Interview with Laced playwright Sam Mueller
During the rehearsal process for About Face Theatre’s production of Laced, Artistic Director Megan Carney sat down for a short talk with playwright Sam Meuller. In the play, three bartenders arrive at their beloved queer bar, Maggie’s, to find that the establishment has been vandalized. As they try to piece together the events of the night before, the three friends grieve, riot, point fingers, and ultimately must decide: is it better to understand what and why this happened, or to just clean up and move on? About Face first planned to produce Laced in spring 2020, but postponed the production to March 2022 due to the pandemic.
MEGAN: Can you share a little about your own experiences in queer bars and how that led to the world of Maggie’s?
SAM: When I first started to write this play, it was a few months after the massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. I was in Cleveland, Ohio when it happened visiting a friend and I did not have any access to a queer community. That next day felt very foriegn to me, I felt disconnected from chosen family, I felt disconnected from myself, and I was downplaying my own visible queerness while in Ohio because quite frankly, it didn’t feel safe. I came back to Chicago the night after and knew that no matter my emotions, I needed to be with any other members of the queer community who wanted to go out. A friend of mine was performing that night at Berlin and so I went with a small group of close friends. By no means was it an easy night, but I needed to be there. I completely stand by the members of the community who needed to be home, I think everyone tends to their own needs in different ways, but for me, I needed to be in a specifically queer place – and moreover be with the people who were going to let me be me, in whatever feelings I had. And we all had a lot of feelings. And that was okay.
There’s a loooooooong long long history of queer people gathering after dark. I think a lot about this quote from artists Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings:
You could say that all nightlife venues are fantasy spaces, but we definitely feel this is intensified in gay bars, which are incredibly theatrical, excessive and exuberant in their design as standard. Historically, this is because gay bars were the only spaces where queer people could be visible, as if that visibility could exist only within the imagined. Now it seems that reality outside the bar is so grim that people would rather preserve this fantasy, not just out of safety but as an emotional necessity.
That being said, Maggie’s is a bit unlike any real queer bar that exists and [director Lexi Saunder] and I talk about this a lot. This bar and the relationship between these three people is unique to the people who build this bar together in the room, which feels delightfully correct to me. Sometimes this play feels like being in a queer bar, but the daytime scenes can feel like sitting in a living room with a small group of queer friends, which is also a haven.
MEGAN: Sam, the structure of this play is fascinating–time jumps and the storytelling relies on different characters’ memories to reconstruct the night before. How did you arrive at this idea?
SAM: There has never been a draft where they don’t dip in and out of time, though the mechanics of time have changed from draft to draft. Ironically, I don’t remember what led me to this structure; my own memory is faulty. I’ve always been pretty fascinated by the idea of memory and its lack of reliability. I do remember writing the first stage direction where the music overwhelms the space. I suspect I needed the music in that moment and the music always brings me back to being sweaty and on a dance floor. So, to memory we went.
MEGAN: How on earth are you tracking such a complex path through the play?
SAM: Incredible question. Not on my own, not even close. In the five years this play has existed, it has had three really brilliant dramaturgical minds on it. Rebecca Adelsheim has carried this play with me through several workshop processes all the way to this production, Maddie Rostami has come in and dropped an immense amount of genius in intervals, and I am lucky to have Hannah Herrera Greenspan as my incredible dramaturg for this production. Everyone who has ever worked with me knows that I need to be able to see a lot of things in my field of vision so there have been a lot – and I mean a LOT – of post-it notes and spreadsheets and pages tacked up on the wall to see everything at once.
MEGAN: What’s it like working with this team in the revision and rehearsal process? How have you and Lexi balanced the work of introducing new pages and staging scenes?
SAM: This team is unreal. Everyone is very smart; so much work happened in table work it was almost dizzying. I’m very lucky!
We are balancing things in a pretty fluid manner. Everyone’s brains are unique and for the most part, everyone in the room is back to making in-person art after a two+ year hiatus so we’re being attentive to that. We’re checking in every single day and figuring out how to balance everyone’s needs. That sounds like we’re a well-oiled machine but really it changes every day, we’re just trying to be graceful in the midst of necessary chaos.