This morning, Gwydion Suilebhan shared a blog post about his new play, The Butcher, which opens this Thursday as the final workshop in our MicroFest.
We thought we would share this with you:
As I write this blog post, it’s a mere seven days since the Boston Marathon bombings became the singular focus of American attention. Narratives about freedom and Caucasians and manhunts and first responders and video surveillance and religion and politics and Miranda rights and Watertown and brotherhood have begun spinning, revising themselves wildly, it seems, with every passing news cycle. Twitter and Facebook and the increasingly feckless fourth estate—not to mention good old-fashioned word of mouth—have been fully revved up the whole time… and we all still have more questions than answers, as it should (probably) be.
In a few days’ time, my play THE BUTCHER—which happens to have been inspired by a real (if little-known) terrorist event that took place in the DC suburbs in 2004—is going open in New York. (It’s a three-day workshop production at the Players Theatre as part of The Theatre Project.) I’ve been sitting with this fact sort of heavily since April 15, wanting to tread carefully and make smart decisions… and, more importantly, use the story I’m telling as a way to (hopefully) convene a healthy conversation.
With that desire in mind, I tried to schedule a talk-back for the night I’m going to be seeing the show myself, on April 26… but the theater was, unfortunately, already booked. Instead, I thought perhaps I’d create this simple blog post, with an offer to converse in any way that might make sense, in the comments below, with anyone who might care to chat. I don’t have any answers, of course—who among us does?—but I do have a desire to wrestle through this scary and confusing world with company, rather than doing it alone.
So please join in. Oh… and if you plan to come this weekend, I hope you’ll also consider this blog post a trigger warning of sorts. These are intense days we’ve all lived through, and I don’t want to send anyone over any edges accidentally. My play doesn’t include any scenes of overt violence or terror, though there is some blood… and more than a few references that might give people pause. So be forewarned.