A writing project that Francis Gercke began near the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic in a “sense of desperation” has become Francis Gercke’s second play “The Dark Heart of Dooley Stevens.”
Gercke recalled that the play came into being after his wife Jessica John told him to “Just write something fun and don’t worry about where it’s going. Just surprise me.”
Surprise! “The Dark Heart of Dooley Stevens” is ready for its world premiere. It’s a tale, Gercke said, “of a couple that is trying to work out their differences in the middle of a desert where lots of magical and potentially mystical things are happening all around them. I tend to see life that way, that there’s magic everywhere you turn.”
The play is making its world premiere this weekend with Backyard Renaissance Theatre, a company Gercke and John co-founded in (year) with Anthony Methvin. Backyard also presented Gercke’s first play, “The October Night of Johnny Zero,” in 2022.
John is playing one half of the couple in “Dark Heart.” MJ Sieber is the other, the title character Dooley Stevens.
“Her name is Cindy,” John said of her character. “She’s hiding out in a trailer in the desert when Dooley comes roaring up on his motorcycle and tries to bust in. MJ and I are having a beautiful experience with it, but it’s going to be a wild ride for people. Not what they expect of a male and female character.”
Gercke had John in mind for the character of Cindy from the beginning, saying: “It was nice to know that I had half the play cast already.”
“One of the things about Jessica,” he said, “is she has this sense of adventure, this sense of daring. The burden I place upon a director or actors is that they have to be willing to turn on a dime, they have to be willing to be vulnerable and that means they are not necessarily going to be the heroine or the hero.”
Up to that challenge, John acknowledged her preference for “playing women that nobody wants to play.”
In “Johnny Zero,” she portrayed a drunken, mean-spirited mother. “I love playing characters that seem tough on the outside but have so many complicated emotional issues on the inside that are festering,” she said.
In conceptualizing “The Dark Heart of Dooley Stevens,” Gercke found inspiration in the plays of John Patrick Shanley, whom he said “tends to write about people who get slammed together cosmically,” but also from his own childhood growing up in South Jersey, from “people I’ve known my entire life and they pick a moment to start talking inside my head.”
“I guess this is a product of me missing a lot of the people I hung with in high school and people I was surrounded by,” Gercke said.
“Dark Heart” also reunites John and Sieber, who played lovers in Backyard Renaissance’s production of Martin McDonagh’s “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” last year and a married couple in the company’s uproarious staging of Yasmin Reza’s “God of Carnage” in 2023. John said the two have developed a chemistry, or “shorthand,” as she called it.
“When we find that shorthand, it’s a beautiful thing,” she said, “particularly when you’re going into a new work. We can keep working on the play. We don’t have to try to get know the other actor.”
“The Dark Heart of Dooley Stevens” is being directed by Hannah Meade, whom to Gercke and John’s delight, is occupying that role for the first time at Backyard after having been associate or assistant director on three previous productions there.
‘The Dark Heart of Dooley Stevens’
When: Opens Saturday and runs through March 15. 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays; 3 p.m. Sundays
Where: Backyard Renaissance Theatre at the Tenth Avenue Arts Center, 930 Tenth Ave., downtown
Tickets: $15-$50
Phone: 760-975-7189
Online: backyardrenaissance.com
