Other Things We Fear in the Dark: A Playwriting Project

Abstract

In proposing my goals for writing this Other Things We Fear in the Dark, I felt immediately drawn·to writing a family play. My previous plays and scenes had dealt with interpersonal relationships, but not family members. I was drawn to the idea of family members having to act both as individuals as well as for the good of the family. There was never really a temptation to write a family closely based on my own; the more and more I developed the idea, I wanted to explore a kind of family unit I was less familiar with. The idea of a neo-Brady Bunch family-single parents with the intent to remarry, each with their own children and personal baggage-was attractive to me from a narrative standpoint. There became three different ideas of identity in that notion: the first being the individuals, the second being the single parent and child relationship, and the final being the new family unit, forced together only in the circumstances of the power outage I wanted to emulate.