Saturday
June 29, 2024 
A playwright creates a world in their mind. Later an audience lives in the world the playwright created and feels what the playwright wanted them to feel and draws the conclusions the playwright wanted them to draw. Hopefully.
And to bridge the gap between the page and the stage requires someone who will assist in the journey from the read to the seen and heard, a translator to deliver the playwright’s world from whole cloth to the receptive audience. Griffin Horn’s work is to be that translator.
Griffin was raised in Solebury and graduated from New Hope-Solebury High School, where he was a member of Mask and Zany Theater Club. He participated in after school programs at McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, N.J., where he also started writing plays.
He remembers his premier performance as an actor was on the stage at Doylestown Presbyterian Church in a play about Noah’s Ark.
At 17, he wrote his first play, “Auto de Fe,” about censorship and school board politics, from the teen point of view.
He got his undergraduate degree at Kenyon College, where he acted, wrote, directed and even got the chance to be a dramaturg, which involves providing the cast and crew with vital research and knowledge about the theatrical work to be presented.
After that, he completed a Master of Fine Arts in Playwriting at Temple University and his play, “Our Hopeful Anxious Hearts,” received a professional reading last year at PlayPenn in Philadelphia.
Griffin is currently directing “The Half of It” by Domenick Scudera, chosen this year as the Premiere Showcase at Phillips’ Mill on River Road in New Hope. Each year, the Drama Committee stages an original, fully developed, never-before-performed play to be produced on the Mill stage by an up-and-coming playwright.
“The Half of It” was inspired by the life and work of Bert Savoy, a vaudeville drag artist who was active in the 1910s and early 1920s.
Scudera first became interested in Savoy’s life when he was doing research for a class he teaches about the history of drag performance at Ursinus College. The play highlights the groundbreaking and inspirational work of Savoy while shining a light on the origins of contemporary drag performance and the LGBTQ+ community in the early part of the century.
Now Griffin Horn is tasked with sharing Scudera’s vision with an audience in a way that will be informative and entertaining. That’s a very tall order, but one that Griffin is very excited about.
“‘The Half of It’ is a memory play,” he says, “and so whenever I read it, I ask myself why the audience wants to go back in time. What can we recover?” Griffin says he keeps coming back to the idea of “lost futures,” which he interprets as “all the futures that people expected, but that never arrived,” a theme we all experience sooner or later, especially as we age.
“New play development has taken a big hit since the pandemic,” Griffin has observed. “Companies which served as incubators for new plays have had to fold or drastically reduce their programming. The fact that Phillips’ Mill and their audiences are stepping up and making space for new plays and new playwrights is a genuine act of courage, and I’m very happy to be a part of it.”
I asked Griffin about the working relationship he has with Domenick Scudera. “Most playwrights spend the production process giving up their agency as the production builds out the script, but the practice in new play development directing right now is to try to make sure the playwright’s agency is respected. When Domenick weighed in on casting, it was my job to follow up on his needs and honor his agency.”
“The Half of It” at Phillips’ Mill Theater will run July 18, 19, 20 at 7 p.m. and July 21 at 3 p.m. Tickets can be purchased on the website.
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