Dear Animal,

Dear Animal,   I’m thumbing through a red notebook the size of a folded bandana. It is on my seat, between my legs, as I drive. Using my teeth, I pull off the pen cap. I usually text notes to myself, but it’s crowded in the car as we drive 1500 miles, and I fear...

Dear Animal, Before I was a director or a playwright, I was an actor. I started in kindergarten and kept going, including seven years of higher education. I never did much professionally, but I’m shaped by those years of acting study.  An acting teacher once told...

Dear Animal, ‘Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb’ is what you might ask an actor to silently mouth as an extra in a scene. Rhubarb creates a believable background, as it simulates conversation, and because the word rhubarb doesn’t have any recognizable consonant clusters, it...

Dear Animal, As you may recall, I work in a lot of different media– snow and ice, water, moss – but my new medium is road. Moving to the foothills of Colorado has upped my driving game considerably, I have a 16-year-old, so I am a driving instructor and my youngest...

Dear Animal, If my voice seems a bit muffled this month, it’s because I am buried deep here. Still, the design is fantastic, I marvel at that white sky. In the mountain hamlet of Sunshine, I’m told by the locals that this fall, 3 feet, is manageable; it’s 4 or 5 where...

Dear Animal, I imagine there are snowdrops now back home. Signs of spring. And daffodil trumpets. When my kids were toddlers, we would stop before a ‘daffy’ and listen hard. We thought we could hear them shouting—wake up, get moving, spring up—and since then, I think...

Dear Animal, I got my kid some sourdough starter for Christmas. He does pie crust and is ready to level up. The starter comes with instructions, and he is into it, does the flour thing and the top of the fridge thing and the discard thing. This goes on for days. At...

Dear Animal, A few years back, you and I, Animal, worked with a local blacksmith to build a typewriter backpack. I wanted to hike and write. Typewriters were originally invented by gun manufacturers, as it turns out, and there was a war in the woods where we lived. I...

Dear Animal, When you were a young Animal, every February, I used to give away show ideas on our socials. One per day for the month. I did it to prepare a blank slate for new ideas to arrive. I remember once that my old friend, the playwright Kevin Kerr,...

Dear Animal,  “I had a boyfriend once who said that all Hostess products contained nuclear waste and it was every American’s patriotic duty to eat her share.” This is a quote from a NY Times article from the 90s that I cut out and stuck in my journal, which later...

Hi again there, hi hi. Kendra, here, the co-founder and past Artistic Director of The Only Animal, and you might know that I left the company and Canada in July of this year. For me, The Only Animal was about making theatre in deep relationship with place and the...