Emerging Artists - Carol Carpenter

Satire, Politics, and Passion in the Dramatic Writings of Carol Carpenter

Carol Carpenter is a native New Mexican (Artesia) and resident (Madrid) who currently is an administrator and dramatic writing instructor at the College of Santa Fe. She has had a writing career that has spanned publishing fiction in small magazines to Hollywood where she wrote trailers and promotional pieces. However, it is as a playwright that Carol Carpenter shows enormous promise. Her most recent play, Wild Dogs, pits the residents of Madrid against Disney Productions when the mega-company invaded the fiercely independent village to shoot the big budget film, Wild Hogs. This work has received enthusiastic reviews wherever it has been produced, including a College of Santa Fe production in June of 2007. In fact, this play wended its way to New York City for a staged reading at the venerable Manhattan Theater Club on December 21, 2007. How Wild Dogs made it to the Big Apple is instructive in how success in the theater is a combination of talent, luck, and timing.

After completing Wild Dogs, Carol sent her play to many friends and colleagues in the theater world. One such person who received a copy of the play was childhood friend Jamie Merz of the Columbia Gorge School of Theater (Oregon) who Carol had seen once in the past decade. Merz read Wild Dogs, followed up with a phone call to Carol, told her he loved it, and offered to produce it. Merz just happened to be producing The Gospel according to Tammy Faye and had rented the Manhattan Theater Club on 42nd Street for six weeks. He had the theater for a week after the close of his play and offered the space to his old high school buddy for an Equity staged reading that would serve as a one-night showcase for potential producers and financial backers. Further lightning struck when a high-powered director, Thomas Caruso of the hit Mama Mia, read the play, phoned Carol immediately, and “attached” himself to the play for future performances.

Then reality set in. Respected agents began returning Carol's phone calls, offering up clients for parts in the staged reading. Illness, last minute commitments, and defections led to Carol doing much more producing, directing, and acting than she had ever anticipated. However, the house was full and Carol received plaudits for Wild Dogs. The entire process from contacting her high school theater friend to the night of her New York reading was exactly four weeks.

As for the productions Carol has had of Wild Dogs, she found the staged reading at the College of Santa Fe “outstanding” and the Manhattan Theater Club one “flawed”: “During the first two scenes in New York, you could hear a pin drop. Then the audience became comfortable. By mid-play, the audience was rolling in the aisles.” Carol’s play elicited such comments as “the voice is authentic” and “the world is rich.” In a final note on Wild Dogs, two College of Santa Fe students who originated the roles of Ashley and Clark—Kelly Khun and Sam Quinn—had the opportunity to participate in the New York reading.

Carol Carpenter’s path to professional theater has not been a direct one, but it has certainly been an interesting and productive one. Carol’s family moved from Artesia, NM to Portland, OR where she attended eleventh grade at Tigard High School. A senior requirement at the Oregon school is to write a full-length play that would be submitted to the “Oregon Thespian Festival (OTF).” Carol wrote a one-act that was rejected by her advisor out of hand. Sputtering about the unfairness of it all, Carol went home and composed a full-length play over the weekend that won the OTF’s first prize, a four-year scholarship to any college or university. This led to Carol’s return to New Mexico where she used her scholarship to study theater (a requirement of the award) at the College of Santa Fe (CSF).

After a sophomore year “melt down” at CSF, Carol felt adrift because as an actor “I had no control over the content.” After taking a writing drama course from Howard Korder, she realized that “while she loved acting, her milieu was writing.”

She began writing fiction and had a major breakthrough in 1996 when she and her best friend at CSF Kari Bruno won the 1996 Academy Award for the Southwest in the category of “Best Student Short Film.” My Piedajuk (the polish word for “vagina”), which was shot on 16-millimeter film, is a thirty-five minute investigation of a young girl molested by her brother. Carol is proud of her film despite losing the national award to Yale University’s renowned Graduate Film Program. She learned she could run with the big dogs.

Carol Carpenter was accepted into the graduate writing programs at Columbia University (fiction) and at USC (drama, including stage, film, and television). Almost immediately, Carol had the opportunity to work on a major fund-raiser for the Gay Rights Archives at USC. Four weeks before the show, Carol “took a stab at the script” that evolved into a history of gay civil rights from the Oscar Wilde trial to the Stonewall Riots and included such headliners as Lily Tomlin and Bruce Vilanche (Hairspray). The El Rey Theater in Los Angeles was sold out at seventy-five dollars a ticket.

In order to study the Hollywood system, Carol took a job writing mass-market trailers and commercials at Paramount Studios. The results were immediate: “Having to boil things down to two minutes, I learned a lot about plot and drama and knowing when to end a scene.” Carol’s Hollywood experience has informed both her writing and her career as a teacher in the creative and dramatic arts at CSF: “The one element that is left out in many creative writing programs is plot” because “it appeals to the basest notions” and is “too commercial.” Carol feels that while many talented writing students know and employ “theme, tone, voice, point of view, and theory” in a sophisticated manner, they “can’t tell a story.”

Carol Carpenter’s future plans all spring from her “love of story.” The medium she chooses for each project is the one best to tell that particular story and the process “is different each time.” As for the theater, Carol wants to create a trilogy about Madrid, NM that has been inspired by the passion of individuals to battle faceless corporate entities. She is working on a second Madrid play that has at its core the recent attempted take-over of the village’s annual “Chile Festival” by an outside developer. As with Wild Dogs, Carol will be dealing with a highly particularized New Mexico environment, issues of the working class and the clash of cultures and peoples.

When asked to categorize her writing for the theater, Carol sees herself as “a storyteller and political satirist”: “The older I become, the more intentionally I make fun of or ignore the cultural sex and gender wars.” Her latest film project reflects her self-assessment as a dramatist with its political, social, and domestic concerns.

Conscience and Grace is the story of the daughter of a Southern Baptist minister who is thrown out of her home at the age of fifteen when she reveals that she is gay. Fifteen years later in Portland, OR, the father is debating the pro side of an anti-gay initiative with his daughter on the other side of the issue. Carol does not take the easy way out: “This is not an anti-fundamentalist tract but a Christian story of forgiveness under the stress of extreme circumstances.” However, even a political satirist needs to have some fun. Another Carol Carpenter film project is entitled Turkey, Texas. This is the actual home of country and western legend Bob Willis where 20,000 enthusiasts gather each year. Carol’s script has two redneck brothers vying for the crown in the country and western swing dance competition.

Loving the collaboration inherent in writing for the stage and the screen, Carol perceives herself as an “open writer” who is “curious about how her work moves (or does not move) her audiences.” She believes she “can recognize” when actors have something significant to add to the play, citing actor Ron Bloomberg’s “three or four jokes” she incorporated into her Madrid play.

Carol Carpenter argues, “New Mexico is the greatest influence on my work.” Carol’s goal is to live, work, and write in New Mexico: “I have no interest in living anywhere else…. I’d be happy to live forever in New Mexico.” She finds the small community aspect of Santa Fe “very accessible” and loves her work at CSF because “she can make a difference.”

Desiring to institute social change, Carol sees her political goals as more important than her artistic ones, though her writing is itself primarily political: “I put people and groups in conflict and have them learn from the collision…. Ultimately, I write about reconciliation.”

Carol Carpenter has a healthy distance from her own early writing success: “As I mature, I take my writing and myself less seriously. Artists need a healthy distance from their work. They spend too much time on the self…and the depressing reality is that too few watch or read their work. There are other ways to engage, to do good things.”

I look forward to experiencing those “other ways” Carol Carpenter will forge to instruct and entertain us all.