WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Interview with Hillsdale Playwriting Competition Winner Emily Griffith

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

WRFH host Megan Pidcock talks to Hillsdale College senior Emily Griffith about her recent entry into the first annual Hillsdale playwrighting competition. She discusses the meaning behind her play, “I’m Not a Mourning Person,” how writing the script impacted her, and how she grew from her experience in the Hillsdale theatre department. 

You're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. My name is Megyn Pittock. And with me here is a fellow senior named Emily Griffith, who was recently announced to be a finalist in the theater department's first inaugural playwriting competition, which I am here to talk to her about today. So hi, Emily. Thanks for coming on. No, thank you for asking me to be here. So just to get us started, what is your play about that you wrote? So my play is called I'm Not a Morning Person, and Morning is spelled M-O-U-R. And it is about a girl named Penny who has to come to terms with death and the role that it plays in her life. it's an interesting framing device because every scene you see Penny growing up attending different funerals throughout her life. So what was your inspiration going into this? Did you have any background experience with playwriting? So I never go to play before coming to Hillsdale. And last

semester, I took the playwriting class with Dr. Matzos, which was a lot of fun, really enjoyable. I wasn't sure if I was going to do the competition, but the prompt is a quote from Frederick Douglas that he, from a speech that he gave when he was visiting Hillstall campus. And the gist of the quote is there's no such thing as new truth. So I was thinking about what has been applicable to my life right now that I would maybe want to write about. So I had a couple ideas that I had been messing with for like months and months. And I was texting one of my friends, Fiona Mully, who's another theater major.

And I was like, do I like do these ideas I've been with for a long time? But then this random idea popped in my head about a show that every single scene takes place in a funeral home, which sounds so dark. But like, personally, I experienced a lot of loss this year. And so it was something that was on my mind. And so that's, I decided to take the risk and start on this topic, this idea that I had just come up with. and ended up being the right choice. And did you, I guess, how did this experience compare to your past theater background? How is it different?

It's really interesting when you talk about famous playwrights like Shakespeare, because a reason that people love Shakespeare so much is that he writes for actors in the way that he does his ionic pentameter, where he puts his punctuation where he doesn't. He's literally telling like the actors when to breathe, when you're thinking a new thought, when you're picking up a different objective or a tactic. And so as an actor first, going into playwriting,

I found that it was really cool to pick up the experience I had just writing as a student and then intermixing it with my experiences as an actor because I'm not only writing a story, I'm putting something down on a page and I'm thinking, would I as an actor want to tell the story myself? So that was really cool. How has that experience maybe different from what you expected or grown your relationship with your craft, basically? So it's really cool is that going into the staged reading portion of this, we, got to help cast it. So that was interesting in and of itself, casting people and characters

that you have written yourself, that it comes from your mind. And a lot of the people that audition are people you know intimately. So seeing people that you know step into these roles, these characters that have been so personal to you was so interesting. And, but I'm not directing it. So I help cast it, but I am not giving them blocking. I'm not giving them acting notes. That's all Dr. Matzos. So I go into the rehearsal room and I get to just sit back and listen to them say it. And then if there's anything within the script itself that I'm like, that's not how the human would say that, then I can make edits. So I just made my first and last batch of edits. And we are going in with the final script tonight for our second rehearsal and

putting it on its feet, which is really exciting. And what surprised me, was the things that the people reading the play pick up on that maybe the playwright didn't even intend. Because for years, I've been studying plays and we have in-depth discussions in class about, like, maybe they met this, maybe they met this, it could mean this. And hearing my cast, we have all of these, like, theories about the relationships between the characters, the meanings, like, a character in my show. Not really a spoiler. He's death incarnated. But his name is Don, and he's kind of just a normal guy. And so after we read the script, everyone was like, oh, maybe Dawn, maybe he's like a real person.

Maybe she can only see him. Maybe he's connected to this character in this way. And they were coming up with these amazing ideas that I didn't even think of. And it really rings true something that they teach us in the theater department here that the writing and the acting of the script is less than half the battle. 80% of the show is the audience's response to it. And so it was really cool seeing from the people from like the outside coming in, seeing what they're picking up from the script without me saying anything. So it's super cool.

Especially it makes me think of like that saying of, oh, the curtains are blue. what does that mean in English classes? I feel like it's a similar thing with scripts and the interpretation of actors and that sort of thing. Who ended up, who did you end up casting in it or helping cast? So I have a cast of seven people plus someone reading stage directions. So I have senior Fiona Mully, sophomore Nina Mory, sophomore more Charlie Reins Snyder, freshman Evie Gray, freshman Carl Schleeder, Junior, Grace Gainer, and then my stage, oh, and junior, Aidan, Christian, and then my stage directions are being read by sophomore Mara Seeley. What were you looking for when you helped the casting process?

So I had never been on that side of the casting process before, but of course I've been through it a lot because I'm a theater major. And man, doesn't it ring true more than I could have ever thought that like, just because you don't get a role doesn't mean you're not capable of doing it. Because or just because you don't get in a show or get a role is because you lack talent. And that's like the biggest takeaway that I, because going into the auditions, I wasn't really looking for anything specific because I never, I didn't picture anybody in my head specific.

Frankly, I was biased against certain people because I didn't want to just give roles to people because they're close to me. But I had people come in who read amazingly, amazingly for characters, like hilariously, but maybe they looked too young or they didn't look like this other person could be their mom. But generally, I would say my writing style that I've kind of created over the past few semesters, of writing script is definitely realistic pattern conversation. So just kind of like a quick back and forth. And so that was, if anything, really what I was looking for from the people coming in was just an authentic, I'm reading the script, I'm talking to this person standing beside me, playing this character, like I just ran into them in the middle of AJ's,

because that's what my script called for. Moira Kate's script called for people who all looked like younger teenagers who were all really funny. Grace Bryant needed a pair of adults that looked like they were in there, like they could potentially be in their 30s or 40s, and then she needed someone to play a 12-year-old. And then I had kind of like a wide range of things. So we all kind of needed people to fill different spots. And yeah, that's that. How has this, I guess, has being on the other side of it changed how you approach being an actor? And I think about that one person. I don't know if being on this side of the process has affected how I approach being an actor,

but I think it has affected how I approach a script, after, which you could say they're interchangeable. But I don't know if I would say anything about my acting is going to change, but how I approach a text, definitely, because now I know the work that goes behind it. And I know the intentions or lack thereof and the really exciting mystery of what a text can hold based off of how you read it. So I definitely think there's something that Professor Tori Matzo's teaches in her acting classes. And it's that a huge part of being an actor, maybe the best part, is wonder. You go on stage and you wonder about something. I wonder how this person is going to respond to me today. I wonder how angry I'm going to feel by the end of this conversation tonight.

And so I am really excited in the future to approach your script and wonder, what are all the possibilities? What could the author of men? what could they have not meant that still works with the script and how would that affect the rest of the story? In the process of writing script, did it surprise you how it went and how you and what the final product ended up being? Yes. So I ended up writing it in a way that I usually write my scripts, which is I think of little one-liners throughout my day. or little common topics that will just come to me and then automatically like quickly like write them down somewhere and then I insert them into the show and sometimes I will like formulate scenes around them.

So that was pretty typical. I had no idea how the show was going to end when I started it. I knew it was going to be about a girl named who you first, you first see her. at age like eight, talking to her parents about her dog having died. And then you move up and you see her at a teacher's funeral when she's like 10. Then you see her at her grandma's funeral when she's a teenager. Then you jump forward and you see her at her mother and then her father's funeral. So I knew that was going to be the case, but I wasn't really sure how she as a character was going to respond to it.

And so something that surprised me and it's a thing. a contradiction. As I wrote the script was that I, the main character, in ways she ended up being more like me than I could have ever expected. And then in other ways, she ended up being a lot different than me. I realized that there are bits of myself in every single character in the script, which was really, really cool because I have characters that I could never relate to in a million years. You know, I have a 40 to 50 to. 50-year-old man playing the role of death. Like, I don't know how I could ever play that role myself, but it equals my personality, my thoughts diffused throughout. And the last thing I'll say about it is that oftentimes when people approach grief and mourning through art or through movies, you see kind of a, a sadness. And I briefly addressed this in my play. One of my characters, Penny, and she goes,

it was supposed to be like the movies. Like, I was supposed to cry and like, but look kind of like tragically pretty while I did it. I was supposed to be like holding her hand when she went. And I wasn't. And so people kind of present grief in a way that is nice for audiences. It's easy. It's what we're used to. And I realized that my grief wasn't like. like that and I didn't feel represented. And so through this play, I want to represent grief in a way that maybe a group of people can relate to when they haven't been able to before. And that is when grief is not crying, when grief is quiet and stony and oftentimes really angry. And I wanted to wonder about what happens when you let your grief push people away from you.

And so I didn't realize that I was accomplishing that for myself when I wrote this. But by the time I finished the last scene, I felt to my heart of hearts that that's what I'd done. It's sort of along those lines. What do you hope that people can take away after they've seen or read your script? I want people to, it sounds really dramatic. I don't want people to be so afraid of death. And that's really ironic coming from me or, what do you call, hypocritical? Because that's something I'm dealing with.

But one of my lines, Penny meets Dawn, and she goes, shouldn't you be wielding like a sithe? Shouldn't you have horns? Shouldn't you be wearing all black? And he's like, why would I do that? And she's like, because you're scary and dangerous and evil. And I think his line is, really, I thought I was pretty normal because death is something that everybody encounters. And it doesn't have to be a taboo topic.

And it shouldn't be. Death used to be, and again, I addressed this in the play, death used to be everywhere. Multigenerational homes. You had grandparents living in the house when they passed away. way. And now we pushed up and we hide it in hospitals and in nursing homes

and we don't like to touch it. And I want to be able to bring it to light and say, this isn't scared. Is scriptwriting something that you see yourself continuing in the future? Maybe in my spare time. Probably not. I love writing

comedy. It's really therapeutic to me. And so even throughout my play, there's a lot of comedy. like no spoilers, but an urn is tipped over at one point. And so I do think that in my spare time, I may try to dabble in just a bit if ever an idea comes to me or, you know, if I ever come back here and they're like, hey, could you give us an example of writing, which is something they've asked me to do? So, yeah.

Nice. And sort of switch gears really quickly. How is your time, like, within the theater department at Hillsdale, since you are a senior, like, how is that sort of shaped the process, if that's shaped the process of writing this and then sort of coming to a close soon of graduating? Like I mentioned earlier, the idea that Shakespeare writes for actors. is really cool and I know that I wouldn't have been able to write a script that is so accessible to actors if I hadn't been through all of acting classes in the department with both Dr. Matzos and Professor Matzos. I'm also able to pull on the great playwrights before me and the classical ideas of tragedy and a tragic hero because of the theater history courses I take

with Dr. Brandon. And reflecting on the department, the Hillsdale College Theater Department is a unique experience for every single person that enters it. Because it is a growing department. A lot of people want to be involved and they're really excitingly

getting more and more opportunities for people. But it can kind of be hard to break in. And it's because we have had such a surge in interest. So I didn't start acting on Markle stage until my sophomore year. And a lot of my friends didn't start until their junior year. And so it's really interesting

meeting a lot of people who are in different places in their craft, who are wanting to focus on different things. I have friends who are wanting to direct, friends who are wanting to playwright, friends that are wanting to be dramaturgs. And we have, like Hilldale College as a whole does, the theater department gives you a shared language.

and you see that in shows with directors where we can talk about what it means to wonder at something, what it means to receive or radiate something, objectives, tactics, things called psychological gestures, things that if you walked into an acting class at Hillsdale College and you started talking about it, everybody would understand. And so I feel really honored that throughout my four years here, I have gained not only a shared language through the liberal arts education

that Hillsdale has provided me as a whole, but I have received an actor's language throughout my time in the theater department. You're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. My name is Megan Pidcock, and I've been talking to Emily Griffith about her finalist script that will be put on as a read-through on April 26th, right? And thank you so much for talking to me about this. Thank you so much. Megan. Hello, this is Megan. I wanted to inform the listener that since the time that this interview was

recorded, Emily's play, I'm Not a Morning Person, was indeed put on on April 26th as a read-through of the script, and won the contest. Congratulations to Emily, and as a result of this win, it will be put on as a full production in the fall next year by the Hillsdale Tower Players. Once again, my name is Megan Pidcock, I've been talking to Emily Griffith, and you're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.