Airswimming: Notes From the Playwright

Playwright Charlotte Jones has published two different sets of author's notes for Airswimming, one from the original production in 2004 and one for the more recently published edition of the script from Samuel French. Both offer some interesting insight into the creation of the play. 

In 2004: 

"I always start with an image. With Airswimming I saw a woman trying to trepan herself with a hand whisk. I happened to read a book about the injustices committed against the mentally ill: “A Miss Kitson and a Miss Baker were placed in a Hospital for the Criminally Insane in the 1920s for bearing illegitimate children and not released until the 1970s.” That was the line that started me writing. There was something terribly moving to me in hearing their names – genteel English names, the names of posh girls who should be coming out into society, not being incarcerated for being out of wedlock. Those names with the dismissive and distancing ‘a’ before them – ‘a Miss Kitson and a Miss Baker’ reading those names was the trigger to wanting to write their story. A story about bad girls trying to be good – a world where it seemed inevitable to me that Doris Day should become the patron saint of all that is wholesome and perfect and feminine.” 

Ms. Jones goes on to say that when writing she starts with the title and then writes the story. About the title of Airswimming she says “[i]t expressed perfectly to me the emancipation that the two women find in each other in a world where they are denied the simple act of coming up for air – and yet still they swim!”

In the recent edition: 

"Airswimming is a comedy about despair. It was inspired by the various true stories of women who were placed in mental institutions in the 1920s because they had given birth to illegitimate children, or for other spurious reasons such as they were deaf, lesbian, or merely "atypical." Some of these women were not released until the 1970s when a lot of the Victorian mental institutions closed down as the great age of pharmacology had dawned. It is a meditation on stasis, on being stuck in a hopeless situation and the salvation that is to be found only in friendship.

The dance and song elements are crucial to the sense of joy that the play can bring in performance. DORA and PERSEPHONE find each other and remain essentially free even though they are incarcerated because of the pleasure and solace they find in each other’s company. As Viktor Frankl wrote so movingly in his book Man’s Search for Meaning: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” DORA and PERSEPHONE manage to save each other and
transform into DORPH and PORPH in order to survive."

Airswimming: Meet the Playwright

Charlotte Jones is a British playwright who was born June 2, 1968. Her first play Airswimming debuted in 1997 at the Battersea Arts Centre in London. She won the Critics’ Circle Most Promising Playwright award in 1999 for In Flame and Martha, Josie and the Chinese Elvis. Her fourth stage play Humble Boy premiered at the National Theatre in 2001, and was awarded the Critics’ Circle Best New Play Award, the People’s Choice Best New Play Award and was nominated for an Olivier award. It transferred to the West End and ran for nine months before opening at the Manhattan Theatre club in New York and being nominated for a Drama desk award. Humble Boy also garnered Ms. Jones the 2001 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize established in 1978, is for English-language women playwrights. In 2004 her play The Dark premiered at the Donmar Warehouse in London. Ms. Jones also wrote the book to the 2004-2006 West End musical, The Woman in White, in collaboration with David Zippel and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Ms. Jones also writes extensively for TV, radio and film.

Airswimming: Meet the Cast

Meet the two women who will be bringing the semi-true story of Airswimming to life this August: 

Katie Anderson (Persephone/Porph) Katie Anderson is so excited to be back at Dragon Theatre again! It's been 6 years since she's been onstage, and she hopes she remembers how to do it! She took a break from theatre to get her master's degree in education and currently teaches kindergarten at Eaton Elementary in Cupertino. In her most recent show, she played Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire at Dragon Theatre with Meredith Hagedorn as Blanche. Years ago, she had the pleasure of sharing the stage with Annamarie MacLeod in And Baby Makes Seven with Theatre Q. It’s been a dream come true reuniting with these wonderful women! At the Dragon, she’s played the Governess in The Turn of the Screw, Soos in The Country Club, and Rosie in Humble Boy (also by Charlotte Jones.) She’s worked at the Pear Theatre as Harper in Angels in America, Emily in Our Town, and Sorel in Hay Fever. At City Lights Theatre, she played Poppy in Noises Off, Georgie in The Full Monty, and Emily Cratchit in A Christmas Twist. She would like to dedicate this show to Shirley Soignet, her grandmother, who fought fearlessly through issues of mental health before modern treatment was available. 

Annamarie MacLeod (Dora/Dorph) is delighted to be back with Dragon Productions, having performed with them in Chekov in Yalta - her Bay Area debut! Regional credits include the Arabian Shakespeare Festival, with which she is an Artistic Associate (Jihad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes, Othello); the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival (Henry V); Pacific Repertory Theatre (Much Ado About Nothing); the New Conservatory Theatre Center (Tennessee in the Summer; Regrets Only); the Pear Ave Theatre (Northanger Abbey; The Way of the World); and theatre Q (And Baby Makes 7) in which she first enjoyed performing with Ms. Anderson. Ms. MacLeod trained in NYC at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy and in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She is a proud member of Theatre Bay Area.