Below is background, in Q&A form, on Delta Center Stage's experience with Kattherine Snodgrass's long-form one act, The Glider.
"MTA" refers to the Mississippi Theatre Association, which is the state affiliate that sponsors Mississippi's entries in the AACTfest cycle every other year.

MTA: We are thinking of stories for our upcoming newsletter, ...An article on The Glider. This experience has taken 10 years. How did you all become involved?

Responses below are from Tim Bixler, production director.

In 1996 DCS produced a script from playwright Katherine Snodgrass entitled Haiku.Our '96 production featured the same three actresses who performed at MTA in 2005 in The Glider. We won the MTA state fest in '96 and won again later that year at SETC. While at SETC that year we were invited by Irish theatre adjudicator Brid McBride to perform in Ireland at the '97 Dundalk Maytime festival. Snodgrass and I had established contact during the rehearsal process for Haiku when I called with questions about her script. When I called her after the win at SETC, she accepted an invitation to Greenville for a post-festival performance to let us share our success with her. This was a very real act of trust. I could tell from our early phone conversations that she had seen some badly rendered productions of Haiku. It was understandable that she would be cautious about seeing her work performed by Mississippi amateurs. --Most all of her writing involves characters with a lot of inner tension-a trait that lends itself to unnecessary histrionics if an actor is trying too hard to "act" the role. She is a difficult writer to produce in the sense that her work is so subtle that it's easy to damage with heavy-handed acting or directing tactics…if the actors are not restrained. But the festival process had provided enough validation, I think, for her to make the trip down south to see what we had done.

After her visit to Greenville she also agreed to attend the Irish festival (the following year) as our guest. One afternoon we were all touristing in Ireland, waiting for our performance date at the Dundalk festival, and decided to picnic on the grounds of Monastaboice, a famous ruin in the area. After wine and cheese in this idyllic setting, she pulled some scripts out of her purse and handed them out to our three actresses, and we first put voice to an early draft of The Glider then. I may be incorrect, but I suspect that this was the first reading that Kate had heard as well.

MTA: What has driven you to stay with it for so long?

How could you resist after starting out the way we did? On a practical basis, I knew that, from it's earliest reading, our three actresses were well-suited to the roles that Kate assigned them in Ireland. Another strong drive was the opportunity to be involved-even though only slightly-in the process of creating theatre from such an early stage. I believe she knew our actresses were suited to the roles as well. -So the Haiku cast and I stayed in touch with her. Occasionally over the years, as she would mention a new draft or revision, we'd get another opportunity to 'read it around.' Watching such material take form and seeing the process from the inside, and from such a talented writer, was irresistible...so we waited, and waited. Kate runs an equity theatre in Boston and has access to many professional readers who were probably more intimately involved...but her trust in letting us, as amateurs, peek over her shoulder from time to time as it grew, was irresistible. Ultimately, that is what has made this such a satisfying experience for all of us --the trust. You could see the trust our actors had with each other on stage, which all began with the trust of the playwright to place her work in our hands.

MTA: What is your and the casts' passion for this show?
Short answer-Seeing an excellent first production in Boston.

When we learned that Kate had (at last) put a final acting version together and was going to produce it at Boston Playright's Theatre, (this was October of '2004) we invited ourselves up to see it. This first production was rendered on stage exquisitely by three professional actresses with a set to-die-for, and was just wonderful overall. We all knew the piece reasonably well, --knew several of the sisters' secrets between themselves-- so hearing it in front of others in the audience and watching how certain revelatory moments worked was chilling.
As we clearly stated in our programmes we performed an edited (cut) version of this show… While in Boston Kate provided some advice and I did a draft cutting of the longer form one-act to see if we could make the main thrust of the play work in MTA's one-hour festival format. The longer form has some luxuriously interesting backstory, and I'll never forgive myself if we don't all get the opportunity to do this without the insanity of the clock ticking away. If your only experience with this script is what you saw in the festival cycle, you haven't seen it all. -As an example... Fran's first entrance, when done without the clock, could take as long as 4-5 minutes before you hear a single line spoken.

MTA: What is the "story behind the story"? What made her want to write, to write about this, etc....

In answer to the question "What makes her write?" I wouldn't want to speak for her, although I don't believe that the main thrust of her writings are that closely tied to personal experience-certainly not to the so-called 'story' of a play. She is a producing theatre professional and I believe that what motivates her to write is more to create material for actors to feast upon. She has a way of creating (or observing) a situation...a set of circumstances between characters...and then getting out of the way as much as possible. I don't think she considers her role to be that of telling a story...that is someone else's job.

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