by Catherine Weingarten. @sarahkaneissexy.
NEW YORK, NY – Local indie playwright Autumn Crystal Summersmith found herself truly humiliated following a recent talkback for her new play, after assuming that she would actually take away something useful from the experience, which, as usual, did not happen, sources confirmed.
“I really just wanted to get some audience feedback to help me write my next draft,” noted the playwright. “But instead, all of the feedback I got was wildly unhelpful. One guy ranted for twenty minutes about his upcoming divorce and how that relates to the western canon and some other chick threw Kit-Kats at me. Why did they even come?”
Gracie Mathersby, a playwright and close personal friend of Autumn, was not surprised by what transpired.
“All playwrights know that talkbacks aren’t actually useful and are just a chance for people to sound smart and impress their tinder dates,” noted Mathersby. “When I host readings, I tend to verbally harass the theater company until they give up on doing a talkback, threats if necessary, whatever it takes. I thought Autumn’s talkback wasn’t that bad compared to the typical awfulness - except that one dude did ask her if she was single, like, a couple times,” she added.
John Steamtown, the artistic director of “Quirky Girls” theater company, was delighted by how the talkback went down.
“I do talkbacks at my theater because I want the audience to have a real voice in the development process, regardless of how the playwright feels,” said Steamtown. “I was happy about the useful feedback Autumn got, like when a random woman said ‘this movie is bad’, and when the other guy shouted out ‘I got a divorce recently’. She has so much juicy feedback to parse through!”
At press time, Autumn claims that she will never again expect anything useful from a talkback. Instead, she plans on taking the notebook in which she wrote her talkback feedback, and burning it in a fire and dancing around it naked like they do in The Crucible.