The Room and a Richard is a one-act play about Alex - a young waiter in his 20’s - who inherits a large cavernous (almost Schapiro theater shaped …) apartment by a customer named Richard who died. Cynthia, Richard’s sister, begrudgingly hands over the keys to him, but Alex … can’t remember Richard - a revelation that opens up a deeper connection between them and a shapeshifting insight into our universal inability to see people for who they are, other than what they are to us. 

The play is under 15 minutes and, true to its content, has shapeshifted considerably since it was written. I wrote it in Anne Bogart’s class under the direction of Ashley Kelly-Tata in 2010, and then took it to Williamstown Theater Festival with director Mo Zhou on a bill of new plays by Bekah Brunstetter and Heidi Schreck that summer. I then produced it again in 2011 with new one acts by Lucy Thurber, Wendy MacLeod and Bronwen Prosser as part of “Connect Five” at Ars Nova, before it was finally ingested into a full-length play version of What the Sparrow Said at the New York Fringe Festival in 2011. 

The thesis of the play is larger than the play, which is why I think it has morphed and changed so much … so much so that I am still unpacking it today.