Who knew the City of Brotherly Love could be so lonely?
Azuka Theatre hosts “Hope Street and Other Lonely Places,” the first full-length play by out playwright and Philadelphia native Genne Murphy, March 15 through April 1.
The play, set in Philadelphia, follows five individuals struggling to cope with love, loss and addictions both physical and emotional.
“There is one thing that happens before the play that impacts all the characters,” Murphy said. “A young man dies of an accidental overdose before the play starts and he is the son of Jeanette and the older brother of Sam. So they are dealing with the death of their son and brother. He is the best friend of Jack and his girlfriend Meg and Jack’s death impacts them and what they go through. He’s also the friend of Frankie who is very recently sober and out of rehab. They’re all connected by this offstage character. Frankie is the first love of Jeanette. They haven’t seen each other for about 25 years. They meet again in the play and there’s a lot of history between them and there’s a lot of things that are complicated about them meeting again.”
Murphy said that the off- and suddenly on-again relationship between the out characters Frankie and Jeanette are at the center of the story in “Hope Street,” but she also believes other characters in the play might resonate with the LGBT community.
“The main LGBT characters are Jeanette and Frankie. But their relationship is integral to the entire play,” she said. “The love that Frankie has for Jeanette bookends the play and frames her entire journey to recovery. It’s a huge theme of the play. The final character is the son of Jeanette. Me and the actor talked about how we see him. We don’t necessarily see Jeanette’s son Sam as straight, per se, but we don’t really get into his relationships with people outside of his family. It can be a little bit up in the air but I don’t see him as straight. But it doesn’t come up in the course of the play.”
Even though this is Murphy’s first full-length play, her shorter works have been making the rounds in the area. Her short plays and monologues have been featured by numerous area theater companies and she has been the co-producer of “Queer Memoir,” a New York City-based storytelling series, which partnered locally with First Person Arts in 2010 and the Free Library of Philadelphia in 2011. Murphy, who is also a 2011 Eugene O’Neill National Conference finalist, first developed “Hope Street” at Azuka Theatre in its Spotlight Series. But Murphy said the play has evolved since those initial readings.
“It’s changed a lot,” she said. “The first full draft of ‘Hope Street’ was in 2009. The five main characters have been in the play the whole time. When I wrote it in the initial drafts, I almost had the different storylines in different drafts. It was almost as if I had two different plays sort of butting up against one another. It was sort of my job over the next year or so to find ways to show that these characters did belong in the same story. I cut up the script a lot and I rearranged things. I spent more time pushing the stories together. Some of the style of the play was very different early on. There is a lot of direct address where the characters would talk to the audience. A lot of the scenes would break from regular dialogue. That’s where a lot of the language and the poetry came out. But the more I worked on it, the more I realized that it was taking away from the urgency and the interactions the characters had together. A lot changed there in the styles of the play.”
Murphy said that the people and the places she has experienced in and around Philadelphia were a huge source of inspiration for the characters and the stories that make up “Hope Street.”
“I am born and raised in Philly,” Murphy said. “Being someone who has a love and interest in Philadelphia, I believe it’s a fascinating place. I’ve always been inspired by life and the world around me. It’s only natural that, over the years, bits of where I come from would work their way into anything I write.
“As a young writer, when I was right out of school, I started working on a project of short plays which I called ‘The Lonely Places’ where I would go to places in Philly and I would write a scene based on a location. I would set one at a Wawa and on street corners, places I’d been to where I’d get inspired by something and write. I’d already been thinking about Philadelphia as a place where I could literally write a play about any place I had visited. It was an exercise for myself. Then one day I passed by Hope Street [in North Philadelphia] and I became fascinated with this street. So I already had Philadelphia as a backdrop in my thoughts. When I started working on the scenes and the characters, I explored themes of addiction, harm reduction, clean needle exchange and the impact of addiction on the loved ones of people who are addicted. It just became a union of my interest in the city. It happened almost organically. I couldn’t write the play any place but Philadelphia.”
Oddly enough, Murphy is debuting her play, set in Philadelphia, in Philadelphia, not long after she relocated to her current home of San Francisco. Murphy describes her current bi-coastal existence of overseeing the first play in her hometown and adjusting to her new surroundings in San Francisco as “a little weird.”
“I feel like I’m straddling different worlds,” she said. “The West Coast feels different from the East Coast. It feels like right now I’m in Philly for the play and I’ll go back to San Francisco as soon as it’s done. Right now, I’m trying to focus on being in the moment of bringing the play together and doing all the revisions and trying to focus on being here. It is challenging to be divided in that way. I try to see it as an opportunity to take time away from the world I know, which is Philadelphia, and sort of see how that impacts me as a person and a writer.”
That being said, don’t expect another play immediately after the production of “Hope Street.”
“As soon as I’m done working on ‘Hope Street,’ I’ll try to clear my head a little bit and jump into some other projects,” Murphy said. “It’s my entire focus at the moment, but I’m looking forward to finishing it and moving on to the next thing.”
Azuka Theatre presents the world premiere of “Hope Street and Other Lonely Places” March 15-April 1 at the Off-Broad Street Theater at First Baptist Church, 1636 Sansom St. For more information or tickets, visit www.azukatheatre.org or call 215-563-1100.