Playwright Counters Memories of the COVID Pandemic with Quirky Humor

I began writing “A Pot of Basil, or, Thank You for Being a Friend” in April of 2020. These were the early days of the COVID lockdown. The play reflects the fear and strangeness of those times, when the streets of New York were nearly empty, and even friends stayed several feet apart and masked when meeting outside. I vividly remember the day a cluster of mysterious white trucks appeared outside the hospitals a few blocks from where I lived – these were morgue trucks to store the bodies of the people who had passed away from COVID.

To counter the horror, I began to write a surreal and silly comedy that also encompassed my anger and sadness at the injustice of it all. I was inspired by 1960s feminist protest plays I had seen in readings at New Georges several years ago. Those plays addressed injustice with goofy and angry Absurdism, combining high and low culture, and I tried to emulate this style in a very personal way. I threw in references to The Decameron, the famous story cycle inspired by the Black Death, with allusions to The Golden Girls and Cher. I named the protagonist Isabel, after both the heroine of Keats’s Decameron-inspired poem, “Isabella, or, The Pot of Basil” and the middle name of my maternal grandmother, which was Isabel. The play’s very title, “A Pot of Basil, or, Thank You for Being a Friend” is a riff on Keats and the play’s constant collision of “high” and “low” allusions.

I sent the play to a contest it did not win. Then, a few months later, I took a chance and submitted it to Naked Angels’ Tuesdays@9 Reading Series, which at that time was happening over Zoom. To my surprise, it was selected for a reading, and was enthusiastically received by the actors and audience. Their support inspired me to keep going with the play, and I revised it over a year of ten-minute readings at Tuesdays@9, which gradually became in-person once COVID vaccines became available.

I am so glad Jennifer Sandella, who has directed many of my earlier short plays, was able to direct this play at The Rat, of which she is Executive Director. I am also pleased to have worked with this talented cast, all of whom have acted in plays and solo shows across the city and beyond, and our amazing stage manager Hannah B. Loftus, who has just completed a stage management apprenticeship at Juilliard. Everyone has worked together to make miracles happen. The theater itself is a small but infinite black box space that perfectly reflects the claustrophobia Isabael experiences locked down in her cramped New York studio. I hope that you can come see this glorious space and witness everyone’s incredible work.

A Pot of Basil, or, Thank You for Being a Friend plays at TheRATNYC August 23, 24, 30 and 31. Tickets are available here.