Photo by Chicago Magazine (2010)
by Eva Laporte
Rebecca Gilman’s Swing State: A Contemporary Play Arrives for Its San Antonio Premiere
Why Surround Project chose Swing State
I spend a lot of time reading new plays for Surround Project. When we’re selecting work for San Antonio theatre audiences, we look for contemporary scripts that feel urgent, human, and deeply connected to the world we’re living in right now.
Last year alone, I read dozens–honestly dozens and dozens–of contemporary plays written in the past decade: new premieres, award-winners, and scripts generating buzz across the American theatre landscape.
One play kept rising to the top.
Rebecca Gilman’s Swing State.
I’ve admired Gilman’s writing for a long time. I directed her adaptation of Dollhouse at Stages in Houston in 2013 and spent some time getting to know her when I was in Chicago. What has always struck me about Rebecca’s writing is the balance she achieves: the relationships feel deeply intimate and realistic, while the world of the play quietly expands outward to take in enormous, intersecting social questions.
Her plays often operate like ecosystems–personal stories revealing how interconnected our lives really are.
The playwright herself describes the idea beautifully in a recent interview with The New York Times:
“When you go to a prairie, it’s just teeming with life – butterflies, bugs, birds, everything,” she said on a stiflingly hot August afternoon in an upstairs lounge at the Goodman Theater, where her new play, “Swing State,” was in rehearsals for its New York run. “It’s an ecosystem. Everything depends on everything else. Some of the plants have to be pollinated by particular butterflies. Particular butterflies have to have lupine to lay their eggs. Monarchs have to have milkweed. And it is not a monoculture. It cannot thrive unless it’s as diverse as diverse can be.”
That idea–of interconnected systems, of human lives depending on one another in ways we don’t always see–is exactly what makes Swing State such a compelling piece of contemporary theatre.
Why Swing State Now
At its heart, Swing State is a play about people reaching the second act of their lives and wondering what comes next. Each character is facing a moment of reckoning: grief, burnout, political disillusionment, loneliness, environmental anxiety. And yet the play insists that small acts of connection–between neighbors, strangers, even landscapes–can still matter.
For us at Surround Project, that felt deeply aligned with the work we want to make with San Antonio artists and audiences.
We’re drawn to plays that explore the emotional realities of the present moment while still creating space for empathy and conversation. Gilman’s work does exactly that.
About Rebecca Gilman
Rebecca Gilman is an artistic associate at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and one of the most respected playwrights working in American theatre today. Many of her plays–including Luna Gale, Boy Gets Girl, Spinning Into Butter, and Blue Surge–were originally produced at the Goodman before going on to productions across the country and internationally.
Her work has earned a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award, the Harper Lee Award, the Scott McPherson Award, the Prince Prize for Commissioning New Work, and the Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays. Boy Gets Girl received an Olivier nomination for Best New Play, and The Glory of Living was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Gilman is also a member of the Council of the Dramatists Guild of America and was inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame in 2016.
Learn More About Swing State
If you’re curious about the play and Gilman’s process, these interviews offer wonderful insight:
- New York Times feature: Rebecca Gilman on writing Swing State
- Chicago Sun-Times article: On Gilman’s long relationship with Chicago theatre
- Video interview: Gilman discussing the play and its themes
For us, selecting plays isn’t just about what’s new–it’s about what resonates.
Swing State reminds us that even in uncertain times, the ecosystems of our lives–friends, neighbors, communities, artists–are still capable of sustaining one another.
And that feels like a story worth telling in San Antonio right now.
See Swing State on March 21, 2026