At the PWC this week: Meg Miroshnik

Core Writer Meg Miroshnik is at the Playwrights’ Center this week, workshopping her new play Utopia, Minnesota with director Hayley Finn and actors Terry Hempleman, Pearce Bunting, Christian Bardin, Katie Tuminelly, Theo Langason, Adia Morris, Tony Sarnicki, and James Rodriguez. The workshop will conclude with a free public reading on Wednesday, December 23, at 12:30 p.m. Learn a bit about Meg in this mini-interview.

You’re a co-founder of the Kilroys. What has the response to that project been?

This year, The Kilroys launched the second annual edition of The List of excellent new plays by female and trans* writers as recommended by industry leaders. This is a season planning tool for theaters committed to equal gender representation on American stages (www.thekilroys.org). Sharing the news with the writers of the most-recommended plays and the responses have been so moving. The realization that this project we just *made up* and started administering from our living rooms two years ago…that this endeavor could offer a sense of community and validation to fellow playwrights has been very powerful. A whole landscape of possibilities is opening up for me as I start to imagine the kind of agency artists can take on to support other artists.

This will be your first time working with the Playwrights’ Center as a Core Writer; what are you looking forward to?

This is really a homecoming for me. I wouldn’t be a playwright without the Playwrights’ Center. I grew up in Minneapolis and attended Buffy Sedlachek’s Young Playwrights Summer Conference as a teenager. It was a completely formative experience as it was the first time I’d ever encountered working playwrights. I’d been reading whatever plays I could find in the library, but had no sense that playwrights could be living, vital human beings like Naomi Iizuka, Sarah Ruhl, Karen Hartman, and others. During that time, I also interned at PlayLabs and saw Bridget Carpenter and Diana Son rewriting, which was also a revelatory experience—seeing what day-to-day playwriting work looked like.

So, even though I’ve never worked with the Playwrights’ Center in this capacity before, I’ve always sort of thought of it as an artistic birthplace and have hoped that one day I might come back and to be a part of this community. I’m looking forward to making this an artistic home.

Tell us about Utopia, Minnesota.

It’s a play about the Minnesota Experimental City (MXC) of the late 60s and early 70s. This was a proposal to build a kind of Silicon Valley under a dome in Aitkin County and, crazy as it sounds, the project gained quite a bit of traction with influential Minnesotans and received funding in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. My play will explore an alternate history in which the city was actually built. I had just begun thinking about the play when I heard I’d be a Core Writer and it seemed like a kind of sign that this is the play I should work on with the Playwrights’ Center this year, especially since the archives for the project are located at the University of Minnesota.