LeapFest production blog--initial thoughts

This year my play Hungry Ghosts will receive a workshop production, directed by Laura Blegen, as part of LeapFest. This is my third time to participate in the festival, and I’m going to write about the experience in this blog. Here are my first thoughts as I get ready for the first rehearsal I’ve been able to attend.

On April 11th, there was a staged reading of Hungry Ghosts at Chicago Dramatists, directed by the lovely Hallie Gordon. This was a wonderful experience, and very informative for me. I’m learning more and more about this play as I work on it, and I love that process, the process of discovering a play through the voices of the characters, the interpretations of the actors, the smart insights of directors and audience members. This play, even more than my others, has truly been a process of exploration and discovering, uncovering the hidden shapes within it.

This play was initially inspired by the essay “Across the River Styx,” which was published in The New Yorker in 2005. The essay profiled a mission to recover the remains of American Gils who died in Vietnam. The US military spends millions of dollars recovering the remains of lost American servicemen from wars going back to World War I, and in locations as remote and inaccessible as the Himalayas. In one case, the team actually emptied an entire lake seeking the relics of a plane that crashed during the Vietnam War. They then had to refill the lake and minimize their impact upon the landscape. They recovered a single finger bone and a class ring. I was fascinated by the noble, extravagant immensity of this mission.

My early attempts to write this play focused primarily on the archaeological and military aspects of the mission. The initial working title was Last Known Alive, a term which refers to the last information about a serviceman who is missing in action, the last time and place he was seen alive. And the military aspects of the mission are fascinating, including translators, mortuary specialists who care for the remains, unexploded ordinance technicians who defuse the grenades, landmines and other explosives found during an excavation. (During one excavation, they encountered an average of five landmines a day.) Amazing, absorbing stuff, rich in dramatic possibility. And yet, and yet… somehow it wasn’t quite right. A ghost crept into the mix, the ghost of an American soldier. I knew that might be a bit clichéd, but I didn’t care because I’m a sucker for ghost stories. I liked this character. But I was still a bit stymied by the play. So I set it aside. I was absorbed in a production of Creole at InFusion Theatre.

And life in general got in the way, as it has a tendency to do. I had a few too many brushes with mortality, my own and those of loved ones, a rough time that I won’t discuss here.

Then last summer, I enjoyed a residency at Ragdale, an artists’ retreat in Lake Forest. While I was there, I worked on Hungry Ghosts, which I also workshopped with Infusion Theatre and the DCA Incubator Series. Long days of research and intense writing, with long walks on the prairie, interspersed with hectic workshop days. According to lore, Ragdale House is haunted, so maybe I had a visitation. Whatever the reason, the original ghost of the play was soon joined by more, many more. The original military aspect of the play retreated, and the story was overrun by ghosts.

I’ve figured out that the play is about ghosts and stories---ghost stories told by ghosts—and somehow, in a way I can’t quite explain, ghosts and stories are the same. They are where we come from, what we are made of, our substance and our soul. Joseph Campbell says that the world is made of stories, that stories are how we carry our cultural DNA, and this play is about the stories that comprise a tiny village in a country that has more ghosts than most.