Caleb Dukes (‘22) is a playwright who writes grand tales about small people, examining the powerful stories that live inside even the most unsuspecting characters. They discovered this passion whilst grieving the loss of their great-grandmother, which inspired Virginia, a Texas Educational Theatre Association award-winning play chronicling her life as a mother, friend, teacher, and activist. Through this experience, they were able to turn pain into art, which is all they do now. After attending and graduating from Rice University with a degree in English with a concentration in Creative Writing and Visual & Dramatic Arts with a concentration in Theatre, they decided to pursue an MFA in playwriting from the legendary Actor’s Studio Drama School. Telling stories that never get told — but so desperately need to be — is their life’s purpose. Caleb explores subjects that are not supposed to be talked about, such as violence in the queer community, dealing with trauma publicly, and the exploitative nature of art itself, in order to process hardship and create something meaningful. They hope to continue collaborating with those who inspire them (their friends, mentors, idols…) and people who have a real passion for craft and substance over spectacle. Working with people on the fringes of society to explore their challenges, failures, and successes through art on the stage and screen is their dream. Caleb wants to someday work on and off-Broadway before making films with a studio like A24, who puts their full trust in the artist, so that they can have their visions fully realized. –taken from calebdukes.com

 

What has post-graduation life been like for you?

I think I’m a bit of an unusual case because I jumped right into graduate school, and I think a lot of people don’t do that, but I was scared to go into the real world so I was like “Let’s do more school.” So it’s been lovely for me. I moved to New York, and I’ve always wanted to live in New York and now I’m doing it. I’m meeting all of these amazing people, and making all of these friends and colleagues who are great and getting connections. I just got into a festival and I was in one this summer as well. So it’s really fun and I like it! It’s very challenging, grad school is really hard but it’s going. 

 

You mentioned playwriting as your main line of work. Can you elaborate more on that?

Yeah! Since high school, I’ve been writing plays. I started with the high school theatre senior project to direct a one-act. I’d been in one-acts previously where other students had directed and written their own plays. I really enjoyed the process and hearing from my friends about how they liked writing and I was like “I think I want to do that!” Then my great-grandma died that summer and she lived a wild life–she lived until 102 [years old]. She was this pillar in her small town in Dublin, TX, so I wrote about her life and I won a Texas Educational Theatre Association Award for it. Then I was like “Woah maybe I’m good at this,” and so that’s what I did all through Rice: took the playwriting and screenwriting classes–I love Amber Dermont so much. Amber wrote my grad school recommendation letters too! For my [senior] thesis, I wrote a play and submitted part of that as my application to grad school and I got the distinguished thing for it which I was really happy about. So I was like “I guess I’m pretty good at this, let’s keep going!”

 

That all sounds super cool! How do you like New York?

Oh, I love New York! I mean all of the bad things about it that people say, are very true, but all of the good things are also very true and I have never felt so at home. So it feels very nice to finally have somewhere because Houston was never really that [home] for me–I hate driving so not driving is amazing.

 

What does a day in your life– whether within your program or your work–look like? 

I have very different schedules depending on the day, but it’s usually one or two classes and that’s either a playwriting, acting, or theatre history class. Then I have rehearsal sometimes because I’m currently writing three plays for school. One of them will be read at the end of the semester which will then go on to be my grad school thesis that I’m doing in collaboration with the director.  I’m writing for these actors, so that’s really cool and I go to rehearsal for that every week. I’m also a barista, so I go to work and make coffee.

 

What has been your favorite part about grad school? What has been your favorite play that you’ve written so far?

My favorite thing about grad school has been the people I’ve met. I’ve met some people who will probably be my best friends ever because it’s such a small program. There’s only 20 of us so I have this group of playwrights, actors, and directors; and we’re doing all this work together and we all inexplicably got along very well. So I have loved meeting them and getting to know them and I think, or I hope, I’m going to be working with them for the rest of my life. I would say that these people understand exactly what you want to do because they want to do it too. At Rice, there were so many people in the Theatre and English programs that I loved because I related to them. But now I’m interacting with other people who want to be playwrights which is nice because at Rice I was the only one writing a play for my thesis. My favorite play that I’ve ever written was my thesis for Rice, it’s called The Feminine Urge. I won the Sherry Matusoff Merfish Award for it too for all of my “humanitarian work at Rice” but all I did was write a play so I always think it’s just for that. 

 

What was the play about?

It’s very dark. It’s about a trans woman who is a serial killer in New York City. She’s a sex worker who kills her johns, at least the ones who she thinks deserve it. So it explores feminity and this feminine rage and how we allow masculine people to feel that rage– we’ll be like “Oh my god that serial killer is so hot” to a man but wouldn’t feel that for a woman, especially a queer woman. So I wrote that to see what it would be like if we actually got to live out our fantasies and comment on why we’re not allowed to–but I don’t support serial killers!

 

Do you have any plays that have been produced?

Yes! I had a play at Rice that was produced through Lovett because I was the theatre rep there, so I did a vanity project and put on my own play. Then Covid hit so I never got to do another one. I was also produced in high school because I directed the student play. I’ve been in a few festivals, I was just in the Secret Theatre’s One Act Festival (in Queens, NY) and I just got accepted into the International Human Rights Art Festival so I’ll be doing that December 4th!

 

What was your process like applying for grad school and getting into grad school?

It was weird because I didn’t want to go to grad school. I told myself “Why would I want to pay more money to do the same thing,” but now I’m realizing that in the theatre world, I’m glad I did. People don’t really take you seriously if you don’t have an MFA, which is sad because there are so many talented playwrights who don’t have MFAs. Also, grad school gives you the connections that you don’t get in the real world. I’ve met so many people that I would have never been able to meet if I hadn’t been here. Originally though, I didn’t want to go, only applied to Yale first because I was like “I don’t want to go but Yale made their program free.” Also, Amber Dermont pressured me by saying “I think you’d be really good for Yale!” So I applied there and did not get in sadly but then I was like “I don’t know what I want to do for the next few years of my life if I’m not going to Yale” because it felt like that was my only option at that point. However, I just so happened to get an email from the Actors Studio the day I got rejected from Yale that said they were still accepting applications so I applied and I got in! So now I’ve been here but it was a weird crunch time of writing a full-length play in only the span of a few months to turn in for grad school applications and then suddenly it was over.

 

How do people respond to your path of playwriting?

They don’t know that it can be a job. Oftentimes people will follow up by asking, “Yes but what do you want to do” and I’m like “…write plays.” Usually, people don’t realize that it’s an option because it’s really not unless you have privilege, which I fortunately have and I can recognize that I’ve come from a very privileged place. So I’ve been able to afford to go to grad school without putting myself into extreme amounts of debt. So not many people are playwrights and people are usually surprised or in disbelief when I tell them–but not in a negative way. 

 

Do you feel like the English major at Rice helped you at all in terms of becoming a playwright? If so, how?

Yes! I’ve only had really good experiences in the English Department at Rice. It was really good, especially the senior project class. That class was amazing because I had this really cool cohort who weren’t playwrights so they would go along with it [my work] being like “I think this is how you do it but I don’t know;” and giving me the best feedback they could and they were actually very helpful. The professors, Emily Houlik Ritchey, Ian Schimmel, and Krista Comer were really nice and amazing professors, especially when I was doing it in such a time crunch to get my thesis done for grad school. I finished it in one semester and they told me I didn’t have to take the second one, but I knew I would miss my cohort and I wanted to make my play better so I stayed.

 

What do you most fondly remember/what are your main takeaways from being a Rice English major?

My answer would probably be my cohort and the senior seminar. It was such a great experience and I made such great friends. The English Department doesn’t feel as tight-knit as some of the other majors do but doing that class–we were all put in the same room and it was really cool. I made friends with some people that I didn’t even know existed until that class. 

 

What was your favorite English class at Rice, and how did it influence you as a writer?

I might have to say Screenwriting, just for Amber Dermont because I love that woman so much. She is the reason I’m in grad school because she pressured me to apply and she has shown me nothing but love. While I did not write a very good screenplay for that class, I attempted and started writing a bad one. I didn’t get the product that I thought I was going to get but I had the best time because I met her and had her mentorship.

 

What would you say to someone who wants to pursue a similar line of work to you?

Get an MFA. Try to go somewhere where it’s cheap or free, go to Yale because it’s free. It’s going to cost a lot and it’ll be more years of life where sometimes you’ll be like “I’m not learning anything new” but it’s worth it just for the connections you get. This industry is now very unfortunately based around nepotism, so it’s just who you know, and going to grad school will help you meet those people.

 

What advice would you give, if you could, to your undergraduate self?

Stop being so afraid to be you. 

 

What’s it like navigating between work, grad school, and life outside of that?

I’m not good at balancing it. I’m going to school every day this week and then working on the weekends so not as much social life as I’d like, but you got to find it when you can. Even if there’s a random weekday when you have free time, there’s always something to do because it’s New York and something is always going on. So my social life is just “catch it when you can”, I need a better balance because right now it’s not great. 

 

What would you say to people who are scared to graduate college?

It’s not as scary as you think. I’ve only been out for a year and some change and I also went into another school environment. I’m a grad student now though so I’m not very involved in university life itself. So I find it very “free-ing,” I’m not an extroverted person so I love being on my own, and living on my own is wonderful! I have this tiny shoebox studio but I love it. I would say enjoy the ride. Honestly, there’s nothing you can do that will mess up your entire life –unless you do something really bad– but what you’re doing after college is just trying to live your life. So give yourself grace because we’re all going to figure it out and there’s no such thing as too late.