Ella Talerico, Studio’s Artistic Producing Fellow, interviewed Sam Walsh playwright of the stranger, which will be featured in the inaugural New Pages, New Stages Festival.
ELLA: How did you fall in love with playwriting?
SAM: I had no idea I was going to write plays. I got my BFA in acting and came to New York with that dream. I ended up working almost exclusively on new plays, often in long development processes. I loved how things shifted in the room. New plays are living, breathing texts. I’d always liked writing, mostly short stories and essays. In my late twenties, I was burned out on restaurant work and enrolled in a nighttime graphic design program, which meant I couldn’t act. I needed another outlet, so I signed up for an improv class—which sounded terrible in a good way. I ended up loving it. It unlocked something in me — improv is like writing on your feet. After that, I took a playwriting class and immediately felt like this was what I should be doing.
ELLA: Why playwriting and theater specifically?
SAM: I love creating a world people can step into. A good novel does that too, but theater lets you fully transcend into another place. And I love collaboration. You write alone, but a play isn’t complete without other people. It changes when it gets on its feet and in front of an audience. I’m really drawn to that.
ELLA: What themes do you find yourself returning to?
SAM: Every play I’ve written is about family—connection and loneliness. There’s also an undercurrent of American values and self-mythologizing. I write about people chasing impossible dreams, trying to become the “self-made man,” and finding themselves lonely and unsatisfied. That specific blend of loneliness is very American — the idea that if you just work hard enough and “pull up your bootstraps,” you can overcome anything. Those ideologies show up in all my work.
ELLA: If everyone read your plays, what do you think would change?
SAM: I went through a phase of writing “issue plays,” and they were terrible. That’s not my strength. I think of my work as hiding vegetables in food — there’s critique and information hidden in the texture of the play. Rather than my work focusing overtly on a specific issue, the systemic is buried underneath the specific. I use a lot of silence to leave room for the audience to have thoughts and bring themselves to the play. My characters struggle with isolation and connection, which feels especially relevant right now. I hope my plays encourage people to connect a little more. To let a part of themselves authentically meet a part of someone else.
ELLA: Where is the stranger in its development?
SAM: I wrote it early in my playwriting journey, and it’s gone through many revisions. Part of my process with the stranger was teaching myself how to write a play. I thought to myself: What would it be like if there were no blackouts? What if an object transfers people from one scene to another? I revised it in grad school, did a reading with Jess Chayes, Studio's Associate Artistic Director, then revisited it at LPAC’s Rough Draft Festival, which led to a major overhaul. I’m excited to see this draft. My hope is that the next step is a fully staged production. The work of the play is in the silence — what the actors do with that silence is hard to fully realize in a reading format. I'd be so interested to see how someone would imagine it in physical space. What does the ending look like? How does the pacing work? Do we need more silence or less?
ELLA: What do you hope audiences walk away with?
SAM: We live in a very ironic time, but the people in my plays are deeply genuine — some would say "cringe". I create worlds I’d want to live in. Their lives aren’t great, but there’s hope. Their sincerity drives them to try and move out of isolation. It is my hope that my audience will become more "cringe" and the world along with it.