The following articles appeared in Actors Theatre's subscriber newsletter prior to the 2004 Humana Festival

“Don’t get married young,” thirty-five-year-old Ashley Hammond adamantly warns her son Justin. “I got married young and I f—ed up my life.” Ashley Hammond teaches art part-time to children—only she doesn’t like kids and isn’t a very good artist. Married at twenty-one when she didn’t know what else to do, and didn’t even know herself, she’s now thirty-five and having a mid-life crisis—only, as fourteen-year-old Justin reminds her, thirty-five isn’t even mid-life anymore. What’s Ashley to do? She’s missed her exit, has lost her map and is truly lost. And there’s no sense asking for her husband to help with the directions. The answer will definitely not be found in Alden, an education reporter for The Washington Post, whose “huge f—ing hypocrite” liberal heart bleeds for strangers while his eyes are blind to the failure of his own family. So what is she to do to get back on track? Unfortunately, Ashley does not have much of an opportunity to find out, for shortly after her husband hires a mentally ill man to do yard work for the family, her life is violently ended—and the rest is media history. What happens after Ashley is, of course, the heart of Gina Gionfriddo’s clever, incisive and poignantly provocative play.

After Ashley’s pre-life began for Gionfriddo in the summer after the September 11 tragedies. “I was interested in the way different people grieved,” she states, “in who expressed feelings publicly and who shunned the spotlight. I didn’t feel strongly that one response was right and the other wrong. I was more preoccupied by the ‘why’ of it all—why is public disclosure therapeutic for one person and appalling to another?” Admittedly, much of America—millions of us—are glued to the media spotlight. Celebrity stature is now assuredly afforded to victims of tragedy; we watch their private grief produced publicly 24 hours a day. “If Larry King wants you to be on his show,” Gionfriddo queries, “would you rise to the occasion?”

In the midst of these sociological issues lies a deeper, fundamental question about family. At the moment when the media machine turns its focus onto a broken family in crisis, how can they grieve? How will they heal? When in Gionfriddo’s heightened reality of After Ashley, talk show host David Gavin shines the spotlight on Alden, now best-selling author of his book by the same title, its glare drives even further wedges between father and son, now the celebrated “911 Kid,” as they struggle over control of Ashley’s enduring legacy. According to David Gavin, Alden Hammond has transformed his enormous pain into a best-selling “book of great beauty and power”—and now it’s Justin’s turn to step up to the media plate.

“Certainly, one of the major questions is: How do you grieve?” posits Gionfriddo. “Justin equates recovering from his mom’s death with diminishing her and forgetting her. So he refuses to do it. He feels like being happy without her is disloyal, an assertion that she was dispensable. I was interested in that conundrum.” Given the obstacles—namely David, recently promoted to producer in charge of crime programming, and Alden, who compromises his journalistic integrity to be show host for gritty reenactments of sex-crimes for his persuasive new boss—Justin’s path towards happiness looks pretty grim. After all, they have decided to name the TV series, yes, After Ashley. “It often seems like TV crime shows are getting steadily more lurid and perverse,” asserts Gionfriddo. “It’s less about what makes us violent than what we do in the face of it. Reenactments interest me because they acknowledge entertainment value in violent crime, which is a weird, complicated idea for me.”

After Ashley, Ashley’s House, Ashley’s Angels. It’s not easy for Justin to have his mother made into a bestseller, a network hit, a Canyon Ranch of women’s shelters and a vigilante group of patrolling do-gooders. Particularly when mom might not have been such an angel to begin with. So what’s a son to do? What will happen because of—and after—these After Ashleys? While, according to Justin, he has “no f—ing idea,” this may be the best place to be in, a righteous rebel with a cause—to learn that to love may mean letting go and that to keep alive may mean letting die.

— Liz Engelman

GINA GIONFRIDDO
“My plays generally begin with ‘what if?’ equations,” says playwright Gina Gionfriddo. “I like to dive into situations where moral and ethical questions hover, ready to be battled out.” In After Ashley, complex moral dilemmas are shot back and forth like ping-pong balls—How should victims and violence be treated in the media? How should we grieve? When does philanthropy become destructive? But Gionfriddo isn’t interested in any conundrums she has answers for: “That would feel pedantic and dead. I want to answer the questions for myself along with the characters.”

Much of Gionfriddo’s interest in ethical quandaries pops out of the crime stories in today’s headlines and magazines, an interest she developed as a teenager. She began reading true crime novels in high school and admits she still picks one up on the occasional long train ride, but her tastes have always been very specific: “I’m particularly drawn to the normal-appearing-people-who-snap stories. Murders within families. Serial killers, I believe, are biologically determined. They don’t interest me as much as people who, in otherwise functional lives, lose it.” But again, simple solutions don’t keep the attention of Gionfriddo’s curious imagination: “I’m most obsessed by cases in which I’m not sure what happened and every way I turn it over in my mind it doesn’t make sense.” For instance, she remains captivated by real life cases such as Jeffery MacDonald’s or Darlie Routier’s—parents in prison for murdering their children, both of whom claim to be innocent. “I’m sort of fixated on those because either scenario is virtually impossible to fathom,” she says. “Either they did it, or they didn’t and they’ve lost their lives to prison for crimes they didn’t commit.” Likewise, many of Gionfriddo’s plays center around crimes and the intricate ways in which people grapple with them. After Ashley’s Alden writes a best-selling book after his wife has been murdered, the characters in U.S. Drag are haunted yet attracted to the presence of a mysterious serial killer named Ed. and Guinevere focuses on an actress who has killed a child in a drunk-driving accident.

Despite the gravity of her plays’ subject matter, Gionfriddo feels uncomfortable wading through heavy tragedy: “I’m that horrible person who doesn’t feel terribly moved by Long Day’s Journey into Night.” Having lived in New York during a time when the AIDS crisis was a recurring topic in the American theatre, Gionfriddo became frustrated with the subject, believing it was only being treated with a morose seriousness that stifled honest exploration. Then she saw Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz: “I felt that Paula’s absurdity unlocked feeling in me in a way that straight drama didn’t.” Similarly, Gionfriddo’s plays crackle with hilariously scathing wit, illuminating the absurdities that arise out of real world situations—from two materialistic young women making a fortune by becoming victims of assault, to a young man witnessing his pot-smoking, foul-mouthed mother become an angelic symbol after her death."

Ironically, a ludicrous acting experience was the genesis of Gionfriddo’s interest in playwriting. In a college acting class, a professor lined up Gionfriddo and her classmates and told them what kinds of roles they would be considered for in the professional theatre. As if this were not distasteful enough, the students were only allowed to study scenes that fit their predetermined type. “I couldn’t find a lot of good material to work on,” says Gionfriddo. “I began composing in my head the scenes I’d like to play.” Gionfriddo’s shift from actress to playwright has paid off in spades. She is a recipient of the Susan Smith Blackburn prize and the Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights. Her work has been produced in New York at Clubbed Thumb; and she has also been seen at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference and A Contemporary Theatre’s Women Playwrights Festival. As she furthers her successful career, Gionfriddo continues to search out more “what ifs”—more questions and more dilemmas to put onstage in a way that casts a new, strange light on our reality. “In my plays, we’re not on Mars,” says Gionfriddo, “but we’re not in the world as we know it either.”

— Dan LeFranc