Men & Guns: An Interview with Kingsville Playwright Andrew Hinderaker

Andrew Hinderaker, author of Kingsville, discusses masculinity, school shootings, and the inspiration for his plays.

Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your writing.
My writing... hmm... well lately it seems to be focused pretty squarely on masculinity. In the piece before Kingsville, I tried to explore why there's such a drastically high rate of suicide among men (and college aged men in particular). In Kingsville, I hit on masculinity even more overtly while taking a look at gun violence and rampage school shootings.

I don't know if it's a by-product of political correctness, but it seems like we're hesitant to explore some of these topics from a gendered lens. And it's like, hello, 80% of suicides are completed by men, and 100% of the rampage school shooters are male. And yet we keep responding to these tragedies with the same constricted view of masculinity that helped give rise to them.

As you can tell, I can get kind a little worked up about this topic. Which, I suppose, is why I write about it.

Describe your play Kingsville and its inspiration.
I was in Savannah, Georgia at the time of the Virginia Tech shooting. I was in a rental car, and I started to listen to radio call-in shows. Every caller I heard insisted the tragedy would have been averted if the other students had been armed.

It's hard to describe how I felt sitting there in the car. Except to say I think we all have moments where the ground shifts beneath our feet, and the things we believed to be certain are cast into doubt. For me, those moments of utter confusion, where I feel like my own neighbors speak a different language, are moments which usually trigger the start of a play. So I figured, all right, let's have a world where all the students are armed, and let's see what happens.

What is your writing process and how does the workshop process factor into it?
My process varies from project to project. For this project, I wrote the first two scenes, then quickly realized I needed to do a whole lot more research. So I spent the next few months researching school shootings, gun violence, and masculinity. Then I wrote the first draft, which was a big hot mess, as my first drafts often are.

I generally need time off between each draft to get some distance from the material. So I worked on another play for a month, then came back to Kingsville, and wrote a second draft. I did the same thing for the third. After the third or fourth, Stage Left helped me throw together a table reading, and we did another table reading after a subsequent draft.
So I entered the LeapFest process with a fifth or sixth draft of the play. This was a pretty ideal time for me, because I knew the overarching structure was sound, but that some of the scenes needed major work. Meg (McCarthy, the director) was able to set a rehearsal schedule that really allowed me to explore those scenes.

How has the play changed during LeapFest?
I've made edits to every scene in the play, and completely overhauled the two biggest scenes. I was also able to work with Meg and Cat Dean to flesh out the character of Audrey. As the lone female in a very male world, I wanted to be sure that she didn't fall so far on the outskirts that she seemed like some sort of device.

What was your greatest challenge in writing this play?
Honestly, probably feeling like I deserved to write the play. At the risk of sounding self-indulgent, I want to always feel like I'm the best person in the world to write whatever play I'm writing. Seeing as I don't have personal ties to school shootings, I definitely had moments early on where I wondered, "Who am I to write this play?" And you just simply don't approach a topic like school shootings without deep sensitivity and respect for those who've been affected. You just don't.

Once I realized that the play was less about school shootings, and more about masculinity, I felt like I was offering a different viewpoint than I'd heard, and one which ultimately paid respect to those who have been affected. And since I have strong personal ties to the research on masculinity that's presented in the play, I felt like I was well positioned to write the piece.
Beyond that initial hurdle, there were a number of challenges with this play. It's probably the most ambitious thing I've written, both in terms of structure and character - the people in this play make very bold decisions. And no question it was invaluable having the actors' feedback throughout the rehearsal process.

What's next for you?
Well... after back-to-back plays about suicide and school shootings, I decided it was time for a comedy. I wrote the first draft of a play entitled, I Am Going to Change the World, right before we went into rehearsals for LeapFest, and we had a reading of the play in April in New York that was really encouraging. So starting next week, I'll get to work on a second draft, and we'll do a staged reading of the piece in Chicago this summer.

The final LeapFest performance of Kingsville will be Thursday, May 28th at 7:30 pm.