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Something True (I Hope)

I get a lot of my ideas from NPR interviews. That’s where Holy and Unruly came from (thank you Laura Sook Duncombe for writing Pirate Women and talking so compellingly about that meeting between Queen Elizabeth and Grace O’Malley). It’s also where the idea for Something True was born. I was listening to a moving story about a choir program that supports people in addiction treatment. Talking of the group’s performances, one of the participants said something like “It moves people because they know they are hearing something true.”

For whatever reason, that moved me. It’s not like I hadn’t heard art referred to as “truth” before. Maybe it was just context: art helping people in such dire straits. Or maybe it was true. I found myself sitting in the car thinking, I want to write about that idea: “something true.”

It’s a long way from addiction treatment to my emotional roller coaster of a short play about young lovers navigating the tricky waters of intimacy. But, there’s no accounting for inspiration. That’s the direction my fingers took me once they hit the keyboard. What are the things in our lives that are deeply, movingly, heart-stoppingly “true,” and why do we experience those things so infrequently?

My answer to the second half of that question (the easier half) is: because those things are hard and often frightening. I don’t know about you, but experiencing something that I know, at my core, to be “true” can be a terrifying and awe-inspiring moment.

My truth isn’t always your truth. However, there are some categories of experience that bend more sharply toward that idea of fundamental truth. Something True touches on two of them: art and love. People often describe the play as a philosophical exploration of truth as a concept, but I’ve always seen it as a play about love. Miki is on the cusp of proposing to Jo when Jo ask to hear “something true.” This seemingly innocent request sends them into a downward spiral that almost ends their relationship. They have to move past the selfish motivations that prompted Jo’s request and Miki’s discomfort with it; they have to realize that love isn’t something you “get” from another person, it’s something you give, freely and unconditionally. If there’s anything true in this play, that’s it.

I purposely wrote Miki and Jo as gender neutral characters. What does gender have to do with love, right? I didn’t think it made sense for the play to suggest that “true” love involved some pre-conceived, externally applied combination of genders. That suggestion would have undercut the entire premise of the play; it would not have been true.

For that reason, I was thrilled when the first three productions each portrayed Miki’s and Jo’s gender differently. They were women at the Short and Sweet Festival in Sydney, Australia (Teneale Clifford, director; Mathilde Anglade as Jo ; Casey Campbell as Miki ), non-binary at the Downtown Urban Arts Festival in NYC (Holly Wright, director; Jamie Lowenstein, Jo; Ryan Beaghler, Miki), and heterosexual at the Theatre Workshop of Owensboro’s 2019 Summer Shorts Festival in Owensboro, Kentucky (Nate Gross, director; ). Yay, love!

The image immediately above is from the Kentucky production. Up at the top of this post is the promotional poster for the performances at Short and Sweet Sydney. Here’s a video of Jamie’s and Ryan’s performance in New York.

You can read, recommend, and request rights to produce Something True and my other plays on New Play Exchange.

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Holy and Unruly goes to Ireland!

Paul Nugent’s email in late-summer 2018 is one of the more memorable I have received. He wanted to know if AboutFACE Ireland, the company he and his wife Anna founded, could perform Holy and Unruly as part of their 2018 NEWvember Festival in Dublin. This was the first time anyone had wanted to do anything with Holy and Unruly, a full length play about the 1593 meeting between England’s Queen Elizabeth and Irish Pirate Grace O’Malley. I wanted to respond “Um, duh!” Instead, I presented myself as adult(ish) and replied something like “Are you kidding? Yes!”

I’m thrilled when anyone wants to do any of my plays: ten-minute script, one-minute script, it really doesn’t matter; my response is generally, “Yippee! Bring it on.” But the feeling is a little different when it’s a full-length script. So much time and effort goes into a full length. For me, it’s generally a three-to-six-month slog to a first draft, followed by a six-month forced march of rewrites, and then (maybe… maybe) I feel confident enough to start sending it to development opportunities like NEWvember. Then the chorus of “no thank you” notes start rolling in. Or, the crickets chirp and I hear nothing at all. My shoulders start to sag, my confidence begins to flag, and I start to dread opening my email inbox. And then Paul Nugent writes and says he wants to do it, and suddenly the world is technicolor once again. It’s different when someone wants one of your full lengths.

But this wasn’t just any acceptance note. This was a “yes” from a festival in Dublin. My little play about Irish Pirate Grace O’Malley was going to get its first official staging in, of all places, Dublin. Holy $hi+! The only place more appropriate than Dublin (which, alas was a haven for English sympathizers back in Grace’s day) would be Galway, which was nearer her base of operations, and which she relished plundered on a regular basis. Or maybe, Clare Island, the island guarding the entrance to Clew Bay, where she spent her childhood. But is there even a theater on Clare Island? But I digress; to have this play staged in Dublin was more than I ever could have hoped for when I began working on it in April 2017.

So, in November 2018, I flew to Dublin and had one of the most thrilling nights of my life watching Kathleen Warner Yeates, Fiana Toibin, Ian Blackmore, Tad Morari, Michelle Audrey, Patrick William de Montfort, Maureen O’Connell, Shane Connolly, Ciaran McGlynn, David Ryan, and Yvonne Ussher read Holy and Unruly, with direction by Paul Nugent and dramaturgy by Krystal Sweedman.

How is it possible that I didn’t take any pictures of the performance? Fortunately, AboutFace posted a big album of photos from the festival, which includes several of the H&U reading. I do have these two, though:

That’s the New Theatre on the left, in Dublin’s Temple Bar neighborhood. On that right, is me with fellow playwright Matthew Cole Kelly, whose amazing play The Gods of the Ozarks, ran just before mine, and Dramaturg Krystal Sweedman, who helped to shape my reading and made some really helpful and insightful observations about my play. And just because I can’t help embarrassing myself, here’s a little introduction to the reading, recorded by me, that AboutFACE posted on Facebook. Finally, a couple shots of Dublin.

You can read and inquire about producing Holy and Unruly on New Play Exchange. Or, if you’re not a member of NPX, you can contact me for information.

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Pretending at TWO’s 2018 Summer Shorts Festival

I love Owensboro, Kentucky. Tucked along the south bank of the Ohio River, it’s about equidistant from Nashville, Louisville and Cincinnati. It’s one of the cultural hubs of Western Kentucky, with a vibe that reminds me a lot of the town where I grew up, Bellingham, Washington. But if you really want to know why it has a special place in my heart , keep reading.

It was a real honor to have my play, Pretending, appear in the Theatre Workshop of Owensboro’s 2018 Summer Shorts Festival. In fact, that July 21 performance of Pretending at the Trinity Center in Owensboro, pictured below, was the very first time one of my plays was ever fully produced. That’s a moment I won’t forget.

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Pretending at New York Theatre Festival

Here’s a fun fact: My short play, Pretending, went up at The Hudson Guild Theatre in July 2018, the very same space where Tennessee Williams premiered A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur back in January 1979. It was a terrific three-day run (mine; I’m sure Tennessee Williams’ play ran for far longer) at the New York Theatre Festival.

Holly Wright did a wonderful job directing this play about an aspiring writer whose fear of failure undermines far more than his productivity as a writer. Michael Anderson was fantastic as Bob, our frustrated (and frustrating) hero. Julia Enos Woods was so powerful as Susan, Bob’s wife. Susan has had it with Bob, but Julia did a wonderful job of finding the love beneath Susan’s deep dissatisfaction. Justine Musselman stole the show as Alexa and Siri, Bob’s AI enablers. Larry Saperstein‘s lighting design captured the mood of the play. Here’s a video of one performance.

The feedback I sometimes get on Pretending is: “not enough happens, dramatically.” For me, that’s always been the point. Pretending is about a life that’s stuck in neutral, a prospect that becomes more and more terrifying as one ages (as I age). You get one, brief shot at life. It’s easy to let it all slip by, until one day you look back and say: “What have I done?” That day of reckoning is coming for Bob. He begins this play in denial about this fact; by the end, he’s resigned to its inevitability. That psychological transition from denial to resignation interested me more than the moment when Bob decides he wasted his life.

It was great to have so many friends and family see this show. Here are a few shots from the dinner Laura, Emma and I hosted after the Saturday night performance: