Swimming After Dark

Winner of the 2005 Kennedy Center’s American College Theatre Region I 1×2 competition, Swimming After Dark is the story of a mother and a daughter, a writer and her work, authorship, ownership, love, and literature. On a day in 1984, one-hit wonder author Claudia Stevens-Keller committed suicide while her nine-year-old daughter Bronte was asleep upstairs. In 2004, Bronte’s ex-boyfriend and literary scholar, James, shows up on the eve before she’s moving away from her Virginia farmhouse, bringing with him a startling discovery about her mother’s literary past. Alternating between the past and the present, Bronte and James attempt to piece together what might have happened while Claudia plays out what actually happened on her final evening.

Penned by up and coming Boston playwright Emily Dendinger, Swimming After Dark is not the first work seen in the area by the young writer. Dendinger’s ten-minute play premiered at the Boston Ten Minute Play Marathon this spring, and she has already become a regular at the Kennedy Center’s American College Theatre Festival in previous years. Her ten-minute play The Kiss was seen in the 2004 5×10 regional competition, and last spring the recent college graduate won the Kennedy Center’s National Selection Team Fellowship, spending a week at the national festival in Washington, D.C. In addition to having productions in the Boston area, her one act play Family Tree was named the Senior Theatre League’s Best New Play 2004, and is currently published by Dramatic Publishing.

Appropriate for all ages.