What happens IN BETWEEN

The process is finally complete.

Let me announce my trilogy of short plays, collectively titled IN BETWEEN.

These are three stories about three couples in various locations in Southern California. Each of these couples have recently made love. Each of these couples will soon make love again. The action we see within these plays is the time in between being as close as two human beings can possibly be...and the realization that their intimacy has changed them both at a profound level.

We meet an avant-garde painter and a recently liberated caretaker; two young friends learning that fun can be the gateway to true love; a military wife with needs and dreams and the head shop owner who hides his own with a jester-like persona.

Each of these plays meets these couples in between...a place where they have decisions to make. Making a decision is the heart of drama. It is decisions, both ours and those of the people around us, which shape our lives. A punch in the face or the firing of a gun are not always what drama looks like.

What is my goal in creating this set of plays? Well, besides getting my name in a program, it’s about both desensationalizing and resensationalizing sex. Sound confusing? Let me explain.

Most people, when they hear that a play will have some sexual content in it, immediately think: “Ew, it’s going to be dirty,” or “Man, this is going to make me horny.” Neither of these is what IN BETWEEN is about. These plays contain no nudity and no words that can’t be said on network television.

I aim to harness the power of suggestion. To make a gesture such as taking a partner’s hand or kissing a partner’s forehead say more than words ever can.

For the three couples of IN BETWEEN, making love is not just recreational. These magical moments take couples into another world, a world of intensified sensations and emotions. When the apartment or bedroom door closes, the characters are not the same people they are in the world where most of us can see them. The closing of the physical door is just the overt sequestration...it is the touch of skin on skin that opens the door to the new world that lovers make for each other. What the lovers do on stage is show how much traveling to that new world has changed them.

IN BETWEEN, I hope, will be a lovely night at the theater...for lovers and for those in between loves.

To learn more, please e-mail jennie@jenniebrownhakim.com