On the opening of my first play, I’m thinking about what I might say. Whenever I go to a play I always look for the playwright’s statement. As if the play weren’t enough, I want to hear what the playwright thinks about his own work. 

But this is not about my work. It’s about our work. I wrote a play. Yeah, it was hard. It was really hard. It took time, and it took coffee, and I could not have done it without my favorite green camping chair: a lot of it was actually written outdoors. 

But then I handed it over to other people. And it was no longer mine. A terrifying thrill that I was attracted to. I think this whole thing is about that. We are not alone. We cannot do it alone. We cannot create alone. We cannot get clarity alone. We aren’t gods, but there are gods operating somewhere, mostly in the places we can’t see. There is a word that Vib and Dan talk about in the play. It’s a word that the Swedes have, Badkruka. It refers to a person who doesn’t like to swim in open water, and Vib says she can’t swim where she can’t see what’s beneath her.

But in the play, Dan and Vib are already underwater. And so are we all, we’re already all in the water. And so we’re always learning to swim, again and again and again.

Dedicated to shared lives of creativity for all of us, whatever shapes they might take.

DREW