Talent to burn: Schatzie Schaefers, shown in a scene with Jeff McCamish in "Kafka Dances," a 2005 production at Cyrano's, is better known as a playwright. Her latest is "Sweet," a dark comedy about women drug abusers.

Schatzie Schaefers is one of Alaska’s most successful, hard-working and productive playwrights, who should be on every “40 Under 40” list in the state (40 talented, influential, amazing people under 40 years old). She’s also a director and actor and has a couple of unpublished novels “under the bed.” She presently earns a wage as the outreach coordinator for Out North.

Schatzie’s three FourPlay shows at Out North have given audiences a dozen short plays of wide variety and trenchant, funny-dark takes on contemporary life for which she’s received raves. She’s all but a fixture of the semi-annual Alaska Overnighters, which are short plays written in the space of 9-12 hours. Her 40-minute one-act TiVO Tribe is one of the funniest plays ever to be shown in Alaska, split-your-sides uproarious, due in no small part to the brilliant performance of its actors (Sarah MacMillan, Paul Schweigert and Rodney Lamb). TiVO Tribe has been performed in Anchorage and in Valdez, where the story takes place, and was called Alaska's best play of the year (for 2004, if memory serves) by the hosts of "Stage Talk" on KSKA 91.1 FM radio.

Schatzie’s first full-length play, Grandma Millie & the Crooked E, received a staged reading in June 2007 at the Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez. She directed Arlitia Jones’s Sway Me Moon, which was performed in 2008 at Out North and again in Valdez at that year’s theatre conference.

Schatzie’s most recent work, Sweet, was performed at Out North for two weekends in February. In a review for ADN, Dawnell Smith said the two-act play “deftly teeters between the real and surreal, the damned and the saved.”

In an unusual twist, not just for Schatzie but for almost any playwright, Sweet was written in conjunction with a specific program “for the treatment of substance abuse and other mental health issues,” as stated in the Out North program for the show.

Sweet was an offering of Off the Rocks Recovery Theater, which is run by Akeela (the Anchorage-based recovery program) and funded by the Alaska Mental Health Trust, the Alaska Division of Behavioral Health, the Alaska State Council on the Arts and other organizations. It was directed by Tami Lubitsh, a clinician who has an M.A. in counseling psychology and a background as a theater director and drama/substance abuse therapist, according to the show’s program.

“Tami saw FourPlay in 2007 and decided I was the writer she wanted” for this particular recovery project, Schatzie wrote in a message to me. “I found the idea instantly intriguing, but why me? I don’t write docudramas. I’m not going to create another Laramie Project or a Vagina Monologues. That’s just not my style. But Tami assured me that she chose me because she wanted the play to be a dark comedy which, as you know, is what I do.”

One of Schatzie’s FourPlay works in 2007 was a piece called “Cherry Pie,” which she describes as the story of “a bunch of women having one of those stupid candle parties. Apparently Tami saw a glimpse of what she wanted in ‘Cherry Pie’: All women, all let down by men, clashing, bonding, and just cutting loose.”

Few theatre projects have such a precise off-stage focus as Sweet. But as you’ll see from the interview that follows, Sweet is meant to be a play that lives and entertains on the stage, without having to be linked to a social/behavioral program.

Schatzie is planning a rewrite. She also hopes Sweet will receive a staged reading and critique at the upcoming Valdez theatre conference in June. [NOTE: Schatzie told us late on March 6 that Sweet has been accepted for the conference Play Lab and will receive a staged reading in Valdez in June.--P.P.]

I recently interviewed Schatzie about Sweet:

Peter Porco—You told me that you were under the gun for this show and had to rush out a script. I think that would feel quite uncomfortable. How did you manage to work under that pressure?

Schatzie Schaefers—When we first set a timeline for this project, I was quite unrealistic in estimating that I could complete an initial first draft by September 1 (starting in July.) My only other full-length piece, Grandma Millie & The Crooked E, took at least six months for a first draft, so I'm not sure why I was so confident I could move faster than that on Sweet. Especially since it's a much more complicated and ambitious script than Millie. And to make matters worse, I had also committed to acting in Well in October. Rehearsing that show obviously cut into my writing time. Not to mention my full-time day job. No regrets—Well was a great show, but again, I was overconfident in thinking I could do both at the same time. Lesson learned.
 
As September approached, I told Tami Lubitsh, the project clinician and director, that I was running behind. So we moved the performance dates from December to February. This was as far forward as we could push it, for two reasons: the timeline of the grant from Alaska Mental Health Trust, and concerns about how long we could keep the same group of women involved.

I finished the first draft in early November. Whew! Now it was time to find a cast. This took longer than expected. I think some people may have been scared away by the unique aspects of this project. "I don't want to be in a show with a bunch of addicts" was one comment that made its way back to me. Can I blame them? No. I have, in fact, been in a show with a person who had a severe drug problem and constantly kept us guessing as to whether each night's performance would even happen. Scary. Luckily, nothing like this ever happened during Sweet. The cast we ended up with was the right one.

P—You worked with women who are in recovery programs, some of whom ended up as actors in the show and all of whom were a source of research for you. What was it like working with them?
 
S—At our first meeting, or drama therapy session, I was scared to death. I had this pre-conceived notion that the women would all be these hostile, aggressive jailhouse ‘ho’s’ who would just HATE me. We sat in a circle and introduced ourselves and I was immediately disarmed. They didn’t know exactly what they were getting into, but they wanted to be there. This was something special for them. For me, too.
 
There were actually eight women at that first meeting. The next week we were down to seven due to one who had relapsed and was back on the street. I of course wondered, “Did we drive her to use?” But apparently this young girl was very much in the midst of her addictions, and the relapse was no surprise. We talked about it the next week and none of the women seemed to think the drama therapy set her off.
 
The other seven women stuck with the group for months. This is quite amazing, as the recidivism rate for women in particular is very high. Most do not recover from their addictions. They just don’t.

continued tomorrow