Between my dual passions of theatre and film, I’ve always been torn between being on stage and being behind the camera. I was either acting or directing in plays or writing, acting in, and producing my own webseries. It wasn’t until Fall of 2017 that I was able to combine my two passions.

In Fall of 2016, Shipwrecked Comedy released Edgar Allan Poe’s Invite Only Murder Mystery Casual Dinner Party for Friends Potluck, known affectionately as Poe Party. It was a lavishly filmed webseries, paying homage to movies like Clue, while also nodding to classic literature. It was based on Edgar Allan Poe and his ghost manservant Lenore hosting a murder mystery dinner party for his author friends, only to have them get killed off for real.

Characters involved included Ernest Hemingway, Oscar Wilde, H.G. Wells, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, George Eliot, and other authors. George Eliot was my favorite. Author of Middlemarch and born Mary Ann Evans, George Eliot was portrayed as a woman trying (and failing) to pass as a man. She was played by Lauren Lopez, known for portraying Draco Malfoy in A Very Potter Musical. She was a delight in a too-big Indiana Jones hat and fake mustache. I was so sad when she was killed off.

The show ended around Halloween 2016, and lo and behold, by Halloween 2017, I was playing George Eliot on Agnes Scott’s stage. As soon as the school year started, I was approached by two students who had received permission from Shipwrecked to adapt Poe Party for stage. They asked me to adapt the script, as I had previous scripting experience from my webseries. I spent weeks slowly slicing away at the script until it was a tidy 1 hour. I immediately texted my best friend, the biggest poe party fan I knew, that she had to play Poe. Auditions were held, and we just baaarely had enough people to make it work. We had a cast. And me? I got to play George Eliot.

Rehearsals were so much fun. Everyone cared so deeply for the work we did, it was a student-led, student-directed performance. Costumes were scrounged up, I invested in a real hair fake mustache, everything felt perfect. But resources were limited. We could only perform this once, on Halloween night, and then never again. We were so proud of our work, we wanted it to live on. So I decided to film it. Over the course of many rehearsals, I slowly built close ups of as many scenes as I could. Then, on the actual performance, I set up a camera in the back of the theatre. The footage from that camera was electric. When our passionate cast got in front of a smart, enthusiastic Agnes audience, everything was funnier. The laugh as I died and finally dramatically “revealed” my true identity will always stay with me.

Cutting together that footage made me realize how similar my two passions were. Sure, it can be difficult to bridge the gap between the mediums theoretically, but in practice, it’s just a matter of staging. I can write a script and it would do just as well on stage as on film. I could study theatre and find a career in film, I could study film and find a career in theatre. It’s all storytelling, it’s all one.