{photo: Playwright Ginny Foster, whose play Starvation Heights will be part of the JAW: Made In Oregon Reading series on Wednesday July 9th at 7:30 pm.}

JAW’s LitMan, Mead Hunter, caught up with Ginny Foster this weekend to talk with her about her JAW: Made in Oregon reading, coming up this Wednesday. Her play Starvation Heights (based on the popular true-crime novel of the same by Gregg Olsen) may surprise some of Ginny’s long-time fans.

Q: Your voice in Starvation Heights sounds different from any of your previous plays that I’ve read. Is there a particular reason for that?

A: I didn’t start writing until late in life, so I had to work through all the stuff a younger playwright deals with early in the career: autobiographical plays, plays which are vehicles for the writer’s pet cause, plays which follow a traditional structure — either because you don’t yet know the alternatives — or, later, because you are afraid theaters in smaller towns (my probable market) wouldn’t touch anything that looked at all like Len Jenkins or Mac Wellman or anyone else mentioned in New Playwriting Strategies by Paul Castagno, which I was reading when I first thought about Starvation Heights.

Q: So having worked through these other structures, you thought this latest opus was innovative enough for JAW? Or wild enough for Portland in general?

A: When it came to plot structure and the story, I realized that I had to withhold certain information, so only a non-chronological form would work. Once I asked Matt Zrebski what Stark Raving Theatre looked for in scripts, and he said “something outrageous.” I replied “outrageous in content? Or outrageous in structure?” And he said : “Both.”

Q: Do you feel Starvation Heights is an outrageous play?

A: When I read Gregg Olsen’s book, I realized Linda Hazzard was an outrageous character. In Karin Magaldi’s playwriting class at Portland State — where fracturing the rules of the traditional play was encouraged — I wrote a number of successful one-acts, often outrageous in form and/or content. Starvation Heights is different from my other plays in that I tried to take an ax to any places — or characters — based on my own philosophical and political views, of which I have many little darlings to murder. Most of the true-crime books portray the killer as entirely evil, and do not raise the question of “why does evil exist?” or “why is this person evil?” I left the former question ALONE, because entering that forest would lead me to my usual philosophical dead-end trails.

Q: How did you make these philosophical questions dramatic, rather than rhetorical?

A: In dealing with Linda Hazzard, I tried to make her “fuzzy” — leaving more up to the audience. Why did she do it? Was she motivated by greed and ambition or by the desire to help the sick? What was Sam’s role [her husband] in molding her— did he play upon her own ambition or upon her messianic beliefs about herself?

Q: You mentioned earlier that you’d like to explore this even more, in your post-JAW rewrites.

A: I can’t wait to see what I write next!
Please join us for Ginny’s reading this Wednesday July 9th at 7:30pm in the Ellyn Bye Studio.

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