It’s a particular thing about writing. Folks often ask “why” you wrote a given play, or when and where or perhaps what your process is; essentially “how” you wrote it.

Ian Forester and Tony Sancho

I generally find myself faking it to some extent, coming up with a narrative reason or sources after the fact; something that fits the truth as much as any history because the whole writing process is, in the end, a mystery. The answer to the question never really gets at it. The writing comes in drips and drabs, you follow impulses, hit dead-ends, put things away and come back to them weeks, or years, later. What you wind up writing often looks little like you imagined it would; and then you start rewriting.

But for my play The Web, there is a very specific starting moment and process for writing it, quite unique in my experience. It happened when I was working on another play of mine that was in production, and I was going back through an old journal looking for place names I might scavenge and use from my travel notes during a stay in San Cristóbal de Las Casas. As I was leafing through the pages trying to make out my somewhat faded and generally indecipherable handwriting, I came across a paragraph I not only had no recollection of writing but didn’t at all feel like it was mine. It was in my handwriting, for sure, but it didn’t sound like me or, at least, the me that I had been reading for about half an hour or so.

It was a fairly long paragraph and explored the condition of being deeply paranoid, cut off and afraid. And the certainty someone unknown was after me or looking into my life for shadowy reasons. It was about the sensation of threat. That I would feel this way was not entirely odd, given I was working with an indigenous theater company with ties to the Zapatistas during a time of quite a bit of political turmoil. I felt very much out of place in Chiapas as if I stood out. Which I did. And I often feel edgy and slightly alienated in the best of circumstances.

Still, the particular tone of the paragraph really got to me. I couldn’t shake it and stopped my research into the names and began to jot phrases and ideas that began coming to me on my computer. As I did this the feeling only increased as I assumed the emotional and physiological state of the character (me?) in the paragraph as if I’d contracted an illness. I wrote for a long time.

Justin Huen

The next day I continued. The play wound up being written in a very intense, short time, about two and a half weeks or so, half in my apartment on the lower east side and half in a cabin in the Catskills, roughly corresponding to each act. I basically shut myself in and wrote for five to six hours at a stretch which was easy in the cabin as it got hit by a huge snowstorm making for some good, claustrophobic anxiety, fuel for the play. There was a wood stove and the chimney leaked so it was smoky. I got no reception on my phone. I was cut off and worried about my food supply (not so much I would starve but that I would be eating cereal for a week). So I hunkered down and wrote.

The first draft was very long, more of a novel in dramatic form than a play. A fun thing about writing it was it’s very plot driven, unlike a lot of my work which tends to come from voice, rhythm and situation while I grope for story. I was eager to see what would happen next. It was also terrifying as the plot basically unfolded as I wrote it, as did the structure, and I feared it would simply…stop and I’d be left with half a play and nowhere to go which is often the dilemma for playwrights. You have that great first act but are hard pressed to bring it home in the second half. But it didn’t happen; it kept unfolding, not unlike watching a movie or reading a book with one’s disbelieve fully suspended. I’ve never had that experience as a writer before or since.

When Matt Wells, the artistic director of needtheatre, called out of the blue and said they had a copy of the play from the reading a company in Chicago did, I was quite surprised. Ian Forester, the associate artistic director for needtheatre, who seems like he was born to play the lead, had done the reading in Chicago and was interested in exploring it some more.

I had done one private reading in New York but then almost immediately afterwards I moved to LA to work at Cornerstone Theater Company and had not really taken it back out of my drawer since. A friend of mine in Chicago asked me for a play at one point. I’d given it to him and never heard back. I’d think about working on it from time to time but life has a way of getting busy when you’re running a company.

Michael John Garces

After doing a reading needtheatre was very enthusiastic about it, willing to work on it if I was. We did a couple more readings, honing it and shaping it towards stage-worthiness, and they committed to the production. The director Alyson Roux and I continued to sharpen and refine the text. I’ve had a great time working with her, Ian and the rest of the cast. It has pretty much been an ideal development process, especially because the goal of a production was in sight and I’m eager to see what this paranoid little episode in my life means in front of an audience. New plays are basically an experiment, right?

So I guess I still have no answer for “why” or, really, “how” but I do have a sense of when and where, which is something, I suppose.

Production photos by by Lisa Gallo.

The Web, produced by Ilona Piotrowska, Rachel Stoll and Matt Wells for needtheater, opens Sept. 17; plays Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 5 pm; through Oct. 17. Tickets: $17-$20. Art/Works Theater, 6567 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood; 323.795.2215 or needtheater.org.