At least two prestigious New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Support for Artists grants were awarded to creators working in the North Country region this year. The two are hard at work crafting their projects – a novel and a musical – to present them before the end of the year.
The grantees – both sponsored by the Adirondack Lakes Center for the Arts (ALCA) – are published fiction author Sara Schaff, who teaches various forms of creative writing at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Plattsburgh, in Clinton County, and theater artist Sam Balzac, who grew up in Jay and attended Keene Central School before embarking on a professional career in the arts in New York City.
Exploring the Legacy of British Colonialism and Slavery through Fiction
Schaff will use her NYSCA Support for Artists grant to work on her novel, The Devil is a Gentleman. Set in late Victorian England and Georgian London, the book is a work of historical fiction and a literary mystery.
The present action of the story is set primarily at Brunswick House, a country estate that has recently changed owners. The novel concerns the mysterious deaths of three recent Brunswick House governesses, as well as the constellation of lives touched by the house, its family, and England’s history of slavery in the Caribbean and colonialism in Ireland.
Schaff is a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction and the author of the story collections The Invention of Love (Split/Lip Press) and Say Something Nice About Me (Augury Books), a CLMP Firecracker Award Finalist in Fiction.
Her writing has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, LitHub, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A graduate of Brown University and the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Michigan, she has taught at Oberlin College, the University of Michigan, and St. Lawrence University, as well as in China, Colombia, and Northern Ireland, where she also studied storytelling.
Pondering the Most-Pressing Existential Questions of Our Time
For his part, Balzac is to be awarded a second Support for Artists grant, having won through ALCA in 2023 in the Composer Compositions category for his original musical score for The Wrong Box.
In keeping with the grant’s guidelines, which require a public presentation by the end of the calendar year for which the grants are awarded, Balzac produced a concert version of The Wrong Box that he and 10 other actors performed in Saranac Lake in December 2023.
“I’m pinching myself that I get to do this again,” Balzac says of winning the grant. “To get anything going as a theater writer in New York City, you really have to have your hand in a lot of different projects, and it can be hard to focus on the stuff that’s riskier or solo-driven. Getting these grants has been a game changer in being able to dedicate time to projects I just would never have been able to prioritize.”
Balzac is fresh off of one of those other projects, a musical adaptation of TV actress Felicia Day’s landmark web series The Guild, which was recently performed live at Dynasty Typewriter in LA and internationally streamed for one week only.
Balzac, who is writing lyrics for the musical, also performed in the reading alongside Day, Kirsten Vangsness of Criminal Minds, Phil LaMarr, and other celebrities he’d seen on his TV screen and YouTube while growing up.
“It was a truly surreal experience,” says Balzac, who is hoping his creative juices from working on The Guild will spill over into his work on this year’s grant project, Existential Questions of the 21st Century, for which he must complete the libretto.
As part of his Support for Artists grant in 2023, Balzac self-produced a free reading of The Wrong Box with a mix of North Country and New York City-based performers at the Saranac Lake Free Library with the aid of Pendragon Theatre. This year, he’s hoping to do something similar, but with a radical twist.
“Existential Questions, which is an absurdist show and deals a lot with misanthropy, was really conceived out of a feeling of hopelessness about the planet and climate change,” he says. “And I’ve recently been thinking a lot about how art and activism interact, so what I’d like to do is find a way to use the show to get people more involved in an active way in saving our planet.”
Balzac envisions this as a panel-style talk-back after the reading with representatives from different environmentally-focused organizations that are active locally.
“The idea really is for people to show up, watch this comedy about the end of the world, and be inspired to make that, you know, not our reality, and sign up with one of the groups present so they can be part of more activism in a tangible and fulfilling way.”
Producing a reading like this requires additional funding that is beyond the scope of the grant says Balzac, which is intended to fund the creation of the work itself and doesn’t cover theatrical production costs.
“Pendragon has been super helpful in offering rehearsal space and housing downstate actors. But to pay actors to come up here, it does take quite a bit of extra fundraising. I’m grateful to the folks who contributed in 2023 because that’s what really made The Wrong Box possible, and I’m hoping people will consider supporting this project too, especially given the climate-catastrophe aspect of what I’m trying to do.”
Balzac is currently raising money on Indiegogo and welcomes support in any amount. Interested parties can contribute at bit.ly/ExistentialQs. “I’m really trying to make donating to this fun and entertaining, so I think it’s worth checking out the page, if you want a laugh or two,” he says. “And there are rewards!”
Previous North Country Grant Winners
Artists working in the North Country who have been awarded the statewide Support for Artists Grant since the program’s inception include playwright Frederic Glover, multimedia creators Julia and Michael Devine, author Erin Dorney, and composer and filmmaker Hannah Eakin.
Applications are currently open, and artists are able to access the grant through any 501 (c) 3 sponsoring organization. More information can be found online here.
Illustration: Existential Questions of the 21st Century in concert at Green Room 42 in New York City (Left to Right, Fernanda Douglas, Alex Sanders, Molly Heller, and Patrick Brady) photo by Cindy Lozito.
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