“Some Kind of Feeling”: An Interview with Jennifer Faletto

“I love leaving when I know how the next scene will start because that’s such a great way to start the next day.”

Jennifer Faletto’s plays include The Texas Homecoming Revolution of 1995, Domestic Animals, This Little Light, The Adventure Club, Conspiracy Theory G, and Rules for Writing Christmas Cards. Her plays have been listed as finalists for the Reva Shiner Comedy Award and the Woodward/Newman Drama Award. Domestic Animals was a 2016 O’Neill semifinalist. Her plays have been developed and produced at The Kennedy Center Page to Stage Festival, Off-Center at The Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Venus Theatre Company, Amphibian Stage Productions, Palm Beach Dramaworks, Best Medicine Rep, Thingamajig Theatre, The Blank, The Capital Fringe, the Great Plains Theatre Conference, and Short + Sweet, Sydney. Jennifer studied at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Sydney, Australia and holds a BFA in theatre performance from TCU. She is also a graduate of the Second City Conservatory (Chicago). She was a 2019 Playwright Fellow at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.

What first steered you towards playwriting?

As a part of improv, you really start writing — so you’re writing and acting in your own sketches. That kinda expanded the world of theater for me in terms of the skills I wanted to continue to develop. Then I started putting on my own shows with my own group of nuts. That’s kind of where the playwriting started. Shortly after that, we moved to Sydney and, because of my accent, I was getting no acting jobs, so it was very easy to start writing there because your accent doesn’t matter and it’s all about what’s on the page and not so much how your voice sounds.

So going from actor to playwright is a big deal. Did you only do playwriting? Did you ever dabble with anything like poetry, short story writing, or anything like that?

I think casually but not much. I’ve dabbled since doing playwriting with screenwriting, TV writing, and webisodes and just trying to figure out every different way. I’m really interested in the dialogue between characters and the dramatic tension in a scene.

I took Playwriting last semester, and before that, I really didn’t understand what all goes into playwriting, specifically how physically challenging it is compared to other forms of writing. You have so many more restrictions. Does that ever bleed into how you write a scene, the limitations of playwriting, and having to put up some sort of physical representation?

I’ve seen so many great plays with no set, with just a chair. It’s amazing what your imagination will fill in. So I think I’m really open to that. And that’s something that’s really cool about the development process in writing a play. You have all these staged readings, and everything is part of getting your play ready for production. Sometimes the staged reading of a play, mine or anybody else’s, I will enjoy so much more than the final product because I didn’t have to see a set where I was like “that didn’t work” because, in my imagination, it’s exactly what’s required for the scene. Sometimes I guess I don’t worry about the limitations because it’ll get resolved.

So is it more of a hands-off approach? Like the set designers will just sort of do their thing?

Yes, and I’ve had set designers not appreciate that! But that’s the awesome part of being in theater. You get to collaborate with all these other artists and these super creative people, and they will surprise you with incredible solutions that maybe you did or didn’t realize you had created.

It’s all a lot more communal, isn’t it?

Totally. You know it goes from being in your head and on your paper to belonging to everybody. Maybe you’re making tweaks, but it belongs to everybody then, and it’s awesome.

Do you have a group of authors or plays that you feel really influenced you?

So for the play I shared with you, Texas Homecoming Revolution, that one was really influenced by the time I spent at Second City. You can see it’s kind of in short, almost sketch, scenes as opposed to long-form play scenes. Also, it was influenced by this play called Be Aggressive by Annie Weisman that I was in when I was in when I was in Chicago. It was about high school students and their parents also weren’t in it and it also in short, little scenes. It had this bouncy little vibe to it that I feel when I was writing that play I was like “This is like a cousin to that other play!” Sometimes with a piece, there’s something about another play that feels a certain way to me that I’m bringing with me as I’m writing something new.

Okay, so it’s not like a direct reference or anything, but more of a general feeling or style?

Yeah, I think so. I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theater, and so I read everything I was supposed to read in college. And since I’ve been out in the world, I try to see all the classics, try to see everything new that I can. So it’s all in there, influencing everything that’s coming out.

Okay. So, hypothetically, say you’re writing a play: Where do you start when writing your characters? Does it start from a conflict or maybe one quality and then blossom elsewhere?

I think there’s usually a nugget of an idea where I’m like, “Ohhhh that could be a play,” and a lot of times it’s a location. Because I usually know what people are like there, and there will be some kind of feeling. Then usually when I start, I have some sort of idea what’s happened to these people to get them wherever the starting point is. Then I’ll usually not know the rest until it comes out.

So when you’re writing, you don’t already have a plot sketched out?

I do not! And I’ve tried because I feel like that’s a good discipline. There are some things you need to know, like who’s your primary character in your story? What do they want? What’s stopping them from getting what they want? When I try to over-outline or even if I talk too much about a play and what I think it’s about while I’m still writing it, I just feel like I don’t give myself enough space for something to arise that I don’t yet know. But a lot of times when I finally get there in the writing, these things will just come.

I think you can definitely get lost in ideas when writing and get fixated on those rather than the writing itself.

Yeah and I think because of my improv background that I like to generate most things and then come back later and clean it up.

Obviously in Texas Homecoming Revolution you show your roots. In your work, do you pull a lot from your life?

None of that would be similar to my personal experience, but I feel like the observation of how a place operates on a certain level — certainly a satirical level for that play. But I do like where the place is. That’s really grounding for writing because I can provide you with so much information about what the people are like and what the pace is like and what the expectations are. I have definitely used a lot of places that I’ve lived. But, in terms of the actual experiences and the people, not so much.

Do you have any kind of practices or routines daily or weekly or do you wait for something to hit you?

I usually try to think about an idea for a while. Let it stew, y’know. And then I’ll just start dumping stuff into my phone or some word document. Then there will just be a time when I’m ready, where I’ve written down enough stuff — which I will probably never go back and look at — but it’s just a part of the practice. And then I like to write in the morning. I feel like I’m at my best and most creative right when I’ve had my coffee and right before I’ve let all the other stuff of the day filter in. Then when I get to a point where I’m stuck, I’ll go for a run or something. Usually, I’ll have a great idea that I hope I can remember by the time I get back. I love leaving when I know how the next scene will start because that’s such a great way to start the next day.

I’m curious to know about editing for you. What does that process look like?

So after I’ve finished a draft, I’ll try to leave it for at least six weeks or maybe two months. It’s really nice to walk away from it altogether. I feel like the healthiest place to start is with some space because then you can really see it. Then I might want to do another draft and then read it — even if it’s just with some buddies at the kitchen table. You can get a lot of good information with that. Then you just kind of chisel away at that editing forever and ever and ever …

Is it forever to you? When do you like to call a play done?

Yeah, I don’t know … Even when I’ve seen a play in full production, I’m like, “I know what we should do to fix that scene!”

You’ll always find something to haunt you.

For sure. I don’t know if I’ve been like “It’s perfect!” When your actors go into rehearsal, I do like to give them the time they need to prepare. To be respectful of the other artists and everybody involved, there’s time when you just go “Okay. It’s gonna be this.” But I give myself permission to change it when they’re done because I’ll know then what stuff wasn’t landing.

Michael Barham is a senior English and Philosophy major at MTSU.