The San Francisco Chronicle featured a great article about Bright Half Life by Tanya Barfield, my next directing project opening at the Magic Theatre Friday November 18th.
“It’s these two women grappling with these serious questions,” said Jessica Holt, the director of the Magic Theatre’s production. “Are you my soul mate? How did this come to pass? And if I encountered you again, would I do it all over?”
Holt, a 2015 graduate of the Yale School of Drama and co-founder of Threshold Theater, was impressed by Barfield’s play when she first saw it performed in New York at the W omen’s Project Theater.
“I was so struck by the language, by the gorgeous effervescence and muscularity of the language,” Holt said. “It also had these great amazing roles for these two women that were so complex, and so fully realized and recognizable.”
As the play progresses with rich sensory snapshots of Erica and Vicky’s lives, a single message starts to solidify: taking leaps of faith. The operative metaphor is hard to miss in scenes where the pair brave Ferris wheels, and, eventually, sky diving together.
“What I love about the play is how they make choices that take them out of their comfort zones,” Holt said. “They want the other to take a leap and enjoy a free fall through this thing they call life.”