Collin Van Son: I’ve been writing plays for about 10 years now. I started doing it when I was in college at Penn State. I went to school as a physics major with literally no creative writing background of any sort. But when I was at school, a good friend of mine strong-armed me into joining the theater club. That was a brave new world for me. I never enjoyed public speaking but I gave it a shot and really enjoyed acting in our student-run productions. Along the way, I took my first creative writing class and I felt that it provided something that I wasn't getting from my science curriculum. It balanced my life in a really pleasing way and I enjoyed using the other half of my brain. I figured if I can write a play, I might be able to get some people in the theater club to put it on and that’s when I started writing short plays and one-acts.

SM: After college, did you pursue physics at all or did you stick to playwriting?

CVS: For a while, I was actually able to do both. My first job after college was an arts and science fellowship in Chicago. I was helping create new works of theater inspired by quantum physics research so I would talk to scientists and interview researchers and try to distill the essence of their research into a compelling story that we could use on the stage. Since then, I've had my “money job” and my “artistic fulfillment job.” It's a constant experiment trying to figure out how to balance those two things.

SM: Have you been to the Colorado New Play Festival before or is this your first year?

CVS: This will be my first year. I've actually only ever been to Steamboat once before and never in the summer, so I'm very excited.

SM: Tell us about the play.

CVS: It’s called “Natural History” and it's set about 150 years in the future. It's centered on two environmental activists who break into the American Museum of Natural History in New York City in order to steal a taxidermied bison. As so often happens in plays, things don't go as planned; some comedy ensues, some drama ensues. I started this play in 2021 when I first moved to Colorado and it’s sort of my exploration of things like wildfire season, which was completely new to me. This play was my attempt to explore things like western history and western landscapes. 

SM: Tell us about your use of comedy and weaving that into a script, especially when dealing with subject matter that’s not at all funny?

CVS: First off, I would say that it's not really a conscious choice. My experience writing a play is often a very solitary enterprise. I'm spending a lot of hours alone working and I need to find some way to entertain myself and to keep myself invested in the material, and for me, humor is the go to mechanism there. So part of it, I think, is just a natural outflow of the process of writing for me. The play does deal with some seriously unfunny subjects – ecological catastrophe to name one. I think it's not a coincidence that both laughter and sadness are things that make us cry. I think there's a pretty close emotional connection there, and those emotions – humor and sadness, grief and hilarity – are maybe a lot closer than we often give them credit for. So for me it's a pretty natural tool to use one to explore the other and vice versa. The script has jokes that are intended to land and be funny, and it also has jokes that are intended not to land but to transition into a moment of grief or mourning. Walking that knife edge is very artistically rewarding for me, and it just feels like a natural fit. 

SM: What is your writing process like and how has it changed over the years?

CVS: There are a lot of different components I could talk about … one is that I don't like to talk about pieces that are in progress. Stories to me feel very fragile when they're in their early stages, and I’m often very reluctant to talk about a story idea until I've gotten a first read and a second draft. I find one of the main motivators for writing is to share a story that's already rattling around in my head, and if I start telling people about it, then that motivation diminishes a bit because I am getting the story out in a certain way. Or there might be unresolved questions about a character or the plot, and sometimes talking about that with people in an early stage can make it a more daunting process. This play in particular started out as a 15 minute play, and I wrote it very quickly; it just sort of came to me. Then I showed it to my (now) wife and she said, “this is great, now go back and write the rest of it.” Also, I’ve gotten to a place where I’m learning to let projects live in various states of semi-completion rather than sitting down and working on one play every day until it's done. Allowing the script to have a bit of seasonality – sometimes it’s in season and sometimes it’s dormant – has actually been a very positive evolution of my artistic process. 

SM: What do you hope the audience takes away from the reading?

CVS: I hope to be surprised by what they take away. I try not to be overly prescriptive in my storytelling or my writing. I don’t think of it as an Aesop’s fable with a very clear moral at the end. But there are certain things that I would be delighted if they did take away from it: at a simple level, if someone walks away with a greater interest in the American bison, I'd be very happy with that outcome. I think the bison is a magnificent animal that is so deeply intertwined with the history of this country and its people. If people want to learn more about wildfire policy that would be great. On a somewhat higher or more abstract level, the play is called “Natural History,” and part of that is because there's a lot in those two simple words. Something I've grown to appreciate more – and I would love to impart this on the audience – is the appreciation that our history as individuals and as a country cannot be separated from the natural world. It’s the idea that history does not belong to us, we belong to history. I think the same thing goes for the natural world – we belong to it. I think we often talk about human society as this thing that is separate from nature but in reality the two are inextricable. Nature is part of our history, and our history has certainly shaped nature in many ways, good and bad. So I think that would be something that I would love for audience members to walk away pondering and thinking over.

“Natural History” will be read on Sunday, June 14 at 7:30 p.m. in Library Hall. For tickets and more info, click here: