Catherine Trieschmann reveals her thoughts on the emotional journey of the characters in CROOKED for WP’s audience.

The themes of power, love and loss seem entwined throughout crooked.  The power we wield, the love and loss we feel.  Do you think they are always linked?

In life, no. In plays, yes.

The Mother/Daughter dynamic depicted in Crooked is real and realistic.  What's the significance of this relationship to the fabric of the play?

No matter the mother, they all have one thing in common: the desire to control their daughters. This is a very easy dramatic conflict to tap into, because the tactics mothers use to “guide” their daughters are well-meaning but endless (although Tennessee Williams may have covered most of them). Elise, the mother in the play, is everything you’d want in a mom on the surface: she’s smart, fun, progressive, cool, but even she has certain expectations for who she wants her daughter to be, and fundamentalist Christianity does not belong there.

(I should note one exception, however, to the above: although all mothers try to control their daughters, my mother does not try to control me, as long as you don’t count the areas of home decoration, wardrobe, and hair color.)

All three main characters seem cloaked in an isolated loneliness.  How does this emotion help each character develop?

I think that desperation can breed intimacy, especially in high school. The two teenagers in the play are so aching to be heard and touched that they jump right on into bed together, so to speak. Much of the play’s humor is rooted in the fact that while we can recognize the only thing they have in common is their loneliness, they cannot. I supposed the heartbreak occurs when they begin to realize this, too.

Playwrights often have interesting twists and turns to their careers.  We would love for you to share some of yours with us.

The most surprising and lovely twist was the premiere of crooked last year at the Bush Theatre in London. Due to the play’s Southern setting and themes, I envisioned it premiering in Atlanta or Louisville; London never even crossed my mind. It gave me such a silly pleasure to tell the woman behind the customs counter why I needed to enter the U.K.

Perhaps the biggest irony of my career is that it started to take off when I left the East coast and set up shop in rural, western Kansas. You would think that would spell certain career suicide for an “emerging” playwright, but instead it’s given me something unusual to talk about at meetings: “You live in western Kansas, really?” And then the inevitable, “why?”

What relevance does Women's Project have to you as a female playwright in the USA today?

Many years ago, a good friend of mine was starting a fledging theatre company in NYC, as post-college twenty something are wont to do, and I remember one of the first things she did was set up a meeting with Julia Miles for advice. Julia didn’t know my friend but she met with her anyway. She talked her through founding a company and keeping it afloat, but the one thing she told her that really stuck with me was: “producing theatre is really hard, and producing feminist theatre is even harder.” Not the gem of inspiration I was expecting, but perhaps the most truthful thing one can say about a woman’s life in theatre. The Women’s Project makes it a little easier for all of us. Thank you.

 And finally, a personal question, would you like to share with WP's audience your favorite song? 

Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” is probably my all-time favorite, but I spend a lot of time dancing my infant daughter around the house to Alison Krauss singing “Baby Mine” at the moment.