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.