9 November/10 November 2019 ★ FTWeekend 15
A
t 33, Clare Barron is the
youngest of the three
female playwrights who
were shortlisted for this
year’s Pulitzer Prize for
Drama. Her playDance Nation about a—
pre-teen competitive dance troupe —
opened at London’s Almeida Theatre
last year, following a run at the off-
Broadway Playwrights Horizons in New
York. This newspaper awarded it four
stars, describing it as “unpredictable,
mixed-up,funnyandfurious”.
Barron didn’t win the prize, but she
was clearly delighted to have been nom-
inated — especially on an all-female list.
“Weneedmoremodelsofwhatitmeans
tobea45-year-oldwomanplaywright,a
55-year-old woman playwright, a 65-
year-old woman playwright,” she tells
me when we meet at Paper & Cup, a hip-
ster café-cum-bookshop in Shoreditch,
closetowhereshe’srehearsingherlatest
playDirty Crusty.Ithassincereceivedits
world premiere at east London’s small
butpunchytheatreTheYard.
Even with a nod from the Pulitzer
judges,theBrooklyn-basedwriterisstill
regardedas“emerging”.Isthelabelfair?
“I still feel part of that young bracket,”
she replies. “I also think my work is
reallyyouthful;it’ssosexual.”
If you want to know what it feels like
to be an American millennial,Dirty
Crusty s a good place to start. In a musi-i
cal interlude, thirtysomethings Jeanine
and Victor sing in unison about their
shattered illusions in life and love. They
used to believe in using condoms, and in
never cheating— t hen they grew up andClare Barron The playwright shortlisted for this|
year’s Pulitzer Prize talks toAugusta Pownall bouta
intimacy, oversharing and her play ‘Dirty Crusty’
Right:
playwright
Clare Barron,
photographed
in London
for the FT by
Gabby Laurent
got broken andbitter.Audiences have
come to expect frank language from
Barron’scharacters.
Her writing has won critical acclaim.
At once naturalistic and oblique, her
dialogue loads layers of meaning into
theseeminglymundane. ou Got OlderY —
about a daughter who returns home to
visit her sick father and finds herself
fantasising about having sex with a cow-
boy — won her an Obie Award in 2015,
andshereceivedtheSusanSmithBlack-
burnPrizeforDance Nationin2017.
Dirty Crustyis a Trojan horse of a play,
a tightly plotted narrativesmuggled
into a series of impressionistic scenes in
which characters oftenspeak over each
other. Barron has a pitch-perfect ear for
theebbandflowofconversation.
And she is unafraid to experiment
withform.Dirty Crustyendswithaballet
recital.Her stage directions read: “This
cantake40minutesifitneedsto”.
Barron looks younger than her years,
dressed in a hoodie with her hair
scraped up. She’s open, eloquent and a
little conspiratorial. Many of her plays
drawdirectlyfromherownlife.“WhenI
write, I’m never trying to shock, I’m
always just trying totalk honestly about
things in my life that were really real or
are really real.”she says. “I just think
aboutmyselfwhenIwrite.”
Dirty Crusty s about lettingi go, dealing
with loss and, as she puts it, the “repres-
sion and freedom” of ballet (described
by Jeanine’s dance teacher as “sex for
thesoul”).
“Dance is a place where I can under-
stand this question of the female body,Yet her characters’ lives are held back
by the gap between what they want and
what is on offer. If thesecurity of the
baby-boomergenerationisn’tanoption,
Dirty Crusty eems to suggest, mights
humanconnectionbeallthenextgener-
ationhastoholdonto?
With six plays under her belt and
another just complete, Barron is firmly
embedded in the New York theatre
scene. She is friendly with the
playwrights Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
(Appropriate,An Octoroon) and Annie
Baker (The Flick,The Antipodes), with
whom she shares a knack for hyper-
realisticdialogue.
Successcamequickly.“Beingafemale
playwright in your twenties is super
fetishised,”shesays.“WhenIlookaheadinto my future, I have questions about
whetherI’mgoingtolosewhatmademe
powerfulandattractivetopeople.”
Barron grew up in Wenatchee, a small
town in Washington state. Her parents
were progressively minded Christians
who kept a six-foot iguana in the house,
but her friends held evangelical beliefs.
“Iwasraisedinaconservative,Christian
community that told me that if I had sex
before marriage I would go to hell,” she
says.It took years to “undo that knot”
and shake off the shame that she associ-
atedwithsex.
Butforsomeaudiences,sexremainsa
fraught subject. “If you just have an
unapologetically sexual woman who’s
kinky and having weird sex, people
don’t know how to locate themselves,”
she says. Does the success ofFleabag
suggest that portrayals of female sexu-
ality are changing? “I feel like it’s having
a moment, but I also feel like it’s some-
thing that comes back and comes back.
You could say that about [the HBO
series]Girlsfive years ago. I don’t think
peoplewilleverfeelcomfortablewithit.
MaybeI’mjustalittlepessimistic.”
Barron wrote most ofDirty Crustyin a
matter of weeks on a silent retreat at the
age of 26, and has made few revisions to
the text seven years on.In the interven-
ing time, she has been diagnosed with
bipolar disorder. Mental health looms
large inDirty Crusty; it is also entral toc
the play that she has just written, she
tellsme.
“I don’t have a lot of boundaries.
If you ask me anything, I want to
tell you,” she says. “That thing in my
plays where people tell you things that
they maybe shouldn’t is very much a
part of who I am.”
She dislikes plays that are “super
intellectual,” she admits. “I like plays
that come from the guts and feel out of
control. I feel like those kind of plays are
happeninginNewYorkrightnow.”
For all its raw grief and broken
dreams,Dirty Crustyisalsoveryfunny.It
is peppered with black humour that
skirtsarounditscripplingsadness.
“There’s something really devastating
about revealing yourself in the most
intimate terms and the person not
receiving it. It can make you feel so
alone,” says Barron. “If I wanted to
make a better world, one of the things I
would say is more intimacy for every-
one. It feels good to reveal yourself to
someone.Ithinkit’shealing.”To November 30,theyardtheatre.co.ukboth how it’s powerful but also how it’s
complicated,” says Barron, who did bal-
letfourdaysaweekasachild.
There’s also a lot of talk about sex.
“The plays are
about — and this
is something that
I do believe —
that intimacy is
the key to every-
thing,” she says.
“The key to
human happi-
ness,the key to
being alive, is to
be able to share
intimate things with another person
and have them understand you. That’s
whatthecharactersaretryingtodo.”With six plays under
her belt,Barron is
firmly embedded
in New York’s
theatre scene
NextGen
‘I am never
trying to shock’
NOVEMBER 9 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 11/20197/ - 17:18 User:andrew.higton Page Name:WKD15, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 15, 1