Day 21 - Huge thanks to our featured playwrights! (Part 1)

11/24/2020

Seven Devils Playwrights Conference welcomes playwrights from all stages in their careers, from beginning playwrights (young and old!), to playwrights who can genuinely be considered master craftspeople. We're grateful to them not only because they come to the conference to work on some truly gorgeous plays but also because they often lead special writing workshops that we offer for free to the company and the McCall community! So THANK YOU, featured playwrights! You make the conference amazing for so many people!

Kathleen Cahill and Gay Smith, in rehearsal for The Robertassey, 2019

Today's Guest Blogger is Kathleen Cahill.
Thanks, Kathleen!

In 2019 I had the good fortune to be invited to Seven Devils Playwright Foundry to work on my play “The Robertassey.” When you write a play, you write at 2 am, and 6 am, and 4 pm and sometimes you forget there’s such a thing as fun. But they haven’t forgotten at Seven Devils. They’re completely serious about the work, but then they don’t forget about the ice cream, sushi, good wine, boat rides, bike rides, walks, conversation –all taking place in this ridiculously beautiful and unique town of McCall, Idaho. Which has a big lake right downtown. Like it was Barcelona and there’s the Mediterranean. That’s an exaggeration of course, but it has that kind of thrill to it. And where I got to meet Jeni and Paula and AP. And the generous family who put me up in their little apartment over the garage, which fit me like I was Cinderella and this was the right slipper.

I feel gratitude for the experiences I had at Seven Devils, for my director and my cast, and my dramaturge, and stage manager – I learned from all of them. And I am grateful for Jeni who, in the course of a conversation about nothing very much, would suddenly ask me a question like “would you say your play is a comedy about grief?” I feel gratitude for what I learned about my play while I was there, gratitude for being in the company of people who love what I love – theatre, language, acting, who believe that the stage is where you step out of the world of artifice and lies, in order to tell the truth.

What’s the difference between gratitude and thankfulness? I looked it up on Google where I read that gratitude is a feeling and thankfulness is an act. I hope my words express my feeling of gratitude. And here the act: thank you Seven Devils for everything.