An Interview with Crystal Finn, playwright of Find Me Here

Do you think your myriad experiences of Summerworks as an actor (8, including the character Crystal Blynn) prepared you especially to be produced in Summerworks? Is it strange to be on the other side of it?

Yes and Yes! Definitely. I know the space, I know the time-frame, I know so many of the designers. I have the rhythm of the festival in me! And it HAS been strange to be on the other side. Strange and wonderful! Same room, different view!

You are an only child. Do you have any insight into why plays about three sisters are so iconic and resonant? Do you think they are more universal then plays about brothers (I do not think I would read myself into a play about brothers).

My Mother is one of three sisters, and her mother was one of three sisters. So that shape is sort of in my DNA. I am drawn to it. I think the triangle of the three sisters in plays is so interesting. It’s not about competition. It’s not about who is going to win. It’s about how each sister is an individual inside of this particular shape. So the tension I think is there between the self and the group. Whereas maybe the brother’s play is about the self versus the self??? But as you said, I’m only child—so all of that is just a guess.

How much of Plano is in there, or your chosen sisterhood with Plano cast mates and best friends Susannah and Miriam?

I wasn’t thinking of it consciously when I started the play. I was really thinking of my own family. It’s really about these generations of women in my family. But then also of course it’s about what I let my imagination do with those women, which I am sure IS informed by the waters of Plano and those women who were my own sisters in it for so long; it’s fair to say once those waters pass through you like that in such a particular way they are a part of everything you write or act—plays are cumulative like that. The Borges reference IS a subtle but direct homage to Plano. Once I realized that I was writing this triangle shape myself, I wanted that link there as a secret sign post—kind of like a thread running through things.

Are other plays in there? I feel like I sniff a little bit of Antlia Pneumatica, Anne Washburn’s which you and I were in together at Playwrights in 2016.

That play is also set in a very specific place. You feel the place IN the writing, in the rhythms. I love that about that play. There were off-stage children in that play also! I think they may have even been hammering something????

You wrote this play while sequestered up in the mountains during the lockdown (and shared it in our early-career writers’ group zooms, which were a total lifeline and also I forget everything that happened via zoom). Do you have a sense of what a pandemic play is and whether this is one?

I was working on one play in the group and then when I got to that house, and I was there with all these memories and ghosts, I stopped writing that play and wrote this one, very quickly. I don’t think I would have written it without that group and those zoom sessions. It was a link to the real world. But I also don’t think I could have written that play if I hadn’t been so isolated. I was alone in this place that was a part of my childhood, but I was there, really for the first time, without any of the people normally there! It allowed me to see the place and them more clearly.

What made you choose to make the children invisible?

Who wants to cast a real child?!! Maybe it was some meeting of that practical problem with the sense of the unseen that I was beginning to investigate. I don’t remember exactly. But I can imagine it being a moment where the limitations of theater were very helpful in clarifying for me what I was exploring in the play. And also…everyone was gone. Theater was gone. That whole part of my life was invisible—just totally on pause. I hadn’t really thought of it until now, but that may have been part of the impulse—to express this huge, huge, gap. In that sense I do think it was very much a pandemic play.