Have you heard of a calf scramble? I must admit I hadn’t prior to learning about Libby Carr’s latest play. Popular in Texas, it’s a rodeo event that sees a number of calves released into an arena in order for youths to catch and harness them. It’s frantic and it’s a little frightening, and it’s realized strikingly onstage by Carr and director Caitlin Sullivan in Primary Stages’ Calf Scramble, playing at 59E59 through April 12th. The play follows five teenage girls as they first catch and then raise their calves, a project that not only teaches them valuable lessons about farming and animal care, but also how to exert power over other bodies. Whether those bodies belong to the cows, themselves, or each other, depends on the girl.
Sometimes the lines blur. In the dark of the barn, it can be hard to tell who is an animal and who is a girl, especially as each actor in the piece also embodies the calf being raised by one of their castmates. It’s a clever device, one that Carr, Sullivan, their cast, and creative team have thought through extensively, building a careful physical language for both the girls and their animals.
With new plays, particularly those taking bold, creative strides, it’s thrilling to get a peek behind the curtain into the process. I was glad to have the chance to sit down with Carr and Sullivan early into their preview performances. We discussed the piece’s influences, their delight in having great collaborators, and exactly what makes plays about girls compelling.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Emily Chackerian: Could you start by sharing a bit about the origin of the piece?
Libby Carr: I grew up in Houston and I went to the rodeo as a child, where I was exposed to the Future Farmers of America and the act of calf scrambles. I moved to New York after college, and was really missing where I came from, and looking back on this experience of southern girlhood realizing that I found it quite baffling. And that experience of girlhood in Texas felt akin to the experience of raising show cattle. I started tinkering around with this play—I come from a dance background—and it quickly became apparent that if I wanted to do something interesting in the world of raising animals, the animals would be played by the cast.
Caitlin Sullivan: The conceit that the actors would play both the girls and their calves definitely struck me on first read. Even more than it making intellectual or metaphoric sense, it hit me viscerally and emotionally on the page. There was something about these girls wrangling each other for some kind of external prize that felt very reminiscent of the ways I found my own girlhood to be baffling. Baffling is such a good word because the stakes feel so high and you feel like you’re fighting for your life all the time, and it’s not always clear why. Often, these feelings are linked to much larger structures of which you have little control. The inherent physical struggle felt exciting to me. I’m always looking for plays that can unlock something that’s beyond what I have words for. I could feel that in Libby’s text.
EC: How did your partnership start? Was this a Primary Stages matchmaking situation, or did you already know each other?
LC: It was, but first I saw the production of [Talene Monahon’s] The Good John Proctor that Caitlin directed at Bedlam in 2023. It rocked my world. There was a similar texture and darkness, literal and figurative inside the play, so I was excited to meet with Caitilin and talk about Calf Scramble and the way it’s–as she puts it– about young women encountering significant power structures and trying to enact that on each other’s bodies. It felt really right.
CS: Erin Daley [Primary Stages’ Artistic Director] sent me the play. It was happening in a very tight window for me, so I gave myself a talking to and said You have to really love it. You cannot go in and have a conversation about this play if you don’t really love it. I read it and immediately felt that I had to be the person who did it.
EC: What’s the rehearsal and collaboration process been like so far?
LC: So much of the play is me trying to answer big questions that I have about the world, and the way that I can do that is through these characters talking to each other. I feel so lucky that this is both my off-Broadway debut and also the most fun I’ve ever had. Every day in rehearsal, Caitlin was articulating the answers to these questions back to me in a way that made me feel so seen and and understood. That’s been really awesome.
CS: It’s been so fun. It is an articulation and re-articulation, right? What is so beautiful about the play is that there are so many corners to it, and complexities, and motivations and mysteries. We get to do that round of table work where we all feel like we understand it and then we have to get it in our bodies then mess it up again. We continue to feed it back to each other. Rather than feeling like I’m doing homework, or have a thesis I have to prove, it feels like I’m in pursuit of something that I only kind understand, but will know when it is ringing and resonating.
EC: Are you both iterative theatermakers? Do you see how much you can continue to generate through the development process?
LC: I’m quite iterative and very ‘drafty.’ I am proud of the way that this play is pretty complex, and it offers a lot of different things. I’m so lucky that of the cast and Caitlin and the designers, no one is interested in flattening that at all. The process has all been a pulling apart and an expansion.
CS: I am also iterative. I’ll usually have a couple images, or a sense of how something should feel, that appear and then I build and revise around them. I only know how to work in draft, and I often joke to casts that I don’t believe in blocking. It isn’t true; I really love strong compositions, but what I mean is that the idea that we would block a scene once and that would be it, that any part of a play can achieve a perfect ideal. When I teach directing, I always say that directing is revising. You’re not really directing until you’re revising. It is easy and exhausting to generate, but that’s what you have to do to get started. Then you’re actually making choices and finding if that’s what you mean.
EC: Libby, this is your off-Broadway debut, whereas Caitlin, you’ve been working for a little longer. Because your process on Calf Scramble has embraced revision so wholeheartedly, how does it benefit you to have a group of younger or early career actors?
LC: It’s a delight. The cast members are all best friends. They make me laugh so hard, and are such hard workers and have met numerous challenges and new pages with such confidence. It’s been such a treat. Caitlin’s directing has put this cast significantly at ease. After the first run of the play, Caitlin, I remember you giving a speech to them where you said Okay. We had to generate that, and now the work is deepening and revising.
CS: They’re amazing collaborators and thought partners. They’re ferocious. They’re relentless, and they have an enormous appetite to deepen the work and make it truer. The play has an extraordinary physicality to it, and they’re throwing themselves into it, but not in a reckless way. I’m so impressed by how full and mature they all are as artists and people. They’re good at taking care of each other and the text and the production. I would say the cast is both young and early-career, so there’s also a meta piece of it for me, because this is the most middle-aged I have ever felt. I spent so much of my career being the young one, and I’m still engaged with the way I was shaped by my younger years. There’s a reason we’re obsessed with girlhood. It makes an imprint, whether you ask for it or not. So I feel with them, but I’m also aware that I’m not early in my career. There is something exciting about being like, God, what if it had felt this way when I was younger?
EC: Why do you think these plays about girls and girlhood (like The Good John Proctor, The Wolves, and John Proctor is the Villain) are so popular? What do people love and find compelling about this genre of theater?
LC: One thing that I feel is true about this play that I also feel is true about the experience of being a teenage girl is that it feels like a slap across the face. It is so fast. There is no time for reflection about what is happening and it’s only after the play ends can we be like, “Whoa, what went down?” That feels inherent to being a young girl. And second, when we were casting this play we were looking for people who were not processing what was happening. We wanted performers who led with their bodies and then were left with the shock and surprise of what happened in front of them because of doing so. Those things all feel tied together to girlhood to me.
EC: It feels very emotionally true in that way, which is exciting.
CS: I’m thinking about everyone’s personal experiences of power and agency and how confusing they can be to figure out. Where you do and don’t have it. That is both a universal human experience and one that is shaped very specifically by every human’s intersections with the structures we have. Some of the specificities of the “girl play” are the places where we dramatically figured out how to allow for a kind of crashing encounter of a human being with systems in which they both do and do not have control. It’s funny that I find it so compelling because I was not like a particularly girly girl, nor am I someone who thinks a ton about how my life was shaped by girlhood. When I think about this play, I’m like “Ooh, wait. It’s shaped everything about me.” That piece is interesting too. It’s such a moment where all of a sudden, the entire world is fixated on your body. That’s such a strange experience, and one I remember really well, being like 12 or 13 and thinking “Oh wait, maybe I’ll never be invisible again,” while also having an experience of immense powerlessness. I think those are complexities that lots of different people feel and it’s what makes these plays exciting.
EC: There have been so many think pieces about the commodification of girlhood and I read them and roll my eyes. Then I go see these plays and they speak to genuine emotions in a beautiful way and suddenly I’m crying. I think it comes from that specificity. I’m not from Texas, I’m from New Mexico, but there’s a realism to the setting of this show that felt familiar, down to the fact that there’s a moment in the sound design where you can hear a big Texas marching band. How do you build the world of Calf Scramble in such a precise way?
LC: Our sound designer [Daniela Hart] and our costume designer [Haydee Zelideth] are both from Texas, so that has been a conversation that we didn’t even need to have. They entered the play and they were already like this. It’s truly amazing. It’s surprised me how many people are like, “There’s such a sense of place in this play” because that’s so important to me, but I don’t think that I knew that we were accomplishing that.
CS: People who are familiar with that place feel something that they recognize. People who are not, have said to me, “I’m getting a window into an entire world that I don’t know.” We have so many people on our team who are from Texas, and we have people like our scenic designer, Cate McCrea, who is from New Jersey, but has just an incredible research-based practice. The depth of research that she did on this show in every direction, has really provided such a foundation. I think Hannah Garner, our movement director, has watched more videos of cows than any other person living at this point. It all came from people really taking it seriously.
EC: I love that you talk about this being a play about power and agency, and as you said, Libby, there are so many other external forces coming into it too. You touch on incarceration, religion, and poverty, and I’m curious about how you make those beats land.
LC: Writing about class is important to me and is present and a lot of my work. Working on this play, I was like These are all people who are hitting walls that they think are in their control and are not. It is that discovery that is devastating and then it is equally heartbreaking to find out which of those walls you can have an impact on. All of these questions were inside my experience of growing up where I did. I wouldn’t say at all that I set out to write a play that was in conversation with incarceration, but in the process of really diving into these characters and this world, that felt like a deeply true part of that world to me. So did poverty, so did religion. That has all seasoned this play. It is infantilizing to think that 15-year-old girls are not dealing with these things. They’re present in our lives and it’s very important to me.
CS: The play is really concerned with what it means to be good. God, all of the systems of punishment, and money are ways that human beings are trying to navigate and negotiate power and personal agency and collective responsibility.
EC: That idea of what it means to be good–internally, in your friend group, in your community, in the world–is one that really sticks with me, and I wonder if there’s anything you’re hoping audience members take away? Do you have dream responses to the play?
CS: One way that I think about a play is, What does it make an audience hungry for? I usually want an audience to leave with a new appetite for something. The final words of this play are, “Can we say something,” line break, “like a prayer.” I find that syntax to be endlessly evocative. That feeling of wow, the things that I have been given have hurt me in a lot of ways, but we need each other and hope for better. That reach that is found in the end of the play is what I’m hoping that audiences are leaving with.
Tickets for Calf Scramble can be purchased here.
Photo of Libby Carr by Chelcie Perry.
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