Elena Freck and kanishk pandey on Protect the Protectors

Shannon Horsey, Gracie Guichard, Jules Talbot

KP: Hi Elena! 

EF: Hi! 

KP: How are you? 

EF: Good, how about you? 

KP: Good, good - Who are you? 

EF: (laughs)My name is Elena Freck. I am a playwright and an arts administrator. I have a play called Protect the Protectors going up at Brooklyn Art Haus September 11th through September 14th! 

KP: You said playwright and arts administrator. 

EF: Yes, I have a day job as a development facilitator at Roundabout Theater Company. And that is my 40 hour a week life and then I have another 40 hour a week life as an artist. 

KP: I’m curious, how did you come to playwriting? 

EF: I started writing plays in high school- 

KP: Oh really! 

EF: Yes. I was an actor in my high school’s theater department and wasn’t great at it, and I wanted to be doing something I felt I was good at in the theater department. And I was doing well in English during High School. And so I wrote my first play to submit to the Oregon State Thespian Festival. And ended up winning first place, so I got validation in the theater department for the first time, and that’s when I decided that would be my niche. 

KP: What was the thespian festival like? Did you get to see it performed or have actors read it? 

EF: Yeah, it was a regional competition where, if you one, you got to have actors do the show. 

KP: And was that the first time you got to hear your written work read aloud? 

EF: Yes, I got addicted to it then and there. 

KP: Many such cases, many such. And then how did you continue to working on pursuing playwriting? 

EF: I went to the college at Emerson and I applied for the BFA Theater Major, which was where they grouped all of the people who weren’t actors, or designers, or stage managers, so I was in a program with directors and dramaturgs, and some other assorted theatermakers. I took a full course of playwriting classes there and had the opportunity to write three full-length plays in college and got one fully produced right before Covid, which good timing. Then I moved to the city in 2022, and have written two full-lengths here! 

KP: Nice. It’s interesting, I went to a program that was fully just writers, not even actors. And one of the great limitations of that was not really having experience working with the various limbs of theater. And I’m curious what was the experience like for you, developing your playwriting surrounded by people who are directing, dramaturging, designing - do you think that affected the way you approach writing? 

EF: Yeah, that’s a great question - it definitely encouraged me to step up my game, because I was seeing what my classmates were doing, and I wanted to bring something worthy for them to work on. And that’s how I still create today - I know my friends, and I know I want to bring them something worthy that they’d be excited to work on and produce. That’s how this piece [Protect the Protectors] came to be, I really wanted to make this piece to work on with Clara. 

KP: Did you go to school with Clara? 

EF: Yes! We didn’t know each other super well at school, but when we both moved to the city we started to hang out more and work together. It was like, we both had fifteen mutual friends, we should probably meet up. We got coffee, found out we got along really well, and figured hey, we should try working on something together. That was early 2024. By September 2024, I had the first draft of Protect the Protectors, and I gave it to them. 

KP: So was that your first time collaborating with Clara? 

EF: Yeah - it has been one of the most fruitful collaborations of my career so far. Clara saw an outline of this show, read the first draft, directed an excerpt reading as part of Paper Kraine, and then directed a full staged reading at The Tank. And then I actually took it on my own for a few months. I had a workshop of the show in North Carolina as part of the Scotopia Festival. So it was with Clara, it was with Clara, then it was not for a bit, and now it’s nice to bring it back to Clara for the full production. Having that continuity is really nice, because it’s not per se like having a co-writer, but it’s almost having a partner in the script. 

KP: What was it like taking the script on your own to develop? Do you feel like it gave you opportunities to understand the show better? 

Elena Freck

EF: The biggest thing about that process to make a difference was that I had a professional dramaturg during the process which helped a lot, but also bringing the show to a Southern audience, especially for a show about something recognizable to the South. It was interesting to see what New York audiences found funny about the show, versus what Southern audiences found funny about the show. New York audiences laughed a lot more about one character in the show that is a former Sorority chapter president, and there was less laughter in the south as she was an archetype that they recognized; she was someone they knew. 

KP: Would you say they sympathized more with her? 

EF: Yes. We worked during this process to start making her character less of a clown. The Southern audiences really didn’t see her that way, so I wanted to shape her character to reflect that. 

KP: I feel like that’s one thing that gets forgotten a lot in the new play scene in New York is remembering how much of the work put on stage is getting shaped for New York audiences. New Yorkers have a very specific taste and cultural background. Tell me a bit about how you came to writing this show. 

EF: I was working on a show taking place in an office, and it was a bit more soap opera-y, more relationship focused, and not politically focused like Protect the Protectors. And I wasn’t as excited about it. And I was thinking about growing up in North Carolina, and growing up in the military background and environment that exists there and doesn’t really exist anywhere else I’ve lived. There’s this expectation that everyone respects the troops and knows someone who has served in the military. And I was reading a lot about how the defense industry operates, about how billions upon billions of dollars worth of weaponry going to Israel comes from American defense contractors, and then articles celebrating that the majority of the largest defense contractors coming from the United States had female CEOs. There was a lot of dissonance for me between the grim sales of weapons, the massacring of families, and the - Go Girls! Feminism wins! It’s very not awesome. That’s where this play comes from. It’s set in the office of a defense contractor with a female CEO, who has chosen to hire a team of all women. 

KP: I’m curious about how you feel the characters came to be full people that you see - especially considering you, coming from the area you’re setting this play in. Are you basing them off real people or archetypes? 

EF: No, not really. When I create characters, I think I’m creating characters that I would be interested to hear argue. For example, when I bring these three characters into an office working together, I want to create three people with completely different ways of communicating, different feelings on the job they work, and see how they clash together. I want each character to be able to start an argument with each other just by communicating. One should be agnostic about the workplace, one that is very aware of the nefarious nature of the defense contractor but chooses to look away, and one that has been brought up steeped in the military culture of the South and comes to see the horror of what she’s doing and resents the work she does. 

KP: I’m curious - has the wider concept of critiquing and understanding the presence of defense contractors in the economy received any complex reception, especially in North Carolina? 

EF: Yes, definitely. The boss character who supervises the three characters - in North Carolina she was played by a military wife. And she was super excited to play the character and to lean into it, and we never got to get into the critique of the military that lives in the play. I never got hear what she thought about that aspect of the show. She played the character incredibly due to her experience, but I never got to hear what she thought of the critiques of the military within the show. 

KP: And how do you feel about the way New Yorkers react and interact with something Southern culturally, and that they get to have distance with - and I wonder if there’s anything you want people to learn when they see the show. 

EF: My biggest motivator, as a writer, is wondering why people, especially women, make certain tough decisions - what political circumstances, economic circumstances, social circumstances motivate people to make decisions that people in New York would look down upon. I would look down at someone to take a job at a defense contractor, but I want to consider why they would make that decision. You may have the ingrained belief in the goodness of the military, or you may not have a college education and are being offered a job with a much higher salary than you would receive otherwise. 

KP: Humanizing these people, then, who are often archetypes in the bubble. 

EF: And scoffed at by us who have more options. 

KP: How did you come to work with Kitchen Sink on this? 

EF: Very fortuitously! When we did the reading of the show at The Tank, we happened to be doing our reading in one of the theaters while Kitchen Sink was doing a show right next door. So Katie (Royse Ginther, artistic director of Kitchen Sink) came after our show ended, and spoke with us about it, and let us know they had a submission opportunity open up. And we ended up getting to work together! 

KP: Wow, super Kismet! 

EF: Yeah! 

KP: So, the last thing, the hard question but important question, what’re you hoping for after this? What’re you looking forward to? 

EF: Having this script published - 1319 Press is publishing it, which is exciting, it’ll be for sale at the show. I would love to see another production of the show, though I won’t be revisiting the script any time soon. I’m excited to start a new full-length - I started Protect the Protectors in the summer of last year, and it has been my sole focus. I have three other pieces I’ve been wanting to work on. I’m lucky that I have a dayjob that I’m happy with, that keeps me in the theater, but one day I’d love to make my artistry more a part of my calendar, and thus more a part of my paycheck. At some point, I’d love to continue seeing my life as both an artist and an administrator. 

KP: Amazing. Protect the Protectors, going up in Brooklyn Art Haus, September 11th, 12th, 13th at 7:30 pm, 14th at 2PM. 

EF: Yes, be there! 

KP: Oh I will. 

Protect the Protectors runs September 11-14 at Brooklyn Art Haus.