Sunlight

  Previews | Thursday, Jan 21 through Sunday, Jan 24
  Opening Night | Tuesday, Jan 26 at 8:00 pm
 After Words | Sunday, Jan 24
After our Sunday Preview matinee in the Boyer Theatre, Margot Melcon, MTC's Literary Manager/Dramaturg, will interview playwright Sharr White.
 Opening Night | Tuesday, Jan 26
The theatre's most festive evening! Meet the cast and director and enjoy a complimentary glass of wine and hors d’oeuvres at a festive post-show reception.
 Director's Night | Wednesdays, Jan 27 & Feb 10
Lively post-show conversations with the director and/or cast members on two Wednesday evenings.
 Wine Tasting Series | Saturday, Jan 30
Complimentary pre-show tasting (beginning one hour prior to show) on a Saturday night featuring a different winery for each production. The wine tasting host is TBA. Tasting begins at 7pm.
 Perspectives | Thu Matinee, Feb 4 (show at 1pm, pre-show talk at noon)
A topical speaker (TBA) will offer insights into the play. Bring your bag lunch. Coffee & cookies will be served.

“SUNLIGHT signals the arrival of a serious and talented new playwright, and in this complex, elegant production, MTC gives Sharr White a first-class debut.”

“A powerfully constructed drama magnificently performed by a talented cast of four . . . This poignant play will keep you on the edge of your seat. . . It's definitely worth a trip across the bridge.”

“Impassioned performances by a first-rate cast.”
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“Charles Dean gives a forceful performance . . . Carrie Paff is razor sharp and tough as nails as his attorney daughter Charlotte . . . Artistic director Jasson Minadakis gives the play a dynamic staging.”
READ FULL REVIEW

“White has done a wonderful job of exploring the relationship between his characters . . . while at the same time taking on the topical subject of torture memos and making it timeless. When everything changes, what do you do?”
READ FULL REVIEW

Keeping Up With the Nightly News

By Margot Melcon

Working on a creative project that relies on current events to feed its research can make keeping up with the nightly news feel like a losing battle. Writing a play in which the backdrop is the political minefield of post-9/11 interrogation policy can feel like madness, not only because of the quantity of information coming out, but also the uncomfortable truths that might be uncovered along the way.

When Sharr White began writing Sunlight in 2006, it was impossible to speculate on the scope of facts the coming years would reveal. It was too soon to know how involved the U.S. had been in torture and who was ultimately responsible. The events of 9/11 and the subsequent government reaction—supposedly on behalf of himself, his home city, and his country—deeply affected White. A New Yorker at the time of the attacks, he felt a sense of urgency to write his take on what had happened.

He distilled the story and turned it inward onto a family locked in constant battle politically, yet fiercely protective of one another. This family, ripped apart in the aftermath of terror, intimately performs a pattern repeated widely across this country. It is the story of a mighty liberal university president on the brink of collapse, his conservative son-in-law taking personal revenge into the realm of public policy, and his daughter recovering from her own wounds while torn between the two men she loves.

White’s challenge—write the story of this family while keeping the play prescient, relevant, and accurate. In an interview just after rehearsals began for the MTC production of Sunlight, Sharr White lets us in on what the process has been like.

MTC: What is Sunlight about?
Sharr White: Sunlight is an epic battle between two university personalities who are diametrically opposed, philosophically and politically. Thematically, it is the tragic dissolution of a formerly beautiful relationship after the events of 9/11. In the new world nothing will ever be the same again. The central relationship in the play among these three characters—Matthew, Vincent, and Charlotte—has largely been destroyed because of their personal experiences and shifting views based on what happened to all of them on that day and in the years following.

It’s interesting that you refer to the central relationship of the play as being between three people. Is that the play you originally intended to write?
It’s a love triangle between a daughter, her father, and her husband. When I started out I wanted to write a play about Nixon, about abuse of power. I wanted to write a play about the end of an era. I wanted to write a play about a central tragic figure. I had been wanting to write about torture as well, torture being the ultimate abuse of power, the ultimate act of tyranny, and I really couldn’t figure out a way to meld these things together. It seemed like a good idea to take this Nixonian character and take him out of a national spotlight and put him in the microcosm of a university.

I also wanted this person who was abusing power to be a liberal, to be abusing power for “a good cause,� but just doing it in the wrong way. And then in building his adversary, I had to design a character who really was diametrically opposite, who didn’t abuse power on a personal level, was a kind, caring good human being but who’d had a part in the most atrocious abuse of power, which was torture. It became clear that these two had to be fighting over a person to get them viscerally involved. Once I added Charlotte, the daughter of one, the wife of the other, then things started firming up.

How long have you been working on Sunlight?
I started thinking about it in the spring of 2006. I’d started researching the United States involvement in torture. Abu Ghraib had broken and it was clear that there was some sort of official government policy in place. When I started reading about the torture memos and the torture papers, there was all this exciting, atrocious material that I was seeing for the first time. Of course, over the last three, almost four years, what we know about our involvement has changed dramatically so the play has had to evolve.

How did your research inform the play and how has the play changed?
Because so much information hadn’t really been widely paid attention to on a public scale, the first draft of the play was very polarized. As the play has evolved, it’s been important to make it more personal. Initially, Matthew, Charlotte and Vincent were more symbols than they were real people in a real family. Early on I thought that Matthew represented liberals, Vincent represented conservatives, and I almost thought of Charlotte as representing New York.

There was a lot of symbolism in these iconic characters that helped me find the underlying themes in the play that I really wanted to write. Because of that, the first few drafts were arguments all the way around. The process of writing this has been about continually personalizing the stories until everybody, at last now, has become very human and very empathetic.

There’s a universal quality to political discussions that happen in families. You’ve said you come from a family where people are very vocal and passionate about their beliefs and that people are respectful of differing points of view.
We are and we’re not. Its funny how during these discussions, especially in the family dynamic, you look behind the argument. You say, what is this argument really about? In a lot of ways with family, its sometimes easier when we’re really getting into the heat of discussions to say, this is actually about deeply hidden things that we’re unable to speak of.

We talk very vocally about a lot of things but we don’t dissect our relationships with each other, so I think a lot of our discussions are coded substitutions for what we really want to be saying to one another. Ultimately, that’s what has had the pull for me in the play. What are these people really talking about? What are they really arguing about?

You tackle events that Americans feel strongly about, politically and personally. How difficult was it for you to tackle the hot-button issues?
I think I went though several stages with it. One of the stages was blowing off steam and saying everything I personally felt. And then the play evolved. It had to or it would have just been a rant. The more I got involved in the characters, the more it became obvious what a rabbit hole we’ve gone through in the last nine years. Especially living in New York, but I guess living everywhere. When faced with this huge catastrophe, this huge crime right in your backyard, it changed people.

You said the play felt like a rant. How were you eventually able to write both sides?
It was difficult at first. I believe that torture is one of the vilest acts ever. It is the darkest act that mankind can engage in. Our own reason for coming into being as a nation was violated so easily and in such a despicable manner. It was hard for me initially to feel anything for Vincent, someone who supported the use of torture. But you have to find empathy.

It was most alarming to look into myself and say, on some level, there is a very visceral, easy justification for Vincent’s position. At some point, everyone has flirted with some secret revenge fantasy, that the people who have done this deserve to be caught and tortured. When you come home and find charred manuscripts on your fire escape and you can smell the smell from across the river for months, you’re hit with a “let’s hunt them down and kill them� sort of attitude. I had to step in and understand this point of view myself to make it an understandable point of view for the audience. It’s been a soul-searching process, writing the play, in a lot of ways.

Did you think about how different audiences would relate to the play?
When I started writing the play in 2006 I was positive the play would make a lot of people angry. Not very many people were vocal about their feelings regarding what the U.S. had been involved in. It’s been interesting to have the play read in more conservative areas. I’m always certain that somehow it’s going to be too polarizing for an audience. I’ve tried to evolve the play even-handedly so that on some level everyone is right and everyone is wrong. I think that is what is important to me about the play now.

Sunlight feels very balanced. Did you at one time want to push a point of view?
Oh yeah, absolutely. I absolutely wanted Vincent to be destroyed by Matthew. Certainly in earlier drafts, Vincent was run around the ring a little bit. I wanted Matthew’s point of view to prevail. But again, I just don’t think anything is that simple. I wish it were, but it’s not.

Did you have to talk yourself out of writing that version of the play?
I did! I think in the writing of any play, with the first draft you’re just working it out and fantasizing about what you want to say. And then you have to get over that and throw it out and start writing a real play where characters can actually be in conflict with one another rather than a one-sided position paper. I got it all out of me but it wasn’t holding up as a piece of theater.

How was it knowing new information would change the way Sunlight was heard?
It was very frustrating. I was convinced that the play would be politically obsolete as soon as the Bush administration was over. I’m glad that it is premiering now because it’s given me time to make it transcend current events.

The frustrating and amazing and scary thing was that as many fantastic scenarios as I could dream up and fictionalize, they started coming true one by one. It shows the depth of the issue and how much has yet to be uncovered. There will be troves of material coming to light in the next few decades.

It’s also been an opportunity to shave out the polemic and make it more about something that will be timeless, about the relationship and the themes involved that we’re going to be playing out throughout this century.