Emma Durbin

 

One year and nine months ago Connor Bradshaw brought in his first pages of Boxed In to our playwriting class. In the time since I had the honor to see it grow from a family drama to a tight two hander ready for first rehearsal. And within the last few weeks Bradshaw and the production team worked tirelessly to transform his play to the online multimedia story you explored today.

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We got two full weeks of workshopping before the world came to a halt. In the time that we got, we learned that Bradshaw’s script was deeply physical. The play, for context, starts when Ted is executed. To work through their grief and eventually escape Tacoma, Washington, John and Louise sort through boxes of Ted’s things to decide what to keep. To accommodate for the new format, Bradshaw wrote a whole new script this April. The following is an interview with the playwright and his experience with this process.

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After only two weeks of rehearsals for Boxed In, The Theatre School shut its doors. I’ve been impressed in your ability to assess the situation and persevere. Within weeks you wrote a whole new script to respond to the need to move online. What was this journey like for you?

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It was wild. We discovered in the studio so much of what happened in the play was imagistic and based on bodies in the room. When we realized we couldn't do the production anymore, it felt wrong to continue with the same play because it's a completely different medium now. So I said, okay: how can I make sure the story holds its integrity while switching to a different format? I felt like the only way to do that was by completely revamping and rewriting.

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What do you miss most from Boxed In that didn’t make it to the online platform? What is in the live performance that we should know about?

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The teeth, for sure.

The play’s timeline is very different from the website's timeline. In the play, we focus on one unit of time and we watch John and Louise spiral together after Ted’s execution. There's a breaking point in the play where Ted seems to have made himself present within the home. Louise is going through the boxes of his things after he has died and she stumbles upon this container of teeth and she's like Oh they’re baby teeth, but actually there are almost 400 teeth in there. Louise does this while John is in another room, and as John starts to come in, she puts all of the teeth that she can fit in her mouth. John sees her and does not notice at all. 

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It was a really cool moment where we see the motif of Louise continuously hiding her son's transgressions. She’s attempting to cope the best way she can, which is through a sort of active eating of the truth So that's one thing I miss.

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Why John and Louise? What was it about these two parents going through this grief process that made you want to tell their story?

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I think it's super universal. When I was writing this play, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings had started and my parents said, I don't know how I could be his mother and love him. That really forces perspective. There are only thirty or so confirmed murders by Ted Bundy, but people have speculated that he's killed more than that. He could have killed, raped, and eaten hundreds of people. And I don't want you to sympathize with him. But I was thinking, God, what a test of a parent's love and dedication to their child. How can you love somebody who the world (and your child) has constructed as abjectly evil?

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It is very poignant especially because you can extend it to a lot of other narratives; how far does a parent's love go and to what lengths will a parent defend their child?

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And is there something too in the question of who's responsible for all this?

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Yes, oh my gosh, yes. The dramaturgy team, you and Liv Garcia, put together a wonderful dramaturgy presentation. Liv had a section where she used the myth Echidna, the mother of monsters, to explore this idea that the mother always gets blamed for her monstrous sons. That is something that might be more subliminal in the website with this idea of placing blame, but was absolutely there in the play. Who is getting the brunt of the blame is also a conversation that goes hand in hand with the child. Who feels guilt for the child?

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