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 “The Beating Heart: How Grief Gave The Spellbinders Its Magic”, where writer Chris Monaco reflects on The Spellbinders. You can also download a free PDF that pairs the essay with short, classroom-ready activities for students.
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The Beating Heart: How Grief Gave The Spellbinders Its Magic
Chris Monaco
The Spellbinders was developed across an expansive period – every reading, workshop, and production was an invaluable stepping stone to get the play to its current form. Its origins are simple: in the midst of the Covid-19 Pandemic, I dreamed up a play that would be set in a magic school, be ensemble-oriented and featuring a cast in which every character feels important to the story, and be a mash-up of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians and Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.
The first draft of The Spellbinders was written while I was eyeing potential shows for my high school to produce. It was written as a response to the dearth of shows out there that speak to this generation of high schoolers, that feel relevant to the issues that they grapple with today. While this is a magic school, the students at Prosper Elite Academy for Spellbinding deal with many of the same difficulties that any young person in this day and age might encounter: Anxiety. Depression. Exploration of gender identity and sexual orientation. Feeling defeated by a system that was not created for them.
He is so tied to the play, now, but Ash did not exist in the play to begin with. He was born from a desire to flesh out Maisie, who was initially too much of an enigma. The day Ash was born was the day the play found its beating heart: it became a play about love, loss, and grief, and it transformed Maisie and her classmates entirely. It created the question “who are we without our memories? Who shapes us? Who do we become when those people are taken from us?”
Early workshops were met with questions of the play’s viability due to the magical elements. Funny enough, every production I have been involved with has been, in essence, a black box production. The play pays homage to The Tempest several times; and just as audiences in Shakespeare’s time were content to just believe that Prospero was conjuring storms and enchantments with his staff, so, too, have audiences believed in the power of these Spellbinders with little more than cool lights and savvy sound design.
I have returned to these Spellbinders over and again because they are, at the core, resilient, brave, silly, flawed, and deeply human people who are seeking to find their place in an increasingly cruel world. I hope you will find as much solace in them as I have.
