The Brooklyn Rail

This is a sit-down, button-up, talking-jag between Theresa Buchheister (interviewer) and Chad Kaydo (subject) about his upcoming and very exciting debut, I’m Repeating Myself at The Brick Theater, playing now through March 15. The interview was much longer, but we yanked out our favorite parts to serve up to you, the community! Kaydo’s website says he’s “a queer playwright from Ashtabula, Ohio, who writes intimately observed plays obsessed with friendship, mortality, and the existential questions hidden in the quotidian.” He says he stands behind that, which means his website is more up-to-date than mine. My website doesn’t have an “About” page. Join us in this conversation—and in the theater.

Theresa Buchheister (Rail): Take me on a little journey, like a fun map, of this project. Where did it start? Where has it been? Where is it going?

Chad Kaydo: Is this like The Boys in the Band? “Who is she? Who was she? Who does she hope to be?” The map starts in Ohio, in my hometown, where I went for the summer of 2020. I started doing these exercises, trying to put down real conversations: a stupid little fight with my sister, a funny moment with my mother. They weren’t for a play, just to see if I could capture the texture of the conversation. I saved them in a folder and didn’t look at them until December 2023, when you and I wanted to share something at Quick + Dirty—the development series we started with The Brick. I had some other scenes I thought would be fun, but they turned out to be boring. But when I reread the Ohio scenes, there was a lot going on underneath the text. So I wrote new stuff to go around them, with context about things that have happened in my family since then—my mother and my sister were both diagnosed with cancer.

I had also been thinking about how since I didn’t start making plays until my forties, I skipped the period in your twenties where you make stuff with your friends and play whatever you want. So I thought it would be fun to cast actors who don’t necessarily match the characters, in terms of race, age, gender. And since all the scenes had me in them, it seemed fun to have everyone play Chad. That conceit has always been part of the piece—this contrast between “real” scenes from life, played in this not-quite-naturalistic way.

As you know, that Quick + Dirty presentation was really fun, so we decided to keep making the piece for The Brick. We asked actors to read a growing pile of scenes and monologues—about family, and porn, and the Gilded Age—to see what kinds of echoes we might find between them. Then you decided to leave New York last year—I prefer to say “take a break”—and go home to Kansas. There’s our map again! So I asked Carsen Joenk to direct, and we’ve been adding and cutting and reshaping the piece into what you’ll see at The Brick.

Rail: Speaking of maps and directors and spaces, how do you view the artistic landscape at present?

Kaydo: Oh gosh. You said “artistic,” but “landscape” makes my mind go to theaters we’ve lost, places where I really wanted to share my work. But that’s the economic landscape, not the artistic landscape, and unfortunately right now we spend so much of our time talking about real estate and resources instead of the work.

I was talking to William Sydney the other day, and he wishes theater people spent less time talking about budgets and more time writing artistic manifestos, which—yes, please! But also we do need to talk about equity and fair pay and where we put resources. The challenge is to put the same rigor into rethinking both how to make something and what you’re trying to make—to explore and explode the means of production as well as the aesthetics of what you’re producing. While also doing your day job!

Rail: Yes. Heard. Tell me: trends for 2025?

Kaydo: I’m buoyed by people putting up work wherever and however they can, like The Hearth and Ugly Face Theatre, Joseph Medeiros’s Telemachus at Home project, playwrights like Marissa Joyce Stamps, Ryan Drake, Joey Merlo.

The fancy nonprofit theaters are struggling—financially and artistically, I think—so we need to make our own work in new ways. That’s really hard, but also exciting and necessary. I’ve been thinking a lot about how plays can address all the horrible things happening “in these times,” in ways that don’t feel didactic or preachy, which I think we’ve seen too much lately. I don’t know how to do that yet, but I’m curious.

Rail: Ah, so where do you live in this stew?

Kaydo: I’m really grateful that when I did the playwriting MFA program at Hunter College—which is incredible—I found a cohort of extraordinary artists and people: Lauren Holmes, Diana Ly, Ian Robles, and Phillip Christian Smith. We started talking about 13P and producing our own work the night we met, having dinner before classes even started.

Since I started doing this in my forties, I’m not waiting for ten years to see if someone else might want to produce my work. That’s why we started The Omnivores, and I’m so lucky to have their support.

I also consider myself lucky to be part of a larger cohort of “early career” artists, people I’ve met through Quick + Dirty, through Clubbed Thumb and Fresh Ground Pepper, through you—you’re such an amazing builder of community. And The Brick is such a valuable place, both for artists wanting to make something weird and wonderful, and as a meeting place for artists in all stages of their practice.

Rail: Yes, community! So, what excites you?

Kaydo: I love plays that are operating on multiple levels, where I’m following the story while also re-thinking some issue or idea, where my brain can’t quite keep up, where I come out with more questions than answers, but still feel like I’ve gone on a complete journey. That’s a north star for I’m Repeating Myself, to see if these seemingly disparate things—growing up queer, Our Town—can accumulate into something meaningful.

Rail: Does anything annoy or disgust you?

Kaydo: Ticket prices that keep artists from seeing each other’s work, and perpetuate a self-fulfilling prophecy loop that gives us plays made for an imagined audience that feel like such a narrow sliver of theatrical possibility. Also plays that are trying to teach me something. Also sets that cost more than all of the actors on stage will make all year.

Rail: Has anything crept up and surprised you as a person or as an artist while working on this project?

Kaydo: The first scene I wrote of this play—a silly argument with my sister about getting our parents’ internet passwords—is like a blueprint for everything the piece has become. How does that happen? I’m also knocked out by the generosity of the people involved. Alma Cuervo, who I watched in Wendy Wasserstein’s Uncommon Women and Others on PBS in high school, is now playing me, in a play, with me. That’s insane.

Rail: If you were to adapt this play into a still life, what would be placed in the frame?

Kaydo: Oooo, it would be a grid of black-and-white photos of my friends and family, sewn together by hand. In the center would be a picture of my mother as Emily Webb in her 1966 high school senior class production of Our Town. It would be displayed with a turntable and a pile of records: Fleetwood Mac, Talking Heads, Fleet Foxes. You might see something like that at The Brick.

Rail: My favorite ending is a beginning … Any art you are looking forward to in 2025?

Kaydo: Zoë Geltman is one of my favorite performers, so I’m excited for her play A(u)nts! at The Brick. I want Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams’s Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods to run in perpetuity, incorporating the lesbian issues of the week, like a bonkers, sapphic Saturday Night Live. So I’m psyched for that to come back.