One Who is Home

A one-act play, written, designed, and performed by Irie Unity and Olivia Nelson

One Who is Home is constantly in-progress. Through it’s many iterations, Irie and I have always wanted it to contain characters and experiences folks could relate to, and to be something compelling for us to create and for others to view.

The play is a post-grad coming of age story about a queer couple: Davie and Pema. Its set within the walls of their apartment, and written using dialogue both poetical and realistic to let the audience into the mind and heart of each character.

Queer joy, queer sadness. Midwestern melancholy. Big thoughts put simply. Simple thoughts put unintelligibly. Love. Loneliness. Hope.

The origin of One Who is Home goes back to junior year of college. Irie and I were pursuing our BFAs, and we were the only two students in a class called Voice Release. Being such a small group, our professor, Lauren Roth, allowed us to steer the course to become a space for devised work. From her prompts, we individually devised the poems, songs, monologues, and images that we then combined a 10-minute scene for the final, which we never presented. (we got sick …)

This was also the year that UMD announced its Lab Series, an opportunity for students to pitch ideas for theatrical events, new works, exhibitions, performance art, literally anything! Before really knowing what it would be, we decided to expand our 10 minute play into a longer work and perform it the next year.

Over the summer, Irie and I developed the characters and plot, and nailed down our set design. It was just the two of us. We had total creative control, and we took advantage of it. While hauling rehearsal blocks to and from rehearsal spaces as a team of two was… not ideal, we kept our team small by design.

Irie and I are actors. We approach theatre-making from this perspective, but in the BFA program, we never had the opportunity to really utilize our other artistic skills. We sensed an energy in our community that actors “did not have the skillset” to fulfill other theatrical roles (specifically design), and while I value prolific designers’ work immensely, as a multi-hyphenate artist, this felt stifling and offensive. Call it spite, but we decided no one else’s hands would touch this project but our own. We knew we had the vision and skills to make something beautiful, and we wanted to prove it.

We didn’t have any board operators, crew, stage management or anything. It was super unconventional, but allowed us to figure out how we work as an artistic duo. UMD professors kindly offered us help and resources when we asked.

One magical element was the practical lighting. Because we didn’t want anyone running the light board, controlling the lamps on stage became a core element of the storytelling. Warm vs. cool bulbs changed the “locations” or subtext of each scene, and we used the sequence of turning on the lamps to build the world of the play right in front of the audience. Fifteen lamps was a lot, and not great for the traveling version of this show, but it is definitely worth revisiting. I’ve fallen in love with lamps on stage.

For sound, we used an old record from the prop loft, and a portable record player. There were so. many. extension cords.

We performed twice for our peers, and it was electric. I knew we were on to something special.

From that point on, we’ve continued to edit the one-act version of One Who is Home. We performed an updated script at the Minnesota Ballet’s Emerging Artist Series, which was even more barebones with just one handheld light.

This past summer, after even more edits, we produced the show at the Minnesota Fringe Festival, under our new company name: Little Lamp Theatre Company. This time with a totally different aesthetic approach: a glowing backdrop and physical props as opposed to mimed, as well as longer monologues and insights into the characters’ minds. We were so honored to receive a Staff Pick Golden Lanyard Award! (Thanks, Lucia! <3 )

Every time we show a new version, we learn so much about how we want our play to evolve. The next steps for this project are to let it breathe a bit, and then get back in the writer’s room to give this story it’s due: a full-length script. A staged reading? A full run? New cast? More lamps???

Only time will tell. Stay tuned.