Picnic

Written by Ryan O’Donnell
Directed by Carla Fusciardi Wallace

Starring

Rachel Ann O’Sullivan

Ryan O’Donnell

The idea to write Picnic came from a late night question: can we prepare ourselves to say goodbye? This felt like it was something worth exploring onstage. Three months after finishing 100 Shades of Being, Ryan returned to this question and the story that would be behind it, and decided to apply for the Agility Award bursary from the Irish Arts Council to set out on writing the piece of theatre that would explore both. 

Successful in applying, Ryan spent three months writing early drafts of Picnic, with collaborative sessions with Graham and Rachel for script discussion and critique. The narrative of the piece centered around two distanced siblings, Tom and Mary, who meet up and visit their father in hospice, who is receiving end of life care. With this narrative, very quickly the questions and experiences in the piece branched out further than the one first asked. How do our relationships change over time with our parents and our siblings. How do we process that. Where in ourselves do we hold that. How much of the past do we hold onto. How do we comfort each other in saying goodbye.

As part of the Agility Award bursary, it was then workshopped with Carla Fusciardi Wallace as director. In the same vein of many Luna projects, there was a significant emphasis on movement-based rehearsal to unlock the physical nature of the piece that lay within the text. In the play, siblings Tom and Mary find themselves in the stark situation of being physically reunited after quite some time. They’ve been leading their own lives.

Mary has been visiting Dad every chance she’s gotten outside of work. Tom has been trying to follow his career and hasn’t been able to be around as much. The text explored how these siblings communicated first with their words, or lack thereof; the workshop period explored what their distance, their closeness, their few hugs, their body language and what their moments silence and stillness all said. The five-week workshop & rehearsal period saw the actors explore the concepts of grief, distance between siblings and communication onstage, and how we as individuals grapple with these in real life.

Memory played a large role in the play. Mary and Tom both have private, fleeting, memories of their father amidst the ongoing conversation between the two of them onstage. Showing memory onstage can be tricky; you face the question of how to visit a previous reality while trying to keep the pace of the present intact. This was a challenging period in workshopping, with many ideas of how to do it thrown at the wall, usually not sticking. But then an idea: water. Trying to find memories, trying to hold onto them, it feels like trying to grab water, trying to wade through it and find something. Following that idea, we found the sound design inspiration and a lead to follow on how to direct the physicality onstage of these moments. The entering into and exiting out of memories presented like waves, they come, they go, we go through them. 

The last stage of bursary funding was staging a small extract from the current script as a work-in-progress to a very small audience. The early workings of Picnic were met with a very positive response, and Picnic has been in further development since to complete the script and to be produced in late 2023.

With special thanks to the support received from the UCD Ad Astra Alumni Initiative to make the staging of the performance possible.