During this past summer's Master of Fine Arts Playwrights' Workshop at the Kennedy Center, Daniel Sauermilch '13 graced the Washington, D.C. stage with a reading of his original play, The Igloo Settlement. Put on by the National New Play Network, the MFA Playwrights' Workshop has been featuring the works of graduate student writers since 1998. Gregg Henry, the co-manager and artistic director of the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF), invited Sauermilch to participate as an undergraduate after seeing Sauermilch's one-act The Rwandans' Visit, which won the John Cauble Award for Outstanding Short Play at the KCACTF in 2011, and which was also a semi-finalist for the Princess Grace Foundation Playwriting Grant.
"The first time [at the Kennedy Center] was different in the fact that it was a – I hate for it to sound like this – but just logistically, it was a competition, because there were four plays in consideration for the top prize," said Sauermilch. "So there was that to factor in. I wasn't nervous because I was so happy with the idea of just having it read. I wasn't nervous about having winning or losing. You're winning if you're read there."
Sauermilch explained how he got to participate in such a prestigious playwriting event.
"The artistic director of that festival, Gregg Henry, invited me to come back and participate with whatever play that I wanted to write for that next summer as an eighth play," said Sauermilch. "They usually select plays from an open submission process and it's all graduate students who submit from all over the place. And they usually have an eighth play that's not done from that submission process and is invited."
The invitation was an honor – it is no small feat for an undergraduate playwright to attend such a workshop. Sauermilch noted that gaining such recognition at a young age is a rare occurrence for a playwright.
"For people to take your work seriously as a young playwright in a world where a young playwright could be in their 30s and 40s – to be 21 and have people take you seriously – and to think you have something to say and something to offer to the American theater[is] a very special and a very humbling thing," he said.
Sauermilch's path to playwriting began at a young age. And yet, even then, he demonstrated a great degree of passion for and dedication to the craft.
"I started playwriting at fourteen in a free afterschool workshop every week for two hours at the Manhattan Theatre Club," Sauermilch said. "The goal was that you wrote a play that would then be read by Equity actors at MTC's studios, which was huge ... David Auburn [the Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Proof] taught for a couple semesters. That's where it started."
Upon his arrival at the College, Sauermilch continued his playwriting education in Visiting Professor of Theater Dana Yeaton's "Playwriting I" course. Sauermilch emphasized the impact of that class, and highly recommended it to other students interested in playwriting.
"People should take the playwriting class here because [Yeaton] is a fabulous professor and because he is a nurturer," he said. "His classes here first made me realize that I had something that I wanted to say and something that people wanted to listen to."
Sauermilch's The Rwandans' Visit is a sharp and deftly constructed piece dealing with issues of identity, race, nationality and class in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where Sauermilch grew up. Two incredibly dysfunctional couples square off over a chair from Africa, trips to Vietnam and Valium, as they deflect from the issue at hand: the crisis of the disappearance of the Rwandan exchange students they have been hosting.
The result is a comedic and poignant piece about the nature of authenticity, compassion and concern in an age rife with the complications that arise from issues such as materialism and globalization.
The Igloo Settlement continues to investigate the issues of class and identity in America, and was influenced in part by occupy movements that Sauermilch witnessed both in Israel and in New York City. Set in Bucks County, Penn. over the Christmas holidays, the play deals with hedge fund manager Christine and her husband Peter – a shy biologist arranging the transport of a giraffe from a zoo in Texas to a self-proclaimed "giraffe sanctuary" in New Mexico. All the while, complexities abound when Christine and Peter's housekeeper Brenda's life begins to intersect with their own, and questions of the land, ownership and power are asked as an Occupy-esque movement takes shape in Christine and Peter's front yard.
Just as the play had a profound impact upon the audience and critics, the workshop experience had a profound impact on Sauermilch, and also had an effect on the piece itself.
"We would meet as a creative team; the dramaturg, the director and I would meet on a one-to-one basis to make the play the best that it could be in the amount of time that we had," he said.
To that end, Sauermilch experienced a sense of kinship with his creative team and fellow writers, which taught Sauermilch about the nature of playwriting in a collaborative setting.
"First and foremost it taught me that being a playwright does not have to be a solitary practice, a solitary occupation," he said. "When you're paired together with people who genuinely believe in the work, you can give them the reigns and trust them in order to make it the best. It's much more about having an affinity with one another. It's one thing to be a writer in any respect, write your stuff, and then stick it in a drawer. And then it's another thing to have your stuff read and produced.
And that's fantastic. But then it's an entirely different thing to work in a collaborative environment in which you're all personally invested in making something better and making good art. And that's probably the best of all three."
In his pursuit of new avenues of writing, Sauermilch has begun to explore the world of screenwriting.
"I just wrote a short film script," he said. "And in the spirit of collaboration I worked with Michaela Lieberman ['10.5] and with my brother, who directed it."
Also on the horizon for Sauermilch this year is a fully realized production of The Igloo Settlement in the College's own Hepburn Zoo. He noted that he will bring the collaborative nature of the MFA Playwrights' Workshop back to the College's production.
"This play will be my senior work in the spring directed by Paula Bogutyn '13.5, and will be our joint thesis," he said. "Even though it's our senior work, and we're very protective of it ... when we work on it, it will be a collaborative effort. Actors will bring in their thoughts. I even want for us as a group to do dramaturgical work, to reshape things, to understand how the set informs the dynamics of this play. It won't just be a production dictated by playwright and director but dictated by all our individual perspectives and voices that we're bringing to the table. And we also need actors."
Whether at the Kennedy Center or the Kevin P. Mahaney '84 Center for the Arts, Sauermilch remains focused on the craft of playwriting, for which he demonstrates not only passion, but talent as well. He plans to work on his thesis this year, and continue to develop his passion after graduation.
"Post Middlebury, I'll just keep writing," he said.
Student Playwright Earns Theater Honors
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