That Time of Night

It’s tricky to combine the thoughts I had while writing this play with the experience of having it produced for the first time, since writing and production were two years apart. I wrote “That Time of Night,” in 2022. I remember wanting the quiet, loaded energy of a mystery that started at two o’clock in the morning and took place on mostly empty roads. That feeling was the most important thing to me. The dialogue would be largely bargaining and loose alliances, so for this script, the plot being clear to the audience mattered more than ever. People need to be 100% clear on what “the deal,” is before you can have your characters start changing the deal, making other deals, etc.

I also had to do some serious brain-digging before I decided on my title, and this title is one of my all time favorites.

My only other writing memory is that Tessy was the last character to be created for the play. I knew from the start who committed the murder between Nora, Rita or Jane, but I wanted a fourth character who could somehow already be involved with the play’s main scenario. The breakthrough came when I realized Nora could pick up a hitchhiker. What would make someone desperate enough to hitch a ride at 2 am? The audience would want to know and that curiosity would make things feel less abrupt when Tessy started lamenting and revealing her backstory, what she’d just escaped. The audience would hear where she came from, who she’d been with, and the plot would thicken.

So that was the writing of, “That Time of Night,” in terms of its main elements: Lonely dangerous energy, hard fought dealmaking, and a surprise fourth character that would sew all of the plots together. I finished the job and felt like I had finished a solid noir.

A year later, I condensed the play’s 25 pages into twenty and submitted it for the 2023 Crashbox Festival at EFCT! The script wasn’t chosen to be performed live at their noir themed show, but it left enough of an impression for them to reach out about having it featured on their Half Hour Audio Hour. I wasn’t able to listen in on any rehearsals- I was still in rehearsals for Great Lakes Theater’s “Murder on the Orient Express,” at the time and we were at the dawn of tech week. So when I did listen to the finished recording, it made the performance a complete surprise. I had a ball. The fierce negotiating, the desperation, the cutting toughness, they were all there in the performances of these four characters and it made me remember why writing this script was important to me:

It’s about the determination that carries you even when there’s no hope. I don’t want to speak for anyone else besides me, but I’m willing to bet that most of us feel like a fish on land and we don’t know how many thrashes we have left. “That Time of Night,'“ is about the lonely ownership of that. A stylish, snappy, satisfying mystery, but still also a story about the things that make us cry when we’re not expecting to cry.

”Stay up this late and you start to feel like you’re all that’s left in the world.”