At the PWC this week: Sherry Kramer

Core Writer Sherry Kramer is at the Playwrights’ Center this week, workshopping her new play How Water Behaves with director Leah Cooper and actors Adelin Phelps, Clarence Wethern, Katie Bradley, Randy Reyes, Sean Dillon, Shanan Custer, and Brianne Hill. The workshop will conclude with a free public reading on Wednesday, January 6, at 2 p.m. Learn a bit about Sherry in this mini-interview.

You’ve had a long-term relationship with the Playwrights’ Center. What excites you about being back?

The Playwrights’ Center has been a part of my writing life since I started writing plays. But the thing that never stops being new is the deep gratitude I feel when I belong to a company of other writers. Nothing like it. It’s like there’s this family, and I get to be a part of it again. Honey, I’m home! All those brave playwrights and a history of generosity in a building steeped in it. I feel as excited about developing a new play there as I did the first time.

What does your writing space look like?

I write on a huge white desk that looks like a small Greek temple. Literally. Ironic Ionic columns, steps leading up, the whole deal. I used to have some small white plaster gods that lived in the alcoves on either side of the main entrance, but it’s hard hanging on to gods these days. I go online occasionally to see what’s available in replacement deities, but they’re always too big to fit the alcoves. That’s the problem with gods in general these days. Never just right.

What are you working on?

A play about forgiveness. Forgiveness is a mystery to me. Either I don’t understand how to forgive because I never did anything wrong or I don’t understand how because it’s my fatal flaw. Either way writing a play about it should be an adventure. And I’m finishing up my playwriting book about the perception shift, A Play Takes Place in the Audience. It’s like writing a 350 page one woman show that I don’t have to worry about memorizing.