Values.

Theater Is Hard interviews playwrights & kUnST fEsT founders Kate Kremer, Lisa Clair & Rachel Kauder Nalebuff.

My last Theater Is Hard piece, (A Woman Could Have Fixed It), was my response to the now somewhat controversial New York Times interview with former (but not for 2 years) Public Theater AD Oskar Eustis where:

a) he quoted Karl Marx and, being a millionaire at the helm of a charity, didn’t feel weird about that at all.

b) he said: “Nobody gives a [expletive] if you fly values and you go bankrupt; you’re not an example of anything but failure. You’ve got to show that you can succeed with values.”

Sure.

Then let’s talk about values.

As mentioned in my last piece, the Public’s only female AD, JoAnne Akalaitis, tried to “succeed with values” by paying artists and offering child care. She was fired for it. (Read the full interview in my 2022 book The Lost Conversation: Interviews With An Enduring Avant-Garde, published by 53rd State Press, or the referenced excerpt here.)

I don’t know.

Paying people and taking care of their kids feel like pretty good values to me. They almost feel like rights.

Sorry.

My sarcasm and bitterness is getting the better of me, as it often does.

So, let me hand this conversation over to some women far more articulate than me about the values Akalaitis was pushing for: Kate Kremer, Lisa Clair and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff.

This week I interviewed these three playwrights and original founders of kUnST fEsT 2026, running September 14th-20th at The Collapsible Hole.

kUnST fEsT is, in their words:

—-brought into being by 3 playwrights in the child-rearing vortex of awe, exhaustion, interruption, grief, extreme mundanity, and inspiration. Lisa Clair, Rachel Kauder Nalebuff and Kate Kremer stole time—between caring, peeing, and teaching—to create experimental plays.

With the festival, these women are living their values: Each is producing the other’s play in the festival, all artists are paid and all children cared for. And, most excitingly for me, their plays live in that beautiful avant-garde stratosphere that is so rare these days.

Please enjoy our convo & defintely grab tix to kUnST fEsT 2026!

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SARA FARRINGTON: So kUnST fEsT 2026— on your fundraising page, you wrote this faux-origin story imagining a world where arts funding is prioritized! And the people have an epiphany that theater is essential to our souls! And millions and billions of dollars pour in! And all wars stop!

(Laughter)

SF: And then you write: “just kidding, this is actually just three playwrights producing each other’s work.” Is that how kUnST fEsT came about?

KATE KREMER: Well, we all went to Brooklyn College at the same time.

SF: Ah I didn’t realize that! You had Mac [Wellman] and Erin [Courtney]?

KK: Yeah!

LISA CLAIR: I think we were the last class to have them?

KK: And our plays were very much in conversation. We’d all recently-ish had babies. The chaos and the maelstrom of having kids was present in the plays we shared. That experience of isolation— but also radical togetherness. Our work was also grappling with the political moment and the current state of the theater ecosystem. And so we tried to build a structure to support one another, to make something happen.

SF: It’s much easier to produce together as a collective. So because you trained with Mac—as did I— so I’m guessing the general aesthetic is gonna be in “MacWorld,” as in, more avant-garde. Which I just don’t see anymore. I haven’t seen anything weird in ages.

LC: I think for people who dub themselves “theater artists” it’s more rare. There’s always the niche performance art, the interventionist pop up, there are some like clowns out there causing trouble. But I think an avant-garde piece of theater theater is more rare.

RACHEL KAUDER NALEBUFF: And to linger on that earlier point, Sara for a moment— this opportunity to create kUnST fEsT came about because Lisa is a member of Immediate Medium, which allowed us to just make our work happen. Which means we can discover what our plays are. We can play in the process—the production process and rehearsal process. As opposed to having this polished thing that’s made it through a hundred different submission processes and vetted by a hundred different people, been written by committees—

SF: I know.

RKN: —and marketed.

SF: Ugh I know.

RKN: But because we could build in process, our play descriptions keep changing.

SF: But that’s good though! If you can describe your play, why write the play?

RKN: I agree! I love that!

LC: Another thing about the aesthetic is related to us being moms: we are building around the idea of capacity and care. We have this aesthetic where you see all of the seams, the debris of each of our shows is going to be visible. We’re sharing a scaffold of a set and then moving in and moving out of that scaffold really fast, ideally. Fast in, fast out, taking care of each other, making sure that the humans are coming first. It’s our main aesthetic rule.

KK: And I’d also say our shows share an aesthetic because we’ve all been playing with kids like… a lot. That energy is really alive in all three of the plays. There are these baby games that have inflected the writing. Lisa, I think about that blanket cave moment in yours? It seems like a game you could have played with Rafaela.

LC: Oh yeah.

KK: And whole tracts of my play are things that Imogen said that I transcribed because I was like… she’s bananas.

(Laughter)

KK: So I rearranged it and put it into other people’s mouths.

RKN: And all of our plays are short. You can do so much in an hour. Just like with a kid— in five minutes with a kid you can have a transformative, profound, hilarious experience. I keep trying to make my play longer, but then I cut it. It keeps coming back to an hour. I know Lisa’s is an hour and eight minutes. Being a parent, it’s like…time is limited. This is all we have. And my play for the festival, The Cycles, is built for a pregnant cast.

SF: Is it?

RKN: Yeah.

SF: I’m so curious about that.

KK: Rachel’s play was ten years in the making!

RKN: I started The Cycles from a conceptual place— thinking about theater and labor and working conditions. About ten years ago, I was living in LA surrounded by these glamorous but completely unemployed pregnant actors in the TV and film industry. And I was like oh my god all these people are being blatantly discriminated against! Out of work. And I was like…can I work with them? Can I make a play for them? I had been pregnant and had an abortion, so I hadn’t gone through the full experience of carrying a child. So again, it was much more conceptual for me. The actors I met who were so inspiring and really taught me, busted so many myths for me around pregnant characters you see on stage. So the play happened in LA and I then put it aside. But then after I had my daughter almost two years ago, I was like, oh my god, I need to do this play again— I have so much that I want to change! And strip away! Having a child for me also taught me how little language you need. So there’s a lot less language— the script is like 40 pages.

SF: I love that. Sounds very lean.

RKN: Yeah, I’m like, why did I need monologues? Having a toddler is like being in Meisner world. You’re just saying a word back and forth.

SF: That’s a good point. It’s like an exercise.

RKN: Like, there’s a whole scene in my play where the main word is “work.” People say, “are you working?” “Work?” “What do you mean, work?” “Work, work, work.” I think that’s enough. It becomes like Beckett or Churchill—toddler, Beckett, Churchill. They converge somewhere for me.

SF: I find that to be so refreshing. I haven’t seen a play like that—-unless it is Beckett or it is Churchill— in years. To speak to the pregnancy thing— pregnancy in plays is usually just a plot device. No matter what the story is— pregnancy is a complication, a big reveal. “I’m pregnant.” “Oh god I’m pregnant!” “I’ve got to tell you something…I’m pregnant.” But you never see anybody pregnant, like actually pregnant.

KK: That character always enters in a big coat.

(Laughter)

KK: That’s my favorite— whenever somebody comes onstage in a big coat, I’m like, oh boy!

SF: (Eyeroll) Here comes the plot twist.

KK: And they don’t take the coat off inside. That’s crucial.

SF: And whoever wrote that play obviously doesn’t know that you don’t need to wear a giant coat when you’re first announcing, “I’m pregnant,” because nobody can tell anyway.

(Laughter)

RKN: But back to our initial questions of infrastructure as connected to aesthetic— we want to make the shows accessible for audience members who are parents. I’ve never seen a show at 11AM. Will it work? I don’t know! But maybe it means people can come who wouldn’t otherwise come.

SF: And how about the childcare thing? Can you talk about that?

PAAL is a miracle— for any reader who might not know it’s an advocacy org whose goal is to make being an artist compatible with being a parent.

RKN: Yes, they are amazing. So they’re doing a couple things in partnership with us: they’re providing childcare vouchers for audience members. So anyone who buys a ticket can apply for a voucher and have a licensed babysitter come to your home. We’ll probably have three vouchers available (each for five hours of care).

SF: Wow.

RKN: And the care is provided by through Broadway Babysitters. PAAL is also helping us create honorariums for care (meaning anything related to access needs, eg transportation during a heatwave) for our own festival company. All so we can also create a tiny, slightly more caring world in a violent fucking nation.

SF: My kids are old enough not to need a babysitter now—which is also a miracle— but when they were younger I sometimes brought them to rehearsal. I’d occasionally get a lot of negativity for that, sometimes pushback from people. I once had a performer request, “no more kids at rehearsal.” That hurt me. They weren’t causing problems, they were just in the dressing room for stretches of time. But it was distracting to her, she had sort of an issue. But for years after that I always felt skittish about bringing them. Like this is my problem, not theirs. I don’t want to upset anyone. What’s been your experience there?

LC: It’s an impossible situation. Aside from the festival I also have a barn in the Catskills that we’re starting to make work in. My daughter’s four. So it’s a negotiation—like, do we bring Rafaela to the thing? Do I give her a job? Have her hand out lollipops to everyone? Then will it be okay? Because she feels a sense of ownership over the thing? Are people going to be upset by it? But it comes down to us cultivating an inclusive space— one that includes our children. Essentially, at its core, it has to include our children.

SF: I mean, if it doesn’t include children… what does that say? To me it says: “hey lady you need to coordinate a babysitter, so no one has to see your children.” Like, what? That’s not inclusiveness.

KK: The pragmatics of it are really difficult. PAAL is doing such amazing work, and yet the problem remains really gnarly. It’s so expensive to pay a sitter. And you’re gone for so long. If you add up the show, the travel time, the tech, it’s just… you’re gone for so long. My parents are gonna come and stay with Imogen during the festival, which is gonna be great, but it’s requiring them to fly across the country. It’s these expenses— it would probably be cheaper to have a babysitter during that time, or even to have her with us. But then it’s hard on the kids, too. Carting them on the train to rehearsal.

SF: And then you’re distracted in rehearsal, too. Even just mentally. When my kids were there, I was always half with them. Because I’m their mom and I carry that mom-guilt.

KK: However good they are at entertaining themselves you still pay for it eventually.

SF: And if you pop them on iPads, then I feel bad about that. But if they’re in the room, I feel bad about that. It’s sadly a female problem. I don’t know that men feel a dad-guilt.

KK: That problem of “feeling bad”—- I don’t know what you do about that. That’s one of the banes of motherhood for me. I can feel bad about anything, you know?

SF: Talk more about that.

RKN: You cannot win. You cannot not be judged for whatever choice you make.

KK: Exactly. Any choice. It’s a problem of freedom, like it emerges from my privilege.. I have a choice about how my child is going to be cared for and whether I’m going to take her to my work. I have that panicky feeling that I could/should maximize her experience and make life as good as possible for her. But that pressure to maximize, to make things as good as possible, is actually detrimental to all of our happiness.

SF: Yes.

KK: You have to figure out a way to just be present. My partner is better at that than I am. He’ll be like, “well, this is a time when Imogen just has to… draw for a while.” And I’m like, oh, but is she getting exercise today?

SF: But it goes deeper for me. When I’m making a play, I’m the one who’s fulfilled, the self-actualized artist. Not the kids. Why should my two kids suffer for my self-actualization?! That’s how that mom-guilt manifests in my head.

LC: I often feel guilty too, but then I remember: I’ll be a better mom if I do this.

SF: That’s very true.

LC: I have to do this so I can be a better mom. Even though Rafaela might burst in here now, like “you rehearsed two days this week and now you have a meeting? What do you mean you have a meeting?! I don’t think so! It’s mommy-time!”

(Laughter)

SF: My parents were not artists. And so as a kid going to see a Broadway show or community theater or being in a school play was incredibly novel for me. It was so rare. Like, a religious experience. I felt so lucky. I almost fetishized theater because it was such a rare treat. But for my kids, theater is totally normal. They see me and my husband back and forth in rehearsal and it’s part of their lives. I’m very grateful for that.

KK: I’m right now stitching the binding on one of the books Imogen wrote during yesterday’s rehearsal.

(Kate presents a kid-made handwritten book with red stitching holding the pages together.)

KK: It’s called Little Maids. It’s genius, man.

LC: That is really great.

KK: I’m sewing the binding so that she can have it all stitched together.

SF: I mean, look at that. You should never feel mom-guilt.

KK: I need to invest in a thimble. But yeah, the artistic process is also very normal for her. She just said, “when I finish this book, could you send it out to some people who I don’t know? As long as they’re young?”

(Laughter)

SF: So tell me about the logistics of kUnST fEsT 2026 here. Is it the three of you playwrights lifting the cathedral here or do you have help?

KK: We have so much help. As we mentioned, it started out just the three of us but then we brought in some amazing people. Like, Caitlin Ryan O’Connell— who’s directing Rachel’s play. And Blaze Ferrer who’s doing amazing work as a creative producer. Now we have like a whole world of designers around us.

LC: So there’s PAAL, Broadway Babysitters, a fiscal infrastructure through Immediate Medium— that’s who’s gonna payroll, manage spending, credit cards, all of that backend stuff. They are part of the core group of artists who rent The Collapsible Hole. So Kate, Rachel and I were like, we want to do this festival and we’re looking at venues and do you want to do it with us? And they were like, yes! Let’s do it at The Hole! Let’s see when it’s free! And it was free in six months. And here it is six months later and we’re doing it.

SF: So you simply planned the festival around when Collapsible Hole was free?

KK: The level of planning and prep— it’s kind of like… that question whether to have a second baby, you know?

SF: Yes! I attribute art making to that baby feeling. Like, you guys have made a theater festival— something that wasn’t there before.

LC: And that level of exhaustion around tech week is just a constant hum.

RKN: And I’m already anticipating post-partum depression. I know I’m going to have a huge crash when this is over because it’s given me so much momentum and energy, while also I…kind of can’t imagine doing it again.

(Laughter)

RKN: But to connect back to the lessons of parenthood. I’ve been learning that it’s okay to not generate new work all the time.

SF: Yes.

RKN: Mac [Wellman] really taught us that. One of the things I will never forget Mac saying in our class was, “if you write a play once, you’re a playwright.” You don’t need to write a play every two years, you don’t need to churn it out. So I really love how we’re freed from any expectation.

SF: When I was Mac’s student, he also said, “why are you finishing a play? Unless you have a production, why panic about finishing it?” He was like, just write something weird and work on it, as he said, “like a cat playing with a ball of yarn.” And obviously the implication is if and when you do have a show, then keep fucking with your play until the end. To me this normalizes theatermaking yet again. Makes it part of the fabric of everyday life. Un-fetishizes it.

KK: It’s true, but hard to take that lesson.

SF: Oh I mean, yeah. It’s particularly hard for me because, you know… I’m a workaholic. But Mac was never like that. His life was his art and his art was his life. And he had a beautiful career, you know?

LC: Yeah. Relationships to time have shifted since becoming a mom. Also relationships to a practice. Writing my play for the festival, Notes From a Cottage, I was like: I am going to spend ten minutes a day and just write and simply be in practice and see what happens. That’s all I have. So I set a timer. Whatever happens is what happens.

SF: You set a timer?

LC: Yeah for Notes From The Cottage I was frustrated with my life in general and staring into the void of making a play. So I was like, okay, I’m going to write by hand. And I only have a short amount of time. I’m going to go till the timer runs out or until I fill this page. It’s aesthetically pleasing to have a full page of handwritten work. Just the practice and rhythm of that. And now here we are making a festival of that play.

SF: And Rachel your play is–?

RKN: My play is called The Cycles.

KK: Mine is The Intimacy. Actually, Lisa, I had a similar process. The Intimacy is part of a larger sequence of plays that I’m doing that are all interwoven. I’ve done earlier iterations at The Flow Chart Foundation in Hudson, New York and in Cleveland, and there’s another future iteration, too. The sentences are all in this shifting first person plural– which I started writing in after Imogen was born. I would have a notebook next to me and I would write these sentences that didn’t connect. One of the tenets of the play is that it’s made of non-sequiturs. So one thing doesn’t necessarily follow from another.

SF: Love that.

KK: And then this year I’ve sort of been working it at the level of paragraph. I’m in this writing group– there are seven people, one for each day of the week. Each person is responsible for writing 200 words on your particular day. So, like, I’m Saturday, so on Saturdays, like, I write 200 words. Then the next person writes 200 words that are in response. You can jump off in anyway— maybe it’s an image, maybe it’s a phrase. It’s been a delight. It’s the one writing group I’ve been able to sort of sustain because nobody’s commenting, nothing’s being evaluated. You just write your 200 words and throw it into the world. So some combination of my first person plural post-birth sentences and then my 200 paragraphs— I’m expanding the frame of thought. SF: So did you start your kUnST fEsT play in a postpartum reality?

KK: Yeah, the whole project started back then, but most of the language in this version was written in the past year. It will eventually all be in one world, but not yet.

RKN: What’s the future version, Kate?

KK: The next version is… well. The story is totally broken, but there’s one piece of it from an anecdote about Ray Johnson painting a mural in The Living Theatre’s hallway in the entrance to their new building. The mural was gonna be these handprints of this child. He was gonna trace around the child’s hand, then paint inside of them. And then the child died in a fire.

LC: Oh!

SF: What?

KK: And so he didn’t feel that he could continue with that plan. So he painted over that. But then he came back one night with two crayons in his hands and he walked up and down the stairwell for seven hours. Just tracing these crayons over and over and over into this thickly layered beautiful wax mural sculpture. But then Judith Molina and Julian Beck painted over it.

SF: Painted over the mural?

KK: Yeah.

SF: Why did they do that?

KK: Great question. In retrospect they were like, we made a mistake. They’ve gone on record as saying they didn’t understand it at the time. So the third iteration of my play is a set of text that exists in the same world— but then I’m gonna have Jonathan walk back and forth for seven hours.

SF: Are you really?

KK: Yeah. So that’s the future of it.

SF: I think we need to platform playwriting more this way. Like, writing can be jazz--- the playwriting version of jazz. I see people on social media being weird and performative and non-sequitorial and symbolic all the time, but for whatever reason, theater producers want everything to make sense now. So boring. Everything has to be narrative now, everything has to make sense. So your plays in KunstFest diving deeper into the psyche is a refreshing thing. Mac would be very proud.

KK: I don’t think our plays make very much sense. Sense is not our priority.

SF: Having kids pushes you there, you know? I mean, I have a teenager.

LC: Probably similar to having a two or three year old in the brain shifts.

SF: Oh yeah. He’s like… all over the place with narrative and non-sequitor. He’s like an art piece.

(Laughter)

SF: So how can people get to KunstFest? Tell us what we need to know.

LC: It’s all happening September 15-20, 2026. We have two marathon days on Friday and Saturday, three show days, which is a “full frontal KunstPass.” And in between the shows are snacks and chances to commune with people. Each play’s an hour.

KK: Thematically, they end up really interwoven with cycles and loops and really in conversation, which makes those three show days fun. But we also have two-show days and one-show days for people who can’t commit to the full pass.

RKN: We think that playwrights should produce each other’s work, just like musicians produce each other’s work. And that we playwrights can do things on a more DIY scale. We know it’s already happening; we’re a part of that culture of mutual support.

SF: And it doesn’t have to be a $100,000 production budget on each of you. I have a friend and collaborator in Edinburgh now– she goes every year– and although I’ve never been, I always wonder why New York can’t do that? Why can’t we re-inherit that scrappiness here? A communal thing, like a religious thing, a thing that’s made exclusively by artists. Which kUnST fEsT is.

LC: And partnering with PAAL has made it that, plus the added bonus of the mission being care-based.

SF: Yes! There is nothing worse than being in a process where you aren’t taken care of. Taking care of your people has to be the biggest priority.

RKN: You know, all our plays are basically asking the same thing: how do we remake the world? We’ve inherited this… trash. So how can our process enact those values? It’s imperfect, of course. But just the idea of a “care honorarium?” It almost confuses people, it’s such a foreign concept. I mean… I wish I could have universal healthcare, right? But I do have a hundred dollars toward childcare and that’s better than nothing.

KK: It draws attention to how insufficient the current infrastructure is. What we’re doing is building a roadmap or prototype that we want to show other institutions. To say it is possible to provide care stipends. And yes, it may not be enough, but it’s aspirational. It’s possible.

ticket link for kUnST fEsT: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/immediatemedium/2296541

PAAL donation portal (everything from now through Sept 21 will go towards kUnST fEsT!): https://www.paaltheatre.com/donate