees that self loathing and laceration that Janice does to herself and she feels very sorry for her."

Another issue that Cory wanted to highlight in this play is ageism, "Ageism is a big thing across the world, not just in the straight community but in the gay community as well. As a gay man ages, he can tend to feel more and more isolated and not included. I wanted to talk about how younger people can isolate older people and say your world's dead and gone, you've got no relevance anymore, just get out of the way. I wanted that to come out in the play as well. I think that's a flaw in Kylie and a flaw in a lot of young people as well, some young people grow out of it but not everybody does."

WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS

With Sticks and Stones, Cory is eager to see what the reaction will be following the play. "There seems to be a lot of word of mouth going, it could be that a lot of people come to it, maybe theatre-goers from other cities in Ohio will come to see it, I would like to get to know them, talk to them, and see if they are interested in producing it."

Cory also has an idea for a new play that has been on his mind, "I know there will be at least three characters in it - a gay man in his 60's, a gay man in his 20's and probably a gay man in his 40's, because I want to explore the different generations and their perspectives and perceptions of the world. Let me give you an example, a few years ago a group of us went to see the movie 'How To Survive A Plague'. It's a very powerful movie about the AIDS epidemic. So we went with a fairly large group including friends who were in their 20's, and after the movie one of them said I didn't know any of this happened! There is a real loss of history, not just in the gay community but in young people in general, they just don't know where things came from, how much effort, blood, sweat and tears it took to get them to be able to walk down the street holding their boyfriend's hand or to get married - they just don't get it."

As a writer, Cory is also in the process of exploring other forms of writing, "I've written around 8-10 short stories in the last year and that was a form I didn't ever think I would be able to do, because I tried it ten years ago and it just didn't come. Now that I've had some success writing plays, I thought let's try a different form and it just came! It's just about adapting to a different format; I had two other ideas that wouldn't work as plays or short stories, and I felt they might work as a screenplay. I had no idea how to write a screenplay, so I talked to friends who had written screenplays, and read about it. Talk about a foreign world! It is a very different way to write than writing for a play. I didn't think I could do it but I worked at it and have got two done now! I think if you put your mind to it and say I want to try this, I want to see if I can do this, it can become fun after a while, trying to work through the intricacies of format and see whether it works out or not. I have never tried poetry, well I have written two or three poems, but I don't think that's a form that works for me, maybe I'm wrong about that but I am certainly more willing than I used to be to explore the different forms of writing. I do have a draft of a novel that I wrote a number of years ago, that I would like to go back to and rework. Why not give it a shot, all these different things!"

As the cold, half-consumed coffees sat staring at us on the table, our discussion then segued into life, learning and everything else and I continued to bask in the presence of this quiet, unassuming man who is probably oblivious to his own brilliance.


*Sticks and Stones will be staged on June 8-11 at 8:00 pm and June 12 at 2:00 pm at The Columbus Performing Arts Center, 549 Franklin Avenue, Columbus OH.

Tickets are available at www.evolutiontheatre.org for center section seating or pay-what-you-wish at the door.

Directed by: Joe Bishara 
Featuring: Josie Merkle, Staley Munroe, Priyanka Shetty, Frank Barnhart, Tom Holliday, Rachel Belenker, Christopher Moore Griffin and Kim Garrison Hopcraft