Playwright Lou Harry and director Katherine Michelle Tanner had similar reactions when they first read the 2016 book “We Are Still Tornadoes.” They couldn’t put it down and imagined it as a play.
“I was going on a camping trip and threw it in my bag and I got up one morning at 6 a.m. as the sun was coming up and read it cover to cover,” said Harry, an Indianapolis-based writer, playwright and editor. “It was such a pleasantly and movingly digestible book, a quick read but a strong one. Immediately, I was thinking about how I wanted it to be a play.”
Tanner caught up with the book during the pandemic and read it in an hour “and I immediately thought it would make such a great play. It’s much like the John Hughes films. He never minimized teenage drama. It was just what it was.”
The book by Michael Kun and Susan Mullen is a coming-of-age story about two high school friends – Cath and Scott – shared in an exchange of letters during her first year in college in the 1980s.
“The essence of any greatness is the truth and this story deals with young teenagers and the powerful truths happening in their lives,” said Tanner who is directing a staged reading of Harry’s stage adaptation for her Tree Fort Productions Projects company.
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“It reminds me so much of the 1980s and in my youth, pre social media,” she said. “There’s trauma here, but nothing that wouldn’t happen to any single one of us. It’s sweet, touching and so truthful.”
Harry said he had met Kun years earlier and published some of his “screamingly funny nonfiction and some of his fiction” when he was working at Indy Men’s Magazine.”
Harry got to read the book before it was officially published and the authors gave him the rights to develop it as a play, which required some trimming of the correspondence between the two characters. The theater department at Butler University in Indianapolis did some workshops over a period of months as Harry was adapting the book, and it later opened the department’s theater season for two performances.
“It packed the house and played beyond my wildest dreams,” he said. Harry also discovered the story spoke to different generations.
“Because it’s a period piece, it spoke to the parents who grew up in the 80s,” but it also touched the student audience.
“It’s two students graduating high school,” he said. “She’s going off to college and he’s staying home to work at his father’s store, and it’s about the course of her freshman year, how the friendship is challenged, enhanced and threatened, all through letters sent back and forth.”
That Butler production led to an industry reading in New York with Broadway actors Jared Goldsmith and Lilla Crawford shortly before the pandemic lockdown.
The movie rights also were sold but Tree Fort got permission to stage the play. Kun had previously co-written the film “Eat Wheaties,” adapted from his novel “Locklear Letters,” with director Scott Abramovitch.
Harry, who has published dozens of books and written numerous plays, said he feels like “more of a midwife of this book becoming a play. Ninety percent of the play, if not more, is from the book, but it’s about structuring, winnowing down and finding what works.”
Tanner’s production will feature Ciana-Noelle Bostock, a senior at Booker High School’s Visual and Performing Arts Center, as Cath. Liam Ireland, a student at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia School of Music and Art and Performing Arts in New York City, plays Scott.
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Tanner once worked with Ireland in an Orlando Shakespeare Theater production of “The Glass Menagerie” and said “he gave one of the best auditions I’ve ever seen.” Bostock performed in Tanner’s revue “Women of Broadway” last season.”
Harry said he’s not sure what’s happening with the film, but it could determine the future of his stage version.
“I hope the film gets made and if it keeps the play from being staged, so be it,” he said.
‘We Might be Tornadoes’
By Lou Harry, adapted from the novel by Michael Kun and Susan Mullen. Runs July 26-28, Tree Fort Productions Projects, Crossings at Siesta Key, 3501 S. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota, Suite 136. $30. 941-544-2276; treefortproductionsprojects.com
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