On Feb. 7, Sara Jean Accuardi’s play, “The Storyteller,” will open its first-ever show at Western Washington University’s DUG Theater in the Performing Arts Center.
The opportunity to put on a university production before the world premiere in April at the Artists Repertory Theater in Portland, Oregon allowed the play to go undergo rewrites with help from the cast and director, Accuardi said.
Seeing the play onstage makes for better development than people just reading the script, she said.
“It is my first time seeing this play entirely on its feet. It’s so exciting to see these characters come to life,” Accuardi said.
Inspired by the implicit themes of denial, grief and lost time in “The Tempest” by William Shakespeare, the creation of “The Storyteller” started with a question back in 2018.
“What if Prospero and Miranda, instead of being on an island, were in a homeless encampment?” Accuardi said.
Prospero and Miranda are two characters in “The Tempest.” Using the play as inspiration, Accuardi incorporated elements of Shakespeare’s writing and her surroundings to create the play.
“I live in Portland, Oregon, and we have a huge crisis of unhoused people. You live in this double world where you walk by [unhoused] people every day. And so many people just look forward and ignore that that's there,” Accuardi said. “To me, that’s an island.”
In a Jan. 2024 report released by Portland State University’s Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative (HRAC), homelessness increased by 8.5% from 2022 with a reported 20,110 people experiencing homelessness across Oregon.
“[The characters] are in a very fragile community. They deal with drugs, cold and shelter loss,” Kamarie Chapman, Western theater professor and director of “The Storyteller” said.
The audience follows along with “The Lady,” the play’s narrator, who acts as a bridge between them and the story, aided by the intimacy of a small theater.
“The audience sees how she uses her power over the other characters to play out her story and how, sometimes, she loses her power,” Western student Alyssa Whorley, who plays “The Lady,” wrote in an email.
Whorley said that playing a narrator is an engaging role, as it involves interacting with the audience.
“It makes the relationship between the audience and performer very personal. I develop a relationship with them that changes as The Lady's storytelling progresses. I think this invites another layer of vulnerability and discovery for both the audience and The Lady,” Whorley wrote.
That vulnerability is expressed within the story as the characters deal with messages of grief and pain in navigating emotions, according to “The Storyteller’s” website.
“Potentially [the audience] can connect with each other through understanding, through a story of grief– and be able to understand that all humans get to have grief,” Chapman said. “Grief isn't reserved for those that have enough, right?”
The shared human experience of navigating unfamiliar emotions goes in tandem with holding one another accountable, she said.
“How do my personal actions while I am grieving, affect you? How do those traumas that have been inflicted on us, affect the way that we grieve and the way that we are?” Chapman said.
When the audience asks themselves those questions, they can understand “The Storyteller” more deeply, Accuardi said.
“What I hope [the audience] will take away is an understanding about how we process things in our own lives, an understanding of what it is to accept, what it is to forgive and what it is to create,” she said.
Performance dates and times are published on Western's College of Fine and Performing Arts website.
McKenna Kilayko (she/her) is a campus life reporter for The Front. She is in her second year at Western, working towards majoring in journalism with a minor in French. You can often find her drinking an iced matcha latte, DJing for Western’s radio station, KUGS, or complaining about the lack of sun. You can contact her at mckennakilayko.thefront@gmail.com.
