Matthew Capodicasa has always been what he refers to as “genre agnostic.” Even in childhood, his writing spanned a wide array of worlds, “everything from a kind of social realism thing to a space opera,” he says. In adulthood, his work is just as expansive. Capodicasa writes across mediums—plays, fiction, film, television, radio plays, and podcasts. While studying acting at NYU Tisch, he wrote independently. “I continued to write in secret and invite actor friends to come to my apartment or come to my dorm,” he remembers, “and I bribed them with pizza and beer to read scenes.”
It wasn’t until after graduation that Capodicasa transitioned more fully into writing. Since then, he has completed an MFA at Fordham University and the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at Juilliard. He has developed work nationally and internationally at the Kennedy Center, the National New Play Network, Primary Stages, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Capitol Fringe, and more. He is a winner of the Woodward/Newman Drama Award, and his plays have been finalists for the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference and the Heideman Award.
Much of Capodicasa’s work places real people in surreal or fantastical situations. “Usually, my work has some kind of heightened element,” he says. His play All the People You’ve Been follows Lucy, a recent college graduate who learns that her deceased mother was actually a 700-year-old entity trapped inside a necklace that possessed her mother’s body. Next/Life, a play Capodicasa wrote at Juilliard, is about an experimental drug trial that ages a 70-year-old cancer patient backwards. The City in the City in the City, a radio play he wrote, sees two women traveling to a fantastical ancient city. Beyond writing, Capodicasa is a member of a podcasting network that produces actual play TTRPGs—or tabletop role-playing games—set in fantasy, historical, and futuristic worlds.
The Scenarios, making its world premiere at Studio Theatre, marks a departure from much of Capodicasa’s work. The play is written in naturalism: “There’s something weird going on,” he says, “but the container is naturalistic.” The Scenarios is set in a police training center where officers are receiving crisis intervention training, learning de-escalation skills to use when civilians are displaying signs of mental illness. The story focuses on Angie, an actor recently hired to portray an EDP—an emotionally distressed person—for the training.
The idea for this piece came not only from reality, but from Capodicasa’s own experience; he worked in an administrative position at a New York social services agency that facilitated similar trainings. Capodicasa was particularly interested in the hired actors, noticing that “a lot of them gravitated toward this job because they had some sort of intersection with one of those worlds, either the criminal justice or the behavioral health world.... They had some skin in the game.”
It’s this skin in the game that Capodicasa is interested in. Although The Scenarios sits at the center of highly politicized and polarizing conversations, Capodicasa foregrounds humans instead of issues. The characters’ wants, needs, and personal stakes are at the center of the action. Capodicasa describes it as “a play about the strangeness of pretending to be other people, and the added strangeness of having to prove your own humanity to another human.” And it's important to Capodicasa that this piece—unlike much of his work—is set in our real world. “This play isn’t dystopian,” he says, “but it does feel dystopian to me that we have to have a training to remind people who have control over human life that humans are... humans.”
Perhaps that’s why The Scenarios both fits in with and expands on Capodicasa’s body of work. Instead of placing real people in surreal worlds, he is exposing the surreal parts of our own world—the strangeness of our real systems. With laser focus, Capodicasa allows audiences to see both the falsity of these trainings—how artificial it is to play-act reality—and the real and pressing need for them. While looking at an issue so politicized, the humanity of the people involved often goes unseen. Capodicasa insists we look at it, illuminating the humans in the room and the human cost of our systems. “That’s another thing theatre can do, right?” he asks. “To make the invisible visible for a little while.”
—Nora Geffen