Playwright Samantha Hurley on turning your fascinations into stories

How did you first get into playwriting? And when did you first start writing I’m Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire?

I went to school for theater studies at Ithaca College. My degree was general, but you could either do directing or dramaturgy or playwriting, and I was on the playwriting track. I had always really liked writing when I was younger. We were the type of kids when we had sleepovers, I would write little skits for my friends for us to perform. So, it naturally progressed that way when we were deciding on colleges. I was like, I love theater. I love writing, and I don’t want to get a real job. I might as well try it. It’s funny because when I graduated from Ithaca, I decided I didn’t want to be a playwright. I was like, it is too hard. It’s thankless, and there really is no career pipeline for it. I shifted, and I did a lot of sketch comedy. I did a lot of late-night writing, writing for TV. I was in UCB and stuff. Then, the pandemic happened, and I moved home, and I was like, well, there’s no better time than now to sit down and try to write a play. It just snowballed from there. I’ve really fallen in love with playwriting, and so now I’m very happy to call myself a playwright.

It started as a homework assignment for my playwriting class. We just had to write a 10-minute play. I wish I remembered what the impetus was to write Tobey, but I was like, “Oh shit, I have this homework assignment, I just have to finish it.” I’ve always been obsessed with pop culture. I’m a huge One Direction girlie. Growing up, I read a lot of fan fiction. I’m sure that changed my brain in some way. When I first graduated, we did it as a one-act at a small New York Winterfest, but then I put it away. It was only when the pandemic happened I called up my friend Tyler [Struble], who is my collaborator and director. I was like, “This is a really funny idea. We should try to do something with this.”

Was there anything in particular that sparked your interest in theater?

When I was growing up, I went to a summer camp every summer, and then I ended up working at it when I was in high school. It was a performing arts camp. You have a week. You pick a character you want to be. You write a play with the rest of the kids and the counselors. That was always the highlight of my year. As soon as that ended, I was thinking about what I wanted to be next year and the types of plays and stuff. I think that impacted me in terms of what I found the most joy in was just creating and being silly with all these other kids and creating plays. I didn’t realize it was something you could study or be. The first year I was Bubbles, the Powerpuff Girl. It let us use our imaginations to the fullest extent. I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.

Do you have a typical day routine or does it tend to vary?

It depends. I just moved to Chicago, and I have a job where I’m working box office, so I work at night. My morning routine is very sacred to me. I have to wake up, and I have to watch The View, and then I go on a little hot girl walk. Once I’ve settled in the day, I sit down to write in the afternoon. I try to not put a lot of pressure on myself to write if I don’t feel like writing. I try to write every day. I think trying to force it, at least at this point, is just not helpful in terms of the point of the process where I am in my artist journey and also in writing this specific play.

You mentioned you handwrite everything. Do you do it in journals or do you convert it to digital after that?

Yeah. I’m crazy that way and I’m definitely going to get arthritis, but I just have notebooks. I just get the 99-cent notebooks at Walmart and I handwrite everything in cursive because I feel like it’s easier to pump out for me, it’s quicker, but I also feel like it just helps me sink into the words. After, I’ll type it up, so I can send it over to Tyler. I’m really selective with word choice, and I think handwriting helps me. Everything is purposeful when you handwrite and it just is a little bit slower. That, to me, works the best right now when it comes to especially crafting dialogue. It’s helpful to know too, if you repeat a word, you can tell it when you’re handwriting, whereas I feel like just typing is a little more passive.

I’m wondering, because Tobey received a book form, and I’m curious when you’re writing your new play, if you’re trying to think if the lines are too long or if the dialogue’s too short, if that makes sense.

Yeah. I just had this conversation with Tyler because I’m on the fourth or fifth draft of this new play where I’m worried about page count. I’m worried about how long this scene is taking. I still think it is a formative draft where I’m still getting all of the ideas out. Tyler is helpful in being like, “Don’t worry about page count right now. Just get everything out.” I think I’m more of an editor than a writer. I will go over and edit a scene over and over and over again. I would still edit Tobey today if I could. That’s what I like about playwriting more than screenwriting. I’m dabbling in screenwriting right now, but that scares me because there’s a lot more rules and structure. Playwriting, really [you] can do whatever you want. It can take whatever format you want, and once it gets published, they put it in their own format, but they work with you to do that. Screenwriting is intimidating for me because it has so many rules. What I love about playwriting is it’s just a canvas, and you can paint it however you want.

That’s interesting. I do want to go back to Tobey a little bit. I’ve read that you were seeing a lot of playwrights leaning into the heavier stuff. You mentioned Arthur Miller, so on, so forth. You were also a One Direction fan growing up, and I guess in a sense, the play felt truer to the modern era and the rise of stan culture. I’m curious, do you find it’s easier to write based on possible personal experience? ‘Cause I was like, I think we’ve all been, I was a Directioner. We’ve all been those teenage girls, but obviously not to Shelby’s degree.

I write about stuff I’m obsessed with. Yeah, I was a big fangirl, but I’m obsessed with talking about this stuff. I say the play is not autobiographical. It’s not, but I’m such a big proponent of writing what you know. This new play is not my personal, I mean, the new play is, have you ever heard of To Catch a Predator? There are all of these people on YouTube who are amateur predator catchers, and I became obsessed with this one group specifically called Dads Against Predators, and I would just watch and watch their videos. That’s what the new play is about. It’s roughly based on their lives. It’s different from Tobey. It’s still a dark comedy. I have just been writing what I have been obsessed with. These guys are from rural Ohio, and I lived in Ohio for a little bit, so I definitely understand their world. Stuff that I could talk about for hours and hours on end is what I tend to write about because if no one’s there to talk to me about it, I’ll just write about it.

They’ll go on these meetup apps and pretend to be a little kid, and then they’ll go in public to meet the person. They’ll bait them, and then once they meet them in public, they humiliate them. It’s all about public humiliation and shaming. Now, they’ve started to just beat the shit out of these guys in public. It’s really about our view on vigilante justice and how far [people are willing to go] because everyone is like, “Let’s save the kids, let’s save the kids.” These guys are going to such the extreme to do it, and they get all this flak because they’re assaulting people. It was just something that I just became so obsessed with because these people are so black and white in their worldview. It was just so interesting to me.

With that and also even just with Tobey, the rise of stan culture, do you feel like that stuff has kind of increased over the past few years?

I think it’s internet culture too. I think we are at an age where people writing plays now have been impacted by internet culture, where Arthur Miller did not know what a computer was, right? I don’t think he was born with a computer, but now all these plays are getting written by people who have grown up with technology. I think playwriting is shaped by that and by our relationship to social media and technology and the internet, especially in Tobey and in this new play too. It’s all about internet culture online and about how people find community and solace online when in real life they feel isolated or alienated from people around them. The internet is a great place to go to find that connection and community, and I guess now it is a universal theme. I’m seeing a lot of that pop up in playwriting and in TV too. There’s a lot of that happening.

Were there any movies, books, or TV shows that served as an inspiration while you were making the play?

It’s funny because I didn’t watch Misery until recently, but people were like, “Yeah, it’s just Misery.” And I’d never watched it, but it did give me a lot of insights. I watched all of Tobey’s movies except for Seabiscuit. I thought that movie was terrible. Oh, you know that Penelope character from The Amanda Show? Her plight was she was going to go meet Amanda, and she had this internet blog.

I talked a lot about this to Tessa [Albertson], the actress who is one of the funniest actresses on the planet. I will go to my grave saying that. Male comedians are allowed to be big and brash and stupid. I grew up with Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey. They were just allowed to be so ugly, dumb, and funny, and women aren’t necessarily given that opportunity. If women are funny, it has to be in a vein of sexuality, or it’s the Melissa McCarthy, Fat Amy’s of it all. What I love about Tessa is just her fearlessness in being so funny. I think a lot of the reasons why Shelby is such a great character and what I wanted to do was give a platform for actresses to just be stupid, silly, funny, and unapologetic.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Lexi Lane.