I still remember the exact moment when it finally dawned on me what I was getting so wrong, why this story mattered, what made it so different from virtually every other fairy tale that many of us can remember. All of my early attempts to work on this play failed because I could not crack that character. This may be sort of a cop-out of an answer, but my favorite “part” of the play is Gerda. Q: WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE PART OR LINE IN THE PLAY? WHY?Ī: I feel that to answer this question will essentially spoil the entire play, so please skip this question if you haven't read it yet and come back to it later.Īll caught up? Great.

All told, it was an extremely enticing project that would end up being profoundly more personal that I had anticipated. I'm also a sucker for a cast full of quirky side characters, and Hans Christian Andersen provides them in spades! It had also been a while since I'd done an episodic story, so there was the added incentive of doing something a bit outside of my routine. I also saw in its varied settings and fantastical whimsy the opportunity for some vivid, creative, challenging, and rewarding theatricality. When I originally read “The Snow Queen,” I was immediately drawn to it for this very reason. There is nothing so rewarding as when an audience comes into the theater thinking they know a story very well and the leaving the theater with a greater appreciation for their favorite stories after being exposed to something deeper that they'd never known was there.

While there's certainly nothing wrong with a fresh take on a classic work-I've seen some that I've absolutely loved-I like to try to select stories for adaptation that may have lost quite a bit of what made them classics over years of reinterpretations. I feel many modern adaptations of classic tales in film, television, and theatre tend to try to bend the classics every which way to make them more palatable to a contemporary audience (or, in some instances, more profitable). PLAYWRIGHT WILL LEDESMA TALKS ABOUT HIS PLAYĪ: I find most classic fairy tales are like wild beasts-they can inspire awe, delight, fear, appreciation, and compassion simultaneously, but if you remove one component of an animal's nature it ceases to be the creature that so captivated us in the first place.

The snow queen fairy tale