(Above: Cottage Theatre’s world premiere of Treehouse by Joe Musso features, left to right, Blake Nelson as Oliver, John Eckstine as Ben, Malakhai Schnell as Johnny, and Clare McDonald as Alana; production photos by Emily Bly)
By Randi Bjornstad
There’s no better summation of the plot of Treehouse, a new play by Joe Musso that has its world premiere at the Cottage Theatre starting on Aug. 10, than the one that appears on Musso’s own website:
Johnny and his pals Oliver and Ben could be typical 17-year-old boys, hanging out in Johnny’s treehouse and dreaming of talking to the beautiful Alana, were it not for Johnny’s insistence that he has the mind of a 53-year-old. Johnny’s mom is a little worried. Out-of-the-blue her son is suddenly pulling straight A’s, keeping his room immaculate, and reading Shakespeare. As Johnny persists in his claim that he’s an old man in a teenager’s body, and conversations in the treehouse become increasingly peppered by the words of the Bard, Johnny grapples simultaneously with adolescence, love, and the mind’s ability to heal from great loss. Through his budding friendship with Alana, Johnny comes to realize the life-affirming power of “the eternal summer that shall not fade.”
If that doesn’t pique the curiosity — not to mention a yen to head for the theater — it’s hard to imagine what might. The fact that theatergoers in Cottage Grove will be the first to see the play doesn’t hurt, either.
Tara Wibrew directs her first world premiere production with “Treehouse” at Cottage Theatre; photo by Randi Bjornstad
Tara Wibrew, a Eugene-area actress and director, is directing this one, which has come to production via the American Association of Community Theaters, or ACCT, and its NewPlayFest program.
“The association heard from its membership that there was a lack of attention being paid to the needs of community theaters, so they decided to focus on new play development that would meet those particular needs,” Wibrew said.
Community theaters serve a different population, and because they are locally oriented they need plays that represent a broad range of ages and types of actors, she said.
In addition, the content needs to be appropriate and interesting to a broader audience, and the production demands — sets, costumes, and technical demands such as lighting, sound and special effects — need to be simpler.
And when it comes to musicals, she added with a laugh, “The performers need to be able to sing well — but it’s not opera.”
Getting the nod to land a world premiere production through ACCT is not exactly simple.
“It’s a multi-level process, and this year there were 300 plays submitted for consideration, and that first had to be whittled down to 12,” Wibrew said. “On the theater side, six theaters throughout the country are chosen to participate, and it means they are commiting themselves to producing a world premiere play before they’ve even seen a script.”
In the case of the Cottage Theatre, “They had readers for all 12 of the scripts, and after reading them they had to choose their three top picks,” she said. “It just so happened that Treehouse was Cottage Theatre’s first choice.”
The other theaters chosen to participate in ACCT’s NewPlayFest this year are located in Indiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Wyoming.
Wibrew, whose master’s degree focused on new play development, is understandably elated at the prospect of helping to launch a brand new play.
“I have never worked with Cottage Theatre before, and it’s very exciting,” she said. “To me, playwrights are magical creatures who create gorgeous, layered worlds from thin air.”
She’s written some short plays herself, “but it’s not my strength,” Wibrew admitted. “But one of the things that is so good about the NewPlayFest productions is that the participating theaters are able to give feedback to the playwrights, and they also can ask questions of the playwrights about their plays — although they don’t have to answer them if they want to leave interpretations up to the directors or audiences.”
Wibrew said she found Treehouse particularly intriguing “because it is hard to describe in a couple of sentences.”
“It offers so much, both literary value and realism,” she said. “It has joy, comedy, life, death and elements of science fiction. It has a lot of nuance — every day with this script, I find something new. To me, that means it’s a good script, and when it comes to plays, you can’t help a bad script, and a good script doesn’t need your help.”
Her job as director is “ensuring that the story is being told honestly by a group of people dedicated to telling the same story,” she said. “That means that the actors and the director agree on the basic things that are contained in the script, such as the arc of each character — what they need and how they get what they need — and the trajectory of the story.
Put another way, “You can’t think outside the box until you agree on the box,” Wibrew said. “As the director, I work to take what everybody else sees in the play and distill it into a shared vision.”
Playwright Joe Musso, who lives in Alabama, visited Cottage Grove for a couple of days early in the process, which gave the Cottage Theatre cast and crew a chance to ask questions about plot and stage directions.
“Based on our questions, he made a couple of changes,” Wibrew said. “We wanted his level of participation to be whatever he wanted it to be.”
It’s a risk to take on a brand new work, especially one by a playwright who is not necessarily familiar, “but I think that’s one of the things that is so exciting and rewarding about this play,” she said. “And I give a lot of credit to Cottage Theatre — they aren’t afraid to offer a broad span of work that is new for both the audience and the artists.”
Treehouse
When: 8 p.m. Aug. 10-11, 16-18, 23-25; and 2:30 p.m. matinees on Aug. 12, 19, and 26; “talk backs” with the director and actors following the Aug. 12 and 19 performances
Where: Cottage Theatre, 700 Village Drive, Cottage Grove
Tickets: $15 to $25, available at the box office, 541-942-8001, or online at cottagetheatre.org
Malakhai Schnell plays Johnny, and Tracy Nygard is Susan, in “Treehouse” at the Cottage Theatre
