For the final Pizza & Plays event of the Summer, we’re shaking things up a little. We will be doing a reading of “After We Become Rain” written by Mac Mitchell, yours truly. This play is a new play — it’s so new it hasn’t even been rehearsed or performed by anyone ever.
The special insider deal of attending this specific event is a sneak peak of Hearth & Mantel’s upcoming season because — following revisions, rewrites and all that important stuff writers claim they do — “After We Become Rain” will be Hearth & Mantel’s season opener.
“Hey Mac, what’s your play about?” I will try to give a description without much more shameless self-promotion. It’s a play about how we remember the important events of our lives through the stories we tell about them. It’s about the impact of the dark things we didn’t understand when we were kids. It’s about how we tend to run away but if we run for too long, eventually we don’t know where we are. It’s about what happens next. It’s about the pain of people leaving, and leaving people, and letting each other go. It’s about searching and finding.
“After We Become Rain” is also –– hopefully –– funnier than it sounds, because an inseparable part of the play are the ways we use imagination to connect with one another, make each other laugh, and remind each other how to smile.
Chuck: I’m gonna tell you the story, and it’s not gonna sound right. By which I mean, it’s not gonna sound like reality. I’m trying to be truer than that. You need to know there are things I can’t talk about. Not because –– not just because I don’t want to –– but also because I don’t know how to talk about it. There’s no guidebook.
It’s late one evening. The start of one of those cold, fog covered winter nights in a little town on the edge of the countryside. And just beyond the drifting red and orange maple leaves, a dark river moves through the trees, as it has since the start of time. That’s where I first saw the darkest and brightest girl I ever met at the bottom of the river. The sun’s in disguise. The blue sky is just beginning to turn grey.
Blog written by Mac Mitchell
Resident Playwright
Hearth & Mantel Theatre 