Emerging Dallas-based playwright Erin Malone Turner’s “through a glass darkly” is being featured this week at Amphibian Stage’s Spark Fest.
The play had a showing Thursday night and another is scheduled for 11 a.m. Saturday.
Last year, Amphibian Stage came to Erin to commission a play, but it never took center stage after Covid-19 caused the postponement of Spark Fest. Instead of throwing in the towel, Erin pursued the play.
“At the time, the play was not written, but I had everything developed. Jay [Duffer] and Kathleen [Culebro] knew who I was, and they took that chance,” Malone says. “It was just a first draft back then, but now I’ve spent the past six to seven months working with the dramaturge.”
Weaving through the story are science fiction tones, Louisiana culture, and Black history. The play is set at a summer camp in New Orleans in 1989. The camp is beset by child disappearances. Camp counselors later realize that an alternate dimension in the forest is to blame for the missing children.
“If there were anywhere in the world where there would be alternate dimensions, it would be New Orleans,” Erin shares. “The city has such a soul, weirdness, and a heartbeat that I knew something could happen there. I’m very interested in how there are parallel universes folding around us, and then you start thinking, if this is true, what else is true?”
The play will be a developmental reading in which performers will act from the script in collaboration with the Erin, the director, Sky Williams, and fellow actors.
