Exploring the Great Unknown
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A former advertising copywriter, Penniston had been trying without much success to write a salable screenplay when her husband, a graduate of Northwestern University’s theater program, urged her to try a play. Eventually she took one of her screenplays and revised it as Now Then Again. A throwback to the sort of witty, literate relationship comedies common on Broadway in the 30s and 40s, the play also allowed Penniston to introduce some high-tech elements. “I wanted to put the play in a physics lab because physics has always seemed like such a romantic subject to me,” she explains. Last fall Wechsler brought the script to Bailiwick artistic director David Zak, who wasted no time slotting the show into the theater’s 1999 season. The process moved so quickly that Wechsler and Penniston wound up workshopping and revising the play even as it was being rehearsed.
Shakespeare in Doubt
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