a good mother | a.d. notes

Tomorrow we open A GOOD MOTHER by Kathy Parsons to our audiences as a script-in-hand staging.  Here are Artistic Director Ron Reed's notes on the show and the Working With playwright development group it came from.

Working With is working!

In the fall of 2013 we launched a new initiative to develop original scripts for the PT stage. A Good Mother is the third of those shows to be seen on our stage already! Script-in-hand stagings of Kris Marushey’s Cultivation (last season) and tonight’s play, as well as our fully mounted production of Common Grace, are the first fruits. And our season opener in September - A Good Way Out, by Cara Norrish - will be the fourth Working With project you’ll see, with others still in development for subsequent seasons.

The same impetus to create “in-house” shows led to a batch of commissions, and our new season will unveil the first of those! Lucia Frangione is creating a sequel to what is undoubtedly one of PT’s “Greatest Hits” - Holy Mo! This time out Guff, Buffoona and Folly set aside the stories of Moses and King David and tackle the original Christmas story.

A sister theatre of ours in San Diego has a motto: “Telling good stories well.” That’s what Pacific Theatre is about, as well. And tonight we celebrate the storytellers - specifically, the playwrights, the ones who first dream up the stories we set out to tell.

Tonight’s storyteller, Kathy Parsons, has made an immense contribution to playwriting at PT. Long before she brought A Good Mother to the Working With table, Kathy was our literary manager, and worked as a dramaturg on many scripts we’ve developed over the years. I’m personally indebted to her for tremendous help in shaping my own play, Refuge Of Lies (2010).

So here’s to new plays! And to an audience with an appetite for them! And most of all, here’s to our playwrights, and especially Kathy Parsons, who’s got quite a story to tell tonight.