Falling

Falling 2022

Written by Deanna Jent

Directed by Bella Vondracek

Mentor - Erin Klage

Assistant Director - Caleb Swinney

Stage Manager - Braeden Jackson

May 13th and 14th, 2022

Directors Note

I want to begin with a thank you to the audience, the cast, crew, and everyone who has contributed to Falling. This show is one that took courage and care to put on stage, as well as a deep consideration for our audience, and I am so proud of the entire company.

Playwright Deanna Jent wrote Falling based off of her real life experiences as a mother of a son on the autism spectrum. Jent felt that how she was seeing autism represented on mainstream platforms - such as television shows, movies, and social media - was not representative of her personal relationship with the diagnosis. Her main goal in constructing such a powerful play was to show that autism is not a "one-size fits all" experience and that this misconception is, ultimately, harmful to individuals with autism and their families. She used this goal to create the central question of the play: How do you love someone who's hard to love?

Throughout the course of rehearsals, this company has had countless discussions over what we want our message to be to our audience. We were lucky enough to have someone give us their time and talk to us about their personal experiences that they've had with their brother who was diagnosed with autism early on, and exhibits some similar behaviors to the show's character Josh. The cast got the opportunity to elicit the advice of this extremely kind individual in how to play their own characters and we all got a glimpse of how little this diagnosis is talked about in its entirety.

As a company, we had to educate ourselves on some of the aspects of Autism that are not widely discussed and, personally, this made me realize how much I didn't know about the diagnosis. We, as a company, ultimately decided that we wanted our portrayal of Falling to be representative of the spectrum that is Autism.

I hope you can see how much time and effort this amazing cast has put into this incredible show. Thank you all so much for coming and I hope you enjoy the show.

Farewell Spartan Drama, for how I've loved you,

Bella Vondracek

Director