“What I like about playwriting,” Sheila Cowley says, “is that you can’t do it all yourself. I can only get so far writing it on paper by myself. There comes a point really quickly where you just have to work with actors and directors, a scenographer — and, if you’re lucky, a dramaturg — to really help you dig into a story and give you feedback.”
Cowley’s mask-and-movement drama Trio premiered this week in a staged reading at The Studio@620. She’d been working on it for several years, tweaking, adjusting and making wholesale changes as her collaborators have suggested. Trio was workshopped with University of South Florida theatrical fight director Dan Granke's students in 2014 and ‘15, had a reading by the Dramatists Guild Fund in New York, and is being produced next year in Austin.
Her full-length play Flying, opening the Tampa Repertory Company’s season Sept. 15, has gone through a similar process. The show had staged readings in Chicago and London, and was fully produced five months ago in upstate New York.
Flying sprung from a series of memoirs and oral histories that fascinated Cowley. During World War II, she discovered, female pilots were used in training exercises. Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), of course, weren’t allowed to fight — they tested B-17s and other warplanes for the male pilots.
“How did they teach guys to dogfight before there was video simulation?” Cowley marvels. “They would go up with cameras, and shoot each other that way. You could tell by the picture whether you got a hit or not. They didn’t realize that it was women dive-bombing them. And the women with their cameras in these training exercises, apparently, shot down more American flyers than the Germans ever did!”
Cowley’s imagination did the rest. She created, out of whole cloth, the story of a former WASP named Susan, who returns home to manage the family airfield. Her pilot husband, Bob, is still overseas fighting the Germans.
The question, Cowley says, was “What do you do when that stops and you go back home — and everybody wants you to get back to normal? You have to re-adjust, or not re-adjust, because you’ve changed more than the world has.”
Susan and her ilk were expected to go back to baking bread and making babies. “The men were coming back and taking all of the flying jobs nobody wanted,” Cowley explains. “Not very many of the women got to keep flying after that.”
Directed by Robin Gordon, Flying stars Becca McCoy, Justin Smith, Rosemary Orlando, Holly Marie Weber and Joseph Parra.
Trio was inspired in part by Full Moon, the “silent clowning” Broadway hit with Bill Irwin and David Shiner. Using elements of commedia dell’arte and mime, it tells the story of Leslie, wounded by grief, distracting herself by creating a vivid children’s theater production.
“It’s got three actors and three silent clowns,” Cowley explains. “People gave me a lot of grief about the clowns. But I wrote it deliberately to work with any kind of movement, so it could be silent clowns, or dancers — it could be puppets, it could be acrobats. Something physical and silent. They’re sort of creating this magical world of the children’s theater company. They’re creating the world around the actors.”
In the current drafts, the second trio — the erstwhile clowns — were portrayed by dancers Helen Hansen French, Crystal DelGiudice and Sean McDonald. Becca McCoy, Derrick Phillips and Chris Rutherford were the actors.
These six performers — along with playwright Cowley, director Elizabeth Brincklow, choreographer Paula Kramer and others — workshopped Trio throughout the summer.
“That’s what you need to make sure a script is right,” says Cowley. “I’m in a big believer in, you just can’t do the whole thing by yourself. Talking with people can help you find a way into it.”
She treasures her collaborators, but at the beginning of everything there’s Sheila Cowley, alone in the wee hours in front of a computer screen. Or a legal pad. Or the back of an envelope (hey, whatever’s handy when inspiration strikes).
It’s always been that way, ever since the former news editor, PSA writer and operations manager at WMNF started writing down her ideas. In 1998, Cowley began the much-loved Radio Theatre Project at the station — it exists to this day, across the bay at The Studio@620.
“It was working with voices that got me into playwriting,” she says. “The first year, we’d just cast whoever we passed in the hall. Then we got to know the actors at USF, and everything stepped up at that point. It was the first time I’d worked with actual actors. It was so amazing to see how an actor could take just words on a page and bring them to life in a way that you didn’t even imagine.”
Cowley and her husband Matt own an audio recording, editing and mixing company. They produce, among other things, The Dalí Museum’s audio tours and the “Arts In” podcast for Creative Pinellas.
Plays, she says, “don’t pay anybody’s bills. I think Pulitzer Prize winners are still teaching college.”
Still, she wouldn’t have it any other way.
“It’s getting people in the room with you that I really love,” she enthuses. “We’re fortunate that there are so many wonderful actors, directors and dramaturgs around here who are glad to work on new plays. And dancers, who are thrilling to work with. They see storytelling in a whole different way than I do.”
This article appears in Aug 17-24, 2017.