In Carey Crim’s “The Islanders,” Two Characters Connect in an Isolated Spot

“No man is an island,” or so the poet John Donne wrote. But in Carey Crim’s new play, The Islanders, next-door neighbors Anna and Dutch are very happy to be their own islands, keeping themselves remote and removed from an excess of intimacy with others. They even live on an island — Beaver Island — in the middle of Lake Michigan, underlining the script’s ideas of physical and emotional isolation and insularity.

Early in the two-character play, which is receiving its world premiere in summer 2024 by Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, Anna asks Dutch, “Are you running from something or to something?” Later, when he turns the same question back to her, she replies, “Wherever you go, there you are, right?”

Crim told me, “The story is really about whether these two damaged souls can find healing through connection or will they stay in their mutual comfort zones and push one another away.”

Plays by the Michigan-raised Crim sparkle with wit, specificity, rue and ideas. And she doesn’t seem to repeat herself. She might be best known for her comedy Morning After Grace, about unlikely lovers connecting in a senior community. It had close to a dozen productions pre-publication and at least five more are on the way next season. Her play 23½ Hours, on the other hand, is an issue drama about trust, marriage and an accusation of sexual impropriety. (That rewrite of her earlier drama, formerly called Conviction, will bow in London this fall.) She calls another play, What Springs Forth, about middle-aged women at a wilderness survival retreat, “a laugh-out-loud pure comedy.” (It’s getting its world premiere through Aug. 31, 2024, by one of her artistic homes, The Purple Rose Theatre Company in Chelsea, Michigan.)

Check out Carey Crim’s page at New Play Exchange. (She’s currently working on an update of her website CareyCrim.com.)

The world premiere of The Islanders, playing through Aug. 25 at Shakespeare & Company’s Tina Packer Playhouse in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, is directed by Regge Life and features Michelle Mountain as Anna and “ranney” as Dutch.Crim answered a slew of my questions about The Islanders and more. I’m so glad to interview a fellow former Michigander, and a fellow former Grosse Pointe resident, especially when talking about a play set in the Wolverine State. Crim is now a Bucks County, Pennsylvania resident who works full-time as a playwright and mom.

What inspired the The Islanders? Or what was the first thing you “saw” when conjuring the play? A person? A place? An idea?

Carey Crim: It was the people, then the place, then the idea. Anna and Dutch came to me first. I wanted them to live on an island but not tropical. Somewhere small, remote, and beautiful but also somewhat wild and untamed. I knew it had to be [set on] an island and it needed to be remote but not impossible to get to. But also someplace a person had to want or even need to live and then possess a certain fortitude to stay. Anna says that people are “called” to Beaver Island. I wanted a place that could summon a soul.

Beaver Island, in Lake Michigan, not far from where Lower and Upper Peninsulas of Michigan meet. You’re a Michigander, right? Do you have a past with vacationing in northern Michigan?

Carey Crim: I grew up in Grosse Pointe then lived in Ferndale and Royal Oak as a young adult before moving to New York. We never had a cottage “up north” but many of my friends did and I spent a few summers doing theater camp at Interlochen. I live in Bucks County, Pennsylvania now. I wanted to set the play in Michigan. I hadn’t been to Beaver Island as a child but I had been to Mackinac Island and [the Lake Erie island] Put-In-Bay and various up-north towns. They weren’t what I was looking for, setting-wise, so I started researching.

Once I found Beaver Island, I remembered a friend and colleague who had a house there. He was generous enough to invite me for a week and we did a staged reading of The Islanders on Beaver Island. The power went out during the reading. The audience and actors took it in stride and we finished with flashlights. It was kind of perfect. The residents were very welcoming and gave me lots of inside information. I incorporated a good bit of it into the story. The island was even better than I had imagined — the third character in the play. I’m ready to move!

Share a little about the geographic or demographic world of the play?

Carey Crim: It’s known as America’s Emerald Isle. It’s been designated an International Dark Sky Sanctuary. It’s only about 13 miles long and three-to-six miles wide, depending where you are. The beaches are beautiful. The residents are very proud of their home but there is little to no pretension and everybody waves to everyone else when they are driving. They like being a best-kept secret. Beaver Island is kind of the anti-Mackinac Island.

There’s always a danger of knowing too much about a real place that you draw from, and overstuffing your plays with factoids.

Carey Crim: I had a draft of the play that contained many more random pieces of island lore that didn’t make it into the final cut. For example, there was a self-proclaimed king on the island named James J. Strang. He claimed to be the successor to Latter Day Saint Joseph Smith. He “reigned” for six years as king of a Beaver Island church monarchy he formed until he was assassinated in 1856. I had to cut that bit.

But the important things I discovered in terms of story for The Islanders were that the island has distinct personalities in summer and winter. That most people don’t stay for the winter. During those months, there can be bad storms and the only way on or off the island is by small plane. In the warmer months you can take the ferry. But the ferry ride is a couple of hours. It’s not a quick 20-minute trip. One of the islanders told me a joke about the difficulty of  finding enough things to do in the winter months. He said everyone on Beaver Island is related…until February. By February, all bets are off! He was mostly kidding but I got the point. That became important for the evolution of Anna and Dutch’s relationship. They spent those winter months really getting to know one another and Anna’s creativity comes alive when there is “nothing” to do.

At first glance, The Islanders has a sort of “meet cute” rom-com vibe, suggesting we’re in a comedy about quirky outsiders. But it deftly explores human trauma and wellness, too. In any of the plays you write, do your characters take you down surprising roads?

Carey Crim: Always. Those roads don’t always pan out but I like to follow them just in case. I did a lot of research on mental health and trauma and some of it was based on real people I have been lucky enough to know. Once I had the people and their “stuff,” I just put them together and let them go. I had a very general sense of where it was going, but mostly it surprised me, which is always a gift.

Often I will know the beginning, major middle and end beats of a story before I start and then I let the characters help me figure out how to get to each point. Islanders was different. I really only had the people and the place and I knew it was a story about a relationship. But I didn’t know how it would end or if they would make it or even what they would do along the way. It was more intuitive writing than I have done before and once I could learn to trust it I really enjoyed it.

What was the primary challenge of writing The Islanders?

Carey Crim: It sounds kind of ridiculous, but letting the characters hurt. I fell in love with Anna and Dutch as people and it was difficult to put them in such painful situations even though I knew that was what the story required.

What was the development history of The Islanders?

Carey Crim: Islanders has been helped by so many along the way. The Purple Rose did the first reading on Zoom. Then we had a workshop at Shakespeare & Company. We also had a week-long workshop culminating in a reading at Palm Beach Dramaworks and the workshop and reading on Beaver Island, which was incredibly useful. So many people at each of those theaters made an impact.

Are you a big rewriter in rehearsals? Did you come away from the Shakespeare & Company production with notes, ideas, rewrites or was it frozen? 

Carey Crim: I did a lot of rewrites in the room and the actors and director were very game for it all. This is a play that really needs to be seen rather than read. So much happens between the lines. It works on the page but it comes alive in the room and that was such a helpful experience in terms of rewrites. We did the major work the first week but I think we worked right up until the final week of rehearsals. Just little things at that point. It’s never “done” for me, but eventually I have to stop tinkering.

What play of yours is totally different from The Islanders? Or what is it most similar to? If you had two plays in rotating rep, what would you pair The Islanders with and why?

Carey Crim: I think if I were to do it in Rep with something it would probably be 23½ Hours, which is opening at The Park Theatre in London in September. They don’t share any obvious DNA but I feel like they would make a good pairing. All of my plays are very different, but many of them tackle grief, loneliness and the struggle to find connection in an increasingly fractured world. Islanders is one of the more fully realized visions of those themes. 23½ Hours is about how a conviction for sexual assault impacts a family, friends and community but still deals with finding connection when trust has been lost.

Morning After Grace is, I think, your most produced play. Have you seen productions around the country? How many? And in spite of it being published, do you ever think, “I wish I could tweak this line — make a cut, an addition, a clarification”? My play Alabama Story has been produced and published and I email future producers a page of pencil changes. Is a play ever really finished?

Carey Crim: I’m hoping Alabama Story comes my way soon! But yes, Morning After Grace is, so far, my most produced play for sure. I just found out last week that it is going to be translated into Polish and will premiere in Warsaw next spring. I would love to go and see it. We’ll see! I have seen it a number of times. But I’ve missed many productions as well. My dad has seen it a lot. Which I love. And yes I would still make changes if I could. I may employ your pencil changes method.

Take me back to your start as a playwright, which usually begins with one being a theatergoer.

Carey Crim: I grew up doing Grosse Pointe Children’s Theatre. Grosse Pointe Children’s Theatre is no more. It was run by a woman named Sally Reynolds, who was such a character and who I adored. Celia Keenan-Bolger was in it, as well. It was mostly musicals and we recycled the same ones every seven-ish years. My parents took me to the theater all the time and I thought I wanted to be an actress, and was an actress for most of my twenties. But I always wrote as a side job, and in my thirties I married the two.

After graduating from Northwestern University — my degree was in performance studies, which was part of the theater department, but everyone got a bachelor of science in speech and communications — I worked in London for six months. I went with a program called BUNAC. It allowed me to work and also audition. You had to be a recent graduate in order to get a special visa. And you could only stay for less than a year, I believe. So I worked in a pub for BAFTA and saw as much theater as I possibly could, while auditioning.

I went to L.A. after that to pursue acting. I wasn’t in the best place emotionally during that time and L.A. is a rough place to be anyway, but even rougher if you are not even close to feeling grounded. So after a couple of years I came back to Michigan to get my shit together, and eventually moved to New York, which suited me a bit better, temperament-wise. I’d love to go back to L.A. now and see how it feels from a very different place in life.

When I came back to the Detroit area I got my Equity card doing Arcadia at Meadow Brook Theatre. I also did a lot of commercials and industrial films, back when you could make a living doing those. Then I moved to New York and after a bit I started writing my own audition monologues. I made up the name of a playwright because I wanted people to think I was using “real plays” and not writing my own. I started getting better feedback on the monologues than the auditions. One night I got a call from a director about an audition I had had that day. I didn’t book the job but he really liked the monologue and had sent his assistant out to Drama Book Shop to find it. No surprise that she was unable to find the non-existent play written by a non-existent playwright. I confessed and instead of being angry, he told me if I ever did write the whole play to send it to him. By the time I did write that play, I had lost the director’s information. But the writing group I was in at the time produced it and I signed with my first agent based on that production and then it was produced at The Purple Rose the following year.

I learned a lot from that play and production. I remember I received one really awful review. It felt personal. Like I should never write again. But I also received one of the best reviews of my life for that production. I kept them both side by side in my writing space for a while to remind me that if I believed one, I had to believe both so better to believe neither. I’m still finding my way writing-wise and am grateful I had strong people around me to encourage me to keep going.

I was a big fan of your newscaster dad, Mort Crim. I grew up in suburban Detroit in the 1970s and 1980s and left in 1998, a year after your dad left WDIV-TV. Was your career as a storyteller influenced by him? As a newsman, he was, after all, a storyteller. Were you folks supportive of your life in the arts? 

Carey Crim: Yes, my dad was a big influence on me as was my mom. They were both incredibly supportive. My mom died when I was 17 and my stepmother, Renee, was also a big cheerleader for me. My dad is still a great storyteller!

Has Carey Crim ever written about TV broadcasting in a play?

Carey Crim: Ha! So I have a play called The Last Broadcast that is about a former radio broadcaster. It’s not based on my dad at all but I didn’t have to do a lot of research since I knew the world so well. That one has had workshops, but no one has bitten on a full production yet. It’s a five-character multigenerational family drama dealing with the long-term effects of  a single act of gun violence. It still needs work but I think it has a lot of potential.

Did you take playwriting classes at Northwestern? What did you carry away from Northwestern?

Carey Crim: I did not study playwriting there. I wish I had! I started as an actor though, so playwriting was a logical step for me. David Downs was my acting teacher and I learned so much with him that I still use today about acting, theatre and just life in general. I was still reeling from the loss of my mom, so I think a lot of what I learned at Northwestern I didn’t actually metabolize until later in life if that makes any sense.  I also met Scot Reese there — he was a graduate student at the time — who is now a director and professor of theatre and one of my closest friends and first reader (after my husband) of my plays.

Is there a major mentor in your career? Name names and share what you learned?

Carey Crim: [Purple Rose founder] Jeff Daniels and the people at The Purple Rose. Jeff was very involved in my latest play there. He has been incredibly encouraging and his notes were a master class in comedy writing. It was a safe place to try something new and push my boundaries comedically. Scot Reese has been a mentor since my college days and David Downs was a big influence and I think of his teaching often. My imaginary mentor is Nora Ephron — her essays, scripts and novels continue to be an inspiration. She said once that “My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be the comic stories the next.” I think of that often in writing and in life. I am also about to wrap up six weeks with The Orchard Project Episodic Lab. I’m working with a cohort of TV writers, mentors and industry guests on developing our original TV pilots. The whole experience has been a joy and definitely worth applying for playwrights interested in writing for television — though you don’t need a playwriting background to apply.

Best advice you ever got? 

Carey Crim: Stay true to yourself and write what you write. Don’t write what you think will sell or what people want to see because it won’t be any good and is always changing anyway.  Best advice probably came from André De Shields, by way of Scot Reese: “Three cardinal rules for sustainability and longevity in the arts — Surround yourself with people whose eyes light up when they see you coming; slowly is the fastest way to get to where you want to be; the top of one mountain is the bottom of the next, so keep climbing.”

What are you grateful for in your career?

Carey Crim: I’m very grateful to be where I am with theaters willing to take a risk on new work. I know it’s  easier to do yet another production of “insert audience favorite here” but I’m really grateful to the theaters, artistic directors and boards who understand the value and necessity of new work and are willing to take that chance.