August W. Guszkowski (he/they/whatever) is a playwright, librarian, actor, and novelist (not necessarily in that order) from Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has been writing one-act plays since 2023 and getting them produced around New England and New York for roughly the same length of time. His first full-length script is currently in development with the Cambridge Foundry through their Pushing the Margins Fellowship. August co-produces Pearl Diving, a living-room reading series featuring Boston-area poets, comedians, and drag performers, with his wife Cassidy. In his limited free time, August bakes, bikes, and bothers his cat.
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I learned the basics of writing for the stage from a steady diet of Classical Athenian tragedy, where efforts to better the mortal world and avert disaster are always in vain. I studied an awful lot of Shakespeare, where (problem plays excepted) genre is determined by ending, or vice versa: no matter what happens in the first four and three-quarters acts of a comedy, you'd better believe there will be a wedding at the end of it.
All of this gave me an appetite for stories whose characters are trapped by their own emotional baggage, their social mores, or the genre conventions of the stories they inhabit. The plays I write are frequently futile and end in failure -- characters try and fail to say what they mean, or try change their ways only to find themselves unable to change their circumstances, or try to grow only to be dragged back down by forces outside of their control. But my goal is not to write plays that leave an audience feeling hopeless: my argument as an artist is that, even in the face of failure, it's the trying that matters. I don't know about you, but I need the trying to matter. Because if it doesn't, Jesus, what does?
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