‘We Are Still Tornadoes’, a novel of letters, is set in Sarasota

Playwright Lou Harry and director Katherine Michelle Tanner had similar reactions when they first read the 2016 book “We Are Still Tornadoes.” They couldn’t put the book down and imagined it becoming a play.

“I went camping and threw it in my bag. One morning at 6 a.m., as the sun was coming up, I woke up and read it cover to cover,” said Harry, an Indianapolis-based writer, playwright and editor. “It was such a pleasantly and movingly digestible book, a quick but powerful read. I immediately thought about how I wanted it to be a play.”

Tanner read the book during the pandemic and finished it in an hour, “and I immediately thought it would make a great play. It’s a lot like John Hughes’ movies. He never minimized teen drama. It just was what it was.”

The book by Michael Kun and Susan Mullen is a coming-of-age story about two high school friends – Cath and Scott – who exchange letters during her freshman year of college in the 1980s.

“The essence of all greatness is truth and this story is about young teenagers and the powerful truths that unfold in their lives,” said Tanner, who is directing a staged reading of Harry’s stage adaptation for her company Tree Fort Productions Projects.

“It reminds me so much of the ’80s and my childhood, before social media,” she said. “There’s trauma here, but nothing that wouldn’t happen to any of us. It’s sweet, touching, and so true.”

Harry said he had met Kun years earlier and had published some of his “screamingly funny nonfiction and some of his fiction” while working at Indy Men’s Magazine.

Harry was allowed to read the book before it was officially published, and the authors granted him the rights to develop it as a play, which required that the correspondence between the two characters be somewhat abbreviated. The theater department at Butler University in Indianapolis held a series of workshops over a period of months while Harry was adapting the book, and it later opened the department’s theater season for two performances.

“The house was full and played out beyond my wildest dreams,” he said. Harry also found the story spoke to different generations.

“Because it’s a historical story, it appealed to parents who grew up in the ’80s,” but it also touched the student audience.

“It’s two students graduating from high school,” he said. “She goes off to college and he stays home to work in his father’s store, and it’s about the course of her freshman year, how the friendship is challenged, strengthened and threatened, all through letters sent back and forth.”

That Butler production led to a film industry lecture in New York shortly before the lockdown, featuring Broadway actors Jared Goldsmith and Lilla Crawford.

The film rights were also sold, but Tree Fort was given permission to stage the play. Kun had previously co-written the film “Eat Wheaties,” an adaptation of his novel “Locklear Letters,” with director Scott Abramovitch.

Harry, who has published dozens of books and written numerous plays, said he feels “more like a midwife of this book becoming a play. Ninety percent of the play, if not more, comes from the book, but it’s about structuring, paring down and finding what works.”

Tanner’s production will star Ciana-Noelle Bostock, a senior at Booker High School’s Visual and Performing Arts Center, as Cath. Liam Ireland, a student at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia School of Music and Art and Performing Arts in New York City, will play Scott.

Art Newsletter: Sign up to receive the latest news about the Sarasota arts scene every Monday

A step towards conservation Residents Help Architecture Sarasota Choose 100 Moderns That Matter

Tanner once worked with Ireland in an Orlando Shakespeare Theater production of “The Glass Menagerie” and said, “He gave one of the best auditions I’ve ever seen.” Bostock performed in Tanner’s revue “Women of Broadway” last season.”

Harry says he’s not sure what will happen with the film, but that it could determine the future of his stage version.

“I hope the film gets made and if it prevents the play from being performed, then so be it,” he said.

“We are still tornadoes”

By Lou Harry, based on the novel by Michael Kun and Susan Mullen. Showing July 26-28, Tree Fort Productions Projects, Crossings at Siesta Key, 3501 S. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota, Suite 136. $30. 941-544-2276; treefortproductionsprojects.com