Next Generation: Hope Dunkle

Finding one’s place in the world can be a lifelong trek, and for University of Sioux Falls senior Hope Dunkle, the sweet spot for this sense of belonging has happened to lie in her two greatest loves — writing and theatre.

Hope Dunkle

“It wasn’t until I took playwriting that my eyes were opened and I realized this is basically a combination of my two passions,” the English and theatre student said of her sophomore year at the university. “And so that was where I started developing my skill and my niche in playwriting.”

Storytelling through performance has always been a pursuit counted amongst the favorites of Dunkle’s, a Sioux Falls native whose homeschool experience thru junior high led to eventually spending her final secondary years at Lutheran High School of Sioux Falls.

“I did theatre there and I was primarily an actor,” she said. “I did tech for the first year, but then my director noticed that I could project and memorize lines. Since our school was really small, I was primarily an actor at that time.”

It was during the COVID-19 pandemic that Dunkle started to develop a greater appreciation for the craft of playwriting, eventually finding herself as part of USF’s program just a few years ago.

“I had a lot of time on my hands, especially during that summer,” she said. “I learned more about plays and musicals, and that's when I really fell in love with theatre and decided to take a risk, as it were, and study theatre and English at USF. And I've been there ever since.”

The campus experience has offered up a variety of perspective for Dunkle as a fledgling theatre artist, including exposure to the impacts that character development, an eye for blocking and aesthetic can have on a work.

“I've taken USF’s acting classes and our directing class, and that has really helped me learn more about diving into a text and developing a character and all of the little nuances and intricate parts of putting on a show — just a holistic experience,” Dunkle said. “There are a lot of opportunities to grow and develop a wide skillset.”

The first work that the young playwright developed was part of her aforementioned coursework — a 10-minute play about a girl in college struggling to keep up with her responsibilities.

“I'd say my voice in playwriting is delving into a character's psyche and kind of having a question to answer,” she said. “In a lot of the plays that I've written so far, there's an overarching question, and there are two sides. One character believes that the answer to the question is this, and then the other character believes the opposite.

“I take a question that I'm personally struggling with, and I manage to form it into characters that other people can relate to because I want to create plays and art that builds connection between my audience and myself. Where it's like I'm asking my audience this question as well. I want the audience to find some solace and some comfort in it, if that makes sense.”

Hope Dunkle (right) and Apolonia Davalos perform in University of Sioux Falls’ production of Love’s Labours Lost.

This is particularly evident in the piece Dunkle has written for her USF honors thesis, which will debut as her senior show later this school year.

In addition to her work on the USF campus, Dunkle has found herself branching out and sharing her work with other local organizations, such as Mighty Corson Art Players (MCAP) and The Premiere Playhouse.

“The first show that I worked on with Corson was They Promised Her the Moon,” she said of the company’s fall show from 2023. “(MCAP board members) Ryan Howe and Logan Leavitt mentioned that they needed to find a script for their kids camp. So I said, ‘I could write a play for you guys.’ And they took me seriously.”

Dunkle was able to draft the piece as part of her English internship at USF, and A Night in the Woods debuted at Corson’s playhouse this past June, featuring a cast of kindergarten thru sixth-grade student performers.

“I wrote it as a gift to Corson because of how welcoming they were to me, especially with what they were going through during the fall last year,” she said, referring to the passing of the company’s artistic director Brian Schipper, the individual who first brought Dunkle on as stage manager of They Promised Her the Moon.

Additional original works from the playwright have been featured in the Premiere Playhouse’s Festival of New Plays in both 2023 and 2024, and her upcoming piece, Finding Godot will cap off her time at USF.

“It’s a play in one act that I wrote over the course of my junior year last year as part of my honors thesis,” she said of the play, which she hopes to debut in February on campus. “It really leans into the absurdist and morality genres of theatre, where abstract ideas and values come to life and interact. And there's a lot of monologues and questions involved.

“It’s about a young man named Lucas who was born into a world where evil doesn't exist because this entity named Godot is able to telepathically communicate with all humans, preventing evil from happening”

This prolific playwright has no plans on slowing down her theatre development as she approaches her impending graduation from collegiate arts.

“I'd like to have a writing job during the day that will intellectually engage me in a different way than a theatre job at night, which is what I hope to continue doing,” she said. “And then playwriting definitely is a hobby I want to keep going. Basically, as soon as I finish one play, I've already got ideas for the next one! My brain really has found a lot of reward in playwriting.”