BATH

I tell people it’s a love story,” playwright Cassia Tirrell said Monday afternoon.

“The fairies are breaking free and they’re into this other world now, able to explore this different life … They’re much more magical and light than a normal human being. They’re so much happier. Except for the harpies, who are very twisted.”

Tirrell, 18, sat in the back of Morse High School’s Montgomery Theatre, describing “Foreverland,” the original one-act play set to premiere March 7 at Morse’s Fine Arts Night.

Beneath fuchsia bangs, her huge eyes glanced frequently at the stage where students rehearsed various scenes of the work she describes as her “masterpiece.”

With traces of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Peter Pan,” the play tells the story of Milo, a young woman who falls from a statue and hits her head, breaking a spell and bringing the fairies to life.

Milo “wakes up in Melody’s arms,” Tirrell said. “From that moment, it’s love at first sight, but they have to keep fighting … for acceptance. It doesn’t matter what gender you are. Love is going to happen, it doesn’t matter what gender you are. You can’t banish it, you can’t cast it aside. It’s going to happen.”

Tilting the world

Morse drama isn’t shy about controversy: Last year’s one-act, “In Decent Man” by Max Ater, focused on a Catholic priest who tried to seduce another man.

“We cause the world to tilt a little,” drama coach and English teacher Kevin O’Leary said Monday.

“I’m openly gay, so I don’t really give a crap,” Tirrell said.

The themes of “Foreverland” — including struggling for acceptance and “never wanting to grow up” — draw from intensely personal experiences.

Tirrell recalled her first day at Morse, when a classmate called her “disgusting.”

During a discussion of a scene from Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” English teacher Tom Rackmales asked the class, “Would you bring home a significant other to your parents?”

“I was like, ‘Absolutely not,’” Tirrell recalled. “And I was like, ‘I’m a lesbian, they wouldn’t approve of me bringing home a girl.’ And this girl in the back of my class was like, ‘That’s disgusting. That’s really disgusting.’ My teacher told her if she said anything else he’d kick her out of his class. It felt good that he was on my side, but it felt horrible that she would say that to me.”

That same year, a substitute teacher in O’Leary’s class looked at an early draft of “Foreverland” and asked, “Did you write this to really (tick) people off ?’”

I was like, “I wrote this because I had to. This was bursting to come out.”

The relationship between Milo and Melody was based on Tirrell’s first experience falling in love with a woman, she said.

“But when we came back (to school) in September, the characters were all their own,” she added. “Mr. O’Leary told me, ‘You can talk to your characters and they’ll answer you.’”

“Not always,” O’Leary interjected, striding up the aisle from the stage as he did throughout Monday’s interview, before heading back to his actors.

“Not always,” Tirrell smiled. “But I said to (the character) Melody, ‘Why did you come to London?’ She freakin’ told me … it’s a monologue that rips your heart out.”

“She understands the dull knife edge of pain,” O’Leary said.

In recognition of the sensi- tive subject matter of the play — “There are jarring words that come out of people’s mouths, there’s a kiss on the lips,” O’Leary said — he met with the parents of his two leads and Morse Principal Peter Kahl prior to casting 16- year-old Dana Douglass as Melody and 18-year-old Elizabeth Swanson as Milo.

“I said, ‘Are you OK with them kissing another girl on stage?’ They said, ‘Yes.’”

Of the teens, he said, “What was so beautiful was I said to them, ‘You do realize that the playwright wrote in a kiss on the lips?’ They both took a big deep breath, but said, simultaneously, ‘We want to give Cassia her play.’”

“I’m straight and not incredibly comfortable with anything like that on stage — close physicality,” Douglass said. But she seized the lead role “because the writing is beautiful and I’d hate to pass up an opportunity like this.”

“It’s always a little weird having to act like you’re in love with someone and to manufacture that emotion,” Swanson said.

Sometimes, Tirrell said, the actors react to those emotions, and the play brings up situations in their own lives that “people don’t want to think about.”

“But we take care of each other,” she said. “This program, more than anything I’ve ever been involved with … We keep each other alive here.”

And while some criticism comes their way — last year, in the form of emails that Kahl “handled” — Kahl supports the club “1,000 percent,” O’Leary said.

‘Kinship’

Audiences tend to feel a “kinship” with the original shows Morse produces, O’Leary said, in large part because they’re the first to see them on stage.

Perhaps more significantly, the actors and crew members, playwrights and others involved find themselves bonding and ready to fiercely defend each other — through whatever difficulties they experience.

“All they want to do is give Cassia her play,” O’Leary said.

Tirrell grew up in Bath and attended a Christian school when she was younger.

“I left my parents’ home when I was 16 because I came out to my parents and my mother was not on board,” Tirrell said, setting her mouth and looking toward the stage. “My dad was OK with it— he told me he loved me no matter what, but my mother is a very religious woman and she wanted to fix me … There is nothing wrong with me. There is nothing to be fixed. And so I got so sick of it I just left.”

For more than a year, Tirrell “couch-surfed,” staying with friends, until two months ago when she found she had nowhere else to go.

She told her friends in the Drama Club, “I’m in a really bad place right now, and this is home, so you guys need to be there for me.”

For a while, she stayed with Sophie Mayo, who plays one of the harpies.

Then two months ago, she moved in with Gail and Doug Fitch of Phippsburg, “a really nice family” Tirrell has known since spending time in foster care when she was younger.

“It actually feels like I’m in a normal family situation for the first time in two years,” she said. “We go out to see movies, and we’re talking about going to see ‘Wicked’ on Broadway.”

Tirrell said she’s grown from the challenges, and “Foreverland” is better for them.

“This play came from a place of really horrible pain and darkness, but you wouldn’t ever guess that because it’s so light and magical,” she said. “I love this play. It’s beautiful. It doesn’t stop there. Someday I want to see it on the big screen. I’m going to be a screenwriter. This is going to be my masterpiece. It is already.”

Next year, Tirrell hopes to study screenwriting and film at St. Thomas University. She’s already sent pages of “Foreverland” to the school’s admissions office — and to the New York Film Academy. After next week’s performances, Tirrell will forward DVDs.

Still, Tirrell said she’s nervous about her play’s debut performance. A lot of her life is up on the stage.

She also suspects — and worries — that her parents will attend the show.

“They have no idea,” she said of the play. “I’m very nervous. I don’t want to deal with their feedback.”

Then, nodding at the stage, she said, “I’ve already got a couple of bodyguards.”

“And like Mr. O’Leary said, ‘If one person can be comfortable with themselves because of what they see on the stage — if one person can come out, can get let go of something — then the play was a success.”

Tirrell credits O’Leary, and the Drama Club, with getting her through the worst of the last few years. She plans to recognize that during the traditional playwright’s speech following Wednesday’s performance.

“I wouldn’t be here without Mr. O’Leary giving me this chance. I would have dropped out of school, I would have fallen apart, I wouldn’t be here, but because of this play — because of Mr. O’Leary — he showed me that I am a great writer and I have so much potential and talent. He’s more of a dad to me than my own. He looked for me, he looked for places where I could go.”

Then, for the first time on Monday, she began to cry.

“He saved me. He saved my life.”

bbrogan@timesrecord.com

¦ “FOREVERLAND”
Wednesday, March 7
Morse High School’s Montgomery Theatre
Fine Arts Night, 7 p.m.
Curtain for “Foreverland” at
approximately 8 p.m.
Admission is free.

“Foreverland” also will be
performed Friday, March 9, as
part of the 2012 Maine Principals Association Regional
One Act Drama Festival at the
Freeport Performing Arts Center at Freeport High School.
The show starts at 7:30
p.m., with “Foreverland” slated to begin at approximately
8:30 p.m.
Tickets cost $5.
The two-day festival runs
March 9 and 10.