by Chelsea Sutton

I was recently in Virginia at James Madison University’s Theatre Department for the Madison New Works Lab. We were working on a play of mine for a reading series — a play that is very dear to me, that feels like one of my go-to calling card plays, so making sure it works has been especially important to me.

What I did, almost accidentally, was put a lot of distance between myself and the script; the last I heard this version was over a zoom with actors reading it cold in spring 2025. So it had be over a year by the time I heard it again in August 2026. I’d done bigger rewrites in that draft but had not revisited.

So when I first heard this draft out loud, I had an almost out-of-body experience; there were whole sections of the play I didn’t remember writing but I remember trying to solve the problems the new sections took care of. During the first reading of it I genuinely didn’t know what was going to happen next.

But of course I KNEW. Because I wrote it. Even though I couldn’t remember it.

I think I might know when a play is getting close to being “done.” At least for me. And it lies in this sensation — the feeling of watching a thing running around that both IS you and is absolutely NOT you. I saw the play, knew it was mine, knew almost immediately what I needed to do once I started looking at it with an editor’s eye — but it somehow no longer felt like mine. It felt alive, I suppose, in a way that made me feel like a stranger intruding on something important.

But I think that is the point. To get your work to a point where you can let it go, that you couldn’t hold onto it even if you tried. The point is to become a bit of a stranger to the work. Give each other space. Write so that the play solves its own problems and no longer needs you.

I supposed I just needed to be reminded of the joy of a rehearsal room, of revisiting a play after a time away, to learn how to look at something you know so intimately with new curosity.

And curiosity glues that whole universe together.