Seth is away in La La Land and has lent this week’s LAC space to local performer-producer Paul Castaneda, whose “Generation Next” series, profiles of notable Central Florida artists under 40, launches with this look at Orlando playwright Savannah Pedersen.
You may remember Savannah Pedersen from her hit F*ckboys: The Musical, which took the Orlando Fringe by storm in 2018. It focused on four unnamed women who enjoy a karaoke night every Wednesday, each in her own way learning to navigate a world overflowing with the eponymous males who make their lives so difficult. That show was such a success that after its initial local run, it went to the Tampa Bay Theater Festival (where it won best musical), the Melbourne Fringe Festival in Australia, and finally a two-and-a-half-month tour of cities in Ontario, Canada. That’s quite a run, considering that the person who wrote it, co-directed it and starred in it was in her early 20s when it all happened.
Pedersen was first exposed to the Orlando Fringe in 2016, when she was part of the cast of Triassic Parq, portraying a dinosaur with genitalia that grew throughout the show. “After the first year of Fringe I got really obsessed with the idea of Fringe … guerrilla warfare type theater.” She loved the idea of seeing shows that would not be part of a normal theater season. To Pedersen, one of the challenges with such a strong local theater community is that “you’re gonna see a lot of repeats of the same shows as part of people’s season,” and Fringe seemed to her to be the perfect antidote to that.
Like a lot of great art, F*ckboys came from a place of pain. Pedersen says succinctly: “I got dumped and wrote a revenge musical.” Although the piece may have sprung from that moment, it succeeded because it struck a somewhat universal chord with the experiences of many young women, and because its honesty and detail in storytelling came from her real, lived experiences. When asked about the vulnerability involved in creating the way that she does, Pedersen says she finds the process “liberating and therapeutic,” and she knows no other way. “I always do put a lot of myself into everything I create,” says Pedersen, adding, “A lot of my dialogue is conversations I’ve actually had with people, taken from memory or literal screenshots.”
Pedersen first got into the arts as a fourth-grader after her mother picked her up at school, drove her to the other side of the building and threw her out of the car, telling her she was auditioning for the school show. From there the performing bug bit, and her talent was nurtured and molded by Vince Santo, her theater teacher from sixth to 12th grade. In 2016, she decided to follow what she thought was the path to being an actress in Central Florida: “Hustle, audition, book … overcommitted.” Her Orlando debut was in the part of Heather Duke in a 2016 production of Heathers at Breakthrough Theatre, the demise of whose original, somewhat claustrophobic space she still laments.
Pedersen has followed F*ckboys with several pieces in a variety of genres. Her play Anxieties Anonymous debuted as a table read at the 2019 Be Original Theater Festival, and was then made into a film with the help of collaborator JoKing Films, winning Patron’s Pick at the online-only Orlando Fringe Mini-Fringe in 2021. Then, while shut in by the pandemic, Pedersen wrote and orchestrated her first two-act musical, Thoughts About You, which premieres March 31 at Theater West End in Sanford.
Inspired by musical performers like Stevie Nicks and Taylor Swift and film auteurs like Wes Anderson, Ridley Scott and Christopher Nolan, Thoughts About You is the second installment in Pedersen’s expanding “F*ckboys Theatrical Universe.” A prequel to F*ckboys that also functions as a stand-alone piece, this new work centers on a 12-week window in the relationship of Shane and Joanne (the now-named “Woman 4” from F*ckboys) as lived and fueled by their love of film and music, respectively.
Again mining her own history, Pedersen says that Thoughts About You “was a super-personal, honestly heartbreaking, gut-wrenching thing for me to write.” This time, however, a couple of years have passed between the play’s writing and its premiere, allowing her to gain a new perspective on the work. “Revisiting it now … it means something totally different to me now,” she says.
Pedersen hopes for a bright creative future for herself. “My end goal is I would like to be in NYC in the next five years,” she says, adding “I’d love to write for HBO [and] of course, Broadway.” Selfishly, I hope O-Town gets to see the results of her creative labors for at least a few more years to come.
This article appears in Mar 8-14, 2023.