The Right Room | Final Dress Rehearsal

Bradley Hughes & Kayce Kvacek
as Leif & Lucille Larsen

Last night an invited audience witnessed the final dress rehearsal for The Right Room. Today everyone is taking a well-deserved rest — or scurrying about taking care of last-minute details — before tomorrow's ticketed performances at the Crowne Plaza Playhouse Square, presented as part of the BorderLight Theatre Festival.

I cannot adequately express how happy I have been with this experience. The acting company is ideal, the members of production working in tandem, attending to every detail, calmly addressing every challenge, and it all came together so lovingly last night as the show progressed without a dropped moment.

When first proposed, the script ran about 75 minutes. As BorderLight conditions called for an hour max, it was necessary for me to lose a not insignificant number of pages. The result is a tight, streamlined piece which nonetheless lost none of those moment I most treasured. It's a better script. If I were to later expand it to, say, an eighty minute piece, I'm not sure I'd just put everything I've cut back in.

Having eight audience members in the room with us last night, it became apparent just how intimate this piece will be; how close the audience is to the actors, and they to the audience. This may sound obvious, but these audience members are right there in the room with the characters, just as the characters — those who cannot see each other — are with each other. It's such a fascinating dance!

Rachel Gold & Cole Tarantowski
as Fanny & Mason

The post-rehearsal response was positive and generous, and none more supportive than my spouse, my favorite critic (no, really, she's an actual critic) who provided me with some welcome and much appreciated perspective. The company should be confident they are doing great work, she let me know it's a great play.

And here we are. The festival is open, and tomorrow this wildly talented team of artists is going to present this play that I wrote, The Right Room, three times in the same evening, in an actual hotel room. And I have to remind myself this is also the story of a story, a story I have spent the greatest part of my long life believing would never told, that I never knew could exist, let alone that I could actually tell. And to tell it like this.

I don't actually wish my parents could see it. But I kind of wish they could see it.

BorderLight Theater Festival presents The Right Room, a new play by David Hansen and directed by Jasmine Renee, July 16 - 19, 2025