According to ancient Chinese mythology, a matchmaking deity will tie an invisible red string around your ankle and attach the other end to the person you are destined to spend your life with, connecting soulmates across time and space with a bond that can never be broken. I’m not certain about the reality of romantic predestination, but a ruby ribbon of fate certainly seems to have entwined playwright-director Amanda Scheirer and her Without Fear Theatre co-founders, Dan Drnach and Lern Morrison, with her tale of The Red String, which has been under development in various media for nearly 15 years. I recently attended a rehearsal of their new musical ahead of its Nov. 15 premiere at Fringe ArtSpace and talked with the trio about the tangled path they’ve traveled together from page to stage.
The seed for The Red String was initially planted back in 2010, when Scheirer was studying at Trinity College in Dublin under Irish playwright Marina Carr, who assigned the class to keep a “dream journal” and mine it for creative material.
“I was having dreams about someone in my past who I always had that missed connection with,” Scheirer recalls. “What if it wasn’t a missed connection? What if we actually had that moment to say all the things we thought about each other, all the feelings we felt for each other? What if we got to have that moment? And from there, that’s where the story really took flight.”
The result was a one-act play called How to Say I Love You, which was performed at The Venue (RIP) in 2015, and went on to spawn a novel by the same name published in 2018. It also inspired a stage followup titled The Unavailable Man Magnet at the 2016 Orlando Fringe, which was my first introduction to Scheirer’s semi-autobiographical protagonist, Nessa (played then and now by Morrison), an aspiring novelist from Philadelphia working in Orlando’s entertainment industry.
“I think Nessa started out as a lot of me, and over the years, has evolved,” says Scheirer. “So I think there’s still a thread or a string (if I can say) of me that runs through her, but I think she has moved past being a proxy for myself.”
“Nessa is exactly what we all want to aspire to be when we’re just simply trying to chase our dream,” adds Morrison, whom the author credits with contributing a “fairly big stamp” on the character over the years. “I’ve always wanted to chase my dream, no matter what people told me. No matter how ridiculous it might have been, or even people telling me to give up or telling me ‘no,’ I told them what for, and I went after it. I think that’s exactly who Nessa is, and that’s why I’m really happy that I get to play her.”
Back in 2016, I called Nessa “a compelling, contemporary character,” writing that “the charming Morrison inhabits her with the effortless ease of a (tattooed) second skin,” and suggesting that the brief script be expanded with some dramatic conflicts worthy of her “plucky personality.” Scheirer had said at the time that the play was “a small part of a bigger project,” and a little over eight years later she and her collaborators have finally culminated Nessa’s journey — and their own — with this full-length, fully staged original musical.
After composer-lyricist Drnach — who played a role in the non-musical Fringe production — read Scheirer’s novel, he was inspired to write five original songs; those became the backbone of the musical’s first act, which received a concert reading in 2019, and were combined with songs he’d previously penned to form this two-act version.
Drnach says he “basically gave Amanda 100% permission to use anything that I had written and had recorded up until that point,” which includes a range of catchy classic rock-influenced tunes with a country-blues twang. “Amanda has been able to identify whatever the emotion or the story that was in a piece of music that I had written independently of Red String and apply it to the characters.”
The Red String follows Nessa’s quarter-life crisis, as she criss-crosses Europe with best friend Sami (Carly Skubick-Clark), desperately searching for her dream man, George (Adam DelMedico), who she’s been obsessed with since they were childhood neighbors. The star-crossed lovers’ emotional entanglement is irresistible — thanks in large part to the onstage chemistry between Morrison and DelMedico — but inconvenient obstacles like George’s Teutonic wife. Greta (Lily E. Garnett) get in their way, driving the pair apart for years before they finally get their [spoiler alert] happy endings.
But unlike the 2000s-era romantic comedies that obviously inspired this show, The Red String‘s characters strive not to be as stereotypical or saccharine, according to Scheirer. “We know we’re writing a rom-com and staging a rom-com, and we don’t want it to be, like, unrealistic. We don’t want it to be something that people can’t see themselves in, which is kind of a cornerstone of the work we do. … We want them to be full, rounded characters.” That includes their sexuality, as both leading ladies are depicted as LGBTQ. “It’s just something about her that everyone knows and accepts,” explains Scheirer, who initially conceived Nessa as bisexual, but now sees her as pansexual. “It’s just who she is, and it’s accepted by the people in her life.”
This show concludes Without Fear’s involvement with Orlando Fringe’s Collective incubator [full disclosure: which my wife works for], after premiering their rock opera Find Me in February. Drnach calls the entire experience a “dream come true,” while Scheirer says they will be donating a portion of their proceeds back to the Festival because the production “never would have been possible, I don’t think, in this timeline without Fringe, and for them to give us this opportunity really just meant the world. … It’s strengthened our relationships as partners and as producers, so we want to make sure that Fringe is able to keep doing that, and keep giving that opportunity to other theater makers.”
Fringe ArtSpace
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This article appears in Nov 13-19, 2024.