Joining me today is playwright
. Kari’s full length plays include Paper Cranes (Backstage Critic’s Pick), (The Secret Theatre New Voices Project), The Ocean Thought Nothing (O’Neill NPC Finalist), Prepared (Kilroys List Honorable Mention), and The Worst Mother in the World.Watch the video above or download the audio version, and check out Kari’s newsletter
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Edited excerpts from our conversation.
SER: I’d love to talk to you about two of your plays, The World I Have Known and Orphan Christmas, which both address the COVID-19 pandemic. It seems a little obvious to ask what inspired you to explore this subject, but I do wonder if you think the pandemic and its ongoing impact is something modern media fully explores?
KARI: Yeah, so The World I Have Known takes place in New York when COVID hits. So it’s a family who lives in Astoria, Queens, which is where I live. I hadn't written an Astoria-centric play before, so I was like, yay. Because at the beginning of my career, people were like, if you live in New York, don't set a play in New York.
So I didn't for a long time. And now I don't care. I don't care what anyone thinks. So, but it also dovetails with 9/11 because the family in the play lost a daughter in the 9/11 attacks. And I was sort of trying to bridge the gap between 9/11 and where we are now and sort of how delusion for lack of a better word has kind of fueled this country ever since 9/11 happened because it started off with people being “Oh, it was an inside job,” which isn't weird. People think lots of things are inside jobs, but then it was “Oh, it was holograms.”
And then it was, the 9/11 truthers. I thought it was stupid, but then that kind of thing just kind of sprung off and it fueled all of these different things plus Fox News.
The rise of Fox News was especially pronounced after 9/11 and I am of the idea that all of this is displaced grief in part because people couldn’t handle it or it was too awful for people to imagine and I also think that if you weren’t in the city there's a distance from it so it felt like a crazy movie you were watching and not something that was actually happening.
Whereas Orphan Christmas is a comedy. It's me, so it's a little dark, but it's a comedy. And it's about a group of friends who are chosen family who get together for their first Christmas when everybody was able to get back together for Christmas. So that was like 2022. And sort of exploring how they're all trying to have a normal holiday and no one's okay. But everybody just tried to get back to normal as soon as possible. And everybody was super traumatized. So yeah, so it was me exploring like two sides of it.
It was like the lead up to it and how America sucks at grief and sort of the way that this magical thinking has come into our society, which has been really fascinating to watch if it weren't having a horrible impact on all of us and then this rush to get back to normal after Covid because it's not over for a fair amount of people but in terms of it being an emergency pandemic situation yes it's over but the effects are still going on.
As far as the media covering it or displaying it, I think that people stayed away from it because I think people didn't want to think about it. And maybe in the next few years, we'll see more of that. But I haven't seen a lot that has to do directly with Covid. I've seen things that refer to it, but not anything that's like you're in it.
Yeah, I think it was difficult to depict it. Also most of the time it was spectacularly boring because no one was really doing anything. You could show drama in a family or it's like everybody doing a living room TV show, kind of like Bo Burnham inside, but maybe with other people.
And especially because everything seems to be more action based now. People want something to happen in the first 10 minutes of a show now or people switch to something else. So [covid] doesn't really lend itself to that.
I think the fallout is probably going to be written about more than the actual time that we were in it, the aftermath of it all. But I don’t know, so I thought, why not both? I'll just do both.
Living in New York through 9/11 and through Covid, there were a lot of similarities. I mean, it was very different in a lot of ways but it was also similar in terms of not knowing what was going to happen next and everybody kind of being really nice to each other for a while, which we didn’t get in Covid.
It was like everybody banging the pots and pans out their window for the first responders and everybody helping out as much as they could. But after 9/11, it was like people going out of their way to ask you how you are and holding doors for you. When that stopped happening, I was actually super relieved, because this is not how we are.
Everybody says like New Yorkers are really mean. We’re not. We’re just busy. So normally we don’t have time to be asking everybody how they’re doing because we’d be spending all morning doing that. So it was really strange. But anyway, my brain saw the parallels between the two events.
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