AMERICAN THEATRE | The Subtext: Spenser Davis Wants to Be Part of Something Big

Each month on The Subtext Brian speaks with a playwright about life, writing, and no matter itches we’re scratching.

This month Brian talks to Spenser Davis, is a author and a director born and raised in Arkansas who’s at present based mostly in Chicago. He was the 2020-21 Michael Maggio Directing Fellow on the Goodman Theatre, the place he served as affiliate director to creative director Bob Falls on his live-streamed manufacturing of The Sound Inside. Davis is at present assistant-directing on Falls’s manufacturing of Swing State on the Goodman (a brand new play by Rebecca Gilman, who appeared on The Subtext within the winter of 2019). Spenser’s most up-to-date play is A Million Tiny Pieces, which was featured at this yr’s Pacific Playwrights Festival at South Coast Rep (who commissioned it as a part of the Elizabeth George Commission). Other performs of his embody Merge, concerning the rise and fall of Atari, and Plainclothes, about retail safety guards (which gained the 2019 M. Elizabeth Osborn New Play Award).

Spenser tells Brian concerning the household influences that acquired him into the humanities, the help he acquired as a brand new playwright in Chicago, and about how and why he gravitates towards large-cast performs.