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Bio

Stacey Isom Campbell’s plays include: 1999 (workshop, 3rdCourse: Theatre / grant awardee, MAC arts / Play Lab selection, Valdez Theatre Conference); CICADAS (selection, New Play Development Workshop, ATHE); THE CONTROLLER (finalist, Henley Rose Playwright Competition and Seven Devils Playwriting Conference); THE LOOPHOLE (LORT-production, Barter Theatre / nomination, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize / selection, Great Plains Theatre Conference / semifinalist, National Playwrights Conference); BUFFALO CREEK (finalist, Rose Henley Playwriting Competition / finalist, The New Harmony Project / semifinalist, Bay Area Playwrights Festival); WHEN MOUNTAINS MOVE (commission and production, Lee University); LAUNDRY AT THE COIN & SPIN (equity-showcase approved production and publication, The Collective: NY); MEMORY OF ICE (semifinalist, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Seven Devil’s Theatre Conference and National Playwrights Conference); ON THE 8’s (winner, Dan I Rodden Jr Award / finalist, Rose Henley Playwriting Competition / selection, Great Plains Theatre Conference); SMOKIN’ DEVILS (selection, Appalachian Festival of Plays & Playwrights / 2nd place, Plays for the 21st Century / production, Red Clay Theatre). Her work has also been seen at the Pittsburgh New Works Festival, L.A. First Stage, EstroGenius Xtended, and others.

Stacey is a Fellow of Hambidge Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and Trillium Arts. She believes the way we live our lives is an artistic expression—from the mundane washing of dishes to the bigger aspirations of building relationships or creating plays. In everything, she aspires to be an artist who makes things a little more beautiful.

We all contain many voices, identities, ancestors, but mine are paradoxical. Maybe it’s why I’m a theatre artist, why I can’t sleep at night for all the conversations reverberating in my head. I’m an athlete who deals with chronic illness, a middle-aged woman and a gamer, an Alaskan with Appalachian roots, a person of faith and an artist. These identities, or at least the communities that represent them in my life, are not easy bedfellows. At times, I have felt the need to hide one from the other and that separation grieves me.

Increasingly, though, I find people who live in similarly complex tensions, even if their specific subcultures are different. We don’t belong in the communities that raised us and yet feel inextricably tied to them. To hate them would be to hate part of ourselves. Living in the messiness of the margin allows me to find nuance and authenticity my work might otherwise lack. I stand in the margins, one foot in each community, trying to add my voice to these conversations.

I write about the small human moments beneath the labels that divide us: rolling down car windows and singing into the wind, competing with a friend for bragging rights, sharing a story over a table.

I write the kind of funny that rips your heart out. Where I come from humor is almost as sacred as religion. The last time I saw my uncle Milton he needed a drink so bad he held his ribs to keep from shaking. He said, “Lord gawd, my bones are a-jangling” then told funny stories about keeping his moonshine still hidden from the cops, blowing himself up with dynamite, and dye-ing his hair jet black because “women are fond of ol’ Milton.”

I write about women—freaks like me, the walking-wounded like my sister, tough-as-a-rusted-wash-board like my grandmother.

I write about connection and disconnection. Disrupted connections cause shifts in the language, story, characters providing the structure of my plays. I explore the pattern of these shifts further in the theme and form of my plays by blurring the lines between time, place, and reality.

I write for myself first. The subjects of my plays are as varied as my obsessions. In each, I wrestle with tensions and increasing hostilities that are hard for me—an olive branch from one part of me to the other and to an implied audience, saying this is who I am and this is what’s ugly and beautiful in me and what I see in the world around me.