Nothing bad happened, thank God. The Amtrak people put me on the next train and all my things--my coat, my bags--were waiting for me in D.C., but it got me thinking…What if something terrible had happened to the train after I stepped off it? What if it derailed? Or, worse, crashed? Would I feel guilty? Would I be suspected of wrongdoing? And then another, darker question popped into my head: What if something terrible had happened and a body that looked exactly like me was pulled from the derailed train's wreckage?
At which point, I thought: "There's a play here."
Actually, half a play. Because after I went back to my two strangers on the train played at Second Stage by dreamy Gavin Creel--as hapless, affable movie director Joe Manning--and tall, dark, handsome Scott Ferrara as charismatic Nathan West and stuck them in the middle of a supernatural mystery/ghost story/horror movie, I thought that the narrative--though funny and spooky and surprising--felt somehow incomplete. I liked the themes the play was wrestling with--questions about faith, forgiveness, the afterlife, and even the existence of God like the medieval mystery plays that inspired me a bit--but I didn't think they'd fully gelled yet.
So I started writing a companion piece, exploring similar themes but in a non-supernatural way--well, mostly.
I took a minor character from "The Filmmaker's Mystery"--the director's attorney/ex-girlfriend Abby Gilley played by my good friend/former YSD classmate/soon-to-be superstar Heather Mazur--and plunked her into "Ghost Children," about the murder of her family in rural Oregon, and her struggle to forgive the person responsible her own brother.
The more I worked on "Ghost Children" and revised "The Filmmaker's Mystery", first at Yale, then at various readings and workshops through the country, the more echoes I heard between the two plays. Words and images were repeated sometimes consciously, oftentimes coincidentally, connections sprung up between them organically, and Joe Manning even found his way into "Ghost Children." In short, the journey that audiences began with "The Filmmaker's Mystery" was concluded in "Ghost Children," and one play became two plays became one play.
To heighten the play's theatricality, I gave the two one-acts a framing device and oh, how we worked on that, the director Connie Grappo and I and a narrator: Mister Mystery played by Mark Margolis who really is Mister Mystery--part Rod Serling, part Cryptkeeper, and part Stage Manager from Our Town.
My last year at the Drama School, Chris Burney--Second Stage's Associate Artistic Director--called to say that Second Stage would like to produce The Mystery Plays as part of its Uptown Series. Needless to say, I was thrilled. A few months later, the Drama School's Dean and Yale Rep Artistic Director James Bundy called to say he wanted to do a co-production, with The Mystery Plays starting in New Haven--where it had been produced as a student production--before coming to Second Stage. Needless to say, I was doubly thrilled.
The journey of this play--to quote Mister Mystery--has been long and winding, and fraught with dramas high and low, but I couldn't be prouder of the result, and I couldn't have had a better time working with this director, this cast, these designers and these crews both of them.
No mystery on that front: They're the greatest.