A Guide for The Homesick - Behind the scenes

Step into the rehearsal hall of Ken Urban's arresting new drama A GUIDE FOR THE HOMESICK. On stage beginning October 6 → bit.ly/GuideBOSy On his way home after a year in East Africa, a young aid worker goes back to a shabby Amsterdam hotel room with a fellow American. The two strangers look for redemption from their pasts and confess their shared fear that they betrayed the people who needed them most. A passionate encounter becomes a chance to confront the truth in this new play by Huntington Playwriting Fellow Ken Urban and directed by Colman Domingo (“Fear the Walking Dead”). A Guide for the Homesick October 6 - November 4, 2017 South End / Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA Huntington Theatre Company -- Featuring: Ken Urban Colman Domingo McKinley Belcher III Samuel H. Levine --- New backstage videos every week! Looking for more of the Huntington on the web? Website: ****** Facebook: ****** Twitter: ****** Instagram: ******

In "A Guide for the Homesick" two strangers meet in a hotel bar near the Amsterdam airport. And they end up spending the night together drinking beer, sort of sharing secrets of what has happened to them recently. And through the course of the evening we learn that they both feel like they've betrayed friends. So it's a play about the possibility of connection and redemption between these two strangers. These two men. "A Guide for the Homesick" is a two-hander. Two gentleman are playing two roles each. It should have a sense of rawness to it. It should feel like we just settled into this moment with these two humans. And I want it close and up-front so we feel like we're a part of it and we're just a fly on the wall. The bulk of the story is centered around Teddy and Jeremy. They're two people from Boston who have traveled to Amsterdam for different reasons. The story is told in a sort of non-linear fashion. It's like, we see this this interaction between two people, between Teddy and Jeremy, in real time And so the way the play works is that when these two strangers are together, they keep being reminded of their friends and so the play shifts back and forth between time and space. You get, like, flashbacks, and, like, scenes that are spliced together, so that you see the other two characters, Nicholas and Ed. It reminds me of these really high-paced films where you sort of jump from characters to characters and back in time and forward in time. Everything is happening all at once. It's all going down all together. That really drew me in. I think it's an exciting way to tell a story. You give the current reality, but then you also provide the history that allows people to understand why a character is acting the way he is. This play is really about how people... how the ways we bump against each other expose who we are. And I think that's an exciting thing to unpack. You don't know who is going to change you. And you don't know who you're going to change. Even just walking around Boston I find I'm looking people in the eye more and realizing that maybe a stranger could change my life, the way these two strangers change each others' lives.