EMILY CLAIRE SCHMITT
My name is Emily Claire Schmitt and I am honored to join the Skeleton Rep Core Team. This is the story of me.
I am originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, a deeply Catholic city, and I am the product of sixteen years of Catholic education. The first eight were pretty miserable, the second eight were a dream. The key difference was that second half was all women. It was during my eight years of Catholic women’s education that feminism and divine worship become inextricably enmeshed in my psyche, cementing the tension-filled worldview that permeates and elevates my perception of the mundane.
I co-wrote my first original play, a comedy about a female God who runs a coffee stand at a bus stop, during my senior year of high school. I ran the production like a tyrant because I was a teenager and had a vision. By the miracle of women’s grace, I survived the experience with my relationships intact and a sure knowledge that I would be writing plays for the rest of my life. I continued my studies at Saint Mary’s College, studying theater with a focus on playwriting and philosophy with a focus on Baruch Spinoza. During that time, I received a grant to travel so San Luis, Colorado and interview residents involved in a mass poaching raid in which the US government targeted members of the local indigenous community. It was the largest such raid in US history. The resulting play, San Luis, 1989, won the American College Theater Festival’s full length play award for the Midwest region. At the same time, I was writing fantasy and completing my thesis on Spinoza’s ethical system. As Baruch would say, all of these disparate interests were in fact modifications of the same substance.
Moving to New York City was a culture shock, but not for the reasons one might expect. The secular world was no different than I expected; I was different. I was not a journalist, philosopher, story-teller and playwright who also happened to be Catholic. I was a Catholic that also happened to be a playwright. My other identities feel away and my religion began to define me. I became hard and ridged and lost sight of the nuance, the wonder, that had been so plentiful just a few years before. I missed sisterhood. I yearned for other women who would shake me out of my stupor, question and prod me in a loving way, and laugh as I tied myself up in unnecessary philosophical knots. During my three years at The New School for Drama, my technical skills developed but my soul slept.
I didn’t connect with Ria until the summer after graduation, when she directed my comedy Whatchamacallit: A Play About Jesus, the story of teenage atheist inconveniently pregnant with a miracle child. This rehearsal process cracked me open and brought be back to the core of who I am as an artist. Since then, Ria and I, with the help of composer Emily Rose Simons, have evolved the play into a musical called The Inconvenient Miracle.
Ria’s vision and mine are complementary pieces of a whole. We both perceive the world as filtered through a larger, grander, structure, but for me that structure is religion and for her it is mythology. I used to prickle at comparisons between religion and myth, because so often to call something a myth is to discredit it. (“Climate change is a myth.” “The Christmas story is a myth.”) But The Skeleton Rep is never so arrogant with its stories. It treats mythology with the respect one would give a sleeping giant. Climate change, Zeus, and Jesus Christ, are real. They exist on a plane above our own, yet intimately infused in our daily lives. God is nowhere, of course, but They’re definitely in your breakfast cereal.
Lest there be any confusion, I am not at all saying that my faith is a mere story-structure for understanding the universe. (“Yes, but what is Jesus,” she says, while blowing cigarette smoke in your face.) I’m quiet literal when I talk about my religion. When I ultimately meet God I expect Them to touch me, or what’s the point? I touch Christ every Sunday in the Eucharist, an Earthly ritual in which humans commune with the literal God in a physical way. This is the experience I hope to embody in my art.
I believe that writing is my vocation, but I’m only as good an artist as God wants me to be, and my work will go as far as They deem it necessary. I do know that I was brought out of the warm womb of like-minded Catholic women for a reason. I’m supposed to be out in the world, and I learned from my time at The New School just how uncomfortable that world can be. I’m grateful that I was allowed to find a true home in the world, one where I fit but am distinct, where I can venture out but come back to safety. I’ve found it at the Skeleton Rep.
I am originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, a deeply Catholic city, and I am the product of sixteen years of Catholic education. The first eight were pretty miserable, the second eight were a dream. The key difference was that second half was all women. It was during my eight years of Catholic women’s education that feminism and divine worship become inextricably enmeshed in my psyche, cementing the tension-filled worldview that permeates and elevates my perception of the mundane.
I co-wrote my first original play, a comedy about a female God who runs a coffee stand at a bus stop, during my senior year of high school. I ran the production like a tyrant because I was a teenager and had a vision. By the miracle of women’s grace, I survived the experience with my relationships intact and a sure knowledge that I would be writing plays for the rest of my life. I continued my studies at Saint Mary’s College, studying theater with a focus on playwriting and philosophy with a focus on Baruch Spinoza. During that time, I received a grant to travel so San Luis, Colorado and interview residents involved in a mass poaching raid in which the US government targeted members of the local indigenous community. It was the largest such raid in US history. The resulting play, San Luis, 1989, won the American College Theater Festival’s full length play award for the Midwest region. At the same time, I was writing fantasy and completing my thesis on Spinoza’s ethical system. As Baruch would say, all of these disparate interests were in fact modifications of the same substance.
Moving to New York City was a culture shock, but not for the reasons one might expect. The secular world was no different than I expected; I was different. I was not a journalist, philosopher, story-teller and playwright who also happened to be Catholic. I was a Catholic that also happened to be a playwright. My other identities feel away and my religion began to define me. I became hard and ridged and lost sight of the nuance, the wonder, that had been so plentiful just a few years before. I missed sisterhood. I yearned for other women who would shake me out of my stupor, question and prod me in a loving way, and laugh as I tied myself up in unnecessary philosophical knots. During my three years at The New School for Drama, my technical skills developed but my soul slept.
I didn’t connect with Ria until the summer after graduation, when she directed my comedy Whatchamacallit: A Play About Jesus, the story of teenage atheist inconveniently pregnant with a miracle child. This rehearsal process cracked me open and brought be back to the core of who I am as an artist. Since then, Ria and I, with the help of composer Emily Rose Simons, have evolved the play into a musical called The Inconvenient Miracle.
Ria’s vision and mine are complementary pieces of a whole. We both perceive the world as filtered through a larger, grander, structure, but for me that structure is religion and for her it is mythology. I used to prickle at comparisons between religion and myth, because so often to call something a myth is to discredit it. (“Climate change is a myth.” “The Christmas story is a myth.”) But The Skeleton Rep is never so arrogant with its stories. It treats mythology with the respect one would give a sleeping giant. Climate change, Zeus, and Jesus Christ, are real. They exist on a plane above our own, yet intimately infused in our daily lives. God is nowhere, of course, but They’re definitely in your breakfast cereal.
Lest there be any confusion, I am not at all saying that my faith is a mere story-structure for understanding the universe. (“Yes, but what is Jesus,” she says, while blowing cigarette smoke in your face.) I’m quiet literal when I talk about my religion. When I ultimately meet God I expect Them to touch me, or what’s the point? I touch Christ every Sunday in the Eucharist, an Earthly ritual in which humans commune with the literal God in a physical way. This is the experience I hope to embody in my art.
I believe that writing is my vocation, but I’m only as good an artist as God wants me to be, and my work will go as far as They deem it necessary. I do know that I was brought out of the warm womb of like-minded Catholic women for a reason. I’m supposed to be out in the world, and I learned from my time at The New School just how uncomfortable that world can be. I’m grateful that I was allowed to find a true home in the world, one where I fit but am distinct, where I can venture out but come back to safety. I’ve found it at the Skeleton Rep.