Lucy and Roberta don’t seem to share much more than a high school. But one evening in the parking lot outside a movie theatre can change their perspectives on a lot of things.
Bekah Brunstetter
Bekah hails from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and currently lives in Los Angeles. She is an alumni of the CTG Writers Group, Primary Stages writes group, Ars Nova Play Group, The Playwright’s Realm, and the Women’s Project Lab. She has previously written for MTV (Underemployed; I Just want my Pants Back) and is currently a Story Editor on ABC Family’s Switched at Birth. BA UNC Chapel Hill; MFA in Dramatic Writing from the New School for Drama.
Based on “Use It” by The New Pornographers
Seamus: Without giving too much away, yours is one of the darker and more intense pieces of the evening. What was the process like, going from song to script?
Bekah: I listened to the song driving to and from work about 900 times, and I decided that the song (Use It)’s rhythm is the very rhythm and feeling of frustration, the kind you bottle up inside, that festers and explodes. So I started from that headspace.
Seamus: This Night is about teenage girls. Your last Flying V show, The Oregon Trail, is about an unhappy girl in middle school. What draws you to writing about that period in a person’s life?
Bekah: I think that everything that happens to you when you’re like 12-16 shapes you for the rest of your life. You’re like clay before it goes into the kiln. I am still noticing patterns within my own emotional reactions and thought processes that I can directly relate to things that happened to me when I was that age. And so I’m endlessly remembering being that age.
Seamus: One element of the script that I found resonant was this horror of not being important, of feeling like you don’t exist for other people, and how that can tempt a person to do something horrible and violent to become more important. Reading the news, there’s a perception of that kind of desperate violence as something men turn to in particular, but This Night puts a young woman in that scenario. Can you talk a little about what it was like writing from Roberta’s perspective?
Bekah: You’re totally right — we read a lot of stories about these invisible people — but they’re all dudes. But as a lady, I’ve felt the same invisibility at times. I was hoping to that just taking the headspace and placing it in a girl would make a sort of predictable and, sadly, at this point, tired story, and make it fresh and perhaps even a bit unexpected? Mostly I just wanted to write it so that anyone reading or watching TRULY GETS why Roberta decides to do what she does. It’s important to me to try and constantly be humanizing villains. If we can’t understand the psychology of villains, how can we ever stop them?
Seamus: Was your song’s creepy-as-hell music video an influence at all?
Bekah: It gave me a weird David Cross dream in which I think he was trying to ride my cat to the mall? But other than that, no.
Seamus: What’s another song, New Pornographers or otherwise, that you’d like to turn into a short play?
Bekah: Oh man. ALL THE SONGS. Most recently Justin Bieber’s Sorry, but it’s more like I want to crawl inside of its music video and live there.
