On September 15, playwright Rachel Bonds and director Mike Donahue, along with their cast and production team, began rehearsals for the world premiere of The Wolfe Twins in Studio Lab. The Wolfe Twins is Bonds’s intimate drama about adult siblings reconnecting on vacation.
Studio Artistic Director David Muse spoke about the about the impetus behind Studio Lab. Now in its fourth year, Lab was one of Muse’s first artistic orders of business when he arrived at Studio. The Lab presents scaled-back productions of world premiere plays, bringing playwrights into the rehearsal process and providing them the ability to work in an environment of collaboration and discovery. Or as Muse put it: “We figured that the best way to develop a new play is to produce the darn thing.” Two years into the Lab initiative, Muse decided to add commissioning to Studio’s new work initiatives, and The Wolfe Twins is the inaugural production from the first round of commissions.
Muse says of Rachel Bonds: “She’s a remarkable writer with a burgeoning career. Her writing is deft. It’s assured and subtle in the mode of some of the best of New American Naturalism—think Amy Herzog or Annie Baker. Her voice is strikingly alive and real; she writes with a style and sophistication that belies her age. This play is a well-observed and nuanced take on growing older and changing, and the particular relationships that siblings share.”
Bonds shared her experience of writing for Studio. “It all happened very quickly,” she recalls. “I got the commission in April of 2013, and put off writing because I was getting married in October. And then I went on my honeymoon and my first deadline was coming up. Luckily, I went to Italy on my honeymoon, and stayed in a bed and breakfast run by two brothers. We saw one brother, Fabrizio, almost all the time. But we never saw Alex, and that got my imagination going. The play is set in a version of that B&B, and is informed by my experience of being a boisterous American in another country.”
“This is my first commission, and it’s a rare and amazing opportunity. So often, you write a play and nothing ever happens with it. Or you workshop it over the course of three years or so and finally have a chance to get into production with it and have to remember the reason you wrote it to begin with. But this has been almost immediate—I sent my first draft in in January and learned Studio was producing it in April. It’s a gift to do a play while I’m still really interested in it!”
Director Mike Donahue, who also directed a workshop of the play at Studio over the summer, reflected on its plot and themes: “It’s about Americans abroad and about two particular Americans—Lewis and Dana, siblings who grew up inseparable and are now grappling with the ways they’ve grown apart. The trip is a way to see if they can ever get back the easy intimacy of their childhood, and the piece plays with the ‘us vs. them’ dynamic of being abroad. A part of what Rachel’s doing that’s so fun and theatrical is the way she contrasts the antiseptic space of this B&B, with its kind of tacky furniture and unflattering lighting, with the inappropriately intimate conversations that the characters are having as they take stock of what their lives actually are. And there’s the awkwardness of being with your sibling, whom you can’t lie in front of about who you are—because they’ve been there.”
“The play explores intimacy and the loss of intimacy,” adds Bonds, “trying to reconcile who you are with who you’ve become. And the unexpected ways that being out of your element can suddenly make things—make your whole life, in a way—unravel and hit you all at once.”
https://issuu.com/839998/docs/the_wolfe_twins_program