Stacey Isom Campbell’s “1999” Exposes the Price of Ambition in Hollywood’s #MeToo Era

In her new three-character drama 1999, playwright Stacey Isom Campbell fixes her lens on the Hollywood ambitions of female filmmakers in the era of #MeToo, when women were speaking out about the predatory and punitive nature of male producers and directors. Getting its world premiere by WAM Theatre in Lenox, Massachusetts Oct. 16-Nov. 2, the play is a dream for theater companies looking for small-cast plays about indelible characters, big ideas and punchy theatricality.

Shifting time and place with a style that recalls jump cuts in film, 1999 is the story of lauded film producer and professor Emma, who is giving an industry address that she didn’t expect to give. In it, she reveals her complicity in the shattering of a friend’s life — and the creation of Emma’s own Tinseltown success story. The question of the price we pay to rise in a world that keeps us down (and has kept us out from the beginning) is a powerful force in the script.

Toggling between 2019 and 1999, the play looks back to the 1990s, when a lot of complicated Hollywood movies (mostly by men) were celebrated. A budding film director (Emma) and a vivacious actress (Reese) meet in grad school and their friendship, collaboration and goal to start a production company are disrupted by the shadow of toxic masculinity.

You can’t help being moved by the sisterhood Campbell conjures, showing the vivacious chemistry that comes with the meeting of like-minded pals in college.

“The play is fictional, but I actually borrow quite a bit from my own life,” Campbell told me. “I used to teach film criticism, I have a deep affinity for the films of the late 90s, and the friendship at the heart of the play borrows some from the creative kinship formed with Lisa Neely when we were just starting out as artists.”

At WAM Theatre in the Berkshires, artistic director Genèe Coreno directs Zoë Laiz as Emma, Caroline Festa as Reese and Zurie Adams as firebrand Naomi, a student in Emma’s film history class who isn’t happy that the syllabus includes movies produced by a predator.

WAM Theatre’s mission is “producing theatrical events for everyone, with a focus on women theatre artists and/or stories of women and girls.”

I was lucky to see a reading of 1999 in Florida Repertory Theatre’s spring 2025 PlayLab,  when my three-character play Why We Go to Florida was also on the slate.

Campbell’s 1999 was an O’Neill Center National Playwrights Conference Finalist, a Modern Works Festival Finalist & Selection at Sarasota’s Urbanite Theatre, a Carolina Playwrights Lab Selection, a Seven Devils Playwrights Conference Semifinalist and a Valdez Theatre Conference Play Lab Selection.

In the days leading to the Berkshires launch, Campbell fielded a bunch of my questions about 1999 and beyond. You can also learn more about her at her website. Or view her work on NewPlayExchange.org, the marketplace for plays and playwrights.

What was the very first glimmer you had for the play? What did you “see” first — a conflict, a character, a time period?

Stacey Isom Campbell: I saw a powerful female producer giving a talk to filmmakers in which she was forced to reckon with a wrong-doing from 1999. I wrote a version of the opening monologue before I knew much else about the play.

There was a primary real-life monster in Hollywood and he is not named in your play. His shadow looms large, though. Did you ever consider naming a name?

Stacey Isom Campbell: Initially, I used a few names. I consulted a lawyer who advised against it. So, I cut all mention of names. I find it a more powerful choice. Abstracting all the men feels like an act of agency for the women in the play and for me. And it highlights the idea that it wasn’t just one bad person, it was an entire culture of enabled behavior.

Despite the strong relationship between Emma and Reese, it’s Emma who is the main character from the get-go (for me). What’s revealed about her is complicated and you make strong arguments in favor of her actions. Is she in the wrong? Do you judge her?

Stacey Isom Campbell: It’s definitely Emma’s story. As you point out, she is complicated, complex, sometimes likable and sometimes unlikable. I work hard with all my characters to make them as complicated as I can. I don’t have any answers. I just believe that people are a mesh of conflicting ideas and are capable of carrying many things. I write mostly about women. I sometimes get frustrated with the depiction of women on screen and stage. Because often the women are one thing — good or bad, likable or unlikable, right or wrong. So for me, Emma is both right and wrong at different times in the play. I think the way she brings complicated films into her class should have been more sensitive. And I think her way of dealing with her friend’s trauma is misguided. But even in those statements, I don’t think I’m judging her. I love her and feel connected to her journey. Her toughness was necessary to achieve her dreams. The difficult part in creating all the characters was finding the right balance, giving each character valid arguments and points-of-view, and allowing the audience’s feelings about them to change over time.

In general, do you tend to write “thick” and then edit back? Do you ruthlessly outline? Index cards? Lists?

Stacey Isom Campbell: I tend to overwrite, then pare back, repeatedly. I don’t outline much. Sometimes I know the ending I’m writing toward, or at least a big moment I’m movin

g toward. Sometimes I use index cards and lay them out on the floor, but this is a practice I do after I have a draft. When writing a play with so much movement in time, I find I need to see it laid out. This gives me the ability to move things around more easily.

The play has highly theatrical time jumps over a 20-year period. I love that the people don’t just talk about the past, but we see their pasts. Is this typical of your plays — playing with time?

Stacey Isom Campbell: Yes, I think I tend to play with time. I’ve been told my work is too cinematic for this reason, but I believe time jumps or even simultaneous time depictions are theatrical and can be accomplished very simply. Of course, it takes brilliant actors, directors and collaborators! I like to think of all time existing at once. I think maybe I believe that about time in general — that we are living life in a linear way. But we exist — all of ourselves, ages, lives — at the same time. I’m not sure I can explain this well, but I’ll say: I think it’s something the theater can do beautifully to create meaning. I juxtapose the past and present in order to create more meaning, to provide context, to make moments in the present even more dramatic.

I wish I could write the linear, two-hander play. I keep wanting to try that but never seem to be able to. I think my writing is best when I write for myself — the things that I’m thinking about and working through are what excites me. When I try to write what I think will sell, I get bored. That’s not to say I don’t think about the business side or even embrace limitations. I do. But jumps in time are just what interests me, I guess.

The play made me curious about your own relationship to movies and film history. Did you grow up being a fan? 

Stacey Isom Campbell: I started writing screenplays before writing plays. Films are what I knew. I grew up watching TCM [Turner Classic Movies] channel. When I was 16, I got very sick and had to drop out of school for a year. I obsessively watched everything on TCM. Everything from Meet Me in St. Louis to The Godfather.

Did prep for this writing include re-watching movies from the 1990s?

Stacey Isom Campbell: Yes, I did re-watch the movies of the 90s — the best homework ever! I re-watched American Beauty, The Virgin Suicides, Magnolia, and others. I mostly did a deep-dive on the films from 1999. But there are so many wonderful movies from the 90s in my library that I revisited for the play and still revisit on occasion because they take me back to a time when I was so inspired by these films.

Another powerful and active aspect of 1999 is a daughter’s quest for the truth about a parent — the secret life of a parent. Is the “quest for the parent” a major part of your thinking when writing this, or your other plays? Did the young student Naomi evolve as you wrote the play?

Stacey Isom Campbell: The character of Naomi evolved quite a bit over the development process. Because Naomi is 18 years old in 2019, I found her voice harder to access than the other two. I was able to use feedback from the actresses playing Naomi with each new cast. Naomi’s quest for a parent is one of the major threads of the play. I do write about parent-child relationships often. I think what interests me is how generational perspectives bump up against each other. So my plays often represent two or three generations.

What do you hope people walk away with after seeing your play? 

Stacey Isom Campbell: I want people to be devastated! Ha! I’m kind of joking, but not really. I always set out to give an audience some laughter  — because I think my characters are funny, humor being the way they cope with life — and in the end break the audience’s heart. I think giving the audience this wide range of an emotional experience is a gift. We don’t have many places left in contemporary American life to have a communal, live experience. And we need those spaces where it’s okay to feel emotion and collectively share it. To give you a deeper view into my process, I’ll add that I really struggle to feel my own emotions. I write the plays to find a safe way to feel my stuff. Then I get to experience that emotion again when it’s on stage — the gift gets given back to me when the actors respond emotionally to what I wrote and when the audience feels that experience too. It’s gratifying, and I experience it again. So, I do it as an act of healing — for myself and for my audience.

The play talks about a social justice movement. Is this an activist play on some level? Do you want audiences to act upon some question?

Stacey Isom Campbell: Yes! Thank you for this question. I think this play is political and that it inspires people to do something after. I hope audiences feel the emotional weight of three disrupted lives. And that they take that weight with them between the theatre and their car as a moment when they can choose to change. If they want to help in a practical way, I tell people to give money to places that are uplifting female stories and voices. I grieve the loss of films that weren’t made, the films I might’ve made had the industry been a place of safety and gender equity. Give money to places like WAM Theatre and Urbanite Theatre’s Modern Works Festival, both of which share this mission.

Are there subjects or topics or styles that you’re generally drawn to, or do your plays cover a wide variety?

Stacey Isom Campbell: My latest plays are feminist plays, though I think I’ve always written for and about women. But I’m leaning into that more and more in my work thinking about my plays as a form of activism and resistance. I play with form constantly. I’m interested in moments of disconnection and almost-connections. I’m interested in finding beauty in the most ugly places.

How is 1999 different from or similar to another play of yours? Does it share DNA with other works?

Stacey Isom Campbell: All of my plays are quite different in terms of subject matter and even form. I try to invent a form to match the subject of each play, which gives me a great deal of freedom to allow both form and content to evolve together. The subjects of my plays follow my obsessions. I’ve got a play, The Controller (or a play about a marriage),  that’s about a middle-aged woman who plays a PlayStation game. It’s a play that borrows from my experience in the gaming culture during the height of the pandemic. It’s also about how chronic illness can affect a marriage. All of which resonated with my life at the time.

The common preoccupations that thread through my work are: exploring complex/flawed women, creating space for both laughter and tragedy, and employing the most theatrical way I can find to tell the story — through language, a Greek chorus, direct address, live music or tableaux.

Have you been revising 1999 in the weeks or days leading to the Lenox, MA, world premiere?

Stacey Isom Campbell: I was at Urbanite Theatre’s Modern Works Festival in Sarasota the same week WAM started rehearsing for the premiere. I was making changes in Florida and sending them to Lenox each night. It was a wild week! I revised a good bit that week. Being in the room with Urbanite artistic director Summer Dawn Wallace, who directed the workshop/reading at Modern Works with a stellar cast, was instrumental in making those final changes to the play. She also directed the reading at Florida Rep earlier this year. So, she’s been a consistent voice in shaping the play. I trusted her within minutes of table work. She’s a pro and I consider myself extremely lucky to have my work in her hands. Also, the director at WAM, Genèe Coreno, inspired a big discovery in our first conversation about the script. She talked about wanting to find a way to allow a silent moment in which the objects on stage told the story. Her comment led me to create a new thread that tied together the idea that the details make a film — the mise-en-scène in Emma’s first film, and the reality of the trauma that happens in 1999. She’s bringing her film sensibility to the production. It’s going to be gorgeous.

What do you want to express about 1999 that I haven’t asked about?

Stacey Isom Campbell: The friendship from the 1999 scenes between Emma and Reese borrows from my friendship with Lisa Neely. We became friends and collaborators at the beginning of our artistic journeys. So, we sort of grew up together during the late 90s. We saw a lot of movies and plays, took an acting class [there’s a scene in the play about the discomfort of an acting class], and we talked a lot about aesthetic, voice, character. I think those years were instrumental in who we became as artists. We developed a shared language over the last 25 years that I think makes the work we do together very rich.

Any other plays in development?

Stacey Isom Campbell: Always. I’m in the earliest stages of a new play about two female soldiers during their deployment. It follows their friendship during war and the subsequent physical and mental scars 10 years later. And I’m heavily revising my play, Buffalo Creek, about a coal mining disaster.

You’ve lived in the South and in Alaska. Tell me a little about what you consider your primary home?

Stacey Isom Campbell: I grew up in Palmer, Alaska, though I’ve lived all over the U.S. Both of my parents are Southerners, so I grew up eating salmon and biscuits and gravy. I identify as…confused? Seriously, though, I feel tension in terms of where I belong. I don’t neatly fit any one place.

Do you think of yourself as “Southern”? And what does that mean to you? Is there a “Southern” sensibility to 1999? Have you written plays set in Alaska or the South?

Stacey Isom Campbell: Yes, I think of myself as Southern, more specifically Appalachian. I write about coal mining in a few plays, like with Buffalo Creek, because my father’s people are coal miners from Eastern Kentucky. And I have a more traditionally Southern play, The Loophole. I have found Alaska very difficult to write for the stage because in my mind it’s so expansive and gorgeous that the impulse is to want to show that. But I do have a couple of Alaskan plays. The military play I mentioned earlier will be partially in Alaska. And my play, Memory of Ice, is set on a glacier in Alaska. I don’t think there’s any Southern sensibility to 1999. If you see one, please let me know! It feels distinctly of the Western U.S. to me.

What exposure to theater did you have as a kid, and how did you arrive at playwriting? 

Stacey Isom Campbell: I didn’t have access to much theatre in Alaska at the time, but we did see an amazing production of The Secret Garden that was done with three or four actors, character-doubling. The actors were on stage the entire time going around a hat tree for costume pieces. So, it was actually a really great, theatrical introduction to the theatre for me around age 10. My other childhood training was in the form of movies.

You’ve got degrees in dramatic writing. Name some places? Can you share a little about your academic journey and point to a takeaway you got from a program — something primary that you learned about playwriting? A piece of advice that stuck?

Stacey Isom Campbell: I have two MFA degrees. One in Script & Screenwriting through the Film School at Regent University. But while pursuing screenwriting, I was drawn to the theatre. My actor friends adopted me and very soon began to ask me to write them audition monologues. By the time I graduated, I realized I wanted to go to New York City to pursue playwriting. But that plan changed when I saw a reading of Brian Silberman’s play Manifest at Old Dominion University. The play absolutely blew my mind. I knew I wanted to take one class with Brian before going to New York City. On a whim, I applied to the program and got a fully funded teaching assistantship. So, I went back to school [to ODU in Norfolk, VA] and earned an MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis in Dramatic Writing. The dramatic writing emphasis was new and I was the only playwright for much of my time there. So, it was an amazing education in that it was a true mentorship with Brian. He continues to read my work and give me feedback. I feel very fortunate to have had that experience.

My journey as a playwright is definitely not the usual one or even a logical one. But maybe that’s what I needed to develop my own voice. I’m a late bloomer.

What plays or playwrights were foundational to you?

Stacey Isom Campbell: Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive, Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House and Euridyce, Naomi Wallace’s One Flea Spare and The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, Naomi Iizuka’s At the Vanishing Point and Language of Angels, Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus, Wendy MacLeod’s The House of Yes, Nicky Silver’s Pterodactyls. My earliest introduction to theatre as literature was Chekhov and Ibsen. And I’m continually inspired by the plays being written now. I’m such a fan girl of Lauren Yee, Jen Silverman, Clare Baron, Martyna Majok, and so many more. It’s hard to pick a handful because I’m so inspired and challenged by the work that’s being written right now.