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 Techies. The downloaded PDF also includes supplemental classroom activities to help you connect the play’s themes and characters with your students.
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On the Origins of Techies: A Note from the Playwright
Mark Rigney
That Techies has an oddball opening will be apparent to any reader or viewer within moments. A sort of custodial stage manager holds court, with the explicit task of introducing the audience to the play and to the space, but other characters keep interrupting. This stop-and-go, direct address approach is the opposite of immersive, sit-back-and-relax theatre.
My intention here is to remind us all––readers, cast, crew, and audience––that Techies deals in live performance. Unlike the hermetic, packaged pleasures of the silver screen and streaming television, a live experience carries a whiff of permissible danger. Actors may go up on their lines; sound cues may fail to appear. Simply attending the theater amounts to an act of faith, one where we hope to be transported, and on a good night, that’s exactly what happens.
But there’s also a voyeuristic lure: the show could all fall apart at any moment. That’s true on several levels with Techies, a play built around the moments when both life and performance go off the rails.
Unlike the stage manager from Our Town, the custodian who welcomes us to Techies returns only in character, and never again as a break-the-fourth-wall narrator. Essentially, I’m looking to have my cake and eat it, too: while overtly announcing that this is a play, an artificial and carefully built construct, I then want to seduce any given audience into slipping seamlessly into the story, and to do that, I can’t afford any additional interruptions.
This overtly presentational opening hopefully serves a second purpose, in that it presages the play-within-the-play (The Crucible) embedded in Act Two. Based on the janitor’s janky welcome, what should we expect from this internal production? Chaos, that’s what.
And that’s exactly what we get. In real life, custodial staff are the very definition of what goes on behind the scenes, so my unlikely opener is designed to prep the audience, to get them ready not for an actual production of The Crucible, but for a behind-the-curtain peek at how that show might be mounted. Techies, then, is a play where we get to see how the sausage gets made.
If all that seems hopelessly meta, trust me: there’s a human story that grounds the rest, and everything I just wrote about here is only included, ultimately, to serve that central tale. What really happened between Tyler and his now ex-girlfriend? Why did Haley transfer into this school? And once the accusations start flying, who, exactly, should be believed?
On with the show!