Let it Grow … a quite perfectly-realized dramatic gem.
-Jon Tuttle
Everyone sit up please: you are reading this just in time to save your place for the fourth installment of Jasper Project’s Play Right Series--the launching of a brand-new play by a South Carolina author. Jasper regulars will recognize the PRS as the birthplace of Randall David Cook’s Sharks and Other Lovers (2017), Colby Quick’s Moonswallower (2022) and Lonetta Thompson’s Therapy (2023). Each of these plays, following its showcase staged reading event at the end of the PRS cycle, has been published by Muddy Ford Press and gone (or soon will go) on to full productions around the state.
This year’s winner is Let it Grow, by Columbia theatre veteran Chad Henderson, a name likely familiar to anyone even peripherally connected to the Midlands’ arts scene. Chad was for six years the producing Artistic Director at Trustus Theatre, in which capacity he directed dozens of plays and musicals and developed, as writer or collaborator, several more, including (with Daniel Machado) 2018’s The Restoration’s Constance, a sprawling, gorgeous, Bernstein-esque epic-with-music that tells a generational tale of Lexington and environs. He has also brought projects to other theaters in Columbia, like Workshop and the Columbia Children’s Theatre, as well as to theatres in Charleston, Spartanburg, and Key West. In 2017, his short film Overture won the Audience Award in Jasper’s Second Act Film Festival. He is now the Marketing Director for the South Carolina Philharmonic. So yes: it’s that Chad Henderson.
The play’s language, by the way, is magnificent.
His play Let it Grow is a gentle comedy about later-life love blooming on the set of a public television gardening show. The PRS judges (I was one) found that, besides checking all our boxes pertaining to cast size, length, and venue-suitability, Let it Grow was a quite perfectly-realized dramatic gem. It is at once highly original but still demonstrates a throughgoing mastery of the traditional conventions of stagecraft. It’s also deliciously funny and arrives at a denouement at once surprising and inevitable.
The dramatis personae in the play include Mary Lily (played by Libby Campbell), the host of our favorite gardening show, also a widow and the play’s moral center of gravity, into whose studio strolls Christoph, a new panelist, and the author of the bestselling Fifty Shades of Stamens. Christoph is also, as it happens, a widower, and you might see where this is going. Trying to keep the show right with sponsors and donors is producer Charlotte, who begins the play as the uptight voice of fiscal necessity but who emerges as someone entirely more sympathetic to the humanities. Finally there’s hot-blooded but kind-hearted Jeb, an expert on sustainable humanure who gets “madder than a one-legged diabetic at a cake-walk” at critics who should sooner “shit in their momma’s best frying pan than to mess with me, cause I’d fold ‘em up like a fourth-grade love letter.” The play’s language, by the way, is magnificent.
This year’s PRS cycle begins with its first meeting on the afternoon of July 21, at the 1013 Co-Op off North Main in Columbia. On that day you can meet Chad, the play’s director Marybeth Gorman Craig, the cast and, if you choose to be one, the other Community Producers (more about that below). In anticipation of that first meeting, I tracked Chad down for a quick Q and A.
JT: How do you know so much about horticulture? And where did you get the idea for Let It Grow?
CH: The impetus for this play was my desire to...well, write a play. I have been researching the punk music scenes in Belfast, New York City and London for a spell with the intention of writing a trilogy of plays with music. It'd been years since I wrote the book for The Restoration's Constance (a process that felt like being in a fever-dream), so I wanted to ‘dust the cobwebs off’ of my writing. I wanted to write a play as an exercise, I wanted to write it for me, and I wanted to write something simple and human. In short, I wanted to write something that was the opposite of the kind of theatre I gravitate towards as a producer/director.
Around that time, I was finally becoming a fan of SC ETV'S Making It Grow. I kept watching the show as my late-30s interest in plants grew, and I also felt the show was a great source for comedy—though completely unintentional. It seems to teem with innuendo and winks, and I can never be sure if the panelists are aware of it. So, I decided to tell a story about a public broadcasting program where the fun, pleasant, scandal-avoidant day-to-day rigor is upset by their being confronted with a conflict.
So then I wondered...what conflict could I confront them with? I may or may not have injected some of my personal experiences along with the workplace experiences of friends into the plot and come out with Let it Grow. In the end, the play turned out to be an investigation of humanity in the workplace. It examines vulnerability, discomfort, and plants.
JT: So this play was, in fact, inspired by ETV's Making it Grow.
CH: Yes, it was the steppingstone into the rest of the play. I recently met Amanda McNulty, "Making It Grow’s" host, at a local Publix. She was lovely. I did not tell her I wrote a play based on her show. But I have had a lot of hilarious conversations in recent months with other folks who work with her and know her, and apparently my "Mary Lily" character--the play’s protagonist--is not nearly as colorful or daring as the real-life source.
JT: The play is stiff with botanical erotica. Comment?
CH: Honestly, the "botanical erotica" (my new memoir title, thank you!) came into play because the actual SC ETV show feels stacked with unintentional innuendo. So I wanted the characters to examine certain horticultural topics that might open me up to intentionally creating innuendo for the audience. Plus, the growing conflict in the play is directly related to this kind of dialogue being an issue on air, so it felt necessary.
JT: Anyone reading the above would assume that this play is bawdy. It most certainly is not. It is a gently witty exploration of later-life-romance that uses botany as its love language. Here's the question: this play, like every play, is a journey. From what, to what? Where do you want the audience to land? Or what do you want them to know or take away.
CH: I'm hoping that this play asks us to think about each other’s complexities and make an intentional effort to stop viewing each other as black or white, right or wrong--as dualities versus dichotomies. I'll be candid and say that while I am offering this idea in the play, it is a practice I fail at constantly.
JT: On which note, I notice there are no antagonists in the play, at least not by the end. Even Charlotte, the producer, who is the Voice of Business Sense, becomes sympathetic. Was that a discovery you made in the writing? Was she ever, to you, an antagonist?
CH: I think it's easy to dislike Charlotte because she really needs to lighten-the-fuck-up. She's the type of person whose company I have never enjoyed, but is she the antagonist? No. The villains in this story are the faceless attorneys and sponsors who orbit the characters throughout the play. They view their staff as cogs in a wheel and sensationalize their humanity - making them liabilities versus assets.
JT: Mary Lily is a remarkable character--gracious and wise, and clearly the conscience of the play. Whence came Mary? Anybody you know?
CH: Mary is the confluence of a lot of the smarter and more genuine people I've met in my life. There's quite a lot of my own heart in her as well. I suppose that happens quite a bit when you're creating a character you intend audiences to love. You pull together all the best parts of yourself and others, and boom: you get a Mary Lily.
JT: This is obviously not your first foray into playwriting, and your career in the arts has led you many places. Where does writing--plays or otherwise--fit into your conception of yourself?
CH: This is a bit of a doozy to answer. Trying to be brief, I'll say that writing new work is putting my money (or time) where my mouth is. I have long championed new work, and I have long envied how the larger cities are creating new work that infiltrates our regional and community theatres over time. So while I continue to expect SC audiences to favor the familiar, I think we are capable of having our own creative "new works" scene. So, instead of waiting on local audiences and granting organizations to call for new work, I feel we must just create. new. work.
My "self-conception" keeps changing, but I confidently call myself a storyteller. I think I've been a storyteller for most of my life. I recognize that the little kid who made stop-motion movies with his action figures is still alive and well in this 39-year-old with a greying beard. So playwriting seems like a sensible avenue to telling new stories (read: creating new work), and I had quite a fun time working on Let It Grow.
Your curiosity having been piqued, you’ll be glad to know that you too can have a fun time working on Let It Grow, because there is still time—through July 21--to join the PRS cycle as a Community Producer. For a $250 (or larger) buy-in, you can participate in the development process and learn more about the many elements that go into creating, writing, rehearsing, producing, and marketing a new play. There are also opportunities to be a developmental sponsor for those who would like to support Henderson’s play but are not interested in or available to serve as a Community Producer.
The PRS group meets about every two weeks through August into September, when, on the 14th, we will open some bubbly, pick up our just-published copies and enjoy a staged-reading, with talk-back, at Harbison Theatre. For more information about the project or becoming a Community Producer or sponsor, please click here, and then join us on July 21st for a read-through and lively chat.
--Jon Tuttle