Interview: Playwright Jule Shavers of The Baptist Witches Of Shelbyville
A Southern Gothic comedy at the Whitefire Theatre
The latest creation from writer Julie Shavers is an evocative Southern Gothic comedy, The Baptist Witches of Shelbyville, starring award-winners Gigi Bermingham and Mamie Gummer. This sharply rendered full-length play is directed by Daniel O’Brien, and it recently opened at the Whitefire Theatre with an all-female cast.
Angelie Simone, Ashley Ward, Mamie Gummer, Julie Shavers.
All production photos by Jeff Lorch
The story centers on the Moon family as eldest daughter Lucinda Moon returns home to her small Tennessee town for the July 4th holiday. She is greeted not only by fireworks but by the same women who shaped her - and the memories she can’t shake. What’s on this family’s picnic menu? Dark comedy, tragic poetry, and moments of pure sonic bliss as the Moon family finds their old harmonies.
I spoke with the playwright to find out more about this new comedy.
Angelie Simone, Mamie Gummer, Julie Shavers
Thanks for speaking with me Julie. The title conjures thoughts of religion and the occult. Is that literal, or is it a metaphor for the way these women worship and wield power in a small Tennessee town?
It’s a metaphor. I like the way the words “Baptist” and “witch” rub up against each other because I think both of those groups of people draw from ancient sources to try to affect change in the present and I wonder if the two aren’t more similar than we think.
The women in this play are deeply spiritual people who were raised in the Baptist church and have been wounded by it. Each of them is at a different point in her journey of faith and while they tap into different sources and wield these powers in different ways where they all believe that something within them provides guidance and assistance in times of need. There are a couple of scenes where in the moments of crisis they cast prayer like incantation.
Ashley Ward, Mamie Gummer, Gigi Bermingham, Angelie Simone, Julie Shavers
How was your approach to writing this play similar, and different, from your usual creative process and the style of your other works?
It was similar in that I wrote a draft and left it alone for quite some time before returning to the editing process.
It’s different because I completely abandoned the original. The first draft was still set on a porch, but that version centered more around the ancestors haunting the space and how they interacted with the family currently living there. A lot more magic. A lot more ghosts. It lived far outside of reality, which most of my plays have tended to do. Then the sisters showed up. As their voices became more distinct, I let the others go and have really enjoyed writing something a bit more naturalistic.
What is the significance of setting the play during the July 4th holiday in a story about a woman confronting family ties and unpleasant memories? Is it unusual for Lucinda to come back home from Los Angeles?
This is not Lucinda’s first visit home. She brings her family back a couple of times a year. This visit is different because she has left her husband and children back in Los Angeles. Without them around the rest of the group no longer feels like they have to behave themselves for company. Also, Lucinda is able to see just how bad things have gotten for her sister Birdie because she’s not distracted by her own children.
The 4th of July is extremely evocative to me. The heat, the pyrotechnics, the smell of a grill, a damp bathing suit, cracking open a can plucked from freezing cold cooler water - these things take me right back to being twelve years old in a small town. It conjures for me long days full of nothing to do and nobody watching. That’s when these remembered events took place.
Singing at the 4th of July celebration in the town square, something these women used to do as children, is what triggers the highly charged moments of the final scene. They dig back into the parts they sang and the parts they played within the family, which ultimately steers them towards a reckoning.
You have a powerhouse cast which includes Gigi Bermingham and Mamie Gummer. Did their performances reveal new possibilities about Lucinda or her mother and their relationship?
They are both such talented performers. Having them live in these rolls helped me to realize that I hadn’t put enough meat on Mama’s bones in the final scene, which did get a rewrite during the process. Mamie is secretly a brilliant dramaturg. All of the actors, including Angelie Simone and Ashley Ward, had so much to offer when it came to making sure everything lined up scene to scene for their characters and I’m extremely grateful to them for it.
Are the characters based on people from your hometown, or on your own family?
Yes, both.
Did your director, Daniel O’Brien, realize the story as you had envisioned it, and how much did it evolve from the original script to opening night?
He did a great job of bringing the script I wrote to life. He honored every part of it down to the stage directions. It was extremely brave of him to take this on and I don’t know that I would have been able to trust another male director with this material in the same way.
Angelie Simone, Mamie Gummer
What surprised you most about getting this production up and running, and how audiences are reacting to it?
I was surprised by just how much grace we experienced. It was a huge amount of work with some pretty serious bumps along the way, but things just kept falling into place, from discovering The Whitefire Theatre right in our own neighborhood, to finding each member of the cast, to the design efforts of David Zuckerman, Derrick McDaniel, Cameron Clarke, Ned Mochel and Matt Sheel who added so much to the production so quickly.
The audiences have been marvelous. During the last week of rehearsals, I was standing on stage thinking, does this play even work? Am I crazy? But after hearing the audience laugh and talking to people after the show, I’m so glad we kept going and brought this piece into the world.
Are you working on other writing projects now that you can talk about?
I have a screenplay, Working Title “The Pie Hole,” about two sisters trying to turn the condemned house they inherited from their grandmother into a bakery.
Dan O’Brien and I have a pilot in post-production called Beaumont and Beaumont, it is about two small town private investigators. My dad was a private investigator so it pulls from some of the things I saw him get up to. I can’t wait to finish it because Danny is fantastic. It also stars Ashley Ward who plays Kitty in our current play and is hilarious.
I’ve always imagined The Baptist Witches of Shelbyville as a series of plays. It’s such fertile ground and I’m interested to see if audiences would come back to the theatre to see more of this family. I love novels that span generations and wonder if that would work for the stage. Part two takes place on the bottom of the lake where Kitty lives out an alternate reality as a country singer. I’m imagining giant fish hooks with aerialists on them and a band of hard luck half catfish mermaids. We’ll see.
Thanks so much!
The Baptist Witches of Shelbyville runs at 8pm on April 17, 18, 25, and May 1 at the Whitefire Theatre, 13500 Ventura Blvd. Sherman Oaks, Ca 91423. Tickets are $40. Reservations: https://whitefire.stagey.net/projects/13984?tab=ticket
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