In Enid Graham’s “How to Save Ourselves,” College-Age Kids Build Community

Playwright Enid Graham isn’t exactly tackling the small stuff in her new play, How to Save Ourselves, a commission from The Farm Theater and developed with a pair of college theater programs. The eight-actor ensemble play is a snapshot of community-building in a time of narcissism, isolation, social turbulence and, perhaps most prominently, climate change.

The fact that six of the play’s eight characters are college students whose minds and hearts are still developing gives the work an undercurrent of hope.

Graham told me, “I think if we have any chance of solving this crisis, we have to start with hope. When people think about planning for disaster, they often think about hoarding food or water or medicine, and all of that is important. But of course, those things run out. And then what? The real resource that we should be hoarding is our ability to work together, to solve problems together, to support and care for each other. These are resources that are endless. Once I landed on this idea, I saw how I could write a hopeful play about this difficult subject.”

The Farm Theater (artistic director Padraic Lillis) commissioned Graham’s play for its College Collaboration Project, the launchpad for John Proctor Is the Villain, currently on Broadway.

“I was invited to propose a topic that interested me and that I thought would be meaningful to college-aged students,” Graham explained. “In my case I proposed the loneliness epidemic and climate change. I felt a huge obligation: first of all, to give [student actors] a good play to work on — one that took the problems of the world seriously — and, second of all, to give them a play that had hope.”

How to Save Ourselves was first developed through The Farm with students at two college theater departments — Sewanee University of the South in Tennessee and Centre College in Danville, KY.

“In Zoom meetings, the students and I had a free-flowing discussion about my proposed topics, meant to inspire me as I write the play,” Graham said. “The next step was for me to write. A few months later we had a three-day workshop of the first draft in New York City, using professional actors and directed by Padraic. Both colleges attended the workshop with the upcoming directors and designers and a handful of students. Then, using the information I learned from the workshop, I worked on my second draft.”

For the Sewanee leg, Graham attended early rehearsals over Zoom and then made two in-person trips to Tennessee — once in the rehearsal hall and then to see final dress and opening night. She later made two trips to Kentucky for the Centre College run.

“Rewrites occurred all the while,” she said.

The last stop in the play’s Farm development is a New York City workshop culminating in a June 10 public presentation, using professional actors, several student actors and a stage manager from both schools.

“The program is wonderful and developmental,” Graham said. “Farm artistic director Padraic Lillis, the creator of the College Collab program, told me that he has two goals with the program: to help emerging writers, giving them the opportunity to see their play produced twice, and to bring the experience of working on a new play with a playwright to students.”

You can find the plays of Enid Graham, a graduate of Juilliard’s playwriting program, on New Play Exchange or learn more about her at her website (she’s also a respected Tony Award-nominated theater, film and television actress).

Here’s more of my chat with Enid Graham.

I’m always curious about the first glimmer of an idea for a play. What inspired How to Save Ourselves: A place, a person, a conflict? Take me to the dawn of the idea.

Enid Graham: After I received this commission, I was working in a food distribution center in my neighborhood. I was amused to see the way all the strangers who had volunteered to pack boxes of food figured out how to work together. We all had a task — to pack boxes — but everyone would approach it with their own particular quirks: one efficient person, someone who liked to talk, somebody with a bad elbow, someone slow, someone shy. But by the end of our hours together we had figured out how to make it happen. I thought, “Hey, this is a good setting for a play!”

For several years I’ve been working with climate activists, trying to get the word out about the great danger we are all in, and I really wanted to write a play that talked about all that, but I was a little scared to write a play about climate change. It’s such a frightening topic and I think most people run away from thinking about it because it seems so hopeless and terrifying.

Beyond “hope,” what other idea pops strongly for you in the play?

Enid Graham: One of the other themes in the play is loneliness. I was interested in exploring how we all put these artificial barriers between us, and how we isolate ourselves by retreating into our phones and computers.

I love that there’s a slight “Breakfast Club” vibe to the play: disparate young people gathered in a place that’s not exactly the limbo of after-school detention — as in the 1985 John Hughes film — but in a place where they are called to action.

Enid Graham: In the play, six college-aged students have agreed to volunteer at a food packing center for six weeks. Some of them are from the private college and some of them are from the public college, and one doesn’t go to college at all. They have different political views and different motivations for being there, and they are forced to deal with each other IRL. So yeah, it is like “The Breakfast Club” — strangers forced together for a prescribed amount of time — and that movie was in my mind as I wrote. But in “The Breakfast Club” the characters start out as archetypes — The Jock, The Beauty Queen, etc. — and by the end you learn that they are actually all individuals. In my play, the characters all start as individuals and they learn that they are actually more the same than different. The image at the top of the play is all of the students alone, each on their phone in their own individual light. And the ending image is all of them talking and planning and laughing in one light together.

The play’s food distribution center is called “Love Your Neighbor Food Initiative.” “Love Thy Neighbor” is a Biblical reference, of course. How do Christian ideals feed your play, if at all?

Enid Graham: The play does have an undertow of Christian themes, although it is not an explicitly religious play at all. The food distribution center is run by a man named Stephen, and we learn that his grandfather was a preacher and that the center used to be part of a church next door, which later shut down and became a Capital One bank, which has since shut down and is now an empty building. The place is kind of frozen in time, with a banner that reads “Love Your Neighbor Food Initiative — Neighbors Helping Neighbors since 1978.” I intended for the humanistic values present in both Christianity and in our secular culture in the 1970s to be like a forgotten foundation, or an atrophied muscle — one that we can hopefully awaken, dust off and start using again to help save ourselves.

Part of the joy of the play is discovering your characters’ vulnerabilities, quirks, backgrounds. So, it’s a richly characterful play. But do you look at this as an “activist” play, as well?

Enid Graham: Yes, I consider it an activist play. My dream would be for people to see the play or work on the play and feel compelled to reach out and make connections in their community, to put aside easy cynicism about the future and dare to have hope, to see the challenges facing the world with clear eyes and say, to quote the play: “Let’s just not give up. Let’s keep trying and caring, even if it doesn’t make much sense.”

How is How to Save Ourselves different from (or similar to) another script of yours? Does it have a cousin?

Enid Graham:  My play Smoke also deals with a world tilted off its axis, but Smoke leans more into the horror aspect of it all. In fact, it’s subtitled A Comedy of Horrors. It has some similar challenges as How to Save Ourselves in that it’s also a play with a big cast of eight and many group scenes with everyone onstage. This is a challenge to write and a challenge to perform. It’s exciting to keep all those characters alive and active on the stage at the same time.

I’m in the middle of working on a developmental production of Smoke at Cadence Theatre  in Richmond, VA, May 22-June 7, and it’s been really fun to see a play I’ve only had readings of realized on its feet. It’s the only way to truly see if those huge scenes that you imagined in your head and then saw read behind music stands actually work! When everyone is moving around and living on stage then you can notice if you left anyone out for too long or what people are doing when they’re not talking!

(Check out this promotional video about Smoke, from Cadence Theatre.)

You’re a graduate of the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwrights program at The Juilliard School. What did you walk away with from your time there? What muscle did you build?

Enid Graham: I loved being a writer at Juilliard. One of the things I learned about myself there was that I could write quickly. Before I was a writing student there, it would take me years to finish a play. But at Juilliard we were required to write six plays in two years. A big challenge! But I did it. And it’s interesting to see what you come up with once all your ideas are gone! But the most wonderful thing about Juilliard are the professors — David Lindsay-Abaire and Tanya Barfield — both brilliant writers. It was an amazing gift to spend two years with them responding to my work.

Beyond Juilliard, do you find value being a member of writing groups — meeting with other writers, swapping pages, making each other accountable for deadlines?

Enid Graham: Writing groups have been a big part of my writing life. I started writing by joining a fiction writing group led by the wonderful Sarah Schulman. Later I formed my own group for playwriting, and we met for many years under our self-titled name the 72nd Street Gang. Now I’m a member of a writing group that is made of playwrights who are also parents and care-givers. So we meet and read each other’s plays and talk about the struggles of the theater and about our kids too. It’s a wonderful bit of community in a business that can be hard and lonely. I recommend any writer just starting out to find or form a writers group!

Following its developmental steps, what is your hope for a future life for How to Save Ourselves?

Enid Graham: In terms of its future, I would love to see it produced further at colleges. I think it’s a wonderful play for students to work on. In these times, I think we’re all craving plays that address the seemingly impossible challenges we face and perhaps point a way toward hope. If students are going to spend their time working on a play, then I think that it should be one that grapples with the difficult world we’ve given them. But I don’t think that a cynical play is helpful. I believe I’ve written a play that is honest but hopeful. Besides college productions, I’d love to see a professional production of the play. Part of the commission was to write characters who were college-aged, so the play is filled with young people, but other than that it isn’t “a college play,” per se.

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Check out my earlier interview with Enid Graham, on the topic of her play What Martha Did.