LEONARD J. DEFRANCISCI
theater with 900 seats (the Hertz has 200). At the center of Ugly is Jess, a combat veteran who returns to her Florida home after a third tour in Afghanistan. She’s disfigured from severe burns that leave her in constant pain. She turns to virtual-reality treatment for therapy — or, more precisely — to distract herself from the agony. Ugly juxtaposes Jess’ hopes and prospects with the declining possibilities of her hometown. The play took root a few years ago, when Ferrentino was applying to Yale. Right after her Yale interview, she recalls, she was on a train and reading on her phone when she came across a GQ magazine article. It profiled a burn-survivor soldier with chronic pain who was a perfect candidate for Snow World, the pain-distracting virtualreality experiences. Ferrentino was overcome with “that feeling of needing to run but being trapped on a train.” Ugly Lies the Bone, described as haunting and hopeful, had its world premiere last year at New York’s Roundabout Underground, with Mamie Gummer (Meryl Streep’s daughter) as Jess. Writing for The New York Times, critic Charles Isherwood called Ferrentino brave and said she’s a “writer of dauntless conviction.” He described Ugly as a “bracing drama that confronts an achingly topical issue with hardheaded honesty.” Rex Reed, writing in the New York Observer, called Ugly “a play of small moments that hide big emotions.” Ferrentino considers herself a sentimental and nostalgic person “who hates
sentimentality and nostalgia.” Her central concern when writing a play is, “Does it speak to America here and now, and is it a story I can personally crawl inside?” She’s interested in “stories of people fighting to carve out a place for themselves in the world, to find and redefine home.” Playwright Sarah Ruhl (Eurydice, In the Next Room or the vibrator play) is a mentor and friend who has described Ferrentino’s approach as “looking at the sun without burning your eyes.” With each play, Ferrentino says, she’s “looking at the sun more and more closely” but doesn’t always want the audience to know what sun she’s looking at. Most of her plays are autobiographical in some way, she says, because you can take the girl out of Florida, but “Oh, you cannot take the Florida out of the girl.” “I pretend to be a two-master’s-degreestoting playwright but would always rather be in cutoff shorts, flip-flops, saying ‘y’all’ and adding ‘ass’ to the end of words.” Florida doesn’t fit the Southern stereotype, she says: “You know, sticky porches, lemonade, slow-moving fans.” Her home, she says, was fast, bright and “gloriously” tacky, a culture dominated by water sports, where people hunt alligators, fish for sharks (“horribly gruesome”) and go “mudding” — speeding through muddy swamps to get their trucks good and dirty. Ferrentino creates people who speak their minds. Her characters don’t lie or cover things up. It’s more like, “Here is the truth about me and what I think of you, so we can move on.” A ALLIANCETHEATRE.ORG
9