Sheila Callaghan headlines American Theatre's preview issue

Playwriting alumna Sheila Callaghan MFA ’97 is the subject of a cover story profile in the prestigious “American Theatre” magazine’s 2008 season preview issue.

Callaghan is a winner of a 2008 Works in Progress Award from the Princess Grace Foundation.

Callaghan’s writing seems to filter in everything around her before spinning back onto the page. Though she's often tagged with various nebulous labels ("downtown" and "language playwright" are two, and neither is totally unfounded), her plays defy categorization. They are sexy, punky, smart, sophisticated, literate, edgy, tightly woven, big, crass, witty, exquisite. They swell with moments of the unreal but never let go of a narrative thread. They expand and contract to underscore everyday grit and epic ache.

“She writes the kind of plays you can't wait to crack open,” says director Kip Fagan, who began working with Callaghan more than a decade ago at Seattle's Printer's Devil Theater, which Callaghan calls her first professional-development home. “She works in a lot of different idioms, but whether the play is naturalistic, like ‘Lascivious Something,’ or a totally dystopian, theatrical story, like ‘We Are Not These Hands,’ there's a buoyancy that can be missing in a lot of more formally adventurous writing. There's nothing dry about her plays.”

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