Get to know playwright Steven Dietz and his new play The Great Beyond.

Orlando Shakes: What themes or ideas are you focusing on with this play?

Steven Dietz: You’ll never get me to talk about themes, but The Great Beyond pokes at the messy notion that perhaps the secrets we keep from each other are what holds our family together.

Orlando Shakes: What is the biggest challenge about crafting a new play?

Steven: Thinking that what worked in the last play will work in this one.

Orlando Shakes: Who or what was your biggest inspiration for becoming a playwright?

Steven: The men and women I encountered as a young director of new plays at the Playwrights’ Center (Minneapolis) in the early 1980’s. August Wilson, Lee Blessing, Barbara Field, Kevin Kling, John Olive, Marisha Chamberlin, so many others. They were my grad school, my boot camp, my inspiration.

Orlando Shakes: If you could only describe your play using four words, what would they be?

Steven: The dead don’t leave.

Orlando Shakes: What is unique about your writing process?

Steven: I think you are talking about habits. I have plenty of habits (“rituals” is the more elevated word, but if I’m honest with myself they are habits). My studio, my old oak desk, my music, my dog at my feet. My habits are comforting but they constantly fail me. Mainly I like to generate plays and – much more than that – I like to work at making them better. I hope that’s not unique. I think of it as my job.

Orlando Shakes: Aside from this play what is next for you? 

Steven: The Great Beyond is part of a two-play commission of interlocking plays for adult and young audiences. Each stand-alone play takes place in the same house on the same night – one upstairs with the adults (The Great Beyond), one downstairs with the kids (The Ghost of Splinter Cove). These plays will premiere and run concurrently in Charlotte, NC, in the spring of 2019.

About Steven Dietz

Steven Dietz’s thirty-plus plays and adaptations have been seen at over one hundred regional theatres in the United States, as well as Off-Broadway. International productions have been seen in over twenty countries, including recently in Brazil, Thailand, South Africa, Estonia and Iran. Recent world premieres include Bloomsday (2016 Steinberg New Play Award Citation); This Random World (40th Humana Festival of New American Plays); and On Clover Road (NNPN “rolling world premiere”). Dietz was awarded the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award for both Fiction and Still Life with Iris, as well as the PEN USA West Award in Drama for Lonely Planet, and the Edgar Award® for Drama for Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure. Dietz is currently a Dramatists Guild “Traveling Master” – teaching master classes in story-making and collaboration across the U.S. He and his wife, playwright Allison Gregory, divide their time between Seattle and Austin.

Don’t miss Steven Dietz’s The Great Beyond at PlayFest presented by Harriett’s Charitable Trust.