Victor Lodato’s World Premiere of Dear Sara Jane

Emily Morse, at NEW DRAMATISTS first introduced me to Victor Lodato’s work. He is a member playwright at NEW DRAMATISTS and I have been reading his plays and tracking his career. I am thrilled that I am producing and directing the World Premiere of his new play DEAR SARA JANE. Victor and I have had several phone conversations regarding our upcoming production. We will meet in NY in April to continue our pre-production discussions. Victor will also be in Washington, DC for his upcoming productions at Theater Alliance of THE BREAD OF WINTER and THE WOMAN WHO AMUSES HERSELF.

Victor Lodato in his own words:

DEAR SARA JANE is a solo play that examines the psychic disintegration and subsequent transformation of a woman waiting for her husband to return from war, a war during which he may or may not have committed a stunning atrocity.

The play, to my mind, hovers above naturalism. While I think it essential that the play exists believably in its external reality (a real marriage, a real woman waiting for her husband to return from war, a real atrocity), ideally the play must also have the strange and unsettling feeling that it is happening inside the character’s head; that the play is giving theatrical form to a shift in consciousness. By the end of the play, the character is profoundly changed, and I believe the power of the play will come from an audience feeling that they are somehow complicit, that they are closely participating in the character’s journey: a mad twisting road inside her mind by which she arrives at a radical change of heart.

At present, there are three songs in the play. In seeking to increase the theatrical electricity of the piece, and to more firmly establish the “cabaret of consciousness” tone, I would possibly like to add a few more songs, as well as to develop some interludes between the scenes (similar to the action of the prologue). The purpose of the interludes would be to give physical form to the madness inside Sara Jane’s head, and to theatrically underscore the absurd and tragic situation in which she finds herself.

I am attracted to Victor’s work. He has an original voice and a distinctive point of view. I respond to his imaginative approach to writing for the stage. He is inventive and theatrical. His plays often examine characters at a dangerous moment between sanity and psychic dissolution. His work explores volatile emotion territories and often pushes the drama into tragic absurdity. His plays are dark but not without humor and they address large and sometimes terrible questions.

Questions Under The Surface:
When you attend DEAR SARA JANE consider these questions:

• Indirectly, DEAR SARA JANE will examine the psychological mechanism of compartmentalization that allows great brutality to exist peaceably beside the “good” and “noble” cause. What is the psychic damage enacted when compartmentalization is effectively achieved? What is the cost when it fails?
• What is a “clean” war? / What is a “dirty” war?
• How does the mythology of war change from generation to generation?
• How does what it means to be “American” shift across generations? Questions of identity, pride, shame. How does each generation chart (or deny) its loss of innocence?
• Questions of racism.
• In regard to the woman’s relationship to her husband: how can one person ever really know another person?
• What is the price of domestic peace, both personally and politically-from the living room to the world at large?

—Ed Herendeen