Welcome to Script Insights! Ever wonder what goes on in the mind of a playwright? In this series, you get a rare and exciting opportunity to hear directly from the authors themselves. Each article offers personal insights from the playwright, giving you a behind-the-scenes look at the creative process, character motivations, and thematic explorations that bring their scripts to life.
Below, you’ll find a downloadable blog post offering valuable insights directly from the author of Bowlarama. The downloaded PDF also includes supplemental classroom activities to help you connect the play’s themes and characters with your students.
Be sure to download this resource by clicking the button above!
Finding Light in the Gutter
Ryan Elliot Wilson
Bowlarama exists in the world of nostalgia fiction, film, and drama that when you look closer, you realize it’s okay to look forward and walk on. Set in 1999, it marks the end of something and the beginning of something else in life and in the world. Sure, there’s an arbitrariness to numbers and ages. Often these things are imposed on us whether we’re prepared and willing or not. And that’s so much of adolescence, feeling like you have to jump into some kind of performance space and deliver when really you just want to be growing, existing, doing nothing, hanging out, making stuff, exploring.
These kids in this Missouri small town have to deal with race, class, gender, religion, expectations—all while watching the decay of the place their parents and grandparents touted as a great place to live. That’s not what they see, watching their entire downtown of small businesses go belly up, watching the biggest employer in town shut its doors. But you have to grow up anyway. You need friends. You need love. You play the status game even if you hate it. It all feels like a big show sometimes, like some meaningless event that you have to find a way to imbue with meaning and purpose.
In someone’s eyes, there are always winners and losers. That’s fine. Walk on.
So for the actors, find ways to listen deeply to each other. Think about your own lives and consider all the times when you could tell someone was waiting to talk and not really listening to you. Sucks. Be the one to see not just the character, but the person, in your scene partner. Find the lightness within dark circumstances, because we all do that to make it okay. We’re good at it. We have to be.