Playwright Randall Colburn grew up in an “apolitical, areligious” home. But in 2002, when he fell in love with a preacher’s daughter as a freshman at Central Michigan University, he also began an affair with Christian fundamentalism—speaking in tongues and all. “I was going through all these different identities, and then I found this spiritual identity that was mixed with this relationship that was so potent and huge and unlike anything I’d ever had before,” says Colburn, 28. “My fatal error was fusing together the girl and the god.”
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Consider the three scripts Right Brain Project picked for their 2010 season, which is dedicated to Colburn’s work. Produced this summer, Hesperia concerns a porn star who’s fled the business and, born again, started over in a small midwestern town. She’s about to marry a youth minister when her former lover and partner in sleaze shows up, leading to what Reader critic Zac Thompson called “an intimate, insightful, achingly sad portrait of two people desperate to regain their innocence.” Before that, in March, Right Brain mounted Pretty Penny, in which a young phone-sex operator finds herself getting sucked down the rabbit hole of a client’s fantasy.
While Colburn cites Joyce, Harold Pinter, and Sarah Kane (the famously suicidal author of Blasted) as major influences, he’s also a fan of supernatural fiction a la Stephen King and Michael Crichton. But even his horror play, Ghostbox, contains elements of spiritual conflict. Opening this month in an InFusion Theatre Company production, it explores “the idea of repression,” Colburn says, through the relationship between a woman who’s been a Christian all her life and a newly saved man. “It’s really about the tension between them: somebody who’s lived a life of experience vs. somebody who’s lived a very sheltered life. Something that’s very scary to me is when repression is unleashed and it comes out in a flood.”
Halfshut Opens 11/4. Through 12/4: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 7 PM, Right Brain Project, 4001 N. Ravenswood, 773-750-2033, therbp.org, $15.
& He Flew Over the Forest Previews 11/11-11/18, free. Opens 11/19. Through 12/18: Thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat-Sun 2 and 8 PM, Prop Thtr, 3502-04 N. Elston, 773-798-9915, brainsurgeontheater.org, $10-$15.
