\n<\/p>\n
That these characters are, as Hunter puts it, \u201cversions of me had I not found offramps\u201d does not make them less dramatically valid. In a way, as he has been discovering ever since, it makes them more so. If \u201cA Case for the Existence of God,\u201d from 2022, is about the struggle to have children, his latest play, \u201cGrangeville,\u201d<\/a> which opens this month at the Signature Theater, is about the struggle to care for parents. \u201cI\u2019m now in the sandwich generation,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Like Wohl and Jacobs-Jenkins, Hunter feels he could not have written his newer plays, with their newer concerns, sooner \u2014 nor, for that matter, his earlier plays now. One of the benefits of reaching midcareer is that a new life stage offers new stories to tell and a larger reserve of craft with which to tell them. Another benefit is that midcareers are obviously a prerequisite to late careers, with their witchy, molten qualities. You don\u2019t get to write \u201cThe Tempest\u201d unless you\u2019ve already written \u201cHamlet.\u201d<\/p>\n The question of what comes next for these playwrights is in any case no longer an anxious one, as it was in their youth. For Headland, 44, it seems to be pleasantly unanswerable. A cycle she calls the Seven Deadly Plays<\/a>, which began with \u201cCinephilia\u201d in 2008 and continued with \u201cBachelorette\u201d in 2010, came to a close this season with \u201cCult of Love,\u201d<\/a> the first to make it to Broadway.<\/p>\n The sins were \u201csuch a good container,\u201d Headland says, like breadcrumbs leading forward instead of backward. But despite having run through them all (\u201cBachelorette\u201d was gluttony; \u201cCult of Love\u201d was pride), she in no way feels at loose ends.<\/p>\n A highly praised TV series like \u201cRussian Doll\u201d and a \u201cStar Wars\u201d spinoff (\u201cThe Acolyte\u201d) will do that. And perhaps it helps too that, atypically among the midcareer cohort, Headland\u2019s dramatic interests have been \u201cthe same from day one\u201d: addiction, God, the female experience \u201cand some version of how those things conflate to make you grow or die.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n