Katie Grant Shalin takes on the real modern family
Katie Grant Shalin’s play, Swimming With Jellyfish, is one of the three plays included in the Essential Theatre Festival. Her play tells the story of a family that is falling apart and yet still holding on to what is left to grasp. Heartfelt, relatable, heartbreaking, and humorous: Swimming With Jellyfish explores familial situations and pores them upon the stage honestly. Below, she talks about staying on the track, falling off of it, and what it takes to write a play about an entire family.
You can see Shalin’s play, along with other plays written by Georgia playwrights, at the Essential Theatre Festival going on now till August 11.
Q. Your play Swimming With Jellyfish is featured as one of plays in the Essential Theatre Festival. As a Georgian writer, what aspects of Georgia influenced this work?
A. Suburban life that is so much a part of the fabric of Georgia’s makeup began as the launch point for the writing. The pressurized suburban existence demands that we craft delusions of perfection: the perfect marriage, the perfect children, and the perfect family. We feel the need to create these illusions. The trappings of idyllic southern living are presented as we often attempt to put on a show for society.
Q. Your play is all about relationships and how they can fall apart, especially for family. What are some of the issues that this play entails?
A. The play examines the theme of children moving out and leaving the nest but still trying to hang on to a piece of stability represented by the comfort of the childhood home. The notion that marriages grow and yet fail under the weight of personal pressures also emerges in the play. These entrenched marital and familial relationships are like running on a track. We often just stay on the track without consideration of why we are running in the first place. Arguments are rehashed, and old conflicts resurface, the product of unresolved and often unspoken anxieties. That is until something jars us off the track: infidelity, betrayal, or perhaps a change in circumstance. These jolt the family from its patterned routine.
Q. Although taking on some serious topics and dealing with interpersonal fallouts, what brings in the humor for this seemingly serious play?
A. The family in this play is, at the core, a group of funny people who genuinely enjoy making each other laugh. I also wanted to explore the humor inherent in chaos. The layered conversations of everyday life are imbued with a frenetic energy that is both amusing and, yet ironically, can hold a family in place. Day to day family business can mask or push down the greater problems. There they remain, lingering just beneath the surface.
Q. What was your writing process like when taking on an entire family?
A. As a wife and mother, I wrote initially from the perspective of the mother. I felt though that the play had to tackle the fact that each character must have his or her own point of view. Self-focus brings about conflict within a family held together often by momentum, habit, and custom. It’s easier to stay on the track that way. When I think about what someone else may be feeling, one begins to think “that way danger lies.” We often don’t see what’s right in front of us when we are so focused on what is within us.
Q. Did the final staging of the play, from casting to design, fit what you had imagined while writing?
A. The play production is still in process. I do think, however, hearing the words spoken aloud, by actors, reveals areas and possibilities that existed in the text that I hadn’t considered when writing it. Having words come to life in the choices made by other artists make dimensions of the play apparent to me as never before. So although it’s not often exactly as I had imagined, it is what I imagined the process to be: discovery, revelation, and recognition. It is at once both what I envisioned and what I never could have envisioned while writing alone.
