“I've been in the community theater scene in Austin since I was wee,” says the still-very-young Sharky Meehan, “and in a lot of my experiences, I felt like my voice wasn't really heard. And I was thinking about it and I was looking at all of my wonderfully talented friends, and I was like, they're probably feeling the same way too. So I talked to them – I talked to Clementine, I talked to Avital and Will and everyone else in the cast – and I was like, do you wanna do a play? And they were like, hell yeah, let's do a play.”
That’s the origin story for The Spark, the all-teen theater group that is now presenting their production of Ray Bradbury’s Pillar of Fire. They’re an offshoot of La Fenice (the local commedia dell’arte company run by Sharky’s mom Kate Meehan), and while they’ve gotten some guidance and advice from the adults on a strictly as-needed basis, they’ve been responsible for all aspects of producing Pillar of Fire.
Pillar of Fire was written by Bradbury around the middle of the last century, and centers around William Lantry, a man who awakens 200 years in the future to find the world a very changed place. Meehan says it’s a play she’s wanted to do for a couple of years now. “I read through a lot of plays,” she says, “and when I was reading this play, it was kind of timeless. The whole play is an animalistic reaction to authoritarianism. I don't want to spoil too much, but… any good historical dictatorship, they all sort of have a pattern of how they come to power, and this play encapsulates that so perfectly with metaphors that aren't specific. That's mainly why I chose this play — because it's just so timeless.”
Meehan and the other artists involved in the production say that if it seems like an apt time to produce a play about the rise of authoritarianism, that’s very much by design. “In our world, there are definitely some patterns that are repeating,” Meehan says, “and I saw that and I read this play and I was like, I'm just gonna put this on real quick.”
“I feel like a lot of some of the things that this play is trying to say is like, if we don't listen to the past, it will repeat itself,” agrees Clementine Kennedy, who plays protagonist William Lantry, “and if we don't pay attention to it, especially.”
“Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it,” adds Will Lambert, who has worked on marketing and will also play live cello for the play, “but even if you do know that quote, you're still repeating history. I feel like knowing history is not enough. You also need to apply what happened.”
“I read the script and then I started looking around,” says actor Avital Cuevas, “and it freaked me out so much because as time went on, everything in the play seems so much more comparable to our real current-day lives.”
The artists of The Spark definitely have a message to get to their audience, but they’re also having a lot of fun banding together to produce a play the way they want to do it. “Well definitely at the beginning of our rehearsal process, it was a lot of that analyzing [and] reading through the play, analyzing the points we want to get across and how we're gonna get those points across,” says Kennedy, “and then we get into the rehearsal, and we get into all the fun parts like learning your choreography and [stage] fighting and everything that we're doing. [And] we've become such a tightly knit group that I think it's just made it all the more fun because it's entirely youth and queer and people that we can relate to each other. We can all really relate to each other and it's been really beautiful to see everyone… working together so nicely.”
Cuevas agrees. “It's such a beautiful and amazing thing to see because it's so driven and powerful,” she says. “Every action that we take and every movement that we do is so well considered and like just so joyful to be around.”
Pillar of Fire is the first play produced by The Spark, but they don't intend for it to be the last. This to be the beginning of what's envisioned as a long-running theater project; they’re already planning next year’s production. “Next year we are going to be writing our own play, like La Fenice does," Meehan says. "It's going to be a Barbie spy heist. What a jump, from Ray Bradbury to Barbie.”
'Pillar of Fire' runs August 29 - September 6 at the VORTEX.
