ENLIGHTENMENT.COM
“Think of striking oil in your own backyard and you’ll have the perfect metaphor for ‘Enlightenment.com’... It’s as sharp, fresh and funny as anything you’ll see this year.”
Kristi Pruett, Jeff Fazakerley, Andrea Carpenter-Heffernan, Sue Berkompas and Paul Eggington in ENLIGHTENMENT.COM performed by the American Coast Theater Company. Photo by Susie Hudson.
Synopsis
When Vince, a thirty-something bachelor about to tie the knot for the first time, receives an unexpected RSVP from a former flame, the result is a soul-searching journey into his own, unresolved past. With the help of an “Enlightenment Therapist,” a part-time dream analyst, an online minister, and a contemporary Shakespearean fool, Vince attempts to correct his personal history and move forward into a more enlightened future.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
In 2006, Jonathan Beller, then Artistic Director for Theatrikos Theater Company in Flagstaff, Arizona, asked me to write a new play for the mainstage. In fact, in its thirty-eight-year history, no new play/world premiere had ever graced the mainstage season, so this would prove to be a breakthrough of sorts. Jonathan had a few ideas for this new work – a romantic comedy, a small cast, a single set, and a script that he could sell as family-friendly to his base of patrons.
Kristi Pruett and Jeff Fazakerley in Enlightenment.com performed by the American Coast Theater Company. Photo by Susie Hudson.
Those guidelines resulted in Enlightenment.com, a play with the lofty goal of serving as a kind of 21st Century Shakespearean comedy. I utilized many of the tropes common to the Bard’s works – miscommunication, deception, love conflicts and resolutions, wise fools – and I even created a character, Dr. Leonard Waldo Crum, who taught Shakespeare at the University level, and whose everyday language was peppered with quotations from Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III, and Sonnet 116. The update to this structure involved technology – iPhones, websites, text messages – that served to heighten the rumors, gossip, eavesdropping and innuendo that Shakespeare made use of to create misunderstanding and conflict.
The cast was small – three men, three women; the set was simple – a living room in a Southern California home; and the characters were cherrypicked and exaggerated from contemporary society – an online minister; a dream analyst; a university professor, clad in a Beefeater costume and armed with a halberd; and a semi-comical femme fatale with the curious name, Alison Light, a self-styled “Enlightenment therapist,” whose website served as the title of the play.