Meet the Playwright
Hanna Kime is a Chicago-based playwright and screenwriter originally from St. Louis, Missouri.
Her full-length work has been presented or developed with Goodman Theatre, Berkeley Rep, St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, Steep Theatre, Jackalope Theatre, the New Coordinates, UP Theatre, Broken Nose Theatre, Sideshow Theatre, where she was an ensemble member, and First Floor Theater, where she previously served as Literary Manager. Most recently, her script THE BEST DAMN THING served as the first fully produced play at The Understudy: Coffee and Books. Kime is a two-time O’Neill Finalist, was the winner of OKC Rep’s New Voices Contest, and has been named a semifinalist for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Ashland New Play Festival, and Premiere Stages Play Festival. She holds degrees from the University of Chicago in English and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Outside of her own writing, Kime works as a freelance dramaturg and teaching artist. She is represented by UTA.
Because it's the obvious first question: what inspired you to write a play about the annual women's July 4th competitive hot dog eating contest?
HK: I was home in St. Louis over the Fourth of July in 2020 and the women’s division of the hot dog eating contest happened to be on TV. We were deep in COVID lockdowns at that point, and with so many sporting events canceled, it seemed wild that, of all things, this was still going on. Instead of hosting it outdoors on Coney Island as usual, Nathan’s had the competitors inside an empty room with plexiglass dividers between them. With no crowd and so much less pageantry, the image of these women silently downing as many hot dogs as they could in ten minutes felt even more alien and eerie than it usually does. The contest felt like a big nasty knot of many different pernicious cultural forces - American consumer culture, competition, misogyny - and I wanted to find a way to untie that knot. DOGS is an attempt to do so.
HK: The play’s structure - the repeated “dogs” chorus, the fast pace, and the interwoven narrative threads - came to me before any specific plot or character details. I love playing with form in my work, and I wanted to find the right weird container for this story before I started writing it. I wanted the play to feel like a game, like the women were fighting for control of the narrative, with each “dogs” feeling like winning a hand at cards. I wanted competition and frenzy and a sense of losing control to be baked into the shape of the text itself. Of all of my scripts, this is probably the one I’ve made the most radical rewrites to over its development. I found the characters and the plot through the structure, and kept surprising myself with where it went. Also, I will never write a play that’s not funny!
The titular repeated chorus, alongside the increasingly-spikey humor, are the driving forces of this play's intense pace. What made these elements exciting to play with / what did you learn while writing this play?
DOGS is certainly a political play, but it comes at it from the side. What makes the annual women's July 4th competitive hot dog eating contest the right framework for interrogating The Current State Of Things?
HK: I think all of the best art that attempts to interrogate “The Current State of Things” comes at it from the side. Our material world and pop culture landscapes are not created in a vacuum - they are built in the context (I know, I’m sorry, I was searching for any other word) of so many destructive social forces. DOGS - and I think all of my plays - examine the ways these forces pulse through the mundane by dissecting the mundane as thoroughly as possible. Personally, I don’t think art is particularly great at solving problems. When it tries to, it gets preachy. But I do think great art asks questions, and DOGS asks question after question after question.
HK: Every line is perfect! If you see the play you’ll agree. (But also, Carol’s monologue)