The Soil and the Soul: A Dinner with Andy Landis

Andy Landis is very passionate about soil.

Playwright C. Kay ‘Andy’ Landis divides her time between NYC and Middle Tennessee. She earned an MFA from Lesley University and was the first Dramatists Guild Representative for Tennessee. Prior to being a professional singer-songwriter with Warner Chapel Music, she was an actor in Los Angeles appearing in television shows, commercials, and on stage. Landis’ award-winning play The Volunteer will be produced by the Murfreesboro Little Theatre in January 2020.

I’m sitting across from her at a tiny table in this Italian restaurant, and she’s holding up her spoon and growing glassy-eyed. She’s explaining to me how one teaspoon of soil can hold something like a billion organisms within it.

“How dare I bring something into the world that’s going to kill people’s hope or kill their love or kill their dreams or kill something in them, you know? I can’t even kill a teaspoon of dirt. There’s so much life in it.”

This is Andy Landis in her truest form, warm and sincere and unmistakably passionate. With the check on the table and two hours of conversation behind us, she somehow manages to bring the conversation back to soil, an homage to the dedicated farming lifestyle she somehow manages to balance with her playwriting.

We had come together over bread and under the fairy lights of Marina’s on the Square to discuss her newest play in process, Take a Breath. Centered around a protagonist immersed in the process of moving forward after losing a friend, the play cradles the human experience in a bed of humor, the same way in which Landis herself has learned to deal with personal trauma. In fact, the inspiration for the story came from a close friend whose career was “sabotaged by addiction.” In between bites of salad, she talks to me about the relevancy of this type of loss, of losing people who shouldn’t have died, and then emerging from it and facing life again.

For Landis, loss doesn’t seem to be about finality. In fact, she recognizes that life is inherently brimming with loss, but from that change springs newness. Landis herself has undergone numerous changes, from pursuing a career as a songwriter and recording artist to acting out in L.A. to going back to school for playwriting to now dedicating herself to the craft (and her farm, of course). Though our conversation ranged from the hardships she faced as an aging woman in an industry that idealizes indefinite youth to the perils of the modern food industry to our mutual love of the now-endangered compact disc, Landis remained positive. Even when the server forgot to bring drinks until halfway through the meal, she only smiled and told the server not to worry.

With twinkling eyes, she described to me what makes playwriting so special to her, even after all of these other art forms she has mastered. She notes how urgent the material must be in a play, how the characters speak to her and tell her how they need to be written. When Landis comes to share Take a Breath at In Process on Thursday, November 7th, she’ll be revealing these characters in the same way they revealed themselves to her.

“I’ve become enamored and taken with the ability to dive into a character,” she said, and for Landis, the dialogue and the drama are as close to the vividness of life as she can get. “The world is so lonely. So lonely. And if I can help one person feel less alone, feel understood or relate in some way, then I’ve made it just a tiny bit better.”

In those final moments of our dinner, I thought about how beautiful and pure the mind of Andy Landis is, how she celebrates the tangible and the intangible, the soil and the soul, this life and even death.

After she put down her spoon and we’d shared documentary recommendations, she beamed wide,

“Art is life. And life is amazing.”