From psychology to playwrighting: Vermont native stages work in New York City

She came to the University of Vermont to study psychology. Four years after earning her degree, Claire Crowley has moved to New York City to pursue another career option, as a playwright.

The 2019 UVM graduate is about to see her script “The Box Office” staged in what she refers to as an “off-off Broadway” production. The play runs Saturday, Oct. 28, through Tuesday, Nov. 7, at The Tank in Manhattan. On its website, the nonprofit arts center refers to itself as “a home for emerging artists.”

Playwrights and psychologists, of course, both delve into the minds of their subjects, so on some level the shift in Crowley’s life is a natural one. Crowley, who grew up in Sharon and Hartland, replied to questions by email from the Burlington Free Press about her years at UVM and the shift toward the stage. These are her answers, slightly edited for length and clarity.

Working at UVM's Royall Tyler Theatre

Burlington Free Press: Tell us about your time at UVM. It sounds like you switched gears from psychology to playwriting.

Claire Crowley: When I started college at UVM I was very undecided in everything − what I wanted to major in and who I was … I was a good student in high school and was used to just coasting. I got my first C ever and even though it wasn't the first time I felt like an outsider, I remember feeling completely out of my element (turns out most people feel this way in their first year of college). The only thing that brought me a sense of stability and certainty was a friend who sang Ingrid Michaelson duets with me in the Music Hall on campus and my work-study position at the Royall Tyler Theatre in their box office.

During the end of my first year, though, I took a class in Human Development & Family Studies (HDFS) in the College of Education. It was the first time since being in school that I finally felt excited about learning.  In my second year at UVM, I declared it as my major, and decided to be a musical theater minor. That lasted for just a semester. I got way too nauseous before Theater 101 simply by anticipating my performance for a class of eight people. So, I quit the minor.

While I was in the HDFS department, I found a mentor who encouraged me to do research with her. Since then, I found a passion for research on intimate partner and sexual violence research and advocacy and thought, "I'm going to be a professor just like my mentor and do this for the rest of my life.”

I went straight into a Ph.D. program in counseling psychology at the University of Oregon after I graduated from UVM. At first I loved it, but then the pandemic hit. I started to lose interest at the end of my first year ... I went home during the summer of 2020 and spent it at my mom and stepdad's house, and played tennis and had outdoor social-distancing time with my dad.

Second year of graduate school began and so did my clinical work … Then, during the first term … I got a phone call that my stepdad had died very suddenly.

I took emergency leave from school and went home. It was a surreal and awful few months. When I finally got the courage to go back to school, I decided I couldn't do the Ph.D. I would graduate in the spring with a master's. With this new plan, I had some free time on my hands and a lot of grief boiling over inside of me.

I took a one-off playwriting course online through Oregon Contemporary Theatre … I hadn't felt so inspired since I was in a class with my mentor on feminism and research at UVM. It was like all this long-lost playfulness and curiosity and joy and love found its way into a Zoom room with people I never would've met if I hadn't decided to sign up for the class ... And all by hearing people's stories and sharing my own. I wrote a 10-minute dark comedy about a funeral for a dog and it was sort of game over after that. I graduated with my master's, but I had new, secret dreams − to write plays.

Plays unite people in empathy

BFP: What is it about writing plays that excites you?

CC: It's an art form that brings people together in community and empathy, in both the process of writing − unless you're a person who doesn't want feedback or readers, which I'm not − and the final-ish product of actually watching actors give life to the words on the page. I'm also excited by how much I don't know about playwriting and how much I have yet to learn. I also just love writing outrageous characters, putting them in scenes together, and letting them just talk to each other.

Inspired by her stepfather's death

BFP: What was the inspiration for “The Box Office”?

CC: I was working in a box office in California after graduating with my master's degree … It was just me, the manager, and the assistant manager in a tiny room (a box) dealing with some absurd customer demands. And the loss of my stepdad was pretty fresh.

I can't remember the exact moment that I had the idea for this play in particular, but I do think it was a seedling for a long time. I've experienced a lot of loss, starting at a very young age, from friends to family. It's been a story raging inside me for probably over a decade.

I alluded to some of the inspiration before when I said my stepdad died in 2020, which was the catalyst for wanting to write something for him and to express how sad and angry I was − it sort of tore apart every notion I had had about my future with my family. But what made his death so much more haunting, and what absolutely gutted me, is that when I was 15, my first stepdad died of cancer.

When I was alone in Oregon after my stepdad passed in 2020, I walked the streets listening to music and just crying. Every day. What I started to realize was these thoughts that would enter my brain and try to deny me my experience of grief and deny the relationship I'd had with my stepdad … Like, "You shouldn't post about him on Instagram because he was only your stepdad and you know what people are going to say about you, right? That you're just looking for sympathy." And all these other feelings came up, feelings about my first stepdad that I'd kept lidded for eight or so years, which started to bubble over and overlap with the grief for my second stepdad. So it was kind of like two different grief experiences that I was feeling at the same time. And all the while I was just so sad and angry that I was denied family, not once, but twice. It didn't make sense. A part of me wrote this play to make sense of that experience.

I wrote this play (a dark comedy, of course) about feeling on the outskirts of one's own grief experience. It's about perspectives of grief − who is "allowed" to grieve and for whom and what? And the unexpected people who help us along the way.

I wrote it for a younger version of me who wasn't kind to herself, I wrote it for my little sister, for my mom, for my stepdad, Jay, and my stepdad, Brad. And for my friends who have lost love.

Staging a play in New York

BFP: What was the process like to get your play produced in New York City?

CC: It's a lot. Because I don't have a formal degree in playwriting or in the arts at all, it's been a challenge to figure out what opportunities are out there and how to get my foot in the door. I don't think I would've been able to get my play produced and on its feet without the support of a friend and playwright named Joey. They were kind enough to hang out with me when I first moved to the city, and over lunch they'd tell me about their projects. From there we would exchange pages and give each other feedback. It was through Joey that I heard about The Tank − a home for emerging artists. They encouraged me to do a staged reading of “The Box Office” and so I sent in a proposal. The Tank accepted. I got together a cast and a director and we read it to a house of 56 people − sold out (tickets were free, but still!).

Based on the success of that and positive feedback from the audience, I submitted a proposal to The Tank to put it up as a full production. They accepted it as "The Tank Presents ..." programming which provides some marketing materials and a completely free theater space to the artist. The rest is self-production. So I raised a good chunk of change to hire actors, a director, a lighting designer, stage manager, sound designer, and to have a small (and I mean SMALL) budget for props, some marketing, costumes, and a VERY MINIMAL set.

'New and emerging theater'

BFP: How do you feel now that the production is about to open?

CC: I'm just so happy that a group of theater artists believe in the play enough to want to be a part of this process and journey with me. Everyone is working so hard and giving it their all. And I feel so lucky to be in the room with the actors and director in rehearsals − to be asked what the writer's intention was when X happens is powerful … I was so inspired by the interpretations of the director, Claire Marieb, and the actors during the first week of rehearsals that I ran home and rewrote a couple lines and added some banter that's specific to their talents. Even if there's a night where hardly anyone shows up, I just feel very lucky to be a part of new and emerging theater in NYC.

If you go

WHAT: “The Box Office,” a play by University of Vermont graduate Claire Crowley

WHEN: Saturday, Oct. 28-Tuesday, Nov. 7

WHERE: The Tank, 312 W. 36th St., New York

INFORMATION: $25. www.thetanknyc.org

Contact Brent Hallenbeck at bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com.

This article originally appeared on Burlington Free Press: The Tank in Manhattan putting on play by Vermont native about grieving