The cast of Inheritance Canyon. Photo by Marcus Kyd with Teresa Castracane.

By DCist Contributor Anya van Wagtendonk

The process by which playwright Liz Maestri arrives at a polished script is usually pretty fluid. She gets an idea. She writes something. Then she talks and plays and consults with actors and directors and dramaturgs, and she writes more, and she rewrites, and she talks more with more people.

But the journey to completing Inheritance Canyon, opening tomorrow at Taffety Punk Theatre Company, was different. For starters, she didn’t think she had anything to write about.

Unlike past projects, she couldn’t wait for the idea to strike her. Taffety had commissioned her to write a play for their participation in the Women’s Voices Theater Festival, a D.C. region-wide commitment of more than 50 theaters to each stage an original work by a female writer this autumn.

“I was not in a place where I wanted to start a new play,” she says. “I was neck deep in some other stuff, so I was really grappling with what to write about.”

But she had this commission. A script had to be done within a year.

Working on her first-ever play, Owl Moon, with Taffety in 2011 had been such a great experience, Maestri says, that she considered writing its prequel as her Festival contribution. That play had taken place in a bleak, frozen landscape, and Maestri thought about placing those same characters into a different world—someplace equally desolate, perhaps. Eventually, that setting has shaped itself into a kind of post-apocalyptic canyon in the days following a government test disaster.

Even with that structure in place, Maestri says she was “still struggling.” So Taffety Punk’s artistic director, Marcus Kyd, started taking her out for coffee every few weeks. The two didn’t talk much about the play, but they talked about other things: art, family, school, life.

It was during one of those conversations that Maestri found herself honing in on a conflict that would come to sit at the core of Infinity Canyon. The two were talking about art and their careers, and struggling with the idea that money and family background can often be an obstacle to one’s ambitions. On that particular day, Maestri remembers, “I was feeling really bitter about money and who gets to have the say, and who gets to make art.”

Maestri laughs when she recounts this moment. “That sounds really ‘sour grapes’.” But on the other side of that day’s frustrations lay a bigger question: Is it possible to fundamentally change who you are?

“Like, actually become someone else?” she asks. “I feel like I’ve been trying to do that my whole life in a weird way.”

Playwright Liz Maestri. Photo: Ryan Maxwell Photography

From that question, Maestri says, the script slowly came into being, less as a prequel than as a riff on her first play. Another shift in her process: Maestri worked almost completely alone, placing her characters—a few characters she already knew, and a few newcomers—into “this situation where they want so badly to have a different life.”

It’s an appropriate issue for a play making its debut within a festival dedicated to amplifying the voices of women playwrights, whose works are historically underrepresented in the theater. Maestri’s personal struggles— wondering what doors might have opened for her if she’d gone to an Ivy instead of a state school, or if her style were more poetic or classically-influenced—mirror larger questions about structural barriers facing women writers in particular. Some participating theaters are also using the initial conversation about gender diversity to highlight the lack of racial, national, or class diversity among produced playwrights as well.

For her part, Maestri is wary that a diversity festival will be too enthusiastically received as a panacea. The hurdles that she and other writers have run up against won’t go away just because of one large event.

“What I don’t like is this idea that this festival is somehow fixing the problem that the people who started it have been talking about, that there’s a lack of gender parity in theater,” she says. “The way you fix that problem is by hiring women to be in your season. I would gladly give up all these bells and whistles … [to] just quietly have women be hired.”

The stated mission of the Women’s Voices Theater Festival is to “highlight the scope of new plays being written by women.” If it succeeds at this, it will show audiences that there’s no one way for a woman to write a play. Diversity of voice demonstrates that you don’t need to write like Shakespeare to write a great play. Hopefully, too, a challenge like the one the Festival poses shows companies that maybe skipping over yet another rendition of Chekhov or Williams or Wilde in favor of something new is an expansion, not diminishment, of the theatrical canon.

For Maestri, that lesson has just been a part of growing up. “As an adult, [I] am kind of accepting that, no, I am who I am,” she says. “I’m the public school kid. I write the way I write. I’m not fancy. And that’s fine. Maybe someone can respond to that even though I’m not fancy and I’m not a poet. Maybe there are still things that I have to say that people understand.”

Inheritance Canyon opens tomorrow and runs at the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop through October 10. Tickets are available online.