“It’s only loosely based on the story of Icarus,” says playwright/director Leslie Barker.
Barker’s good at saying what Reasons for Falling, the new play she’s co-written with Joe McDaniel isn’t, but struggles to say exactly what it is. It’s not because she doesn’t know. But sometimes she knows in pictures instead of words.
“I’m the image person,” She says. Joe was always asking, ‘Okay, what’s the story.”
Barker describes images from her early life in the rural South. She describes a big uncrossable river. She describes a young person struggling to determine if he’s human or something more. And she talks a lot about music, and bands like REM and The Magnetic Fields.
The characters, she says, are music lovers and regularly play games that involve song lyrics.
So what exactly is Reasons for Falling: A Story of Icarus? It’s an impressionistic tale of teen angst, Bible stories, and small town dreaming. It’s set in a world where angels and prophets are real, but don’t always know how real they are.
Voices of the South is committed to developing work by regional authors and, in a town where most theatricals are imported, the spunky independent had incredible successes with full-length original works by Steve Swift (Sister Myotis), and Jerre Dye (Cicada); Elaine Blanchard’s Prison Stories; and various other new and adapted works by company members.
Reasons for Falling, with an original score by Jeff Lusk, is Voices’ latest debut.
For the particulars.
