Sending the Kids to College

Hello, Portland Actors Conservatory! It's your playwright Jeff Whitty, here. I'm deeply honored that you are staging the Northwest premiere of "The Hiding Place." It's without a doubt my most personal play -- there's a great deal in it that's based on actual events, though where I am in said events shall remain a mystery. Is that alluring enough? It's much more interesting than the facts of the matter, trust me.

And then, of course, there's lots of the play that I made up. Lots and lots and lots, though every character has a component of someone I know, and a component of me, too, I guess.

"The Hiding Place" was written in tandem with my musical "Avenue Q." Though I loved writing for the lively puppets of the musical, I found that I needed a release valve. I'd never say that the puppets have no subtext, but their subtext is necessarily fairly obvious to the audience. They are humanity simplified and then exploded. So I yearned to write a play where there could be something a bit deeper, a bit more sensitive and halting and unspoken.

So I started "The Hiding Place," and worked on it when I wasn't, say, finding the difficult entry to the "Q" song "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist." At the time, the projects seemed entirely different.

But looking back, I'm startled that the plays have so much in common: young people, moving to the city, filled with yearning, and dealing with the disappointments of life in the real world. And then finding resilience. Much as I was experiencing at the time, I might add, and in the years prior.

Both plays end on a note of ambivalence, of those dreams not necessarily coming true. You could plug the song "For Now" from "Avenue Q" into the end of "The Hiding Place," and while it might be jarring stylistically, it would be a perfect thematic fit.

(I wonder what Myra and Karl would think, on the beach, being descended on by a colorful lot of puppets? Hmm. Well, I approved the final galleys for the published script, so it's too late to explore, I suppose.)

I compare the life of a play to raising a child -- the first tentative readthrough, early in development, is like the baby steps. And then you keep raising the kid, revising, and at a certain point the child asserts itself, and your job is to get out of the way: removing obstacles, smoothing, developing trust that the kid has a life of its own. And then you're suddenly sending them to rehearsals, to college -- and then performance, a graduation of sorts. The kid isn't yours any more.

And with "The Hiding Place," that kid has graduated from college and is leaving to explore the world, without me to sit nervously in the back, taking notes, giving agita to the director. And it's a terrific feeling -- admittedly not without yearning, but hey. From all reports, "The Hiding Place" is in marvelous hands at Portland Actors Conservatory.

And what makes me happiest is this: this kid made it back to my home state of Oregon before "Avenue Q"! By a matter of days, as it turns out -- but hooray!