By Sonia Desai

What interested you in doing a Sherlock Holmes adaptation?

I was into Sherlock Holmes as a kid, and I read the hits like The Hound of the Baskervilles. A couple of years ago I started getting really interested in the idea of doing Holmes and Watson with two non-male actors. I grew up watching all these movies like Ghostbusters and The Goonies, which are fun buddy comedies, but they’re almost exclusively men. So I knew I wanted to do a Holmes and Watson about female codependency and women who are allowed to not be sexy, to just be totally crazy and funny and go on adventures and hijinks. 

Why did you choose to set it in 2021? 

In 2021, right when theatre was coming back, my friend Stuart Carden, who runs Kansas City Repertory Theatre, wrote to me about my Holmes and Watson story. I didn’t want to pretend what just happened to us didn’t happen. I think part of our American problem right now is we tend to ignore things and pretend all the bad things didn’t happen. I was also thinking about why people are drawn to mystery stories. I think what mysteries do for us is that they provide answers and patterns to a life that sometimes seems chaotic. So I thought this would be a great time for this story because we’re all very confused and want meaning. I also thought that would be meaningful in terms of Watson’s journey. Watson is based on a family member of mine who works in the medical profession who went through the pandemic working in ERs.

How did you get started as a playwright?

I actually got my degree in acting. I moved to New York City and was living the life of an actor. I was going to all these auditions, and I swiftly got frustrated with the dearth of interesting female roles. I was always auditioning to play the main guy’s wife or girlfriend or prostitute. One night, I went out with a friend, and I was telling her that I wished there were new feminist takes on the classics. I’ve always loved the classics. After about a bottle and a half of wine, I bet my friend $100 that I could write one. I wrote her a check, and, at the time, I could not afford for her to cash that check. I told her to give me six months. If I didn’t have a draft for her by then, she could cash the check. And that was my first play, Sense and Sensibility. 

That is an incredible story!

It proves that you should always make unfair bets! You should always do stupid things. Promise things you have no idea if you can do. That’s how it started, and quite to my surprise, it became a whole different career.

What are you hoping the audience will take away from this piece?

I always want an audience to come away with a new perspective on an old story, or questioning how we see stories. I want them to question who gets to be the hero and who gets to have a hero’s journey. There is also a part of this play that is about using your “weakness” as a strength, and I think that’s really important too. You can be a super weirdo, like myself, and there will be a place where that weirdness will be your strength.

Photo by SubUrban Photography.