Wethersfield’s Christopher Shinn Turns To Home For ‘Opening In Time’ At Hartford Stage

Christopher Shinn sits on a park bench on the long narrow green of Old Wethersfield, surrounded by large lush lawns, historic homes and an atmosphere of small-town serenity, just a short walk from where he grew up.

“Home is the place where your first experiences are,” says the Hartford-born Shinn, “but [as a child] you don’t know what it is. You just soak it all in. You don’t have context. You don’t know how big the world is.”

For his latest play, “An Opening In Time,” which has opened for its world premiere at Hartford Stage and is set in his hometown, Shinn, 40, has found that personal and professional context and has returned home, both literally and figuratively. It’s all the more meaningful following a devastating blow in 2012 — a cancer diagnosis.

When he was receiving intensive chemotherapy during the past few years, he says: “I was thinking about how many writers I love write about their childhood and those landscapes and how that’s very powerful, very universal,” he says. “And I realized I’d never done it.”

His first play, “Four,” written when he was 20 and produced by London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1998, had echoes of Hartford and its suburbs, but “Opening” he says, has a more specific sense of place and home.

There’s the town pizza parlor, a diner that was one of his teen hangouts, a neighborhood not unlike his own — mixed with feelings of loss and regret and dark underpinnings.

“The play is largely about two people looking back at a relationship that never took off,” he says during a recent visit to the area at the start of rehearsals “and 30 years later they are measuring where they are.”

“An Opening In Time” centers on Anne, a woman in her 60s whose husband has recently died and who moves back to a town she lived in with the hope — or “a wish,” as Shinn says — to reconnect with the man from her past. “Now both of them are at a place where a relationship could happen. The question of the play is will they take that opportunity as other things get in their way?”

Making Choices

Shinn’s writing often revolves around his characters making choices — or not — in such plays as “What Didn’t Happen,” “Now or Later” or “Dying City,” which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and was produced in 2009 at Hartford Stage, following its Lincoln Center run.

Among other plays by Shinn, who has an Obie Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, are “Other People,” “The Coming World,” “Where Do We Live,” “Picked,” “On the Mountain” and an adaptation of “Hedda Gabler,” which premiered on Broadway in 2009 with Mary-Louise Parker.

“Sometimes an absence of a choice is a choice,” says Elizabeth Williamson, associate artistic director of Hartford Stage, who early this year brought Shinn’s new play to Artistic Director Darko Tresnjak’s attention for inclusion in the season. “Chris writes with such brilliant acuity as he tracks his characters’ psychological states. This is not a young playwright’s work about the discovery of the way people are. This is the voice of a mature playwright.”

Shinn smiles on hearing this. “I remember a guy who runs a theater who said to me, ‘Your characters don’t do anything.’ Well, that’s true to life but it is dramatic, too. And I’m not the first playwright to do that,” he says, citing Anton Chekhov as an example. “Those type of plays always appealed to me because they were true to life and I’ve always wanted to tell the truth as I experienced it.”

Some of the truths include the darker side of life, and in writing “An Opening In Time,” Shinn remembered some of the more disturbing elements of seemingly safe suburbia, notably the murder of a gay man in the ’80s that left a profound impression on him as a gay boy. (“It haunted my childhood.”) Other murders and troubling incidents in the area — “I read the local news and follow the happenings of the town almost as if I still lived here” — also informed the atmosphere of his new play.

“It got me thinking about the reality of people’s lives — and the world as it is, in this area,” he says. “Nothing that extreme is depicted in the play, but that kind of spirit of lingering and latent violence is present. I wanted to be sure there is not an idealization of the town. I guess I wanted to tell the truth about where I grew up.”

Growing Up

As a boy, “I was consumed about what was happening inside me,” he says. “My mom told me they thought I was ‘slow’ because I would just sit and just stare at a plant or something, but I think I was just having thoughts, enamored with what was happening in my little mind.”

Shinn, whose father was an investment manager and whose mother worked in the school system, went to public schools in Wethersfield and at the Greater Hartford Academy for the Arts. Twice winning a statewide student playwriting contest sponsored by the Oddfellows Playhouse in Middletown gave Shinn the opening to explore writing about his deep private feelings, of which there were many during his high school years as he struggled with his secret sexuality, loneliness, bouts with weight and alcohol issues and thoughts of suicide, until therapy “saved my life.”

After high school, he enrolled in the dramatic writing program at NYU but soon found the atmosphere “conformist, oppressive and middlebrow.” Shinn switched his attention to playwriting and found solace in an undergraduate course taught by Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of “Angels in America.” Despite Kushner’s encouragement, none of Shinn’s college pieces — including “Four,” about of quartet of lonely people, including a gay teen, finding human connections — received a production or even a reading at NYU.

Shinn switched to Columbia University for grad school and found a more intellectually stimulating and welcoming environment.

After his first year at Columbia, Shinn, on an impulse, mailed “Four” blindly to the Royal Court in London, where his professional playwriting career was launched — and is steadily supported there with more than half of his plays receiving world premieres there. His last play, “Teddy Ferrara,” is receiving its London premiere at the prestigious Donmar Warehouse, and directed by Dominic Cooke, at the same time that “An Opening in Time” is running in Hartford.

Health Issues

Shinn began “An Opening In Time” at a time when he was experiencing major health issues that he thought could claim his life. In late 2012, just as “Teddy Ferrara” was to start rehearsals at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, he was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare, aggressive form of bone cancer, which prevented him from traveling and participating in rehearsals — or seeing the production.

The disease at the age of 37 necessitated a below-the-knee amputation and many cycles of chemotherapy, including clinical trials last year with a new drug.

Writing “An Opening In Time” about an older woman whose husband had died was a “way of distancing myself from what I was going through.”

And, no, he says, the play is not about his widowed mother, who is now in her late 60s.

“I think I was thinking of myself. I couldn’t do much but think about myself all the time. But I didn’t want to write an ‘illness’ play. My oncologist said, ‘Don’t write about this. It’s been done. There are enough plays about having cancer.’ And I said, ‘You don’t have to worry about me. I don’t want to write about this.’ I wanted to escape what I had. But maybe it’s a paradox writing a play set in my hometown because it’s not escaping myself at all.”

In re-envisioning his hometown and Hartford, he remembered how much his father, who died of leukemia when Shinn was 26, “loved Hartford and would often take me driving through it so I would get to see the city. As a teenager I would drive myself all over Hartford in my car, too, go to Celtics and Whalers games, shows at Hartford Stage. For me Hartford and Wethersfield were part of the same landscape, not just geographically, but emotionally, too. They’re very different, obviously, but I always saw them as very interconnected.”

His new play features a young Hartford character who enters Anne’s life and plays a significant role.

As he was formulating “An Opening In Time,” Shinn was thinking about the plays of some of his favorite writers, including Shakespeare, written late in their careers. (A line of King Leontes’ from “The Winter’s Tale” opens Shinn’s script: “Come and lead me unto these sorrows.”)

“It’s such a simple play on some level,” he says. “It’s really about regret and choices: What do you do when you come to regret a choice you made? I also wondered how things could have gone differently in many of my relationships and certainly during the period of my illness.”

During his illness, he and his fiance split. He also reached out to others.

“I wouldn’t say there was an overwhelming spiritual awakening that led me to reconnect with people,” he says, “but there were some instances where I felt much more forgiveness and tenderness toward people I felt anger at. Right before I got sick, I also began a correspondence with a guy I went to high school with, someone I admired and thought was immensely deep. I always wondered what happened to him and I guess something at that time made me nostalgic and I reached out to him. He wrote back and we began an irregular but meaningful correspondence.”

Part of that experience is where he got the idea of a character hoping to reconnect with someone from the past.

What was Shinn looking for in his real-life connection with a figure from the past?

“I think I was looking for continuity,” he says. “And memories that could be recovered and reflected. This person witnessed me in the years that were so powerful. I think I was looking for a shared memory.”

Future Projects

As for projects beyond “An Opening In Time” and his revised version of “Teddy Ferrara,” Shinn says his mind is on themes that “people have been writing about forever. I really want to write a play about love. For so many writers I admire, that is the theme they landed on in the end. Not that I’m saying it’s the end, but given everything I’ve been through, going to those simple and primal themes is still so very present. Yes, a play about love.” There’s another commission in the wings as well as a musical he’s working on.

Shinn says he is also stepping down as head of the playwriting program at New York’s New School of Drama, but will continue teaching there. As to his health, Shinn says the experimental drug he was taking is now unavailable because the Food and Drug Administration, based on health violations, shut down the pharmacy where the medicine was manufactured. “So, basically, everything, including the treatment, is in a suspended state.”

But he says he’s been well for a while, feels great “and am very optimistic. If I’ve learned anything over the last three years, it’s you never know what’s going to happen to you. I just try to remember that. I try to balance my optimism with the recognition that you don’t know what life is going to throw at you and whatever it does, you have to be ready.”

“AN OPENING IN TIME” plays at Hartford Stage, 50 Church St., Hartford, through Oct. 11. Information: hartfordstage.org and 860-527-5151.