Steve Yockey says he’s a ‘cheerleader’ for the Utah theater troupe, where he has had two previous plays.
“Sleeping Giant,” which opened Wednesday and runs through Oct. 16, is the third of his plays to premiere at SLAC, following “Blackberry Winter” in 2015 and “Mercury” in 2017. And Yockey readily admits he didn’t know what to make of the Utah theater company’s interest in his works at first. “I know when I go to SLAC that I’m going to see my play,” he said — not an interpretation of his play he doesn’t recognize. “[SLAC artistic director] Cynthia [Fleming] and the entire team there take new work for the American theater so seriously that you really aren’t concerned. You’re going to get to see your play and you’re going to get to see how audiences that come to new plays react to it.”
Yockey praised both SLAC and its patrons for giving new works a chance. “It’s very exciting, and it’s hard to develop that kind of audience.”“Traveling around the country to work on my theater stuff, I tell all the playwrights that I run into that they need to be submitting to SLAC,” he said, “because they’re going to have a good experience if their play gets picked.”Fleming said she was watching “The Flight Attendant” and wondering if Yockey would ever again write plays.
Lily Hye Soo Dixon plays The Naïf; Tito Livas plays The Messenger, Robert Scott Smith plays The Raconteur, and Casssandra Stokes-Wylie plays The Convert. The difference for him is that he writes plays “about things I don’t understand fully” that he wants to “kind of dissect and understand better. … And so because the plays come from a question, they end up presenting the audience with — why are we like this? As opposed to — here’s my answer for you.”