The Brooklyn Rail

When you're going eighty on the freeway and a rabbit darts into your headlights, do you hit the brakes? Maybe not. And while you might feel a flicker of remorse, you might also believe that death is just another casualty of speed and progress, a quiet sacrifice to the road.

For playwright Sophie McIntosh, that moment is a litmus test for empathy—and how long we’re willing to sit with the darkest parts of ourselves. What does this act mean for the killer, the victim, and the people left to clean up the remains?

McIntosh teams up with director Nina Goodheart to explore these questions. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Kenneal Patterson (Rail): Why center a play around roadkill? And what does the title really mean?

Sophie McIntosh: The play’s main character collects roadkill. In the world of the play, it’s an act of honoring them, of taking on a responsibility that really belongs to all of us.

It’s such a striking symbol: death caused by progress. Roadkill only exists because we built roads and prioritized speed over life. In Road Kills, the protagonist collects animal remains. It’s an act of honoring, but it also raises questions: Is it empathetic or twisted? What does it mean to take on collective responsibility for destruction we barely register?

The title makes that violence active. That’s the thing the road does. The road gets us places, but it also kills.

A big part of the play is that when one character is on the road, the other has to be spotting. Even in a rural area, if you’re not paying attention, you can get hit. That idea of constant awareness, and of the road’s destructive potential, is a recurring theme.

Rail: What draws these two characters into this strange, shared world? And how do they feel about collecting roadkill?

McIntosh: The characters are ten years apart. She’s a college student and very plugged in. He’s more old-school, more spiritual in a way she doesn’t really understand.

Owen, the main guy, approaches collecting roadkill from a spiritual place. It’s like last rites, giving animals dignity.

Jaki doesn’t want to be there. It’s court-assigned community service. But over time, she comes to find meaning in it.

Both characters are struggling with the idea of redemption for the things they’ve done or the things that have been done to them.

Rail: What’s your relationship to Wisconsin, and how does it shape the world of the play?

McIntosh: Road Kills is a love letter to Wisconsin, but it casts a critical eye on parts of the culture that destroy people’s lives: alcoholism, isolation, certain dynamics of abuse.

I don’t ever want to say, “Wisconsin is the worst place ever,” because it’s not. It’s beautiful and unique. Theater gives you a way to immerse people in that atmosphere and look at it through the lives of specific characters.

I’m really interested in the people who are born in Wisconsin, live in Wisconsin and die in Wisconsin. People who find full and meaningful lives in that environment.

Rail: What do you wish more people understood about Wisconsin and rural life?

McIntosh: There’s something about the flyover state lifestyle that people sort of go “ew” at: everything closes by five, nothing’s open on Sundays. But there’s so much going on, so much weird culture, and it’s rich in its own way.

I’d call my life in Wisconsin rural-suburban. If you turn right out of my driveway, you’re in farmland. But my hometown Sun Prairie is also a suburb of Madison, so I had access to some theater. I struggled a lot less as a young gay person there than I would’ve just five towns over.

Rail: You’ve called your work “Midwestern existentialism.” What does that mean?

McIntosh: It’s about the limits placed on your life by geography. What opportunities do you not have access to? What does it mean to feel stuck?

Wisconsin isn’t just a flyover state, it’s a punchline. Serial killers, cheese, cows, beer. That’s not romantic like other parts of the Midwest. And when the media shows you that version of your home, you start wondering, “Is that who I am?”

Midwest nice is something I think about a lot. You’re raised to be accommodating, to never express your real opinions. Coming to New York, where people say what they need, was refreshing. But it also made me realize how deeply ingrained those habits were.

Rail: You brought your team on a road trip through Wisconsin. What did you want them to see?

McIntosh: We drove over four hundred miles in five days and saw a lot of roadkill. I showed them the weird road signs: pro-life billboards next to cheese houses, next to the Wisconsin Dells magic show.

We walked around a hunting store that had a gun library. Nina, who grew up in Boston and went to Yale, was like, “What the fuck is this?” That part was really fun for me, to show them where I came from.

Rail: How does the play explore our relationship to animals, and what that relationship reveals about us?

McIntosh: I’ve always loved animals. As a kid, I wanted to be an ethologist, which is an animal behavioral specialist.

There’s been a big shift in Wisconsin from family farms to factory farms. I’m really interested in how humans view animals and what that says about us.

If you hit an animal, you're probably not cleaning it up. You might call someone, but most people just keep driving. If you stepped on something walking down the street, you’d stop. But in a car, you don’t. I’m interested in what that says about our empathy, and how we categorize animals.

Rail: Does working closely with animals build empathy or dull it?

McIntosh: Both. On dairy farms, some people feel close to the cows. For others, it’s like, “That’s just a number in a pen.”

One scene in the play deals with artificial insemination. Near my hometown is one of the largest bovine semen depositories in America. If you do that job, how do you view those animals? Less sentient? Less worthy of empathy?

I think to do that work, you have to compartmentalize. Animal husbandry in general, or the ways we touch, use, and manage animals, is something I’m fascinated by.

Rail: This play touches on some heavy themes like trauma and addiction. How were you able to confront them?

McIntosh: In Wisconsin, your first DUI is basically a freebie. It’s not a felony. You might get a ticket, if that. I explained that to my friends and they were like, “You get a free DUI?”

That’s part of the drinking culture there. The Tavern League has so much lobbying power in the state Congress. Weed won’t be legalized there for a long time because of them. You can be a functioning alcoholic in Wisconsin, and it’s accepted in a way it wouldn’t be elsewhere.

This is a play about the impact of abuse more than about abuse itself. It doesn’t make light of survivors, but there’s a lot of humor in the physical grossness of the job they’re doing and in the dynamic between the two characters.

New Yorker theater critic Helen Shaw put us in the summer culture preview and called it “Sophie McIntosh’s abuse drama.” And I was like, I promise it’s funny! But you can’t call it an “abuse dramedy,” that sounds terrible.

Rail: What kind of reaction do you want from the audience?

McIntosh: There’s a ten-minute sequence that people have described as “watching a car crash.” But we build up to it. You need that foundation so you’re not just seeing these characters as tragic figures, but as full people.

I didn’t want this to be a nightmare slog. There’s comic relief. There’s also some blood, some guts, some ruptured organs, you know, all the good stuff.

The audience response to the final scene at the Tank’s Frontera Series was one of the most rewarding and complex I’ve ever experienced. People gasped, muttered, sat in silence. In the lobby afterward, they weren’t just saying, “I liked this” or “I didn’t like that.” They were debating the moral weight of it.

That’s the best feeling as a playwright. That your play becomes a conversation.