STONE POINT • Pit & Balcony’s World Premier of Playwright Alex Burkart’s Poignant Meditation on Mortality

“Dying is an art, like everything else.” - Sylvia Plath

“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live." - Marcus Aurelius

Death is a common theme among great writers, philosophers, and spiritual leaders because our impermanence and temporality on the physical plain of existence is something that connects all of us together, focusing our attention on life’s meaning, acceptance of the inevitable, and the legacy we leave behind us.

With these weighty considerations in mind, playwright Alex Burkart devoted six months of his life creating a poignant and compelling new dramatic work titled STONE POINT that promises to kick off the new year for regional theatre in the Great Lakes Bay in a major way with the World Premier of this freshly penned production at Pit & Balcony Theatre for a series of performances January 9-11 & 16-18^th.

Centered upon the character of Lee Stone, who is wasting away due to a rare form of bone cancer that has spread to his brain, he now sits alone on his beautiful family hunting property (Stone Point) in Southern, Wisconsin, struggling with the sirens of his past, the fears of his present, and the truths of the future as his final days of life burn before our eyes. Inspired by the ideas of sirens and pretas (hungry ghosts), this new play will also feature songs by singer/songwriter Jillian Secor.

Originally from southern Wisconsin and currently living in Colorado, Stone Point is the fourth play Burkart has written. After receiving his Bachelor’s degree in musical theatre in St. Louis, he lived in Los Angeles for ten years as an actor and instructor, which is when he first started writing plays back in 2016. Upon receiving his Master’s degree in Richmond, Virginia, he moved back to L.A. for a bit and is now teaching in Denver.

When asked about the genesis and inspiration for creating Stone Point, Alex references his earlier theatrical endeavors. 

“I love to incorporate mythology into a lot of my work and two of my earlier plays were also embedded with mythology. My first play wove together the Orpheus and Eurydice myth with opiate addiction and was titled Atlas Pit; and the second one I co-wrote was called El Ciclope  and was a 2018 Finalist for the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center's National Playwrights Initiative, which was huge." 

"So when it came to Stone Point, I took a lot of mythology about the Sirens from The Odyssey  and mixed it together with a highly fictionalized account of my own life inspired by my Uncle Lee, who died the same day I was born in the same hospital in southern Wisconsin.”

“He passed away from Ewing Sarcoma, which is the same cancer this character in Stone Point experiences, so that’s a family story that has kind of followed me throughout my entire life,” he confesses. “It’s been very inspirational to me and while the character viewpoints throughout the story do not reflect my family at all, while growing up my family did have a large hunting acreage in Wisconsin and my Uncle Lee was also very invested in maintaining that property as a steward of the land.”

Regarding his collaboration with songwriter Jillian Secor, Alex is quick to point out that Stone Point is not a traditional musical so much as a play with music. The characters do sing in this production, but Jillian is a friend of mind I met as an undergrad and is an incredible singer-songwriter. She’s based in California, but has a bluegrass folk feel to her music and her songs have a haunting quality to them, so she wrote all the rounds and the siren songs that exist within the play.”

Because this debut of Stone Point is a world premier little can be revealed about the narrative or plot line, however Alex summarizes it by saying, “It explores the conflict we may have later in life asking who are we and who do we leave our legacy to. Once you feel as though the people around you are all gone, how can you open your mind to giving away what you’ve considered your life to be? Can you give that away to a stranger?  I also work some moments of touching comedy into the narrative and try to find the other side of the dramatic spectrum constantly,” he notes. “That way it’s not like you’re just sitting there watching something too heavy-handed.”

When asked about playwrights that informed his own sensibilities in terms of structuring his work, Alex does reference Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Edward Albee, whom he managed to actually work for during an internship.

“My twin brother and I were helping Albee workshop his final play, so I got to see him doing all his rewrites and how he would approach various characters not in terms of editing what they were thinking or doing, but how he could turn everything the characters said so it would further them or the plotline in some way. I was definitely drawing from all of that with Stone Point.”

“With Stone Point we don’t necessarily know exactly what the Sirens are,” he reflects. “We equate them to being family members or ghosts throughout the play, and what I would challenge the audience to remind themselves is that this character has a cancer that started in his bones but spread to his brain, so the images that he’s seeing are in the people he’s seeing. They are cancerous versions of his loved ones from the past. They aren’t directly these people, but almost a carnivorous piece of what he remembers of them.  His wife Jill, for example, gets progressively more vicious throughout the play and that’s symbolic of the cancer taking over his memory a bit.”

Alex says the overall message he hopes audience members take home with them is to not judge a book by its cover. “With a person that you first encounter, you might think something about them based on how you saw them in their public persona, or how their family was portrayed in a public way; but we need to remember everyone has a private self as well that might be radically different from what we see on the outside.”

“I write about the areas that I grew up in and for me it was Jamesville, Wisconsin, which isn’t really a big city and it wasn’t really a small town, either. I think sometimes people think in order to write about big issues you need to write about big cities; but I really think I want to tell stories about what everybody’s going through, focusing on these middle sized towns and cities is where the world is really at. It’s kind of like Americana in a way.”

From Script to Stage

Stone Point Director Brady Katsho says he jumped at the opportunity to tackle the staging of this first-ever world premier  for Pit & Balcony. “I received the script and halfway through the first scene I really liked it because I saw a version of myself in the main character’s shoes, and feel we all at some point experience a sense that everything is running against us and there’s no reason to keep going. All of us at one point in our lives confront this type of loneliness or desperation and it’s interesting to delve into it and show everyone the darker side of that mindset”

With a cast that consists of Bill Ailey in the lead role of Lee Stone; Harmony Emerson as Sarah Greeley; Hope Brown in the role of Jill Stone; Elizabeth Reinhardt  as Louise Stone; and Sherri Angelotti cast as Mavis Stone, Brady says one of the challenges with this production is to sprinkle the heavy tone of the subject matter with touches of levity.

“We have some fresh actors in the show who initially felt because this was a sad play, let’s make everything sound sad, but I finally got it broken through to them that there’s a few jokes and moments of irony that we can have fun with. My personal favorite is how some of the most messed up moments in the show are funny; and the other thing I found intriguing is the use of music within the context of a dramatic framework.  There’s moments where the music connects to what’s going on, but gives a little breathing room in terms of the heaviness. The songs are really beautiful and in a very complex way help us make sense of how people are in this situation, dealing with cancer, and not quite sure how to proceed.”

“Bill Ailey in the role of Lee Stone brings some sad life experiences into the role not with cancer, but with death in his family that informs his performance,” continues Brady. “He’s very good and has a very raw talent, as does Harmony Emerson in the role of Sarah. She hasn’t acted on stage since her high school days and needs to be reassured because she gets anxious and I think she’s doing great. There’s a moment where I told her to safely use real emotions and she dialed it in just right.”

“Hope Brown plays the wife character of Jill Stone and brings a duality to the role that is really interesting because on the one side she is loving, caring, and nurturing; and then the other side is very vindictive - plus she is able to switch between these two sides at the flip of a dime flawlessly.”

“Right now the biggest challenge is working with my process,” concludes Brady, “because I’m also designing the set for this show and there have been times where we’re halfway through blocking a scene and then I decide to change it out of a desire to make it better. I don’t know exactly what I want until we’re working on it basically, and I have a lot of natural things I want to try on stage so the actors have something that will naturally unfold and not pigeonhole them physically.”

“After all, this is a world premier so I want to tune in this broad spectrum of emotion and realization in a manner where everything flows naturally.”

Pit & Balcony’s world premiere of ‘STONE POINT will run from Friday through Sunday, January 9-11 & 16-18^th.  Showtimes are 7:30 PM with 3:00 PM Sunday matinees. Tickets are only $20.00 and available at the Box Office by phoning 989.754.6587 or by visiting PitandBalconyTheatre.com. Pit & Balcony is located at 805 N. Hamilton St. in Old Town Saginaw.