Know Theatre’s Tamara Winters is staging the company’s next production, the rolling world premiere of Jacqueline Goldfinger’s The Arsonists. She says the play, which opens Friday (and runs through Oct. 14), “is about how hard it can be to let go of what we cling to for survival, when it’s no longer helping us survive.” She adds that the playwright “has crafted a cathartic tale of the intensity of love and the power of connection, threaded together with unforgettable classic American melodies.”
Goldfinger, a Philadelphia-based playwright born and raised in south Florida, has written a Southern Gothic tale set deep in the Florida swamps about a father-daughter arson team. The Arsonists is part of a trilogy of plays about spooky events in the Everglades, a setting that’s ripe for visual, emotional storytelling. The Terrible Girls is a dark comedy about women who kill and bury their boyfriends in the walls of a café where they work; Skin and Bone is about a set of cannibal grandmothers.
Initially, Goldfinger considered adapting Sophocles’ Electra, an ancient Greek tragedy about a daughter grieving her father’s death. “But as I did a deeper dive into the literature, I found that that story has been adapted and readapted so often that I wasn’t sure we needed another adaptation,” the playwright says. Instead, she turned to the ancient story as a loose inspiration for her new play. “The Everglades was the perfect place to set this mythical story, transforming Electra’s story of family connection into American myth.”
Goldfinger recalls, “It can be so dry in the Everglades that you can have these fires that just rage. Sometimes they’re set by people, sometimes by nature — and sometimes you don’t know.” Setting fires brought necessary elements together for her script. “To have a father-daughter team with arson as a legacy passed down by generations allowed me to connect with the mythic nature of Electra and her family’s journey while also making it very specifically American and talking about us today.”
Goldfinger has powerfully employed music in her concept. The ancient Greek play had “huge monologue moments that express very deeply held emotions” and she felt songs would be a good choice to replace these moments. As the daughter of an amateur musician, Goldfinger grew up with Americana and Folk tunes. “I chose songs prevalent in the region that two characters could play and be interesting, moving and funny — and also touching and full of grief and hope,” she says.
Her script for The Arsonists indicates songs for various scenes, but she wanted to enable flexibility and invite interpretation from production to production. “While it’s technically the same traditional songs, in some theaters they do them with a harmonica and change the arrangement. In some, they do them with two guitars. The music is specific, but it’s malleable enough to fit whatever vision the director wants to fill the space in the text.” Winters has been rehearsing with her two-person cast, who are creating their own arrangements of the classic Americana Folk songs that weave together the threads of Goldfinger’s play. Veteran regional actor Jim Stark, who teaches theater at Hanover College, plays the father; Erin Ward, a Northern Kentucky University theater grad who has done a lot of improv and Fringe shows as well as an acting internship at the Cincinnati Playhouse, makes her Know mainstage debut as the daughter.
In The Arsonists, after a job goes bad, the daughter is torn between keeping her family whole and putting her father’s spirit to rest. Goldfinger says the play’s bottom-line appeal is the fact that “often we don’t realize how much we love someone until they are gone. Rather than wait for my father to die, I’m going to tell him how much he means to me.” In fact, Goldfinger calls her play “a love letter to my father.”
This is just the second production for The Arsonists. Know’s Artistic Director Andrew Hungerford says, “It’s exciting to join companies across the country in the creation of new work. I’m thrilled that this beautiful new play is our third foray into this kind of national theatrical conversation.”
THE ARSONISTS is onstage at Know Theatre, 1120 Jackson St., Over-the-Rhine, Friday through Oct. 14. Tickets/more info: knowtheatre.com.
This article appears in Sep 20-27, 2017.
