Playwright Sean Farrell has spent the best years of his life daydreaming. A self-described late bloomer, Farrell bounced around boarding schools in the northeast during his teenage years and reluctantly came to Chicago in 1987 to attend Loyola, the only college that accepted him. During his first year he came so close to failing that he took the next year off, moved back home to Boston, and drove a cab. “The structure of school just wasn’t for me,” he says. “I think I was looking for any way I could to get some distance from it. I probably learned more about myself during the year I spent driving that cab than I had in all of my high school years. It provided a tremendous opportunity–at a very young age–to just see and experience life. And it bought me the time I needed to figure out what I wanted to do with myself, namely to try my hand at writing.”
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He slowed down and spent the next two years preparing his latest work, a parable about a pair of women in their 30s who are bound to each other by circumstance and the presence of two smoking guns. The first draft of the script, entitled What It’s About (after a fictional film treatment the characters are writing), weighed in at 147 pages. After extensive workshops and rewrites, Farrell whittled it down by half and rechristened it Blind Faith. Staying true to his promise to himself, he asked producer Tim O’Hollearn to enlist Andrea J. Dymond as director.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jim Newberry.
