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Sarah Gubbins on “Cocked” and her new TV series with Jill Soloway

With the world premiere of her new play Cocked currently onstage at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago and the recent announcement of her pilot I Love Dick to be produced by Jill Soloway for Amazon, it is no stretch to say that playwright Sarah Gubbins is having a moment right now. The out Chicago-born playwright’s work includes The Kid Thing, I Am Bradley Manning, and Fair Use, among several others. Now based in Los Angeles, her work has been read, developed, and premiered at theaters throughout New York and Chicago.

We spoke with Sarah about her career, her art, and her perspective on where LGBT representation is headed in theater and television.

AfterEllen.com: Could you tell us a bit about your background and how you came into playwriting?

Sarah Gubbins: I was at Northwestern as an actor and was not very good-and thankfully realized that very quickly. I had taken a playwriting class in my last year, and that was kind of the first time I started playwriting. I spent 10 years in Chicago doing new work dramaturgy, and I also had a theater company where I did literary management and did a lot of work on new plays with established writers. And I think being a witness to the new play process is what started giving me the confidence, later on, to start writing my own stuff. I was strongly encouraged by the writers I was working with to pursue my own writing-and so I did! It was a longer road to writing for me. And then I wrote a play and decided to go back to graduate school. My first play Fair Use was picked up to do at [Steppenwolf Theater Company’s] First Look. I walked out of graduate school and right into that. And you think, “Oh this is it,” and it’s not “it” entirely, it’s just the next step on the journey.

AE: In looking at playwriting along with television and film writing-the climate these days seems to dictate that you have to be able to do it all. What’s been your experience with that? Because obviously, you are breaking into TV now.

SG: I think it’s about finding the story and finding where it fits rather than saying there are finite media-television, film, plays. There are so many varieties of television, so many different kinds of movies. You look at a show like Transparent, and it’s a five-hour film. But then you watch Broad City, and that’s not your typical half-hour. And then you see some of Amy Schumer’s work and some of it looks like 10-minute plays. Storytelling is storytelling and creating characters and worlds and having points of view on your society-it’s less about breaking into television for me and more about keeping curious and expansive about where those stories can live. And then getting a lot of help from a lot of wonderful people to bring those stories to life.

AE: Going to back to theater, can you speak to the trend in your work of lesbianism acting as a central theme, given the huge lack of lesbian representation in mainstream theater?

SG: I don’t know that I would say lesbianism is central to it-and that’s not backing off it at all. I just populate my writing with a gender presence, a queer presence, a class presence in the creation of character, for me, these are ways in which people experience the world. And so to draw a character is to address their gender presentation, their gender expression-but I wouldn’t ever say there’s a hierarchy. I think the great thing about including gender in your storytelling is that you have an opportunity to try to write various experiences that queer people have in the world. And in Cocked yes there’s these relationships, but there’s also a queer character concerned about taking care of an older parent. Or in The Kid Thing, about becoming a parent. I’m excited by the fact that these plays have been received and that audiences can maybe experience something more than a coming out story, though that’s not to say that those stories aren’t still necessary.

AE: Do you consider your plays queer theater or do you prefer not to limit them into that canon?

SG: You know, it’s a tricky question. I am obviously a queer writer and very, very open about that. So to say I’m going to reject that because I’m being pigeon-holed-I’m not there. I’m definitely very, very proud to be a part of a long conversation, a very very long lineage of queer writers, female writers, and I don’t ever want to reject or shy away from that because in many ways I feel indebted to the writers that have come before me, and the writers who inspire me to take up that mantle.

So in many ways, I’m honored to be a part of that, and I also feel like part of my role is to add to that lineage in whatever unique way that I can. Basically, my big, arrogant wish is to create characters that will live in the cultural imagination-to see what fabulous queer characters we can add that will inhabit a space that can live alongside Willy Loman. It’s like when Ruth Bader-Ginsberg was asked how many female Supreme Court Justices are enough, she said, “nine.” Let’s have more queer characters taking up the cultural imagination or living in it. I think that’s a richness that we get to strive for.

AE: You’re preaching to the choir. It seems that the trick is negotiating one’s pride in identifying as a queer female writer without feeling that sense of being pigeon-holed.

SG: I identify with how successful my writing day is going. At any given point, I’m going to identify as “Ugh” or “This seems okay!”

AE: So what are you able to tell us about I Love Dick?

SG: Amazon has greenlit a pilot. I am creating it with Jill Soloway and her company Topple. It’s based on the iconic novel I Love Dick by Chris Kraus, which is a fantastic read if you haven’t read it. We’re adapting that novel into a television show, and I’m really, really excited about where it’s going and what it says about the journey towards actualizing one’s place as an artistic being in the world.

AE: And Kathryn Hahn is attached to star, correct?

SG: Yes, Kathryn Hahn is attached. The lovely and amazing Kathryn Hahn. In addition to being a wildcat, I find her to be such a tremendous and marvelous actor and all around brainy gal. It’s been a delight to be having her as part of this process. It is an amazing group of artistic minds and hearts and guts coming together. And the way that Jill works is like nobody else I’ve worked with. She’s just fearless and honest and just a true, true art maker. So that’s been really exciting to have that kind of collaborator on a project like this. It’s really heaven.

AE: And is this a project you’ve had in development for a while?

SG: It’s actually been quite quick. Jill and I were working on a feature, and I was reading the book and thought it would be a great thing for us to be reading in terms of expanding the psychology of one of the characters in the feature. And when we both fell in love with the book we started talking about turning it into a show. So really it’s been pretty quick as these things go. It’s not been bouncing around in development for five years, there’s just been a flash of excitement, and the ways that it’s come together have been really fast, and that’s exciting too. Amazon is just an unbelievable partner to have when you’re developing-very open, very passionate. Just incredibly supportive of the process, and allowing the thing to organically emerge, which is great. I couldn’t tell you one horror story.

AE: So. My last question. Looking at the current state of affairs in LGBT representation-how do you think we’re doing, and what can be done, what can be better?

SG: I think…more! More visibility. I think what can be better is just to not feel any sort of complacency and getting rid of a scarcity mentality. We don’t need to have one queer feature or one queer character on Broadway. I think what we can keep working toward is a multiplicity of perspectives, a multiplicity of voices and genres and stories and aesthetics that all will come into play. I just think it’s ultimately welcoming the shattering of that patriarchal male gaze, for all the things that means, and when you shatter that gaze, there is so much room for so many more perspectives. I guess the only thing I feel we can do better is stop thinking that just because we have a presence that that is enough. We have to continue to strive for ambition, and continue to strive for really the kind of seismic shift that needs to happen in altering that gaze. And I think the best way that can happen is when we feel a shared sense of advocacy for that singular objective. There is a ton more work to be done, but I don’t want to live in a negative space. I believe it’s inevitable, that there is a generational shift that is happening and it’s ours to take care of. I’m not going to sit in a blame game; I’m going to say, “Okay, what are we doing today?”

The world premiere of Sarah Gubbins’ new play Cocked, a thriller about a couple whose lives are interrupted by the sudden appearance of one partner’s brother, is currently running at Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago now until March 13th.

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