Ariel Stess, a playwright from the desert of Santa Fe, loves water onstage: kiddie pools, hot tubs, atmospheric pits and mirages and mirrors. Her crafted worlds are not just eerie, isolated, and dangerous, but playful, intertwined, and human.
For her play KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA, Stess received a 2024 Obie Award in Playwriting and the 2025 Yale Drama Series Prize. The play, a wild, internal, connective carousel of four women living in Santa Fe, will be published by Yale University Press.
Stess and I discussed creative generation, self-producing, violence in art, how to be human, and the four essential plays to read alongside her work. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Audrey Kolker: Why do you write plays?
Ariel Stess: I write plays to create new worlds and new ways to see and understand what being human is all about. I think a big thing is creating plays in order to give people new vantage points into humanity: the joys, the pain, the ways we cope, the ways we can hurt each other without knowing it, the way power works in us and on our bodies, the ways we can heal.
AK: Where and when do you think you began to develop your voice as a writer?
AS: At Bard [College], if you majored in Playwriting, they would produce your senior project, which was amazing. They would bring in artists from New York City to work—directors, a whole production design team—and they put up an entire set. I think I really landed in my voice when I was working on that play senior year. I remember telling my mom, “this is clearly the best possible career ever, like, I wrote a play, and now there’s a world on stage, and everyone’s saying my words” but of course later on I was like, “oh, this is an incredibly difficult career”. But yeah, that’s the height of joy: to see a 3D world on stage that came out of your vision.
AK: Tell me about that play.
AS: It was called Prowlers in the Night, and it took place in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was about a daughter who was being objectified by men in her life, and an unsatisfied and resentful father figure, and also about the dangerous, hot, unforgiving environment that Santa Fe can manifest in the summertime. So the play was about that eeriness and danger, and also the danger of coming of age as a woman.
The set was an abandoned, empty pool with a huge billboard in the back, which just felt very desert, very New Mexico. There was a lot of water in the play too. I love water onstage. I love pools and big pits. We had an empty pool, and we also had kiddie pools that the actors actually went into and got wet.
AK: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, just awarded you the Yale Drama Series Prize for your play KARA AND EMMA AND BARBARA AND MIRANDA. Congratulations. What’s your relationship to Branden?
AS: When I was teaching at NYU, Branden was premiering An Octoroon at Soho Rep. That play was a total game-changer. It riffed on an old play, then got inside that play and transformed the play into a new play for a new time.
The set, and how it sort of exploded-slash-collapsed on the audience, was a game-changer for me in terms of how I visualize my plays while writing them, and how I think about the role of the set in relation to structure and content. It was only after seeing An Octoroon that I started to think about how the transformation of a set can facilitate the transformation of narrative structure, and the transformation of narrative structure can transform audience members. The audience can transform from living in the framework of old fashioned ideas to arriving in a new framework where they’re able to see something new about the world.
AK: Can I ask more about how you visualize your plays while writing them?
AS: It’s different with different plays, but I have a play that I’ve been working on; I had one draft of it years ago, and then I just kind of put that draft away and rewrote it completely. It’s called The Only Girl in the Hot Tub. I realized when I put the old play aside that I had to figure out how the hot tub was going to work, because it was going to symbolize the way that teenagers are vulnerable and exploited by irresponsible adults. I do try to understand when a set really matters to the play’s operation– sometimes it doesn’t. I have a couple other plays where the characters go all over the place, and all that really matters is that they’re face to face, or can sit on some chairs, or be near a table. Some plays need to be really specific. Some need an empty stage.
AK: Write me a syllabus: a Stess Crash Course. What are three plays from the 20th or 21st century we should read next to your work?
AS: So my first instinct is to rebel—I was like, I have to go back to the 19th century.
The first play that comes to mind is Woyzeck by George Buchner. It’s a story about exploitation and power and how humans’ insatiable lust after power, money, or acclaim harms them. Woyzeck is a working class guy who’s just trying to lead a pleasant life, support his family, eat and stay alive. The play is written in short scenes, and—oh, this is really fascinating—the playwright, George Buchner, died before finalizing the order of the scenes for the play, so it sometimes feels like the order doesn’t matter so much: move this here, move that there. The same struggle is going to come across. The scenes feel both concise and muscular. He doesn’t let the audience off the hook. I think I’ve been striving in my plays to do the same: to show life as it is, and to show cycles of abuse. Even when I’m writing comedy or dramedy, I don’t aim for resolution at the end in a way that makes everyone feel like we don’t have stuff to work on as individuals and as a society.
The next one is Happy Days by Samuel Beckett. I first encountered Beckett in a course at Bard College, which was taught by the brilliant Joanne Akalaitis; she directed a lot of Beckett. I thought Beckett was the biggest badass I’d ever read. His work is always playful, whether that playfulness happens in darkness or light. His characters contain multitudes, like people do. His plays only give us a glimpse into some slice of their psyches. But to me, it always feels like the full person is right there. They’re just trapped perpetually by life in some way. Every character Beckett creates feels like a stand-in for people on this earth. The struggle in each of his characters makes me feel like I’m seeing life in all its fullness, represented on stage, one character at a time. After reading Beckett, I started wanting to create characters trapped by a piece of life in some way: characters who feel universal in their specificity. The most important thing for me is always trying to be playful in my writing and keeping my characters playful too. That’s what I’ve learned from Beckett. It reminds me that life is hard, and humans always need to play. It’s essential to living.
When I thought of a third, two came to mind: Sarah Kane’s Blasted, and Will Eno’s Tragedy: a tragedy.
Eno’s play is incredibly playful. People compare Eno to Beckett often. The premise of Tragedy: a tragedy is a bunch of reporters sitting around reporting on the fact that the sun has set for the very last time. And while the reporters have nearly nothing to say to their audience, as there is no new news in the natural disaster, they’re still compelled to speak. It shows us how absurd it is for us to keep talking and keep making stories out of what’s going on in our external worlds and in our bodies—but, as human beings, we constantly do it anyway. I think this happens a lot in my plays. The act of speaking becomes almost absurd. The compulsive drive humans have to make sense of their sensations, their disasters and their emotions, I find really strange and funny, and my characters are constantly talking to try to make sense of stuff, to try to connect with other people, and to try to change or grow.
And then Sarah Kane’s Blasted—the crazy violence in the play really shook me and also really woke me up. That was an epiphany to me, that words on a page could lead your audience to feel sick to their stomach. The play takes place in a hotel room in Leeds during a war, and eventually the war comes into the world of the play, into the hotel room, in a violent, horrific, and vicious way, the same way that war enters parts of our world in reality. And I always loved that, because I want my plays to show something that’s true about life, even if it’s something we’d all rather not look at, or not look at very closely.
AK: How do you identify yourself and your work within the ecosystem of theater today?
AS: I see my work as being about human beings and the minutiae of what it is to be alive—this open space for people to feel seen, to feel in camaraderie with me and my characters, to enter into community and move away from isolation. This potential is what I find beautiful and powerful about storytelling.
In terms of the contemporary theater ecosystem, I have to talk a little bit about where theater is at at the moment in order to place myself in it. I find that many theaters lately are looking for work about hot-button issues that can be easily explained, or plays wherein a certain part of a person’s identity becomes the central story, rather than the human being who contains multiple parts.
I find currently that many theaters are more interested in thinking about how they’ll market the play, what blurb they’ll use, and how they’re critiqued, than they are in imagining the way the play can represent, contain, and expand the messiness and the humanness of our world.
I understand why theater organizations are under this kind of pressure currently. I’ve heard it directly from passionate artistic directors, that they’re under this kind of pressure. My work doesn’t seem to fit into those boxes.
I do think audiences are hungry for work about human beings, and work that plays with structure in order to unearth new dimensions of the human experience. This is all the more reason why I think playwrights need to be producing their own work, to skip over the institutions who can act as gatekeepers and share their work directly with hungry audiences. When I wrote KARA AND EMMA AND BARBARA AND MIRANDA, I wrote it without thinking about who would produce it or where it would fit amongst these institutions, and that was a huge gift to me and to my work.
AK: You’ve spoken about drawing characters from yourself and others you’ve known while writing KARA AND EMMA AND BARBARA AND MIRANDA. How do you source and generate material?
AS: I think I start with picturing a place that stirs up a lot of emotion in me, where there are also a lot of wild, strange, earnest people. I’m from Santa Fe, I grew up there, and so that’s one of the places I often write about. That play started with me picturing the character of Kara, whose husband leaves her for their babysitter. A lot of friends of mine growing up had single parents or parents who were divorced, or parents who had never gotten married to begin with. That was where I started—being in Santa Fe and being around characters who felt like they were more alone than they should be, characters who felt isolated and trapped. When I’m starting to write a play, I generally start with a location and the complicated, contradicting emotions that are stirred up by a place. I lean into trying to surprise myself as I write, and I jump into characters and a space that I can really feel and sense, where the atmosphere is already totally established in my brain and memory.
AK: What makes a line great?
AS: It hits you in the gut.
AK: What do you want your audience to take away from KARA AND EMMA AND BARBARA AND MIRANDA?
AS: It’s a play about women who are isolated in their own shame, and they discover that they need each other to get themselves out of this shame. At a time when we are hearing messages of so much polarization, so loudly and so often, my hope is that the play reminds us we all have much more in common with one another than we may realize, and that we need each other to survive.
AK: How does this relate to your instinct to leave things unresolved?
AS: Though I really have not been into resolving things for a long time, since the pandemic, I have been feeling like I want my plays to give us paths toward healing. Kara and Emma is one of my first plays give that path.
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