“Here or, The Love We Make” will open its doors to the public 7:30 p.m. Thursday with a $3 admission fee for non-UI students.
Tanner Collier, a University of Idaho senior and theater major, is both the writer and director of the play.
“I ended up in Moscow, kind of by mistake,” Collier said. He said the marching band eventually drew him to the university, rather than anything theater related.
Collier said he wrote the play two years ago in his living room, after returning from a long weekend at a music festival.
“I just kind of had a need to tell the story, we expanded on it, about 90 new pages were added on it this year and now it’s a full-length play,” Collier said.
He said he is still trying to grasp the full meaning of the play. “For the longest time I tried to figure out, what is this play about?” Collier said. “How do I describe this play?”
It’s a story about seven individuals lost in love and heartbreak, about their five-year journey through the disastrous landscape that is, the love we make, he said.
During the play’s creation, Collier said he himself has been the greatest challenge.
“My biggest struggle has been myself, fighting with my thoughts, taking too much time worrying about whether or not this play is relevant, or if it’s going to translate to audiences, if it’s going to affect people,” Collier said.
He said if viewers are impacted in some way after watching, then he knows he has been successful.
“My hope is that I can create something that can effect someone, if they walk away from the play completely unaffected, I did not do my job,” Collier said.
Even after two years of work, he said the impact the play has on him is still the same.
“I find myself re-reading the script and finding moments in it that absolutely destroy me,” Collier said. “These are the things that affect me, and I’m hoping that these things can affect other people, because they’re truly human and that’s what I’m interested in, getting at the human experience and finding its core.”
For Collier, the play addresses certain aspects he wants to see more of in theater, and also topics he views as worth discussing,
“There are a lot of things that we don’t talk about, as human beings a lot of things that we go through I haven’t necessarily seen in the theater,” Collier said. “And the heartbreak is a very real thing, and everybody goes through it in a different color, a different shape, but it’s all relevant and everybody’s story matters.”
Nicole Etchemendy can be reached at [email protected]