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.