1. SHE WHISPERED VENOM is a recent play you’ve submitted to The Baltimore Playwrights Festival. What is it about?
SHE WHISPERED VENOM is a horror play following teenager Devon Webb after her transfer to the Ambermorne School for Young Girls. With students disappearing and teachers encouraging abusive behavior, Devon sets out to investigate the school’s secrets, and finds out that Ambermorne is not what it seems — something beneath the school is alive, and it is hungry.
2. Please tell us about how your collaboration worked: did you write together, write different scenes? How did you resolve disagreements and inspire each other?
We wrote on WriterDuet, an online app designed for collaborative screenwriting. We would write together, usually with one of us taking the lead on a scene (typically whoever had the stronger impulse for some detail or image) and the other tweaking as we went. As for disagreements and inspiration, they went hand-in-hand; our refrain throughout the process was “We can have our cake and eat it too”. Whenever we had differing ideas about a character or direction to go, we bounced off of each other until we’d figured out how to combine them, which ultimately gave us a lot of complex and interesting tools to play with. The rest of the time, we were on the same page, and with almost every scene, we experienced an idea cascade, where some offhand comment or quick line one of us had, spurred the other on to something new, and that did the same, over and over, letting us weave through the story in tandem.
3. Did you have a plan in place before you began writing: number of scenes, characters, subplots, etc?
In order to make it easy to work on the script together, we built a sparse outline, laying out each scene’s chief purpose and any important dialogue or concepts we wanted to include. We expanded the character list as we moved through the outline, trying our best to be economical (not easy — even combining as many as we could, the cast still ended up being pretty large) and give each character at least one or two unique traits or quirks to distinguish them, establishing their place both in the story and in the setting. Alec is typically much more of an outliner than Jonas is, so this loose framework of “big ideas” was a good balance that allowed us to stay focused and in sync while also leaving room for discoveries and cool twists as we wrote the actual script.
4. Tell us about yourselves.
Alec is a student in the secondary education program at Towson University, and hopes to teach high school Spanish. His writing debuted at the Capital Fringe Festival in 2019 with Let’s Fight and Say We Didn’t. During the pandemic, his focus shifted from live theater to preparing tabletop RPG sessions for his friends.
Jonas is a poet, novelist, and video producer living near Annapolis. They’ve always loved telling stories, and have focused heavily on their writing career since rediscovering their love of it toward the end of high school. They studied Creative Writing at AACC, which is where they met Alec.
5. What are you working on now?
Alec’s current biggest project is One Minute Lyric Analysis, a popular TikTok series examining the poetry of modern music (@awmoyes).
Jonas is currently querying for their Norse mythology-themed novel How to Bottle Moonlight (And Other Useful Tricks), starring an ex-valkyrie hunting a rogue einherjar across the American Midwest. They also irregularly write shorts, songs, and video essays for YouTube.
6. What is coming up next for you?
Alec hopes to finish and release a new play, This Machine Makes Folk Music, once theaters open again. It follows siblings Milo and Tasha as they navigate harboring a fugitive from the eyes of the dystopian state.
Their project backlog is long, but in the realm of theater, Jonas has plans for a comedy musical based on the Cthulhu Mythos. They and Alec are also brainstorming for another horror script around the corner.