By GREGORY LASKI
On a late September evening in a rehearsal room perched on the third floor of The Pittsburgh Playhouse, Point Park University Conservatory of Performing Arts student actors Mia Hill and Charlie Kennedy sit on stools. Their feet hold fast to a floor adorned by sneaker scuffs and blocking tape of neon green and orange.
Outside the lines, other cast members, along with the design and creative team, look on. They call cues, provide lines, and take notes. In turns, ecstatic laughter and adoring awes sound from faces illuminated by laptop screens or shielded by music stands.
The kinship of cast and crew is evident, as is the excitement, even as it’s just the team’s third full run of The Trees, a new play by Agnes Borinksy about David (Kennedy) and Sheila (Hill), siblings who suddenly find themselves rooted in the soil of a Connecticut park, and the unanticipated circle of family and friends that grows around them.
“This show is less about Sheila and David’s dilemma, and much more about the community that is built around them because of it,” explained Eliza Boyanton, a Point Park student serving as one of the dramaturgs for the production.
“This wonderfully diverse group of individuals surround them; some drawn by the spectacle of their plight, others simply craving a reason to stop. To slow down.”
When the production opens on October 10 in the Playhouse’s Rauh Theatre, an intimate blackbox located down the hall from the rehearsal space, Pittsburgh audiences can witness the first collegiate production of the play, and just the third in total, counting its New York premiere last year.
In February 2023, Playwrights Horizons and Page73 Productions brought Borinsky’s script to life in a co-production directed by Tina Satter. The two theater organizations boast an impressive track record, having previously joined forces to launch A Strange Loop, the Michael R. Jackson musical that went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2020 and Tony Awards for Best Musical and Best Book of a Musical in 2022.
Adam Greenfield, artistic director at Playwrights Horizons and an admitted “Agnes Borinsky fan-girl,” commissioned The Trees before the COVID-19 global pandemic intervened in 2020 — and seemed to stop everything in its tracks.
“I was so worried the play would lose its urgency,” Greenfield remarked in a program note for the 2023 production.
“But now, three years later, after the world ended and then kept ending and now is starting to come back, this feels like precisely the right moment for it.”
Adil Mansoor, who is directing the Point Park production, agrees. When Mansoor saw the premier of The Trees in New York, he immediately felt called to it.
“I had a real emotional response,” said Mansoor, who holds an MFA in Directing from Carnegie Mellon University and has been based in Pittsburgh since 2010. “It’s rare that I see a play and then want to direct it.”
Mansoor, who focuses on developing new work by queer, trans and BIPOC authors, noted that Borinsky is one of several contemporary queer and nonbinary playwrights who are deploying the age-old theatrical device of human transformation “in surprising, exciting, and magical ways.”
“What I’m really drawn to is how literal they are making it,” Mansoor said. “They had to take it to a literal place to make us really feel the metaphor.”
Borinsky’s text emphasizes the literalness of the main characters’ stuckness in the earth.
“Their toes root into the ground – break through their shoes and rapidly spread through soil,” instructs a stage direction early in the script.
And yet, if in this moment the world that Sheila and David knew suddenly ends, another also, importantly, opens. Sheila’s travel plans, what David’s ex-boyfriend Jared should do with the Nintendo David left at his place: all these matters fall to the side, allowing for a sustained reflection on what it means to be a person and to live with others.
By the end of the play, Borinsky even raises the question of who exactly David and Sheila are — trees or people?
The answers are as multiple as the diverse community that gathers around them, in what becomes something of a cross between Waiting for Godot and Rent; all played out in the Thoreau-like setting of a New England park. Saul, a rabbi who comes to visit the siblings from Cleveland, understands the transformation as a miracle, a divine gift, while David and Sheila come to appreciate the chance to bond, something that the busyness of their former lives impeded.
“We’re trying to leave as much open to audience interpretation as possible,” Mansoor said of the upcoming production.
A conversation with Borinsky is scheduled to take place after the October 13 matinee and will provide a forum for exploring further possibilities for interpretation.
What’s clear for now is that this production of The Trees seems to be perfectly placed at Point Park — and in Pittsburgh.
“Point Park is working hard to find scripts that explore the lived experience of the diversity of their students, and that means all kinds of things,” Mansoor reflected.
“So many times, plays will have only one gay character, and that turns into a stereotype.” But The Trees, Mansoor noted, “has so many different versions of queerness represented.”
For Mansoor the production represents a chance to root himself once again in Pittsburgh, which he considers home.
“I was away from my people,” said Mansoor, recalling the time in 2023 when he saw the New York production of The Trees. “The last few years, I’ve been away from my community, my partner, my home.”
Planted in Pittsburgh once again, Mansoor delights in unplanned encounters, like the chance to stop and have a beer at the bar of his neighborhood pizza joint while awaiting a delayed pickup order.
“I’m so grateful that coming back to Pittsburgh, I get to do a play about the magic of being rooted in a place.”
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Point Park University’s Conservatory of Performing Arts production of The Trees runs October 10-20, 2024, at the Pittsburgh Playhouse, 350 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA, 15222. Performance times: Thursday – Saturday at 7:30 pm, and Saturday – Sunday 2:00 pm. Tickets: https://playhouse.culturaldistrict.org/production/95451/the-trees.
The conversation with Agnes Borinsky takes place after the Sunday, October 13 matinee. Details at: https://playhouse.pointpark.edu/shows-events/conservatory-theatre/the-trees
AUTHOR BIO
Gregory Laski holds a PhD in English from Northwestern University and writes about culture and civic life in Pittsburgh and beyond. To learn more about his work, subscribe to his Substack
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