Stargazers
Page 73 Presents The World Premiere Of Majkin Holmquist’s Stargazers, Directed By Colette Robert
Photos by Daniel J Vasquez
APRIL 8 - MAY 4, 2024
Connelly Theater
220 E 4th St
New York, NY 10009
TICKETS GO ON SALE FEBRUARY 8, 2024
SYNOPSIS
In Stargazers, a grieving mother contemplates selling her Kansas farm – guided, she thinks, by the ghost of her daughter. While her ex-husband and neighbors fight to keep the land, an East Coast developer schemes to build a progressive “utopia” that would alter the landscape forever.
We sat down with the playwright, director and Page 73 Artistic Director to learn more about Stargazers, this ambitious work of grim humor and heartful horror—a play both warm and barbed with social and political insight, set in an expansive agrarian landscape teeming with life and death. This land, based on Holmquist’s own family’s central Kansas farm, pulses with a strange energy: electrified by its ghosts, it has borne witness to tragedy and transformation.
Rita Olds wants to be done with her family’s Kansas farmland. Surprising everyone in her community, she is considering an offer from an East Coast developer promising to build boutique feminist utopias in middle America. One problem: letting them dig up her land begs the question of what to do with the body she buried on it. A nocturne of pasture parties and funeral pyres, skeletons and ghosts, Stargazers tells the intimate story of the land through the lives of those who shape and use it to their own ends.
When she moved in 2015 from central Kansas’s Smoky Valley region to the East Coast, homesickness instilled in Majkin Holmquist the desire to write a play from the perspective of a plot of land like the dilapidated farm her family purchased from distant relatives.
“Being on this piece of land ignites my imagination — it’s so stunning but also eerie; with its overgrown corrals and broken down barn. From the East Coast, I started experimenting with telling a story about the land, and what it might want to say about the people coming on and off it and changing it. I wanted to ask: what is our responsibility to land’s history, and to its future?”
Beyond the land itself is another character who never speaks but whose presence is felt throughout the narrative: Cate, Rita’s daughter who would have inherited the farm, but died in a horrific accident. Characters — friends, family members, the subordinates of “progressive” corporate visionaries — merge around this unknowable place and the powerful memory of the figure who died on it.
“I was very excited by the idea of trying to figure out how to express an unseen character’s arc, when she’s essentially an inanimate object—she’s been dead many years, she’s just memory and bones at this point. I remember going into a reading we did earlier this year, wondering if the morbid humor would work, and I was so pleased at the response—that people could at once see its bleakness and its humor and how the two feed each other.”
Stargazers reunites Page 73 with Colette Roberts who helmed our production of STEW and who was a script reader for the 2022 Playwriting Fellowship, for which Holmquist was a finalist (before ultimately receiving the honor in 2023), was enamored of Holmquist's work when she encountered it.
The director, who helmed a workshop of Stargazers this past Spring, says, “I read another play that Majkin submitted, and I've never done this before, because I was reading hundreds of plays and we read about 20 pages of each—but I asked if I could read the whole play. I was so struck by Majkin’s talent and voice.” She adds of Stargazers:
“I remember the first time hearing it around the table for the March 2023 workshop, I was so obsessed with its dark humor. I’m excited by how every character in the play is right and wrong about multiple things, how Majkin shows the nuances and gray areas of the arguments they’re having.”
Holmquist’s familiarity with both Kansas farmland and America’s biggest metropolis are evoked in the play’s intersection and complication of biases within two poles of the country: with interactions both tinged by – or, sometimes, assumed to be tinged by – coastal neoliberal condescension and white rural bigotry and parochialism.
Holmquist says, “I was experiencing a lot of conversations about the Great Plains, Midwest, Red States, fly-over country, and encountering a lot of really strange assumptions about the place that I come from—and on the flip side, I now go home and encounter very strange assumptions about the East Coast. These two conversations are seldom capturing the reality of the other. I wanted that feeling to persist in the play itself where people are coming with this assumption about who is on this farmland, and the politics of the people there—and then the people in Kansas also see through the lens of their assumptions, about the people who want to change this piece of land.”
“Stargazers feels to me in conversation with other great Page 73-produced writers Samuel D. Hunter and Leah Nanako Winkler,” says Page 73 Artistic Director Michael Walkup. “Certainly the evocation of home and the comedy of closely observed characters – and Majkin also shares their interest in offering audiences glimpses of what feels like a vast, maybe terrifying unknown that pervades our daily lives though is often invisible to us. We’re also returning to the Connelly Theater for Majkin’s ghost story, an apt follow up to our last premiere in that space, John J. Caswell, Jr.’s supernatural Man Cave.”
Majkin Holmquist is a playwright originally from the Smoky Valley region in central Kansas where she was co-founder of The Next Stage Theatre Company. Her play Stargazers will be produced in Spring 2024 by Page 73 Productions where she was the 2023 Playwriting Fellow. Her play Tent Revival received a digital production through Paula Vogel’s Bard at the Gate series in partnership with the McCarter Theatre Center in 2023. Other plays include two headed calf, Every Anne Frank, Quickmatch, Dog Pack Play, and Skinflint. Credits include The Quonsets (co-written with Alex Lubischer, Yale Cabaret), Broken Melodies (WVIT Women in Theatre Festival), and Styx Songs (contributing writer, Yale Cabaret). Her work has been developed at New York Stage and Film, Woodshed Collective, Bay Street Theatre, Page 73, Ucross, and Roundabout Theatre Company. She is currently a member of Midnight Oil Collective, Page 73’s Interstate 73 Writers Group, and is a Lecturer in Playwriting at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. She holds a BA in Secondary English Education from Bethany College and an MFA in Playwriting from the Yale School of Drama.
Colette Robert is a director and playwright from Los Angeles, based in New York. She directed the world premieres of STEW by Zora Howard at Page 73 (Pulitzer Prize Finalist) and Behind the Sheet by Charly Evon Simpson at Ensemble Studio Theatre, where she is a member. She recently directed the first New York revival of Crumbs from the Table of Joy by Lynn Nottage with Keen Company. Regional credits include City Theatre Company, Penumbra Theatre, and Williamstown Theatre Festival. Colette is an alumnus of The Drama League's Beatrice Terry Residency, Lincoln Center Directors Lab, and The Public Theater’s Van Lier Directing Fellowship. Her play The Harriet Holland Social Club Presents the 84th Annual Star-burst Cotillion in the Grand Ballroom of the Renaissance Hotel, which she also directed, premiered last spring, produced by The Movement Theatre Company and New Georges. She is an adjunct lecturer at NYU and the 2023 SDCF Denham Fellow.
Page 73 receives public funds from the NEA, the New York Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Majkin Holmquist is the 2023-2024 Page 73 Tow Foundation Playwright-in-Residence.
