Delray Stories: Wisdom, Beauty and Inspiration & Winter by Mark Scharf

Delray Stories: Celebrating our Community Through Theatre is a new annual series, each year with a different theme. Your story will be the springboard for an original theatre piece, crafted by playwrights. This year’s theme, Wisdom, Beauty and Inspiration, features monologues inspired by Delray Beach Seniors. Professional playwrights will use the selected stories to create a staged theatrical production, performed by professional actors on our stage!

The performance will be followed by a world premiere play reading of Winter by Mark Scharf. Winter is a play about our connection to the past, looking at who we are as defined by others as well as how we define ourselves.

Winter explores how time washes over our lives in ways that can both erode and cleanse the past and remind us that time is a force that both ravages and heals. Since life is the unfolding of time, it too has the capacity to destroy and to mend. The characters’ relationship ebbs and flows, just like ocean waves and just like life.

Like a Chekhov play, the drama’s action is more character than plot driven, and the characters are often driven by nostalgia. In a Chekhov play, the stage is littered with a larger body of characters, which can create the feeling of a more traditionally active plot. In a smaller cast play such as this, the action primarily relies upon each character’s arc, the moments of discovery each character makes along their journey, and the conflict that arises as the characters’ paths cross.

The exposition unfolds organically through the catching up conversations between the two characters reuniting after 50 years.

Sounds of the ocean and of seagulls are interwoven to bring the wintry, seaside town setting of the action to the fore. The closed diner setting of Act One and the off-season beachfront condo setting of Act Two both invoke the idea that these two people are encountering each other again in their “off”-romance years, which may or may not be an inopportune time in their lives.

PERFORMER BIO:
Mark Scharf is an award-winning American playwright living in Baltimore, MD whose plays have been produced and published widely in the United States and internationally. Mark has served as Playwright-in-Residence for Theatre Virginia’s New Voices Program. Mark is a member of the Dramatists Guild.