Ever wonder what goes on in the mind of a playwright?
Our Author Insights series features personal essays from playwrights, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the ideas and experiences that shaped their work.
Below, read “Seeing and Being Seen: Reflections from the Author of Sightings.” You can also download a free PDF that pairs the essay with short, classroom-ready activities for students.
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Seeing and Being Seen: Reflections from the Author of Sightings
Mona Z. Smith
It’s March 1983, and on an eerily quiet night in a city park, three high school seniors get the shock of their lives when they witness something in the night sky that they can't explain. The three students usually run in very different crowds at school. Now they are bound together by this unsettling mystery, and the three of them must decide what to do about it. A secret pact, a painful struggle, and a shattering betrayal could jeopardize each teen’s hopes for the future.
The teens in my play Sightings are fictional, but their story is set against a very real backdrop of social and political tension in our country in the early 1980s – and also at the beginning of what would become one of the most famous waves of unexplained phenomena ever documented.
Between 1983 and 1986, mysterious configurations of bright lights appeared in the night skies near the Hudson River between Albany and New York City – the region I now call home. Amazingly, more than 10,000 people reported these UFO sightings, including police officers, business owners, elected officials, scientists, amateur astronomers, teachers, parents, and teenagers. Before I wrote the play, I interviewed some of these folks, and I read hundreds of the reports they filed. One of the very first sightings was by a teenager who happened to have a camera, thanks to his part-time job taking photos for the local newspaper. His short, factual, and fairly terrifying account of his sighting inspired one of my characters and the play’s first scene.
Many of the people who saw those lights refused to talk about their experiences, and we can hardly blame them. The world was very different in the 1980s, and the idea of UFOs and extraterrestrial life was considered outlandish – kooky, fringe, totally-out-there kind of stuff. If you tried to talk seriously about UFOs and aliens from outer space, you risked ridicule or worse. Today, there are documentaries on Netflix where scientists, pilots, military officers, astronauts and others talk about very openly about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. ET is mainstream!
What was out there? How could people see the same patterns of lights thousands of times over three whole years? That question definitely helped to spark the play you are about to see. But at its heart, Sightings is a coming-of-age play about friendship and belonging – about seeing and being seen. It’s also about learning to listen, to trust, and to hold space for each other even if we don’t always agree about something we have heard, read, or seen. This is something I deeply care about – as an artist, a parent, and a human being.