Trista Baldwin shares with WP’s audience the inspiration and deeply personal nature of SAND.

SAND explores the emotional impact of the Middle East conflict on a US soldier and two of his company members.  Did the war provide the inspiration for the characters emotional journey or was the war a fitting backdrop for the emotional journey you wished the characters to undertake? 

The war catapulted me into the play.  It was absolutely the inspiration.   Not the politics of the war, but the people on the line, the people we Americans sent to war.    SAND was triggered by seeing the first of our casualties printed in the newspapers.  I saw these photos of young, incredibly young, beautiful, handsome faces full of potential, full of a future that would never be.  I lost my brother when he was seventeen years old.  I think the photos of these dead soldiers hit that nerve, the nerve of my own grief, and sparked this play.  It’s a very personal play in a lot of ways, but it is absolutely about the war.

When did you start to write SAND and did the changing theatre of this war alter the creative process?

I started the play as the war started.  The changing theatre of war made me focus and refocus on the gut truths of the play, which are not about the politics or strategy of the Iraq war but about how we went to war.  What drove our country into this blind, naïve place where we thought this war was a good idea? Where we thought it would be easy? 

As the war has gone on I’ve asked myself how SAND fits in to the larger social, political dialogue.  (What does SAND say about this war?  How is it saying something different than other plays?)  Every time, the core of the play answers, the core that’s been there from the start. 

SAND is not about whether the war itself is right or wrong or whether our strategies are right or wrong, it is about the soul of our country, told through three souls trapped in a confusing, boring, sometimes terrifying occupation. 
SAND explores what I think of as an American crisis of spirit.  There seems to be a hole in us, something vital is missing, or damaged, and I’m asking questions about that in this play.       

Did you meet with returned US soldiers as part of the development process? 

I read correspondence from one soldier in particular that was influential to the development of the characters and I’ve met with soldiers at both ends of the war – the leaving and the returning from war. 

You have an established work history with your director.  Why do you enjoy working with Daniella Topol?

Daniella is wonderful to work with for so many reasons.  She’s a great dramaturge and an insightful and soulful person who really listens to the writer.  She seeks the writers vision as she forms her own vision for the play and she really investigates, really gets in there and pulls the play out.
Daniella is wonderfully warm and open, even as she’s a force to be reckoned with.

As a playwright, what interests you about Women's Project?

I’ve admired the Women’s Project for a long time. As a young writer searching for role models I turned to the Women’s Project publications, which inspired and affirmed.  I’ve admired the diverse and vital writers the Women’s Project has supported.  And I very much admire the mission of Women’s Project.  I think it’s interesting that even as more female playwrights are being produced and applauded, there still seems to be significant hesitation to produce inherently feminine work on a large scale.   So, there’s more thinking to be done, more work to be done towards theatre reflecting our society.
I’m thrilled to be produced by a company that I’ve admired for so long.

Playwrights often have many lives.  Would you like to expand on your career history?

Grocery bagger, bagel baker, bartender, clerk for a methadone clinic, literary manager, night shift clerk for a laboratory of pathology, Executive Assistant for a NY hedge fund and an Austrian transformer company, dramaturge, tenure-track professor in playwriting.

Care to share something utterly unique about yourself with WP's audience?  And it doesn't have to be about your life as a playwright...

I come from a pretty eclectic blue-collar place.  I spent my formative years in the country, on a couple of acres in Western Washington, near enough to a military base to get some odd characters hanging out in the woods.  My dad worked as a truckdriver, my mom taught preschool and there was always classical music blaring in the house.  I had a pet chicken, was raised an atheist and  earned to shoot rifles with my dad, who keeps a gun in the nightstand and votes Democrat all the way.  We went through a nudist period when I was seven.   We ate a lot of lentils. 

The first writing contest I won was in second grade.  I won with a horror story.  It was the story of two girls trying to escape a horrible orphanage, with victims of the orphanage hanging in the trees all around as the girls ran towards freedom.

My first paper in elementary school was on the Khmer Rouge.  On the cover of my paper I carefully rubber glued photographs of skulls stacked one on top of the other.

I’m an optimist who believes in evil.    
I love to cook. 
I hate cleaning the house.