Inspiration sprang from a simple observation.
“I was walking last summer and I looked down and there was a grasshopper,” actress Vanessa Severo said. “And he jumped up and these glorious ‘monarch’ wings exploded out of him. And then he jumped down and became a grasshopper again.”
That got her thinking about each creature’s role in life and what it might mean if you miss your chance to be what you were intended to be.
Severo is well-known as an actress in Kansas City — she delivered outstanding performances in “The Clean House” at the Unicorn in February and March and in “Desdemona” for Actors Theatre KC last year — but at the Kansas City Fringe Festival, she makes her debut as a playwright and director.
Her memory of the grasshopper led her to write “Advice From a Spider,” a three-character one-act that she originally envisioned as a children’s book. In it a grasshopper, a spider and a butterfly interact in unpredictable and disturbing ways. The festival has rated the show PG.
“I started thinking about children’s stories and how they used to tell a moral and how Grimm’s stories often ended quite gruesomely,” she said. “The stories we get these days always end happily.”
Last summer, Severo was a key player in “The Coppelia Project,” an inventive European clown show conceived by Heidi Van and developed by Van and her actors. The show was among the best at last year’s Fringe Fest.
So when Van heard Severo’s idea for a children’s story, she immediately insisted that her friend and colleague write it as a play.
“I only think in plays,” Van said. “That’s what I want to make up, plays. I thought it would be beautiful transformed into theater.”
Van was assigned the title role — a manipulative and menacing spider. Severo plays the butterfly, who, aware that her life span will be no more than 40 days, has come to terms with death. And Dan Hillaker is the grasshopper, who has missed his chance to join the locusts and devour corn crops and wonders what is his life purpose. He finds himself torn between the spider and the butterfly, each of whom is hypnotic in her own way.
If that sounds a little like a children’s fable staring into the existential abyss, Severo wouldn’t disagree. As she has developed the piece, it has become something darker than you might normally encounter at a children’s theater. She said she has rewritten the end three times, and each one has been tragic.
“A lot of profanity began creeping in toward the end,” Severo said. “It really happens when things begin deteriorating for these characters. Something about insects cussing struck me as funny.”
Severo said Hillaker and Van have helped shape the dialogue. Van and Severo have worked together in recent years but never with Severo as a director.
“She’s a very supportive and nurturing person and those are nice qualities to have in a director,” Van said. “I’m intimidated. It’s hard wanting to live up to the idea of what she thinks I can do or living up to the idea of the character she has. It’s hard to be involved in somebody’s baby.”
Hillaker said Severo approached him early on about playing the grasshopper and has tailored the part specifically to his talents.
“She kind of wrote the part for me, which I had never experienced,” he said.
Beyond that, it’s really a human story. The costuming will be very simple and non-realistic.
“We’re not playing it like insects,” Hillaker said. “If we never mentioned that we were insects, it might take people several minutes to realize we aren’t human.”
Severo said the play will use music composed by Daniel Quinn and should run less than an hour. Ultimately, she said, the viewers will decide what it all means.
“It doesn’t come from an old story,” she said. “I made it up out of my head. The ending, I want the audience to decide. I’m really leaving it all up to them.”
“Advice From a Spider” premieres at 8 p.m. Wednesday at the Off Center Theatre at Crown Center and continues through July 26. See the schedule at
www.kcfringe.org.