I publish my writing for everyone to read — or hear on the airwaves — almost every day, but this weekend, the medium is different for me.
My first play, an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 novel, "The Beautiful and Damned," is taking the stage at the iconic Akron Civic Theatre. I have spent my life writing, which has taken many forms over the years and ultimately led to my career as a journalist, but I had never written a script. I feel vulnerable, but unbelievably excited.
I've been reflecting a lot lately on how I ended up on this path as a budding playwright, one that just a few years ago I could never have imagined. I grew up doing theater as a kid, a hobby I ultimately ditched to pursue other extracurriculars. One of those was the school newspaper, which I dedicated myself to because I knew I wanted to one day become a reporter. I continued to be an avid theater-goer, and I achieved my goal of being a professional journalist.
Two years ago, I fell back into acting after writing a piece for a magazine about a production taking place at the Akron Civic. I decided on a whim to audition for a show. I was cast and I caught the bug, spending many evenings after work on stages in Akron and Cleveland, both as an actor and a stage manager.
So I was elated when the opportunity arose to adapt a story of my choosing and convene my passions for classic literature and theater. And I was a little nervous. It seemed like an impossible undertaking to not only write the first-ever stage adaptation of “The Beautiful and Damned," but to complete a script at all.
My personal writing has always been focused on strong prose and beautiful words. In a play, there's none of that. It's dialogue only, and you have to capture the essence of the real human experience in the words your characters say.
I realized that what I do every day is talk to people for my job. And with that, writing dialogue became less stilted and more genuine. Even a period piece has an element of modern day. This more-than-century-old story, after all, is one that still holds relevant themes in today's society: the corrosive effects of wealth and greed, superficiality, the reckless pursuit of happiness, self-sabotage and more.
The giddiness I felt when I completed the script was something akin to publishing a feature story I'd spent months on and sharing it with the world. It's my baby, until it's not; it's in everyone else's hands now.
The process didn't stop when the script was done. After I wrote the play, I took the helm as the director. Bringing a new work, especially a period piece, from concept to the stage is no easy feat, but each and every one of the talented actors I am working with accepted the challenge and ran with it. From the first read-through, I told them that I wanted this to be a collaborative process. We spent hours in rehearsals discussing the story, character development, motivations and intentions. Their thoughtfulness and dedication is what made this show what it is.
Similarly, for me, journalism always has been and should be a collaborative process. A phrase that once was used often in the industry — one that many reporters have rightfully phased out — is that we "give a voice to the voiceless." The people we meet and interview are not voiceless. We, as journalists, just need to listen. We are not the creators of their stories, merely the tellers of their stories or, in some cases, the vehicles through which they tell their own stories.
When it comes down to it, that's what journalists, playwrights, authors, poets and artists all are: storytellers. We seek to find meaning not just within ourselves, but within the people and the world around us, to make us all feel a little less alone and more known.
The last few months working on this play — alongside my job at Ideastream Public Media , of course — have been among the most joyful of my life. If you'd like to join the party, "The Beautiful and Damned" runs March 22-24 at the Akron Civic Theatre.
“The Cut” is featured in Ideastream Public Media's weekly newsletter, The Frequency Week in Review. To get The Frequency Week in Review, The Daily Frequency or any of our newsletters, sign up on Ideastream's newsletter subscription page.
