Playwright Sarah Kosar interview: 'I want to understand why somebody would want a gun'

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Zoe Paskett6 June 2019

“Being an American, I’ve always had this fear of being shot,” says playwright Sarah Kosar.

Underneath the throwaway manner in which she expresses this fear, she’s deadly serious.

“When I was home over Thanksgiving, I went to the mall with my niece and a TV fell down, but I thought it was a shooting and I literally grabbed her and went to the ground. She was like, What are you doing? I’m sorry, when I’m in America, I feel like a shooting could happen at any second.”

Kosar’s new play Armadillo, directed by Sara Joyce, is running at the Yard Theatre in Hackney Wick. It follows the story of Sam, a young woman (played by Michelle Fox) in a small American town who lives with a gun at her hip after being abducted as a teenager. When another local teen goes missing, Sam has to confront the choices she makes to protect herself.

“It's all about who and what we need to feel protected,” she says. “It’s about how we look at other people’s pain and trauma. I wanted to understand why somebody would want a gun. I also thought using the metaphor of a gun was quite a good way to explore how we navigate feeling safe in a world that really feels very unsafe, especially for women.”

Having moved to the UK from Pennsylvania a number of years ago, she suddenly became at risk of needing to leave when her company were no longer able to sponsor her visa. It made her start to consider what life would be like for her if she would have to move back, considering in particular the USA's attitudes towards abortion and gun control.

While writing Armadillo, she did some research, finding that there are around 2,500 gun dealerships in Pennsylvania and no wait time to buy a firearm. As of 2017, there were just 11 Planned Parenthood centres in the state with abortion services. There are six states in the USA where there is now only one abortion clinic.

The battle between “pro-life” and “pro-choice” voices in the USA has raged for decades. A wave of new laws introduced this year to reduce the amount of time in which abortions can be sought is perhaps the biggest threat to abortion access since the Supreme Court legalised it with the 1973 Roe v. Wade case.

“I’m quite nervous about the way things are going to go,” Kosar says. “We regulate guns far less than we do women’s bodies. Why do people think they are entitled to more autonomy with a firearm to hurt somebody else's body than women are allowed over our own bodies?

"It’s unbelievable. You can’t be forced to donate organs when you’re dead but you can be forced to carry a fetus with more autonomy than you. It's like a pregnant person has fewer rights to their body than a corpse does.”

Despite her view on guns – “they’re horrific” – she didn’t want to present a stance in the play: “I want to have a moral grappling and things to not be so clear cut. I want us to understand why somebody wants a gun. We might not agree with that but we’re kind of rooting for her if that’s what she needs.

“I think right now we’re too binary: this is good, this is bad, this is right, this is wrong. As a writer, I want to write women who f*** up. They don’t need to be super woke or have it all figured out.”

Her writing, which she describes herself as “weird”, uses bizarre metaphors to talk about serious issues. A previous play Mumburger, which ran at the Old Red Lion Theatre, talked about how people digest grief: a woman asks her husband and daughter to eat her as an environmentally friendly way to combat animal agriculture. It is literally about how grief sits in the body.

Kosar makes use of the specific conditions of theatre in her storytelling. She wants the audience to feel deeply what they are watching rather than think too much about it: “I want it to sit more in your body than your brain, and I think theatre can do that better than any other art form.

“I’m always using a metaphor to ask an unanswerable question,” she says, “and show those private weird moments. I’m a weird person and I want to see other weird people on stage.”

In a high school graduating class of 800 students, she was voted the “most unique”, which she says was “definitely not a compliment”. It seems that theatre has become the perfect arena for Kosar to express her individuality.

“I feel like I’m walking into my weird uniqueness and fully living inside the suit of it rather than having it hanging in my closet,” she laughs. “Now, I’m proud and weird. I get out my little plastic trophy that says ‘Most Unique 2006’ and I’m like, f*** yeah!”

Kosar's approach to the topics she covers is to coat them in strange surrealism, but the message is no less impactful: "It's so obvious but I think we should all have control over how we use our bodies. We need to continue to be vigilant in talking about it."

Armadillo runs at the Yard Theatre until June 22, theyardtheatre.co.uk

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