Peter Hardy talks his world premiere of Mysterious Connections
Mysterious Connections, Peter Hardy’s (artistic director of Essential Theatre) world premiere is featured during the Essential Theatre Festival. The play revolves around two women who find a friendship and connection beyond the usual terms. They enter each others lives and dreams and nothing will ever be the same again. Below, Hardy talks about workshopping the play at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center’s National Playwrights Conference, what it’s like to write in the female voice, and what personal experiences inspired this play.
You can see Hardy’s play, along with other plays written by Georgia playwrights, at the Essential Theatre Festival going on now till August 11.
Q. Mysterious Connections is featured in the Essential Theatre Festival this year. Not only that, but it was also chosen for the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference. What was it like to develop this work in the North and then bring it home to the South?
A. Well, the people at the O’Neill Center were top professional artists, and you can find those anywhere, so there wasn’t any great difference between working on the script there and working on it here. The most “southern” character in the play, Jonesy, was played by a southern actress from the Alabama Shakespeare Festival (Greta Lambert) when we were at the O’Neill, so she totally got it. The biggest difference between working at the O’Neill and this Essential production was that many years had gone by, and I understand both myself and the play better!
Q. Your play is very fantastical and includes a connection between characters that is… well, mysterious. What inspired this work?
A. More than any play I’ve ever written, this one just sort of rose up out of my unconscious, without my understanding much about where it was coming from or what it was about – at the time. In the years since I wrote the first version, I’ve had the same experience time and again – I would come to some major new insight into my life and myself, and then realize that I had been writing about it in MYSTERIOUS CONNECTIONS. So, artists don’t always understand what they’re doing! More specifically, I was very interested in dream interpretation and exploration at the time I was first writing the play, and I’d also seen some exciting experimental theatre while living in New York City not too long before, so those were definitely inspirations. I was quite influenced by the work of science fiction author Philip K. Dick, who’s referenced in the script, and the mythology work of Joseph Campbell – also referenced in the dialogue. The story of the play is patterned on the “Hero’s Journey” that Campbell wrote about (you know, just like “Star Wars” was). The play is about the uncovering and exploration of old wounds so that people can heal themselves, and the play very much comes out of my own healing process for painful and confusing experiences of my youth.
Q. Although there is a large amount of dramatic content, you still found a way to include a bit of comedy. Are the humorous moments driven by characteristics or plot?
A. Writers often say that all the characters they write are different parts of themselves, but this was particularly true for me with this play. Each of the four characters is a different aspect of myself and so, while there’s some dark and obsessive and fearful elements in the play (all of which I’ve got inside me) there’s also a lot of optimism and humor. Because I’ve always had that in me as well. I call the play a journey through darkness into light, and the humor – mostly kind and wise humor, I think – supplies a lot of the light. It’s not a question of “comic relief” so much as organic balance, I would say.
Q. Mysterious Connections revolves around two women. What was the experience like writing about two female main characters as a man?
A. Quite a number of people have told me I write female characters well, so that’s nice. I guess I’ve got a feminine side, but most of my friends have always been women, and as one of them said (on the subject of my writing believable female characters), I’m a good listener. But also, to be honest, when I look back on it now, when I first wrote the play I probably chose to center on female characters because it was a way of “distancing” myself from the fact that I was writing about painful experiences of my own – it was a kind of camouflage. Writers tend to be experts at camouflage.
Q. Even as a writer I can’t possibly contemplate what it’s like to write a play. What is your process like? And how do you tackle handling the story in dialogue?
A. Oh, gosh, I don’t know. In the past few years I’ve been writing prose fiction as well (for the first time in many years, after concentrating on writing for the theatre), and I’ve found that they’re very different. In many ways, I think writing plays is harder, because you have to find a way to tell the story almost completely in dialogue, and mostly in scenes that go on for a while in a single location. You need to have compelling action that can INSIST the dialogue move forward. One of the reasons I found myself writing short stories and starting a novel was that the ideas I was getting seemed more suited to fiction than theatre. A couple of those short stories have been published, by way, and I’m about half-way through a supernatural novel about a drive-in movie theatre that’s … a bad place.
