Kirsten McCory: Reflections of Creative Diversity

Kirsten McCory is a Seattle-area actor, playwright, voice artist, and model. Several months ago I had the pleasure of acting in a stage reading of her play In The Garden. A few months later, I was invited to do a table read of another play she’s creating: 100% Solution. Being immersed in Kirsten’s writing gave my inner artist lessons about creativity and self-expression that anyone can benefit from.

Always diligently moving through some part of the creative process, she dares to dream—and all the better for the dynamic worlds and multifaceted characters she manifests into theaters near you. McCory is currently playing the character Amanda Wingfield in a local production of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie.

Samuel (S): How many plays have you written? How did you get the courage to start?

Kirsten McCory (KM): I just started a spreadsheet. I’ve written 21 radio and stage plays. Not all are ready to be produced or finished, though! Courage implies some sort of risk or choice involved. I just do it without thinking.

S: You played five roles in three plays on the same night at the Drunken Owl Theater. How did you prepare for that?

KM: I worked on each character separately and started that work with their physicalities. In one play, all of my characters were sea animals: a jellyfish, a fish, and an anemone. I tried to figure out how each character would move. And I used the sounds of their speech to inform their character.

They were all 10-minute plays performed at Jules Maes Saloon in Georgetown. This production speaks to me of the tenacity of theater and how we make it work. Our dressing room was a rented U-Haul, and we parked outside.

S: Did any historical events make you change your approach to art?

KM: From age five to 12, I was an aspiring actor until I auditioned for an acting school and didn’t get in. Then, I concentrated on writing fiction and poetry for years, and I got a degree in creative writing from UW. Then my brother died, and I stopped writing. When my daughter was born, I started making collages. I couldn't write because I couldn’t think about anything but my brother's death.

S: Tell me a little bit about growing up with radio theater.

KM: So this was in the 80's when I was 11. My friend Tami (who would commit suicide when she was 16) and I were taking drama classes and acting in Oliver! and I would spend the night with her, and we would listen to AM radio as we were going to sleep. AM radio has this unique sound, echo, and buzz like it's coming from another planet. And there were these mystery stories and ghost stories and detective stories, and my memories are colored by this cozy exposure to this wide universe of audio drama that I didn't know existed. And I always looked for those programs as an adult and I was so happy to find them on Spotify! When I write, I hear dialog; writing for radio was natural. You put everything into the text like Shakespeare—stage directions and expository stuff. Early in the pandemic, I asked some of my actor friends to join me, and I started looking up old scripts online. Stories from the 1930s and ’40s mostly.  An audience formed and people would donate a little bit of money to us. They liked having something to do as well.

Kirsten McCory (center) in The Deadliest Instruments, written by McCory and directed by Sara Porkalob. Ryan Sanders and Andrew Duncan Gemkow also pictured. / Armen Stein

S: For your play The Deadliest Instruments, "thegun" was a character. For your play In The Garden, characters stomp at the beginning and make sound effects. How are your ideas generated?

KM: I think that comes from having a movement teacher, George Lewis, who exposed me to the Meyerhold etudes, little movement vignettes like throwing a stone, drawing a bow... I have been interested in butoh and dance, and my friend Carolynne Wilcox had experience in devised theater, so I learned the body can be used onstage in various ways.

S: Artists influence what society considers acceptable. Would you say you aim to change minds or show things as they are?

KM: I guess, ideally, I would like to do both. As a younger person, I had more of a punk rock aesthetic, where I wanted to offend and disturb people. I don't know if I ever did that because I'm not that person, but I still respect things that shake up the status quo. I also like metaphors and symbols. I’m interested in what people hide.

S: Do you fear your message gets lost to disapproval?

KM: I do have that thing where I'm afraid I won't be liked. I wrote for years and years about whatever I wanted to, I was like a channel, not really thinking about what I was writing, just enjoying the act of it. It wasn't until maybe the last 10 years that I learned I could write what I think about the world. I’ve realized that until I got sober in 2015, I didn’t know what I thought about anything. I am somewhat envious of younger artists who say who they are and what they believe in the early days of their careers. My partner Wyatt Landis is a visual artist and he has helped me understand this as well.

S: You've worked with Jon Behrens. His work The Last Ten Minutes of Existence preserves the Kingdome implosion. You both captured the Seattle zeitgeist of the iconic Viaduct in Viaduct. How did you meet?

KM: On Capitol Hill there was an art studio called the Trapeze. I started working there as an art model in 2009, and Jon was a friend of the artist that ran the drawing sessions. I was modeling privately for a portrait and Jon came in to hang out and I was sitting still, being painted, and he was just talking and talking—we became friends. He had been in Seattle in the ‘80s in the punk scene, seeing music and documenting everything with photography. He had a sponsor who helped him financially make his movies and he was a very prolific filmmaker, which was inspiring. He spent his life making movies, which is what he loved. We worked together on several things. We all knew the Viaduct was going to come down. It was important to document its last days.

S: Theater is great for the soul and connection to one’s community, but it is also ephemeral. Tell me about The Glass Menagerie.

KM: This production features a Latino cast as the Wingfield family—that has been really exciting for me because I am biracial, Mexican and Northern European. I have always looked “ethnically ambiguous.” I think I look Caucasian more than Latina, and this has always made me insecure about who I was, about how people see me. Being a part of this production has helped me claim my Mexican-American heritage. Wyatt and Carolynne have encouraged me to embrace it. I always worried I was not brown enough to be accepted by the Latino community.

S: What can be seen in the play?

KM: It’s full of dreams, disappointment, connection, devastation, missed opportunity, tragedy, familial conflict. It's timeless in that we’ve all had struggles similar to what we see play out between Amanda and her children. The frustration and misunderstanding of trying and failing to be who our parents want us to be, the…exquisite pain of a mother trying to help and hold on to her children any way that she can.

S: Other than The Glass Menagerie, what are you working on?

KM: 100% Solution, the radio play. I’ve also been co-writing a play called One Night at the Ranch with Lori. A stage reading of that is in November with the Edmonds Driftwood Theater.  I would like to do some film work.

Kirsten McCory (L) in Have You Seen Us?. Written and Directed by John Leith; produced by Villains Theatre. / John Leith

Left to Right: Kirsten McCory, Morrie Cordero, Ryan Sanders and Tom Spangenberg

S: Great writing is when you can see characters wrestle with choices they are forced to make.

KM: I want to create characters in my acting and writing that are ordinary but go through extraordinary things. How do we write interestingly about everyday people without making them superheroes? Maybe not everyone can have an extraordinary life!

I think the world we have created is kind of sad because people are chained to this idea that their life has to be a certain way. They might be afraid of trying something else because it's “unknown.”

S: What challenges have you faced that other artists could learn from?

KM: My journey through different disciplines could be inspirational. I believe everybody needs some creative outlet—anything where you make something with your hands, observe something outside yourself, seek inspiration. My brother's death led me to collage, which led me to photography, which led me to burlesque, and then I was back to acting and writing. You have to just keep on going; even if you don’t know where your chosen medium will take you, you have to keep on utilizing your imagination and cultivate the desire to create.

I think, to some degree, everybody has that desire, but some people are lucky because that desire is so overwhelming it can’t be ignored! My family exposed me to the arts at a young age and took me to museums, hiking, and traveling. I tried to expose my daughter to that kind of upbringing, too.

Kirsten McCory was born in New York City and moved to California in a VW as a child, then landed in Seattle the year Star Wars came out. She now lives in Ballard.