This is a Legend.
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Lana
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SYNOPSIS
When a fire ravages an individual’s childhood home, they reflect on an equally damaging rainstorm that destroyed their family long ago. Forced into a cycle of memories about their parents’ divorce, they consider what happens when personal history becomes folklore, what a family represents, and the ways that the patterns of nature show us patterns in ourselves. A fable of love, separation, and reconciliation told through the community of a chorus.
PLAYWRIGHT’S BIO
Lana Scott Stringer is a Brooklyn-based graduate of Samford University’s theatre and film programs. Recent work includes co-writing the book of American Game, a new musical being developed at The Hobby Center in August 2025, as well as writing Acknowledging the Elephant of My Unborn Child, an original play being produced for a multiple-week run fall 2025. Other works include a full-length devised collaborative theater adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, short plays for Overnight Theatre, a theater company that she co-founded, and a full-length play, Cardio, produced by Samford’s student-run Underground Theater. She was also the dramaturg and associate producer for Harrison Theater’s production of The Laramie Project and has also done dramaturgy for New York’s First Kiss Theater and Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater.
A BIT ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT
When did you start writing plays? If you had a moment where you realized you wanted to write, what was it?
When I was four, I made and illustrated a series of picture books starring an anthropomorphic cheese puff that my mom, who laboriously typed everything I dictated, then laminated and bound in her office, which was obviously the coolest thing ever. I’ve been writing ever since. During the pandemic, my friend Jake and I started a weekly 24-hour theater initiative called Overnight Theater, and due to a sheer lack of volunteers, I wrote a ten-minute play every week. I thought I’d get sick of it, but I got impatient for each new week to arrive instead because I knew it would bring another new script with it. That exploration is what made me realize I wanted to be a playwright.
How did you come to write your OOB play? Was there a particular inspiration behind its creation? How has it developed?
My friend Stephanie Leary wrote and produced a song, “Plates,” with her band Steph and the Web. I originally wrote this piece for her final for her beginning directing class, with the prompt that it should be in conversation with that song. The imagery of a house burning down stuck with me as a symbol for interpersonal civil war, and the concept stemmed from there.
What are five words that describe who you are as a playwright?
Incisive, exacting, intentional, curious, tenacious.
What/who are some of the major influences on your writing?
Tennessee Willliams, Lynn Nottage, Lucas Hnath, Sarah Ruhl, Julia Izumi, Agatha Christie, Lorde, and my friend Jake Lane.
What’s one fact someone would never guess about you?
I have the same birthday as Elvis Presley, and I also have a four-year-old cousin/bestie named Elvis Outlaw. We’re a big Elvis family, evidently.
What are some of your favorite plays?
I’m a really big reader, so this feels like picking a favorite child, but I love miku, and the gods. by Julia Izumi, Nocturne by Adam Rapp, Aubergine by Julia Cho, The Slave by LeRoi Jones, The Clean House by Sarah Ruhl, Rapture by Lucy Kirkwood, and Pass Over by Antoinette Nwandu.
Any new projects you’re working on or shameless plugs?
I’m co-bookwriting with Benjamin Heintz, who’s also doing music and lyrics, for a new musical American Game, which is being developed this summer at The Hobby Center. I also wrote a play, Acknowledging the Elephant of My Unborn Child, that was developed in May with direction by Ashley Brooke Monroe and movement by Sara Gibbons. A production is planned for fall/winter 2025.
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