The poet Emily Dickinson was known for asking the big questions: pondering the nature of God, death, beauty, and the infinite. It turns out that Dr. Pepper–guzzling millennial teenagers in pajamas have a lot of the same lines of inquiry going.
Playing this weekend and next at Greenfinch Theater & Dive, the YoungLiars original production WILD NIGHTS: An Emily Dickinson Sleepover Play in Which we Hope to See the Face of God invites the audience to a raucous party with an improbable guest list.
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In 1997 Boston, Emily Dickinson, her sister Lavinia, and their sister-in-law Sue summon a clutch of teenagers for a sleepover. The kids arrive and quickly adjust to their unexpected hosts. The setup delivers the expected timeline-crossing hijinks and tasty ‘90s pop-culture references: a reclusive 19th-century poet versus a half-dozen Tamagotchis beeping their death throes is bound to tickle funny bones.
But the zany setup quickly becomes secondary to a luminous search for meaning and permanence, and the play goes deep without getting heavy-handed. There are still the Hot Boy Reports to get to between all the philosophy, after all.
“There’s a line that Emily recites in the play that is from her own poetry: ‘Infinitude, hadst thou no face that I might look on thee?’” says WILD NIGHTS playwright Courtney Bailey. “It’s a very unanswerable question. And I thought I’d answer it in a silly and millennial way by throwing a sleepover party.”
Emily hopes that the teenagers’ almost religiously mapped out, ritualistic approach to the rite of the sleepover (with sacred texts residing, naturally, in a Trapper Keeper) will give her a glimpse of the sublime. The teenagers just want to complete their weekly communion with each other, gossip, and name-brand snacks.
“They have this very sophisticated system for how they run their sleepover, and this is their sacred time,” Bailey says. Audiences won’t see it, but Bailey says the prop Trapper Keeper is filled with their incantations and artifacts.
The sleepover happens on not just any night in 1997. It’s August 31, and the teenagers arrive with the knowledge that Princess Diana has been gravely injured in Paris. Without smartphones, they’re left to conjecture until a phone call from one of their mothers confirms that the princess has died.
Some of them feel more grief than others, but all of them are moved into a metaphysical mood. They make a DIY version of the parapsychological device called the psychomanteum, a spooky mirror setup that thins the veil using the currency of secrets.
Even as 10th graders, the kids are thinking of their own mortality and place in history.
“They repeat the anxiety of ‘tomorrow we will be older, tomorrow we will be older,’” Bailey says. “They’re so aware that all of that is creeping away from them.”
While Bailey didn’t know WILD NIGHTS would be running during Pride Month when she wrote it, there are a few lovely tracks of queer longing going on, from the intimate heart-pounding (and real) letters between Emily and Sue Dickinson to the tagging-along boy cousin’s own Hot Boy Report, spoken privately but out loud.
There are additional guests who will surprise and delight. There are pop songs and Pop-Tarts, and a choreographed dance number. There’s no vodka in anyone’s Dr. Pepper—these aren’t the kids from Euphoria.
“These are very innocent, nerdy, open, and accepting teenagers,” Bailey says. “One of them is in love with a jellyfish, and everyone seems to be okay with it. No one seems to have a problem with it. These probably aren’t the popular kids.”
The kids are weird, and silly, and kind, and the play is, too—but never irreverent, Bailey clarifies.
“The rituals we do as human beings—it is a part of ancient history,” she says. “Even though it feels so close to us, in a thousand years it will be ancient history. A 1997 teen girl sleepover party is the stuff of ancient history.”
WILD NIGHTS: An Emily Dickinson Sleepover in Which we Hope to See the Face of God. June 4–7 and 11–13. 7:30 p.m., Greenfinch Theater & Dive. Tickets $25 with a limited number of VIP Sleepover Zone seats available.
