Laura Jacqmin spent “a solid ten years” (2006 to 2016) in Chicago as a playwright. During that time she developed an admirably eclectic body of work ranging from comedy (Dental Society Midwinter Meeting, about DDS dysfunction at a convention); docudrama (Dead Pile, about exposing conditions in a meatpacking plant); and searing intimate tragicomedy (Look, We Are Breathing, a twist on the dead-kid-grief-porn genre in which the deceased teenage boy at the center of the story, whom we meet through flashbacks, is actually a real jerk).
It worked for a while: after Lucky 7 was canceled (“We had the honor of being the first canceled fall drama that season,” Jacqmin notes with a laugh), she came back to Chicago for Buzz22’s 2014 production of Ghost Bike, her gender-reversed take on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, as well as We’re Going to be Fine, a seemingly prescient piece about an office worker dealing with a mass plague that Jacqmin developed with director Dexter Bullard for DePaul’s Theatre School in 2015.
But she also notes that Chicago provided her with opportunities that she doesn’t think would have been as easily attainable in New York; she initially self-produced Dental Society Midwinter Meeting in 2010 at Chicago Dramatists, then run by the late Russ Tutterow.
“He was like, ‘Hey, you want to, you know, meet up and get dinner? It’s been five years or something since we’ve seen each other.’ And so we went to an Umami Burger in Hollywood and he was like, ‘I have an idea for this movie. Do you want to write it together?’ And I said yes. He said, ‘Do you want to know what it’s about?’ And I said, ‘I don’t care. I want to do it,’” says Jacqmin, adding, “I was so hungry at that point for collaboration and to just not be writing plays that were not going to get produced.”
But being on set for the film has given Jacqmin another goal. “I wrote a feature last year that I would like to direct myself and one never knows if these things are gonna come together . . . but it’s something that I’m actively pursuing.”
