Welcome and thank you for joining us! Each episode we discuss a creative approach to life’s challenges. Today, co-host DR. STELLA SETKA and I talk to playwright and television writer SOFYA LEVITSKY-WEITZ about humanizing flawed real-life people and turning them into characters, complicated relationships both on and off screen, letting ideas percolate, and the love of revising.

Sofya Levitsky-Weitz is a playwright and TV/film writer who splits her time between Brooklyn and Los Angeles. She’s written for Hulu’s THE DROPOUT, FX’s THE BEAR, and GASLIT for Starz. Her play "This Party Sucks" (on the 2019 Kilroy’s List) will be produced on Broadway next year. Her musical "Nostalgia Night" was produced in Winter 2022. She’s worked on several movies with Michael Showalter including Fox Searchlight’s THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE

My co-host STELLA SETKA is Associate Professor of English at West LA College, and the author of Empathy and the Phantasmic in Ethnic American Trauma Narratives which looks at the way that authors of Black, Jewish, and Indigenous descent employ culturally specific supernatural elements as a way of helping readers connect to historical traumas such as enslavement and genocide.

Interviewed by podcast creator & host Dr. Katherine Boutry