Inspiration: I used to work with a lady who had never traveled more than 500 miles from her home in the North Carolina Mountains. The odd thing, to me, was that it was okay with her. She didn't have a desire to go see the world. I have always loved to travel and explore, so that was such a strange concept to me. So, I took the idea of traveling as the hope or dream of the wife because I thought it would be more active for the protagonist to want to travel and to be held back by life's circumstances rather than not wanting to travel like my real life friend. And, I love Japanese culture in general, Noh theatre in particular. I'm highly interested in intercultural theatre and theatre that explores mixing perspectives from multiple cultures. I thought that bringing Appalachian culture into the mix with the Japanese would be unique.

Structure: My structure for most of my plays tends to be Aristotelian, generally. Japanese Noh follows the structure of Jo, Ha, Kyu. This is really equivalent to our idea of basic story structure with beginning, middle and end. So, I feel that this is a way that both Eastern and Western forms of drama are similar.

Projections: I love multimedia use in performance as well as movement or dance-based performance because I watched a lot of TV and took ballet while I was growing up. I'm an incredibly visual learner, so that translates into my writing a lot.

Chorus: The chorus is used in both Greek and Japanese Noh performance traditions. This is another place I felt I could use a theatrical device, in hopefully an effective way, and speak to both performance styles together. The chorus, though, is much more like a Greek chorus than a Noh chorus in that the Noh chorus is relegated to one spot on the stage for the entire performance and speaks more the inner thoughts of characters rather than helping move the plot forward. So, I took them a step further and had them go beyond just speaking chorally to make them even more specific characters.

[April 2010]

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