Playwright Rachel Axler shares her thoughts about SMUDGE.

You have mentioned that although Smudge is funny, it is not a comedy.  Would you mind expanding on this thought for WP’s audience?

Well, it contains jokes.  The dialogue is often funny.  If the audience isn't freed up to laugh, I don't think the play hits quite as hard -- but the topic isn't comedic, and both structurally and thematically, the intention wasn't to write a comedy.  I think most of my plays are hybrids, with comic dialogue and darker, or more serious, themes.

What sparked the idea for Smudge?

There was this article in The New York Times Magazine many years back. It was about a woman who was severely physically, but not mentally, disabled, who had become an academic, and who was forced to speak on a panel with Peter Singer, a controversial philosopher whose utilitarian theories about "personhood," if applied to this woman at birth, might have assessed her condition as, basically, not worth living.  I read this, was briefly fascinated and appalled, and then it vanished to the recesses of my brain.

A few years later, during my last year of grad school, walking to the campus shuttle, I passed a person who brought the article back to mind.  The shuttle stop was right next to the ambulatory area for patients at the UCSD Medical Center.  As I approached the bus, a tiny child in an electric wheelchair came toward me.  As she came closer, I realized that she wasn't a child at all, but a grown woman -- missing, it seemed, most of her body -- the rest, severely deformed.  Her face was expressionless, but she looked at me as she passed me, and my first thought was:  nobody will ever love her.  My immediate second thought was:  actually, she probably has a family, friends, maybe a significant other...and that my first thought was the most horrible and unjust snap judgment I'd ever made.

And then I figured -- if this was something that inspired the most horrible thought I'd ever had? Probably a good topic for a play.

The husband and wife characters seem to grapple with how to love their child.  If this child is indeed worthy of love.  Do you feel we are socially conditioned to love someone only if they are perfect? 

Wow, no.  If that were the case, nobody would ever love anybody.  I think it's more that it's difficult to understand something that's completely outside our realm of experience, and difficult to love something that we don't understand.
That said: luckily, most humans have a capacity to learn.

Fear and a lack of control seem to propel the parents interactions with each other and the baby.  How important were both emotions in the creative development of each character and the play?

When I was finishing a draft of the play, the fear of deadlines helped a ton.

Otherwise, creating the characters of Colby & Nick, the parents, was mostly about trying not to censor human responses.  Particularly with Colby.  Some mothers don't feel an instant connection to their children -- I've talked with friends and mothers about this, and they've backed me up.  And they know they're supposed to.  So looking into a tiny face that you know you're supposed to adore, and not immediately feeling something that books and movies and wives' tales tell you you should be feeling -- that can be terrifying.
And about lack of control: you always hope that your child will have an even better life than yours. The problem lies, I guess, in trying to define "better."

Did you always want to be a playwright or did this desire develop while you were working as a TV comedy writer?

Oh, no no no. I finished grad school at UCSD in 2004 -- I already had an MFA in playwriting when I got my first job writing for television.

My background is in theatre.  But ever since I realized I wanted to be a writer, I've known that I want to be a comedy writer, across medium.  That desire has never really narrowed.  I want to write joke books, too.

...Seriously, I do.

You were the first female staff writer on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - why do you think women are in a minority position as writers on TV and in the theater?  

Actually, I wasn't the first female staff writer for the show -- it was created by two women, one of whom, Lizz Winstead, was the head writer in the show's Craig Kilborne days.  With Jon Stewart as host,  there was one female writer on staff, Allison Silverman, who was there a few years before me. (She then moved to Conan, then to The Colbert Report, where she still works.) I was the only female writer on staff for the 3-plus years that I was there, but not the first.

But to get to the meat of the question, which is still true (women absolutely are in a minority as writers, and particularly notably in comedy) -- I have no idea. Hormones?

No, it probably has something to do with history and societal conditioning on the parts of both men and women. There was just a huge scientific research paper published on this, which I've read about, and which I probably should read, because it's fun to read huge scientific research papers. But until I do, I'll just say this:  If we can even out the male/female staff ratio, writers' rooms will smell a lot nicer.

As a New Yorker, what do you consider to be the must-do NYC experience?

Oh, there are so many choices....  It's insanely hard to pick just one thing that would exemplify New York City.  But I guess if I had to, and since you asked, I'd say going to see a performance of Smudge at Women's Project, between January 3rd and February 7th, 2010.

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