Jimmy Hall

For the Leader

There was no screen. No set. No director. Just six actors and a narrator with scripts in hand, a screenwriter, an audience and the helpful reminder to silence all cellphones before the plot played out.

Through the next two hours, from the introductory description that set the scene by narrator Nancy Boysen, 10 spectators listened to a reading of “The Winter Bird,” a screenplay written by Stephen Delos Treacy, on Nov. 10 at the Charles Pink House.

“If your mind begins to drift, that’s OK,” Treacy told the audience just before starting. “Just pretend you’re in a movie.”

Roles were divvied up before the reading began, and it was rehearsed in advance so the cast could get more familiar with the plot and characters. David Wayne Johnson read the main character of Peter Seacliff. He was supported largely throughout the reading by Sean Boyle, played by Austin Krieg. Michelle Hensel read the part of Thiera, while Consuelo Aduviso Brennan read Officer Killbear’s lines, a part she was familiar with because she’s previously performed it on stage. David Harry Schroeder was Alfred Pettibone, and Kristin Wolfram played the part of Evelyn Finch.

Dubbed as an “Alaskan Gothic Thriller,” the screenplay logline reads as, “A former physician, remorseful over his wife’s assisted suicide, buries himself in library work where he meets a blond, sub-arctic entity. When she disappears suddenly, a wacky science student helps him to find her and, hopefully, to survive the encounter.”

After the reading, which included an intermission to allow the cast and audience a break, the audience posed questions to Treacy about the intent of a few plot points. One audience member said the plot would have made for a serial radio play, since it was rich with description from the narrator.

“This was the best reading I heard of it,” Treacy said, complimenting the talent of the cast.

The afternoon’s actors were recruited from his past experiences with producing plays in the area, one having previous experience on stage in producing the play in Seattle. Treacy said he is pushing to get it produced as a film in Hollywood, but if that fails, he will approach Seattle film circles to search for funding.

Although awarded as the Best Horror Screenplay from the Los Angeles Film Awards, Treacy said he looked at it as a thriller, mystery or fantasy, and many audience members agreed.  

The screenplay also won the 2017 Silver Scream Festival Ackerman Imagi-Movies Screenplay Award.

The event was coordinated by the Port Townsend Playwriting Readthrough Meetup, a group that gathers monthly and invites fellow writers and those interested in the creative process of bringing a stage production together in script form.

“The purpose of it is so playwrights can hear their work being read aloud,” group leader Moss McGill said.

The difference between the reading of “The Winter Bird” and other occasions the club has done is that they usually just go through snippets and scenes of the plays, rather than an entire finished work.

“We are gathering to hear read a play from beginning to end,” McGill said, adding that Treacy’s script is the first the group had read aloud in a live format.

It’s been a long road for Treacy to finish the screenplay. He started working on it more than 20 years ago as a stage play, finding life in that form in Seattle at the Eclectic Theater, where it placed in the top 10 of the theater’s grossing productions.

“I felt like I knew the characters, and they wouldn’t let me abandon them,” Treacy said. He added that the manager at the Eclectic Theater suggested producing it after a reading, using union actors for the stage form.

“I ended up converting it to a screenplay with moral support from the film school in Seattle,” Treacy said. “Once I had the screenplay in hand, I started shipping it out to film festivals. There were some that were specialized with judging scripts.”

Treacy said the inspiration came from his time living in Alaska, where the winter is long and dark. His work with a wildlife biologist gave him familiarity with owls, who have a prominent theme in the narrative.