Review Fix chats with actor and writer Aurora Stewart de Peña, who discusses her upcoming production “Love Story.”
About Love Story:
Maria is dead, but she’s still on the call sheet. She’s trapped inside a play that keeps restarting itself, where scenes from her life are rehearsed and revised by the people who loved her. Conversations loop. Arguments reset. Stage directions are sentient. Maria watches as their memories turn her into a character, a plot device in the stories of the people she loved. As the play slips between rehearsal, recollection, and imagined afterlives, Maria tries to wrest back authorship of her own story. She argues with monologues, questions the rules of the world she’s trapped in, and refuses to become a symbol of loss. Love Story navigates what comes after death, when love refuses to let you step into your light.
Review Fix: What makes this show special?
Aurora Stewart de Peña: God, for me, every single element is special. I think this play is so funny. It’s deeply personal. It was born out of a 20 year friendship with our director, Rose Bonczek. I always think of friends as the people with whom I share the slow project of getting into the middle of life’s mysteries. Rose and I have been on the case, working out death, life, the afterlife. And we’re looking at those things through the lens of a deconstructed play. I think this piece is very emotionally indulgent, and served by some more sparse design approaches. The actors have filled this world with their own experiences, and the relationships they’ve built are nuanced and, I want to say, life-giving.
Review Fix: Who do you think will enjoy it the most?
Stewart de Peña: Anyone who has loved someone.
Review Fix: How has the show changed during the concept to completion stage?
Stewart de Peña: Oh, you know. A lot. I wrote the first draft all in one night. The characters started talking and would not shut up. I was sitting in some absurd thoughts, byproducts of the death of someone I loved. I had been in the room with them when they went. Over the course of development with Voyage, we clarified a lot (without making the world too linear) and added a character. I really value the collaboration of the director, the producers, and the actors. For me, actors really inform the shape a new work takes.
Review Fix: Any unsung heroes on the team?
Stewart de Peña: Ideally, everyone is getting sung! I am publicly grateful to Wayne, Charles and Michael at Voyage and the people of The Tank for taking a chance on me in New York. I’m from Toronto, and it’s wild to open a new play in this city where I haven’t really got a community. They have made me feel surrounded and supported. And of course our stage managers, Keri and Oziel. Nobody in the world is more forcefully competent than a true stage manager.
Review Fix: What are your goals for this project?
Stewart de Peña: For everyone involved to feel good about their work, and for the work to find the people who need it. When I find a piece of art that makes me feel understood, or that helps me understand something, I’m like Mario finding a mushroom. I get stronger and my life force increases. I hope this play is a mushroom for its Marios.
Review Fix: How would you like it to be remembered?
Stewart de Peña: As a completely separate entity from the hit FX show about Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. Although, I think she would have appreciated this play.
Review Fix: What’s next?
Stewart de Peña: My novel Julius Julius is coming out in paperback this Summer! Buy it wherever books are sold (but buy it at an indie like McNally Jackson or Rizoli): https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/750092/julius-julius-by-aurora-stewart-de-pena/
Also I am working on a new novel, and a new play.
Review Fix: Anything else you’d like to add?
Stewart de Peña: Theater is a freewill into the present moment. The playwright Daniel MacIvor said that in an interview I did with him for The Globe and Mail. This is a play about the intensity and absurdity of our feelings, and its thesis is that really trying to know and understand and remember each other is an antidote to that intensity and absurdity. To me, right now, being present while we explore these ideas is a very good use of time.
Review Fix: Bottom line- why should someone see this show?
Stewart de Peña: The cast is charming, moving, honest, insightful, hilarious. I have fallen in love with them, and I think audiences will, too.
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