Teens aim for the heart with Rigby Theater’s ‘Long Way Home’

This weekend, the company, founded by teens to give teens a creative performance outlet, wants to make the audience cry.

Or, at the very least, says Rigby founder and playwright Jacob Toole, move the audience in a way that might have them thinking about the company’s new work, “Long Way Home,” long after they’ve left the theater.

“We wanted to do something slightly different than ‘Death Do Us Part’,” Toole said last week as he and the cast were in the final week of rehearsals before '“Long Way Home” opens on Friday. Showtimes are 3 and 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Sept. 11-12, at Live Theatre Workshop, 3322 E. Fort Lowell Road.

“Death,” which the company presented last August, was a chance for Toole and Rigby’s music director Ben Teller to see “how big can we make something as quickly as possible and how can we just have the largest impact with the company and the sort of proof of concept of what we're doing,” Toole said.

They checked that box when audiences that weekend put a pretty big dent in Pima Community College’s 425-seat Proscenium Theatre — a venue four times the size of the 100-seat Catalyst Creative Collective in Tucson Mall where they had performed their first two productions.

Now, “we wanted to do something that was a little bit more focused,” Toole said. “We wanted to do something that had just a little bit more of an experimental edge, that took advantage of what we can do as teenagers living in Arizona and sort of create a really interesting and new story.”

Toole, who just finished his first year studying theater at Northwestern University in Chicago, wrote the script, which borrows some theater influences he’s picked up living in Chicago. Those include adding filmed segments to the live action.

“Long Way Home” follows Maya Roan, a young girl with a worsening heart ailment, on a road trip from Tucson to the Grand Canyon with her brother and two friends. The farther away they get from Tucson, the closer Maya gets to a tragic ending.

“Kind of the whole conceit of it is that … this is her very last major trip or major anything in her life, and that's kind of looming in the background of this whole odyssey that these kids are taking,” explained Toole, who incorporated personal motifs and his own lived experiences into the story.

“There's some kind of heavier stuff involved with this show,” he said, adding that it also has some humor “and I'm very proud of that. I think you'll go and you'll really fall in love with these four kids. But also, it is a tragedy in the end.”

Before starting rehearsals in August, the cast drove to the Grand Canyon and filmed segments of the trip.

“That footage will be projected on stage in sort of a mix-up, so that part of the action of the story happens on stage, part happens on film,” explained Toole, who is acting the role of Maya’s brother, Roman. ”Anything that's awkward for us to put on stage, we put on film. Anything that's awkward for us to put on film, we put on stage. It's like a perfect compromise that lets us do some really fun stuff.”

Sylas Smith, a junior at University High who took over as Rigby’s president when Toole went off to college, is directing the show.

Teller, who is studying piano performance and math at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, composed new music for “Long Way Home” that Toole said has a different tone from the music he wrote for “Death Do Us Part.”

“ ‘Death Do Us Part’ was more of like an adventure. It had slightly more of a lighthearted edge to it,” he said. “I think that this is a lot more grounded. It's not a fantastical journey through the Wild West. … I think our objective here is to really just make a very moving and intimate piece that will hopefully rock people in a different way than ‘Death Do Us Part’ did, but in a way that they love just as much, if not more.”

Tickets are $18, or two for $30, through www.rigbyproductions.com.