17-year-old playwright’s vision takes center stage at the Rubicon Theatre
VC Reporter, 6/3/2010
The rehearsal space is simple, but for this purpose simple will do. There are a bench, a desk and four actors working to breathe life into In All Honesty, premiering Wednesday, June 9, at Ventura’s Rubicon Theater, from the pen of freshman playwright and 17-year-old wunderkind Quinn Sosna-Spear. Their task is less than arduous — for Sosna-Spear’s characters are uncannily alive on the page, to a degree that speaks well beyond her years.
The play is an off-beat comedy, a character study that pivots on a fulcrum of romance, as these things often do; but in the worlds of this writer’s imagining, characters seldom behave as expected. “It’s amazing to think that she was 16 when she wrote it,” notes Carla Tassara, who performs one of the lead roles. “The characters are all fully developed adults with their own eccentricities, their own agendas. The depth of her understanding is really phenomenal.”
A product of Clark Sayre’s playwriting program at Santa Barbara’s Dos Pueblos High School, Sosna-Spear is no stranger to the theater. “Other playwrights might be better prepared, better educated, older or what have you,” she notes. “It’s hard for me to worry about that. It feels to me like I’m doing what comes natural, feels like it shouldn’t require much more, even as I recognize I have a lot to learn.”
“One thing we’ve found so amazing about Quinn and her process is the way in which the characters come to her,” the Rubicon’s Karyl Lynn Burns explains. “She truly has a natural ear for dialogue — but in part it’s because these characters are very real to her. Sometimes when we ask her what a character is thinking she takes a moment to think it over, and it’s almost as though she must pause to ask them.”
The gifted young writer, who begins USC’s film school in the fall, seems to take all the praise with a grain of salt, idly fashioning brightly colored balloon animals as she watches the actors rehearse. Her style tends toward the acerbic quip, with a sly humor that often elicits a double-take, and that’s delivered with an altogether disarming smile. “Quinn sneaks up on you with this mordant, Sahara-dry wit,” explains Dan Gunther, who stars alongside Tassara. “She drops these comments at rehearsal, and five minutes later we’ll stop in our tracks, realizing she was being completely sarcastic. It was so dry it just went right over our heads.”
The conversational style of her characters, like the author’s, tends to sidestep convention, allowing plenty of room for one to fill in the blanks. “I recently worked with some people who sent me pages and pages of questions to answer about the characters,” she recounts, “and I could only reply, ‘I don’t know, I’m not these characters.’ Why write something so fully that there’s nothing left to be found? I don’t think there’s a point to art, really, if you’re having to explain it to people.”
No comments:
Post a Comment