Bekah Brunstetter: Luck, Pluck and Oohrah!
About the author:
It's been a very good year for scribe Bekah Brunstetter. First she was named playwright-in-residence at Ars Nova, officially marking her arrival on the New York theater scene. Then came word that her play Oohrah!, which chronicles the upending of a southern military family following a soldier’s return home from Iraq, would make its off-Broadway debut at the Atlantic Theater Company. (The news puts her within the ranks of such celebrated Atlantic playwrights as David Mamet, Martin McDonagh, Sam Shepard and Ethan Coen.) For Brunstetter, the move from post-grad to produced playwright has been a joyful one that made her relocation from North Carolina to New York City to pursue writing as a MFA student at the New School for Drama worth all the hard work. Brunstetter, whose other works include To Nineveh, Sick, Used to Write on Walls, Fat Kids on Fire, You May Go Now: A Marriage Play, F**cking Art, Miss Lilly Gets Boned and Be a Good Little Widow, recently returned to her computer to write out her journey, and to tell Broadway.com a little more about her Oohrah!
Last summer, I was one year out of grad school and could officially no longer say, “I just finished grad school!” I didn’t have an answer to the question, “What are you doing with your life?” But I was still totally stoked to call myself a playwright—since writing plays and calling myself a playwright has brought me more joy and sense of self than pretty much anything ever.
I didn’t have an agent and hadn’t had a major production, though I’d managed to get a few awards and festivals under my belt. I’d been working off-off-Broadway for about four years—and loving it. I loved building my own sound cues, working with my best friends, writing for small, weird places and playing "post office" once a week in my bedroom: blowing my paychecks on legal-sized envelopes for submissions. I honestly could have been happy carrying on like so forever, except that I really started to yearn for a sense of legitimacy.
I began to write personal statements for grants and residencies that began with, and I quote, “HELP. ME.” I desperately wanted to get to the next level, but I didn’t quite know how to get there. I was pretty sure it wasn’t really through taking awkward meetings or writing stiff inquiry letters. I convinced myself that if I kept doing what I was doing—attempting to write truthfully and well, working with people whom I loved and loved me—something was bound to catch on. Essentially, I was hoping that my work would speak for itself.
Pre-Oohrah!, I was kind of theatrically all over the place. I was writing a lot of highly theatrical, slightly poetic stories with horrendously flawed characters (and having the best time ever doing it). But last summer, something started stirring within me—some sort of “The Bekah Brunstetter Naturalism Movement,” were I to be so bold as to name a movement after myself. See, I grew up in North Carolina. I have an amazing family comprised of Marines for brothers, a Republican senator for a dad (smartest man alive, but perhaps I am biased) and an incredible, faithful Christian for a mom. My first plays were blatantly about my conservative upbringing and my southern identity: Imaginary friends named Jesus! Metaphorical house fires! Swastikas falling from the grid! (WHAT?! Bekah, really. Just stop!) By the time I reached grad school, I decided to abandon these themes. I focused instead on other topics like love, fertility, the 60s, elephants... you know—etcetera.
Then last summer I went home to send my two little brothers off to Iraq. We spent the weekend as a family. When we went to church, old vets greeted my brothers—dressed to the nines in their dress blues—“Oohrah! Yer a good boy, Make yer dad proud!” I was so captivated by the power of that greeting as well as the camaraderie between soldiers, the pride my brothers felt in uniform and my family’s pain and worry when they went away. I immediately began writing Oohrah! on the plane ride home.
My brothers are extremely intelligent, hilarious and driven dudes who have always had this amazing sense of purpose, and I’ve always wanted to try and capture that in a play. I also wanted to play devil’s advocate to what we usually expect from military stories. I wanted to write a play about what it is to be a soldier emotionally—not politically. I had tried once before, during my first year at New School, to write a play about a soldier (in a piece called Green), but sort of mucked it up with metaphor. This time, I decided no bells, no whistles. I went for it, and just wrote about a family.
I was very lucky to already have a home in the Play Group at Ars Nova (I literally do not know where I would be without them—crying in my apartment, watching Dating in the Dark?), so as soon as I had finished the first draft of Oohrah!, they hosted a reading, directed by Leigh Silverman. A producer from London was in the audience, and his company did a production of the play at the Finborough Theatre in April 2009, which I got to go see. That was immensely helpful. Meanwhile, Evan Cabnet brought the play to the Roundabout Undergound, and they hosted a reading as well. I happened to invite a friend who works in the literary office at the Atlantic, who then took it to Artistic Director Neil Pepe and Associate Artistic Director Christian Parker. They put it in the First Look Reading Series. I had no high hopes, but a week later, I got a call that they wanted to produce Oohrah! on Stage 2. I’m not going to lie—that was pretty much the best call I’ve ever received.
Currently, I have a fulltime job, which sometimes sucks my soul out through my fingertips as I compose corporate-y e-mails. But I am so grateful for my job and for my co-workers, as they’ve kept me sane and stable and able to write these past few years. Lately, I just feel like the luckiest playwright ever, and I hope to keep doing it. Maybe I’ll even eventually make a living writing. If that happens, I just might die of glee.
