Dana Delany (standing) and Dot-Marie Jones and Thomas Murphy Molony (on display) in Goodman Theatre’s manufacturing of ‘Freeway Patrol.’
Keep in mind the early years of Twitter, when it nonetheless appeared novel to speak and even kind friendships with individuals you’d by no means met in particular person? When hate speech and disinformation, although not absent, had been much less distinguished in our feeds?
This was the social media panorama that Emmy-winning actress Dana Delany (China Seaside, Determined Housewives) stepped into within the early 2010s, when she was engaged on ABC’s Physique of Proof and was requested to affix Twitter to advertise the present. Little did she know that this work activity would result in a rare on-line friendship with a younger fan that will spiral right into a stranger-than-fiction story.
Half a decade later, this story captured the imaginations of playwright Jen Silverman and director Mike Donahue, who had labored with Delany on Silverman’s Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties, in 2018. The trio was on a prepare to see one other of Silverman and Donahue’s collaborations at New Haven’s Lengthy Wharf Theatre when Delany’s peculiar expertise got here up in dialog. “Our jaws had been on the ground,” Donahue recalled. “It was such an extremely fascinating, riveting story.”
Silverman and Donahue instantly acknowledged the dramatic potential in Delany’s account and had been happy to study that she had already been considering the way it may work onstage. After bringing on board Tony-nominated scenic designer Dane Laffrey—a frequent creative accomplice of Silverman and Donahue who had additionally labored on Collective Rage—the group of 4 co-creators started a four-year course of of reworking Delany’s Twitter archive into the play Freeway Patrol, now at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre via Feb. 18.
Billed as a thriller that’s half love story, half ghost story, Freeway Patrol stars Delany as herself alongside Chicago actor Thomas Murphy Molony as 13-year-old Cam and Dot-Marie Jones (Glee’s Coach Beiste) as his grandmother and different characters. On this true story, Cam—a significantly unwell child who has undergone a number of coronary heart transplants—reaches out to Dana on Twitter, and the 2 strike up a correspondence over direct messages.
Within the midst of a grueling and isolating filming schedule, Dana quickly finds herself speaking with Cam in any respect hours and even will get to know members of his household. What begins with lighthearted exchanges of songs and video hyperlinks deepens right into a friendship during which Cam can talk about his fears of dying with an empathetic listener; in return, he does his greatest to cheer Dana up when he thinks she’s feeling down. However the relationship takes fairly a flip as Cam will get sicker and begins to have visions, bringing Dana uncanny messages from the past.
“Mainly, this relationship that Dana had developed with this child and together with his household began taking all of them to locations that had been utterly surprising and unusual and mysterious and exquisite and just a little bit stunning,” Silverman stated, cautious to keep away from spoiling any of the present’s main reveals. Working parallel to the intriguing plot twists is a shifting human story, Silverman added. “At its coronary heart, for me, that is a lot a narrative of intimacy and connection and our want to connect with one other human,” Silverman stated.
Making a satisfying theatrical expertise from such unconventional supply materials was no small feat. Whereas all of them share the title of co-creator, every of the 4 has particular roles: Silverman as playwright and textual content curator, Donahue as director, Laffrey as designer, and Delany as actor, and, after all, inspiration for all the mission. Nonetheless, they’ve labored as a group all through the method, every contributing concepts to varied elements of the present. “We’re very fluid with our boundaries,” stated Silverman.
In an early workshop at New Dramatists, the co-creators sat down with an enormous binder crammed with printed copies of Delany’s digital archive—tweets, direct messages, emails, photographs—and browse straight via it with a number of actor pals. “Even with that huge quantity of unshaped materials, there was such a heartbeat to it,” Silverman recalled. “It was so theatrical and so thrilling and so bizarre that we had been like, there’s something right here, and now now we have to excavate it.”
The excavation progressed in a number of phases, every requiring completely different instruments. “For some time, these had been instruments that I used to be wielding of curation, of reducing, of shifting, of juxtaposition—constructing a backbone, constructing a theatrical engine, constructing a set of the way during which the story unfolded,” stated Silverman, “however attempting very laborious to not add or change language—subtract it, for certain, however simply actually constructing with what there was.”
When it turned clear that the archival materials alone wouldn’t create a cohesive narrative, Delany’s collaborators interviewed her to offer further context and fill in gaps. These interviews supplied language that will turn out to be direct addresses to the viewers within the present model of the play, with the objective of higher speaking her private perspective. (Delany was unavailable to interview for this text.)
Over the previous 12 months of growth, the creators have employed “extra conventional theatrical instruments,” stated Silverman. This has required trying on the textual content as if it weren’t in dialog with an archive and figuring out the place sure beats are wanted or the place a personality’s motivation could possibly be higher explored.
“The story we’re telling is, beat by beat, a real story,” stated Silverman. “There are moments during which we’ve needed to get theatrical and ingenious round how that performs out and what the viewers is encountering. And in locations, we’ve made guesses about what a personality would have been considering and feeling primarily based on what it’s that they stated.”
As soon as rehearsals started, the play continued to develop in new methods. “A lot of what’s really occurring within the play shouldn’t be communicated explicitly within the messages that [Delany and Cam] are sending each other,” stated Donahue, “as a result of, after all, particularly if you’re constructing a brand new relationship and it’s with any individual you don’t really see in the actual world, you will have the flexibility to manage what you do and don’t share with that particular person.”
An essential a part of the rehearsal course of has been discovering methods to speak “the actual form of isolation and loneliness and want for connection” that Delany was experiencing on the time, Donahue continued. “None of that’s stuff that she’s speaking about with that child. But it surely’s all in there, when you land that context for the viewers. So loads of the method has been about determining how one can inform the story visually and bodily in order to make that human expertise accessible.”
Because the play is about a web based relationship, the designs naturally embrace an “omnipresent multimedia component,” stated Laffrey. “But it surely was additionally crucial that this piece feels actually dramatically satisfying, and we’re structuring it a bit like a thriller, so it actually, actually didn’t wish to really feel like Dana Delany doing a TED Speak. We’re working to chop in opposition to what it means to place a human in entrance of an enormous video display and all of the semiotic issues that brings up for an viewers.”
Barely a decade on from when the play is about, social media occupies a way more difficult place in our private and non-private lives in 2024. A lot has modified that it virtually sounds quaint to discuss with “Twitter” moderately than “the corporate previously often called Twitter.” Nonetheless, the co-creators of Freeway Patrol discover worth on this healthful if unusual story of two unlikely individuals connecting on-line.
“For all of the methods during which the web could be actually harmful or scary or politicized, and kind of an outrage machine, the concept of the web within the piece is that, finally, it’s a device for connection and that it’s a manner for people who find themselves profoundly lonely and remoted on the earth to search out each other,” stated Donahue. “I feel this play is definitely very a lot concerning the potential for humanity within the expertise.”
It was this sense of humanity that drew Silverman to Delany’s story within the first place. “The optimism and the generosity and the openness with which Dana obtained this child and his household into her life and in addition with which she obtained a set of prospects that the world could possibly be a lot completely different and extra mysterious, and in some methods extra stunning than maybe she had thought—that basically speaks to me,” stated Silverman. “That additionally looks like a dialog that we might use now.”
Emily McClanathan (she/her) is a Chicago-based author whose work has appeared within the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reader, Playbill, TheaterMania, Theatrely, and extra. She is a 2020 Nationwide Critics Institute Fellow.
Associated
