If Stephen Brown could go back in time and change anything, he would go back to a few months ago when his wife was out of town and remember to water her plants.
“I definitely didn’t water them enough when she was out of town in August and I almost killed one of them and she burst into tears when she saw it and it was, like, the worst moment of my life,” Stephen says. “I would leave everything else the same. I’m one of those people who cherishes their mistakes and embarrassments and failures because they make you who you are. They also make great writing material if you happen to be a playwright… except for that plant-watering situation. Oh, man. I would definitely do that over.”
Stephen is the 2022/23 Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition Winner. His play, The Many Wondrous Realities of Jasmine Starr-Kidd, is an exploration of fate, second chances, and accepting what we can’t change. The titular character, Jasmine, is a twelve-year-old computer genius whom Stephen sees as almost his ideal child. He and his wife love to talk about what they think their kids will be like, when they eventually have them. “They always seem way smarter than us. Like we’ll always joke that they’ll be doing our taxes when they’re nine years old or teaching us how to invest in the stock market when they’re seven — but also be really annoyed at us for not knowing about investments yet.”
Stephen dreamed up Jasmine and her story because he and his wife wanted better stories to share with their children. His wife is also a playwright, so stories are very important to them and their future family. Stephen grew up with movies like Armageddon and Back to the Future that made him feel understood “in a weird sort of way.”
Unfortunately, those movies also featured mostly white casts.
“My wife and I are an interracial couple,” he explains, “and I wanted to be able to show our future kids adventure stories that centered characters that looked like them. Jasmine Starr-Kidd really came from a place of wanting to create characters for our future kids to identify with, [and] with families that look like their family.”
Although Stephen isn’t a twelve-year-old computer genius, he relates to Jasmine in that his parents also got divorced when he was younger. He says that the divorce was a “super healthy choice — shout out to my awesome parents!” but, like Jasmine, he always wondered how different his life would be if he could somehow put them back together.
“There’s an ache that forms in the sudden absence of certain parents or family members and you kind of feel it all the time. I think deep down that’s something that Jasmine is going through in the play: This desire to put things back together and bring everyone home.”
Most of Stephen’s plays are filled with longing, Jasmine Starr-Kidd especially. “Longing for that person that’s not around as much as we wish they were,” Stephen says. “Longing for that person that doesn’t love us as much as we wish they did. Longing for things to be different. Yes, it’s a story that’s filled with a lot of fun adventures, mishaps, and humor, but underneath it all, it’s a story about this young girl with an incredible ache in her heart. Who hasn’t felt that before? Who hasn’t wanted to be able to change reality to the one that’s less painful than your current one?”
The Impact of the Kendeda Award
Speaking of Stephen’s other works, he’s a very busy man. He is developing new plays, working on a TV show, and serving as a fellow at the Juilliard School’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program. However, he thinks it’s the Alliance’s Kendeda program that stands out.
“There’s not a particularly long history of sci-fi adventure plays getting produced across the theatre landscape, [so] I don’t think there were any other theaters out there that were going to produce this play,” Stephen says, laughing. “I’m so grateful to the Alliance for taking a chance on me and this play I love so much. Not only is this production going to be just the coolest thing ever, it was this production and the Kendeda Award that also directly led to a lot of the other things [I have going on].”
“The truth is that a lot of playwrights are very talented, but they’re waiting for someone to come along and legitimize their work by giving them their first big production,” he adds. “Once that happens, it’s kind of like they’ve gotten a stamp of approval, which is when other theaters and companies start to take chances on them. This is the exact thing that the Kendeda Award does: It gives playwrights that first stamp of legitimacy and helps launch careers. This is true of so many Kendeda winners of the past and I will always be immensely grateful to be given the opportunity to work here at the Alliance.”
When asked what he would do if a future version of himself showed up to talk to him, he says he would quickly forget whatever was said. “First of all, [Future Me would] realize that I hadn’t sprayed my wife’s plants yet and would immediately help me out because there are 30 of them (yes, there are 30 plants in our apartment; shout out to my wife). And then after we were done spraying, we’d get distracted by sharing dog videos together. That would last for several hours. And then we’d probably geek out about how much fun we were having together and really just need to share that with one another. So, I really hope my future self doesn’t come back to save the world, because we would fail.”
