The Obie-winning Ice Factory festival presents seven new works from June 29 to August 13 at the New Ohio Theatre. We spoke with writer Virginia Grise about SHE SHE SHE, conceived by Carrie Heitman and created alongside director Elena Araoz, visual artist Susan Zeeman Rogers and the performing ensemble of Hook & Eye.

Tell us about your show.

SHE SHE SHE is an epic poem told in the voices of queer women across time and place, exploring the complexities of gender, memory, history and love.

Part of SHE SHE SHE takes place in a 1930s New Deal mountain camp. What's something interesting about this historical moment that you didn't know before beginning work on the play?

I discovered that civil rights activist and poet Pauli Murray attended Camp Tera at Big Mountain. I didn’t know anything about her before this project. I was initially drawn to her only because I read that the camp director took a copy of Marx’s Das Kapital away from one of the women at the camp. I wanted to know more about this woman reading Marx in the woods. As I learned more about Pauli Murray (a black woman who sometimes dressed as a man who dated other women in the 30s), I became more interested in how women were claiming their own agency as queer women, as leftists, as intellectuals, as working women, as artists during that time period and wanted to connect that to the present day.

I wouldn’t call this piece a play – I wanted to write text that was open enough for conversation and collaboration with the actors and designers, text that could be performed. It’s more a poem, a meditation, a dream than a play.

What have been the most exciting things about seeing your show jump from the page to the stage?

My collaboration with the visual artist Susan Zeeman Rogers has been incredibly rewarding. We were in an artistic dialogue through out the entire process that helped shape the performance. Sometimes she would respond to an idea or few lines of text I had written and sometimes I would respond to her visual research or something she made. In the end, Susan created these intricate and detailed hand-made dioramas constructed to fit together in a specific way so that they take on a life of their own and in essence become another character/actor in the piece.

Who are your favorite playwrights, past and present?

A few playwrights whose work impacts the way I think about theater include: Sharon Bridgforth, Carl Hancock Rux, Erik Ehn, Adrienne Kennedy, Ricardo A. Bracho, Olga Mukhina, Reza Abdoh, Migdalia Cruz, and Cherríe Moraga.

What would you change about the current state of theater?

People have long said that the theatre (spelling intentional), like capitalism, is dying. Unfortunately, neither is true - though in recent years, both have had moments of crises and have had to respond to the voices of women, people of color, and queer people while the working class of any color, gender, or sexuality continue to be ignored. It would be my dream to blow them both up: the theatre and capitalism (as they are actually linked).

I try to do this in whatever way I can as an artist, as often as I can, by creating relationships that are not transactional, taking risks in my work, and pushing the limitations of my imagination to imagine a world beyond the black box, both literally and metaphorically. Despite the repeated failed attempts at this experiment, I keep trying – it is in fact my life long project.