12 Ophelias

plays that love you back

It started under a tree in 2002 on the campus of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York as part of the Powerhouse Theatre. Director Debbie Saivetz and I worked together with students in the summer training program on a barebones outdoor production of my play 12 OPHELIAS (a play with broken songs). But actually it started before that: in an old house in Granville, Ohio near the campus of Denison University where I was the Reynolds Playwright-in-Residence in the early winter and spring of 2002.

Denison had asked me to write a play for their mainstage as part of my residency, one that they would produce. I was already at the time working on THE BOOTH VARIATIONS with actor-writer Todd Cerveris and director Nick Philippou, a play that deconstructed the lives of famous actors Junius Brutus Booth, Edwin Booth and the infamous John Wilkes Booth through the lens of HAMLET. So, I had Shakespeare on the brain. I remember arriving at the old house on the edge of campus, wondering what I would write when director Debbie Saivetz - with whom I had had a prior working relationship - called me to say how much she liked my play ALCHEMY OF DESIRE/DEAD-MAN’S BLUES (one of my early career “hits” - winner of the Rosenthal New Play Prize at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park where it premiered under Lisa Peterson’s direction, and a play that had had workshops at the Royal Court under Annie Castledine’s direction and with ASK Theater Projects in Los Angeles in a reading directed by Lisa Peterson starring the then unknown but brilliant Anne Heche) and wondered if I was ever going to write another “analogue” play with songs again.

I had been deep in the land of THE BOOTH VARIATIONS for at least two years by then - a complex triangular collaboration of a multimedia show - and the last thing on my mind was to write another analogue play with songs. I was in my “electric” phase. I had written IPHIGENIA CRASH LAND FALLS ON THE NEON SHELL THAT WAS ONCE HER HEART (a rave fable), which had been workshopped by director Philippou with Actors Touring Company in England, where he was Artistic Director, at the Euripides Festival in Monodendri, Greece, and at the Flea in New York City, and which had prior received a first reading with Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles on one of their retreats before eventually, after a long five years of hope-give up hope - premiering at 7 Stages in Atlanta.

IPHIGENIA CRASH LAND FALLS… was not only the first in a long series of plays I wrote re-configuring/smashing classic Greek tragedies (you can find more of them in my anthology BLASTED HEAVENS published by Eyecorner Press) but also the first all out and out electric play I had written! My first embrace and dramaturgical investigation of hyperlink-inspired, multimedia theatre (something that would become part of my work and thinking as a theatre-maker from then on, whether I was consciously writing electric plays or not). That play also had songs but they were deliberately revved up and amped up. All to say, even though I had Shakespeare on the brain and deconstructed HAMLET in mind, my focus was not in any way, shape or form on going back to analogue, ritual-oriented theatre, which had originally informed the shape/thinking of ALCHEMY OF DESIRE/DEAD-MAN’S BLUES.

But Debbie Saivetz’s call rekindled something in me. She spoke with such affection and love about ALCHEMY OF DESIRE, and how much she wanted to stage it someday that after the call I was left wondering, why not write a “side” play while I was working on THE BOOTH VARIATIONS? Something Debbie might wish to direct! Also, given that I was mired in HAMLET and the Booths, Ophelia was never far from my mind, and so, that night, my first night in Granville, Ohio - in what really felt like the middle of nowhere, at the edge of the midwest - I started singing some of the first lyrics to what would become 12 OPHELIAS, and I started to think about the antithesis to everything I was doing and making with my collaborators on THE BOOTH VARIATIONS, and the first thing that came to mind was my love of bluegrass music. And I thought to myself: what about a bluegrass play about Ophelia coming back to reclaim herself?

I wrote 12 OPHELIAS very quickly, almost in a trance, alone in that house in Granville, singing the songs I had written for it out loud while I was writing, and feeling so free and so far removed from everything related to the “business” of theatre that it was a joy to simply immerse myself in the world of this play. After about ten days of writing, the draft was there, pretty much the same draft that would be the bedrock of the play’s future. I sent it to Debbie Saivetz right away and she read it overnight and told me how much she loved it and asked me how could we scheme to make it happen somehow. For real. On a stage.

And when a director says that, that quickly, after they had read a play, you have to take it seriously. Even if it seems like a pipe dream. Because it means the work has hit a chord in someone else and that that chord could maybe strike someone’s heart/fancy, and who knows… maybe oh maybe, dear theatre, the play can be.

Because the chances a play gets seen feels like one in a million. Even back then. When it was supposedly “easier.” (believe me. it wasn’t) And we all know that even when the chord strikes, some plays don’t ever get seen/seen for some mysterious reason (mostly having to do with gatekeepers or money, or both). Some plays are “seen” in a different way - furtively shared as downloaded files among friends and colleagues as a kind of secret theatre that never finds an audience “out there.”

But the possibility of the seeing being shared beyond the furtive is always tantalizing. You want to hope because often its all you have in an industry that seems to be hard-wired for dashing hope at every turn.

I told Debbie that we should scheme!

Meanwhile, I still had a play to deliver to Denison University (eek!) and I realized that even though I could give them 12 OPHELIAS, I selfishly didn’t want to (don’t blame me, please) because I simply didn’t want to give them the world premiere credit for the play.

sidebar: (longish story but in US new writing circles, the imprimatur of a world premiere credit especially at a university for a first production means that once a show has preemed, it is considered “done,” and it is almost impossible to get the play to have a professional life elsewhere without some serious money/influence to minimize, change or “bury” - i have seen this happen with some shows - the original staging’s credit, sadly.)

So, the night after I shared 12 OPHELIAS with Debbie and we chatted about it, I called the head of the theatre department at Denison and told them if they could give me another ten days to turn in a draft. Then I - being in Shakespeare brain still- sat down and wrote PERDITA GRACIA, my Latinx (yes I use the “x”) riff and inversion/expansion of THE WINTER’S TALE, which Denison premiered that semester. Two plays. One house in Ohio. Different journeys.

Saivetz and I ended up working on 12 OPHELIAS in its early iterations and incarnations at New Georges in New York City, Powerhouse Theatre, and in a full showcase staging at Baruch Performing Arts Center in New York City. The play was in the air but it still had not premiered. That is to say, it had been seen but it had not been reviewed or had had a full run. People who knew the play and/or had seen its various incarnations would ask me when it would come back. I kept saying I didn’t know. I really didn’t. I don’t have nor have ever had a independent producer/patron (I wish). My whole career has been just knocking on doors over and over. Even when I was resident playwright at INTAR studying with the legendary Maria Irene Fornes! But I was very moved that people remembered 12 OPHELIAS and wondered about it when they saw me.

Coincidentally, or maybe by chance, around the time THE BOOTH VARIATIONS premiered in New York City at 59East59, I got a call from actor pal Jocelyn Kuritsky and she said if we could do a reading of 12 OPHELIAS at New Dramatists, where I was a resident playwright. It would be casual. Not public-facing. Just sitting around with some actors and reading the play. Jocelyn, wonderful actor, was also the literary associate for what was then an emerging site-responsive/specific theatre company called Woodshed Collective. She said maybe if we read the play out loud, it could generate some interest from her friends at Woodshed. I said, sure. Can’t hurt to play.

We sat in the big space at New Dramatists in its original 44th Street building and read the play straight through and then chatted a bit. I don’t remember much about the reading itself as an event other than feeling tremendous love for the play from this group of actors, among them Amanda Quaid, and being reminded that even though I had written many plays since then, I loved being in its world again. There were no other expectations about the day than having a good time reading and talking about the play.

A few weeks (or was it months) later, after THE BOOTH VARIATIONS and THE ANTIGONE PROJECT opened nearly back to back (ANTIGONE PROJECT was conceived by Chiori Miyagawa and was an anthology evening of plays written by Karen Hartman, Tanya Barfield, Lynn Nottage, Miyagawa and myself, which premiered at The Women’s Project in New York City), I got a call from Stephen Squibb at Woodshed Collective - Squibb was resident dramaturg/brain/all hands on deck at the company with director/founder Teddy Bergman - who said he wanted to chat about doing 12 OPHELIAS.

I was, like, sure. Are you kidding? When? That sounds like fun!

We met in an unexpectedly lovely French patisserie/coffee shop tucked away in a very nondescript street in the west 30s and 9th avenue, and Squibb told me that Woodshed Collective wanted to do the play in McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn.

A pool?

A dessicated pool that was mainly serving as a concert venue for bands, but that the city was going to turn back into a working pool for the people after that summer. So, this would be the last time any live performances would occur there! Squibb then told me that they were talking to the Brooklyn-based bluegrass band the Jones Street Boys to play and score the show. And yes, director Teddy Bergman wanted to stage the play IN the pool (you can read about it here https://brooklynrail.org/2008/07/theater/a-play-at-poolside-caridad-svichs-12-ophelias/)

The summer of 2008, nearly six years since the play was first seen by an audience of any kind under a tree on campus in Poughkeepsie, 12 OPHELIAS received its world premiere with Woodshed Collective. But it already had had many lives before then, and would, much to my surprise and delight, have many after.

As I kept and keep working on this life called playwriting, I have come across many professors, students, actors, acting ensembles from all over the US and abroad that have found this play and have fallen in love with it. There have been stagings that have used my music. Others that have set my lyrics with and to original goth, emo-rock, and folk and EDM-inflected music. There have been productions with casts of all trans and non-binary people; others with all women, others with twelve actors on stage, others with six, and others with twenty people and a band.

I have visited many theatre departments that are either teaching the play or are staging it where I encounter that same “smitten” tone I heard in Debbie Saivetz’s voice when I first sent her the script. And I am always staggered, surprised, flattered and grateful at the ardent fervor with which so many people speak about the play to me and how it moves them. This play I wrote in a heartbroken/aching trance in 10 days! There was no way I could have ever known back in that old house in Granville, Ohio that the play would go on to have so many lives since its first showings or that it would be the first play of mine to be licensed by TRW Plays (https://www.theatricalrights.com/show/12-ophelias/, and that later this year (or top of next?) it will be the anchor play in a collection of my Shakespeare-inspired plays published by Methuen Drama edited by Kathryn Vomero Santos and Katherine Gillen and Vanessa Cordero that looks at some of my borderlands Shax plays that followed 12 OPHELIAS (PERDITA GRACIA, THE BREATH OF STARS, HOLLER RIVER, DESDEMONA’S CHILD).

All I had back then was an inkling and a feeling that I was tapping into something unknown - all because I wanted to write a play for a friend to maybe stage someday.

On April 10th, 12 OPHELIAS will be seen again with the good people at Strawdog Theatre Company in Chicago, Illinois directed by Kamille Dawkins, where it will run until May 24th, 2026. (https://strawdog.org/12ophelias)

Some plays you fall in love with, and some also love you back.