New play considers finders, keepers and losers of the faith

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Nathan Hosner and Kelly O'Sullivan in "Hesperia." | Photo by Michael Brosilow

Updated: January 31, 2012 8:14PM

When Chicago playwright Randall Colburn was in college, his world changed completely when he fell in love with a preacher’s daughter.

He went from a “little hedonist” to a born-again Christian, he said. A few years later when his relationship collapsed, his religious identity faltered and he was left soul-searching. No longer a Christian, and having negated so much of his former self for the sake of his relationship, he had to wonder what was left?

“If you’re ever going to redefine yourself, it involves great sacrifice,” he said in a telephone interview. “and I’m not trying to make a claim about whether that’s good or bad, but it’s like the things of your past are never really going to go away unless you kill them.”

Colburn explores themes of love, sex, religion and reinvention in his newly-revised play “Hesperia,” named after, but not based on, a real small town in western Michigan. The show runs Jan. 24-March 18 at Glencoe’s Writers’ Theatre.

Hesperia first premiered in 2010 at Right Brain Project, a Chicago storefront theater. After seeing that production, leadership at Writers’ offered to produce a second run of the show, providing Colburn the chance to continue to develop his play.

The young playwright (now 30), readily accepted. “It’s a story that’s so personal to me, I really wanted to keep going at it,” he said.

“Hesperia” is about Claudia, a young woman who leaves her life as a porn star and moves back to the small town where she grew up. Once there, she falls in love with Trick, a local youth minister, and tries to reinvent herself. However all too soon, Claudia’s old boyfriend and partner in porn, Ian, shows up high on drugs. He too begins to search for God in her home town.

Writers’ Associate Artistic Director Stuart Carden saw the Right Brain production of “Hesperia” along with the Writers’ co-founder Michael Halberstam.

“We were really taken by the play and the complexity of the characters and the way that he (Colburn) took a rather seemingly sensational subject matter – porn star and born again – and invested them with so much complexity and humanity that it suddenly became a play that was much richer and more complex than the two-sentence description of it,” Carden said.

Doing a second run of a play allows a playwright the chance to build upon the lessons learned from actually seeing the story from the audience’s point of view, Carden said.

Colburn got the idea for “Hesperia” six years ago while attending graduate school for play writing at Southern Illinois University–Carbondale. He was playing around on Myspace and came across a blog written by a woman who had left the adult film industry and become a born-again Christian.

A simple Google search revealed that this type of experience is common for women in the porn industry, he said.

“I’ve always been fascinated by (the) tension between sex and religion,” Colburn explained. “I think that’s a lot of the place where the play came from.”

Don’t be turned off by the subject matter, Carden advises potential audience members. “When I told my mom the two-sentence version of it, she was like ‘oh, I don’t know if I want to see this,’” he said. “And I said ... ‘really the premise sounds salacious, but the exploration is handled with a tremendous amount of maturity and so it’s very, very accessible.”

Even though the themes are heavy, “there’s quite a bit of joy and surprise and humor in the piece as well,” Carden said.

“Hesperia” has evolved at Writers’ Theatre. Colburn’s first version had more “heightened prose.” The version that is going up at Writers’ Theatre has a “more stripped down naturalistic style,” a voice Colburn has discovered suits him.

This production, said Carden, “is a unique opportunity for audiences to experience a young playwright who’s really coming into their voice.

“I think this is a play that’s going to get produced around the country,” he added. “ It’s that good.”