INTERVIEW: ‘I Carry Your Heart’ looks at the power of donation
Photo: From left, Dey Young and Dana Scurlock star in I Carry Your Heart at 59E59 Theaters. Photo courtesy of Sehee Kim / Provided by Karen Greco PR with permission.
I Carry Your Heart, the play from Georgette Kelly, looks at two families who are brought together over the power and hope of organ donation. The drama, produced by Athena Theatre, plays through April 14 at 59E59 Theaters in Midtown Manhattan.
In the show, which is directed by Cate Caplin, the character of Phoebe must deal with the recent death of her mother and the next steps in the organ donation process. On the other side are Tess and Lydia, who are in a relationship and awaiting for an organ donation to save Tess’ life. Soon enough Phoebe’s story aligns with Tess’ needs, and the two find themselves inextricably connected.
“I would describe it as a play in which two families come together and find the interstitial tissue that connects them in spite of the fact that they’ve never met through both organ donation and poetry and how parts of ourselves can live on after we die,” Kelly said in a recent phone interview. “This story came at a time in my life when I had a friend who was diagnosed with a terminal illness, and so I was spending a lot of time visiting him in the ICU. Although he was not involved in an organ donation scenario, I just got to thinking about all of the people in the hospital and watching the interactions and the ways that people connect seemingly by chance in those moments of feeling alone in a hospital.”
The act of writing, especially a drama like I Carry Your Heart, can be a process in which the writer gets to know him or herself more intimately. Kelly said she listened to parts of herself that hadn’t been articulated yet or experiences that hadn’t been processed, and then she applied her poetic voice to those subtexts to create a piece of art.
After that process was complete, Kelly had this play, which has run at regional theaters in the United States. The fact that it has had multiple productions before allows her some ease for this New York premiere.
“I’m in Chicago these days, so I was at the first rehearsal,” she said about the 59E59 run. “And I’ve been involved in the casting process, but unfortunately since I’m in Chicago and they’re in New York, for most of the rehearsals I’m not able to be there. But I have been on the phone and on email with Cate, and we’ve been talking about the design process, too. Then I’m going to be back in town for tech and through opening.”
She added: “If this were the first time that this text had ever come to life, I probably would have tried to rearrange my schedule so that I could be present at more rehearsals in order to continue doing some rewrites. But this play I’ve been lucky enough to have on its feet twice before through the Hope on Stage Playwriting Award.”
In fact, when the play ran at the Bootleg Theater in Los Angeles, that’s when Kelly met Caplin for the first time, and the two started talking about developing the piece even further. They have been on a journey together ever since.
“I feel that the text is in a really good place, and so that makes me feel much more comfortable passing the baton over and coming at the later stages,” she said. “I would say it’s come into its own, so frequently for me there are parts from a first draft that do really remain true through to the end. There’s usually some core of the play that doesn’t change drastically, and then there are parts that kind of fall into place around that and that get moved around depending on the needs of the characters as they evolve.”
Kelly has been involved in theater for quite some time. She has been acting ever since she was a child, and now her career is focused on writing. She attended Northwestern University, where she studied performance studies, with a particular emphasis on literary adaptation for the stage.
“[I used] that as an exercise in structure and in figuring out what texts work well for the stage, after that I started writing original plays,” Kelly said. “So this is in fact my first play that I started to write at that time, and I would say that I started writing it in 2011. And then I feel it was more or less finished in 2017, when it premiered. Although I’ve continued to do some tweaks here and there.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
I Carry Your Heart, by Georgette Kelly and directed by Cate Caplin, plays through April 14 at 59E59 Theaters in Midtown Manhattan. Click here for more information and tickets.
