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Holy and Unruly, New World Theatre, and the Collaborative World of Playmaking

I love the collaborative nature of theatre. As a writer, I hole for some period of time and write a script. Then, I hand it off to a whole team of creative people and something magic happens: They interpret the words and create a world. There are always surprises in that world, always things I didn’t know were there. Not all of them are good surprises, which is why we call the process “development,” but often the surprises are delightful or profound.

One small example of this from New World Theatre‘s workshop production of Holy and Unruly was the chess board. There’s a scene where one of my stage directions calls for two characters to be playing chess. Since our workshop production couldn’t incorporate a lot of set changes, Director Eric Schildge made a chess board part of the standard set, anticipating that small moment. Then I watched him and his actors begin to make use of that chess board in really interesting ways. What began as an after thought (something for my non-speaking characters Dudley and The Unborn to do in that moment) became an integral symbol of the political maneuvering at the core of Holy and Unruly.

I had a lot of 2019 highs, but New World Theatre’s performance of Holy and Unruly at the Hatbox Theatre was among the highest. So much effort goes into a full length play–so many hours, so many choices, so much rewriting–that to reach the collaborative point in the process and have talented people start to bring the world of the play to life is beyond thrilling. It’s a little like watching your child grow from ultra-sound image, to baby, to toddler, to kid, to teen, to young adult. Then you send them (the kid and the play) out in the world to fend for themselves. It’s terrifying but also thrilling, because you know the village raised them well.

I wrote separate posts about other collaborators in the Holy and Unruly village, especially AboutFACE Ireland in Dublin and The Depot for New Play Readings in Connecticut. However, New World Theatre’s workshop production was special for me because it marks the moment when I knew I had a play. The script still needed work, especially in what was then the second act. However, I knew the work was worth doing. The care and energy that the team brought to the performance, and the reaction it got from that night’s audience, gave me the energy and resolve I needed to keep rewriting.

So, thank you Donald Tongue (producer), Eric Schildge (director), Toby Paul (stage manager), Laura Hoglund (Queen Elizabeth), Mary Fraser (Grace O’Malley), Jim Gocha (Burghley), Ashlee Bliss (Lady Scott, The Unborn, MacNally), Erik Shaffer (Essex), Mitch Fortier (Conroy and Bingham), and Paul Smith (Dudley) for adding your names to the ever-growing list of collaborators. You are helping turn Holy and Unruly from an idea (inspired by an NPR interview with Laura Sook Duncombe, author of the book Pirate Women) into a play. It wouldn’t have happened without you.

Pictured above: The cast of New World Theatre’s “Putting It Together” workshop production of Holy and Unruly during their final walk through prior to the evening performance.

You can read, recommend, or request rights to produce Holy and Unruly and my other plays at New Play Exchange.

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Holy and Unruly at The Depot for New Play Readings

It was a thrill to hear the latest draft of Holy and Unruly read on September 22 at The Depot for New Play Readings in Hampton, Connecticut. Anne Flammang and her group of actors and theatre enthusiasts are delightful people, and they brought so much insight to the reading and discussion of my script. I had a couple of aha moments over the course of the evening and left with ideas for another rewrite, which I have since executed. I think it’s a better play thanks to The Depot.

It was especially nice to have fellow playwright John Minigan in attendance. I am so grateful that John took the time to drive down from Massachusetts. If you don’t know his work, you should check it out, especially his play Queen of Sad Mischance. It’s getting a lot of buzz, and he’s one of my favorite Boston-area writers.

You can read, recommend, or request rights to produce Holy and Unruly and my other plays on New Play Exchange.

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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.