From PlayFest: Looking at Ian August and 'Missing Celia Rose'
posted by emaupin on Jan 30, 2009 12:11:27 PM

Ian August Ian August (3) (right), whose new play Missing Celia Rose is winding up its workshop performances this weekend (noon Saturday, 5:15 p.m. Sunday) at PlayFest, answers some questions about his play:

What's your play about, in a couple of sentences?

Missing Celia Rose takes place in a fictional town in Georgia in 1921, where whites and blacks coexist in a way that is completely impossible elsewhere in the country. The story revolves around a young white boy attempting to discover what happened to the black wife of the preacher, who took the only car the town possesses and drove it off of a cliff. It's part love story, part mystery, and part coming of age story.

MissingElizabeth June (4) Since the original draft, Missing Celia Rose has become more and more like a southern novel, and I've really relished the narrative device that drives the plot along. Despite it being a "memory play," it still has the life and energy of something unfolding for the first time before your very eyes, and the level of discovery that the audience goes through matches that of the lead character, the young Geoffrey Pitts, as he narrates.

Has it been produced anywhere else?

I was fortunate to have a reading sponsored by Orlando Shakespeare for the National New Play Network in December of last year. A handful of plays were presented as readings, and performed in front of artistic directors, literary managers and producers from theaters all across the country. It was quite an honor, and the responses I received were very complimentary.

What do you hope to get out of its inclusion in PlayFest?

I really hope that the workshop this year will give audiences a chance to revisit the play and experience it in a whole new light. The actors MissingNeal & Noell (1) and director only get a limited time of rehearsal and exploration for a reading at the festival, but that amount of time is increased considerably for a workshop.  It allows the actors more familiarity with the piece, and also more of an ability to explore some of the ideas they discover throughout.  What audiences will see this time through will be a much more focused performance, a performance that will let an audience know what the play might look like as a full production.  That physical relationship that a play has with an audience--the overall look of a particular scene, the use of costumes or set pieces, the incorporation of lights and sound--will ultimately help shape an audience member's experience.  I hope people who experience MCR for the first time will fall in love with the play, and that people revisiting the play will deepen their understanding of this world and these characters, and realize that the message of the play is something that can apply to the way we live our lives today.

(Photos: Above right, Elizabeth June; below right, Dennis Neal and David Knoell. Courtesy of Rob Jones/Orlando Shakespeare Theater.)