The idea for Robert Wray’s latest play came to him in the late 1980s, when he was living in New York and working as an actor and writer with the Circle Repertory Company.
“It was just a wonderful, heady, beautiful, romantic time,” the Charlottesville-based playwright says of the off-Broadway theater company.
His play, “All Is Always Now,” which has a show at 7:30 p.m. tonight in Nelson County’s Hamner Theater (see box for all show dates), is “meant to reflect a certain period in the city,” he says, “when things like Circle Rep existed.”
Wray says the company would often do a new show every weekend, with very little rehearsal time.
“It was very seat-of-your-pants, but exciting too,” he says. “I wanted to pay tribute to it and document it because I think the world needs to see these characters. There’s something vital about the notion of wanting to spread beauty, in a way, through your work and the desire to do something meaningful with your life.”
The play, a comedy with a “timbre of sadness,” tells the story of four characters having one last hurrah in the city before one moves to Michigan.
They’re all in their 40s, “that time period when they’re looking back to see what it all meant,” Wray says. “I wanted to do something in real time with real people doing real things.”
Wray began writing it two years ago and developed most of it at the Hamner’s Virginia Playwrights Initiative, a workshop for new plays that he describes as “a mini boot camp.”
“You read a play to an audience, and you really start to revise and reshape it.”
“It’s tremendously helpful because there’s such a high caliber of people there,” he says. “They’re critical and insightful without being destructive.”
Three of the actors who participated in those readings star in the play.
“It’s interesting to see how they’ve evolved,” he says. “It’s a nice, organic way to see the play develop, instead of having (new) actors start from scratch.”
The play itself is still evolving, too. Wray says he’s constantly making tweaks and cut out an entire page of the script late last week.
“I love economy, so any excuse I have, I jump at it.”
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