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Get the most interesting and important stories from the University of Pittsburgh.Pitt Stages is kicking off its spring season with “Morning Reckoning,” a play that harkens back to the 1990s, a golden era of boy bands and teen girl fandom — and formative years for playwright Kelly Trumbull.
Trumbull is a teaching assistant professor in the Department of Theatre Arts within Pitt’s Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. Though she has directing experience, she’s taken a hands-off approach to her show’s Pitt debut. It’s the first time “Morning Reckoning” has been performed in its entirety.
“It’s good practice for me as a playwright to see what happens when the play is in someone else’s hands — to see how their vision brings the play to life, how my words translate to other people,” Trumbull said.
During the COVID-19 lockdown, Trumbull enrolled in an online playwriting workshop and wrote an early draft of the play.
“In the workshop, I did a generative exercise called ‘mining your life,’ where I wrote down every pivotal moment, every interesting event that I could remember,” Trumbull said. “And that’s when the seed for ‘Morning Reckoning’ was planted.”
The play isn’t autobiographical, but the plot stems from Trumbull’s memories of middle-school sleepovers with her friends and their uniting obsession with all things Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync. She tapped her husband, Brad Stevenson, and friend Addi Twigg to compose original boy-band-style songs for the play.
Act 1, set in 1999, centers on a group of eighth graders devoted to Morning Reckoning, a fictional music group. In the second act, the friends reunite in their 30s and come to grips with a traumatic event from their adolescence that continues to reverberate in their lives.
Payne Banister, a third-year PhD student studying theater and performance and serving as dramaturg for “Morning Reckoning,” has gained professional experience interpreting the play’s cultural context for the cast and creative teams. They delved into all things ’90s, including the demographics of Wayne, New Jersey, the real-life town where Morning Reckoning takes place.
“Understanding how the town would’ve looked in 1999 and the changes that have occurred in the last 20 years has informed how the actors and production team have approached the material,” Payne said.
And the Pitt Stages actors, born in the early aughts, had to dig deep to connect to their characters’ backgrounds and motivations.
A strong performance transcends age, said Ava Hartman, who plays the lead role of April.
“There’s always going to be things we can’t understand until we’re really there. At the end of the day, it’s about having a truthful performance, which comes through empathy and not necessarily lived experiences,” added Hartman, an industrial engineering major in the Swanson School of Engineering and David C. Frederick Honors College.
Hartman isn’t the only non-theater major to star in the spring show. All Pitt students are encouraged to audition for Pitt Stages productions, said Payne, who teaches in the Department of Theatre Arts along with their PhD studies.
“It astounds me how multi-talented all of our students are,” they said. “Seeing how students from different parts of the University come together to create art is inspiring.”
Pitt Stages produces four main stage shows and two one-act plays annually. Learn about upcoming auditions by subscribing to the Department of Theatre Art’s listserv.