By Kira Schukar ‘22

Asher de Forest’s ‘21 original play and Theater & Dance honors project, I’m 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’s opening night, scheduled for April 29th at 6 p.m. Touching on themes of grief, relationships, and folklore, I’m Going to Go Back There Someday takes place in the belly of two beasts: a Subaru and a whale.

When Asher describes the play, he starts in the Subaru. 

“It’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.”

“Also,” Asher tacks on to the end of his elevator pitch. “There’s a whale.”

The whale appears as a story-within-the-play. From the Subaru, Garry’s best friend and ex-boyfriend Mohammed writes a graphic novel about Pinocchio, Jonah from the Bible, and the mariner from the Rudyard Kipling story, “How the Whale Got His Throat,” who are all trapped inside of a whale. Using what Asher calls “some real…theater magic tricks,” the play crosses between the three men trapped in a whale and the four friends jammed in a Subaru.

“Because you have those two worlds there’s able to be a certain degree of crossover,” Asher says. The language and aesthetic of the Subaru run up alongside the language and aesthetic of the whale, and “each one can adopt a bit of the other’s.”

When Asher first dreamed up the characters in I’m Going to Go Back There Someday, 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’t come in until Asher’s 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’s assignments that inspired him to write about Pinocchio, Jonah, and Kipling’s mariner. 

“It was…a smaller assignment, but I was so excited by it that I just took it and ran with it,” Asher laughs.

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. “But then the blends just kind of started perfectly revealing itself,” he says. “Which makes it all sounds much easier…writing doesn’t just happen like that. But it was this case of gradually figuring out, ‘Oh, this is how these two things do really fit together.’”

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’s family fest. When the performance ended, the chair of the Theater department, Professor Cláudia 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.

“Which was an exciting, ego boosting moment of like, okay, it’s good,” Asher recalls.  

That’s when the third world—the COVID-19 pandemic—entered Asher’s 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’s less fantastical half.

“It’s not really a story that can take place right now, even though the actors will be masked and distanced,” Asher admits.

The pandemic has also added a new layer to the play’s themes of grief and loss.

“The 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,” he says. “We are constantly in grief, in shock and mourning, anger—all those things right now. Even so…we don’t have the space or the time to be thinking about it and talking about it.”

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.

Asher’s original play, I’m Going to Go Back There Someday, 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 Como La Tierra, an original musical by Gretta Marston-Lari ’21 at the end of April and beginning of May. Tickets for both shows are available through the Macalester box office.