{"id":3368,"date":"2021-03-31T22:09:48","date_gmt":"2021-03-31T22:09:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/160-the-words\/?page_id=3368"},"modified":"2024-07-31T15:52:25","modified_gmt":"2024-07-31T15:52:25","slug":"the-three-worlds-of-im-going-to-go-back-there-someday","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/the-words-april-2021-2\/the-three-worlds-of-im-going-to-go-back-there-someday\/","title":{"rendered":"The Three Worlds of I’m Going to Go Back There Someday"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Kira Schukar \u201822<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"The<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Asher de Forest\u2019s \u201821 original play and Theater & Dance honors project, <\/span>I\u2019m Going to Go Back There Someday<\/span><\/i><\/a>, began as a short story in his freshman year of college. Now, three years later, the playwright and director is weeks away from the show\u2019s opening night, scheduled for April 29th at 6 p.m. Touching on themes of grief, relationships, and folklore, <\/span>I\u2019m Going to Go Back There Someday<\/span><\/i> takes place in the belly of two beasts: a Subaru and a whale.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Asher describes the play, he starts in the Subaru. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt’s about this man, Garry Feldman, who lost his father about a year ago. And he goes on a road trip with his 16 year old sister, his girlfriend and his best friend (who also happens to be his ex-boyfriend) to meet his sperm donor for the first time.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAlso,\u201d Asher tacks on to the end of his elevator pitch. \u201cThere\u2019s a whale.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The whale appears as a story-within-the-play. From the Subaru, Garry\u2019s best friend and ex-boyfriend Mohammed writes a graphic novel about Pinocchio, Jonah from the Bible, and the mariner from the Rudyard Kipling story, \u201cHow the Whale Got His Throat,\u201d who are all trapped inside of a whale. Using what Asher calls \u201csome real…theater magic tricks,\u201d the play crosses between the three men trapped in a whale and the four friends jammed in a Subaru.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBecause you have those two worlds there’s able to be a certain degree of crossover,\u201d Asher says. The language and aesthetic of the Subaru run up alongside the language and aesthetic of the whale, and \u201ceach one can adopt a bit of the other\u2019s.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Asher first dreamed up the characters in <\/span>I\u2019m Going to Go Back There Someday<\/span><\/i>, they were part of a short story that he wrote his freshman year of college, where early versions of Garry Feldman, his sister Rachel, and his girlfriend Joni drove across the country. The whale didn\u2019t come in until Asher\u2019s sophomore year, when he took a playwriting class between the Theater and English departments with visiting professor Dr. Alayna Jacqueline. Asher was still thinking about Garry Feldman, but it was one of Professor Jacqueline\u2019s assignments that inspired him to write about Pinocchio, Jonah, and Kipling’s mariner. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was…a smaller assignment, but I was so excited by it that I just took it and ran with it,\u201d Asher laughs.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the end of his sophomore year, Asher had written two worlds, one with a group of friends in a Subaru, the other with a jumble of folktale characters in a whale. \u201cBut then the blends just kind of started perfectly revealing itself,\u201d he says. \u201cWhich makes it all sounds much easier…writing doesn’t just happen like that. But it was this case of gradually figuring out, \u2018Oh, this is how these two things do really fit together.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the fall of 2019, Asher had written the first act of what would eventually become his senior honors project. He directed a script reading for that year\u2019s family fest. When the performance ended, the chair of the Theater department, Professor Cl\u00e1udia Tatinge Nascimento, approached Asher and suggested that he complete a senior honors project, where he would finish writing the play and then direct it in the spring.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhich was an exciting, ego boosting moment of like, okay, it’s good,\u201d Asher recalls.  <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s when the third world\u2014the COVID-19 pandemic\u2014entered Asher\u2019s play. There is a kind of suspension of disbelief inherent to a play about three characters trapped inside a whale, but the pandemic has added a similar unreality to the road trip, the play\u2019s less fantastical half.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt’s not really a story that can take place right now, even though the actors will be masked and distanced,\u201d Asher admits.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pandemic has also added a new layer to the play\u2019s themes of grief and loss.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe presence of death feels very different putting it on in the spring of 2021 than it did [when I was] starting to write it in the spring of 2019,\u201d he says. \u201cWe are constantly in grief, in shock and mourning, anger\u2014all those things right now. Even so…we don’t have the space or the time to be thinking about it and talking about it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Asher hopes that moments in the play will make his audience laugh, he also wants the performance to invite everyone watching to think about their loss in the last year, just as the characters deal with their own grief.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Asher\u2019s original play, <\/span><\/i>I\u2019m Going to Go Back There Someday, <\/span>will run for three performances: Thursday, April 29th at 6:00 p.m., Saturday, May 1st at noon., and Sunday, May 2nd at 6:00 p.m. Students, faculty, and staff from the Theater department will also be putting on<\/span><\/i> Como La Tierra, an original musical by Gretta Marston-Lari ’21<\/em> at the end of April and <\/i>beginning<\/i> of May<\/i>. Tickets for both shows <\/em>are available through <\/span><\/i>the Macalester box office.<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Kira Schukar \u201822 Asher de Forest\u2019s \u201821 original play and Theater & Dance honors project, I\u2019m Going to Go Back There Someday, began as a short story in his freshman year of college. Now, three years later, the playwright and director is weeks away from the show\u2019s opening night, scheduled for April 29th at […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":913,"featured_media":0,"parent":3388,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-3368","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/913"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3368"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7151,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3368\/revisions\/7151"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}