Sans Merci brings tale of love and loss to B-town

In just four days, Johnna Adams wrote an entire play upon returning to Los Angeles from a playwrighting workshop in New York, writing so rapidly she wrote the setting as the very apartment she lived in.

“My muse just miraculously made me write it,” Adams said. “It hasn’t changed a whole lot since that first draft. There’s kind of a weird thing where the faster you write plays, they ring truer on the paper.”

“Sans Merci,” Adam’s creation and the Bloomington Playwrights Project’s latest production, recently won the latest Reva Shiner Award, which includes the opportunity to have a fully produced play and a cash prize of $500.

Adams entered the Reva Shiner Contest twice before she won the 2008-2009 award. There were more than 180 plays submitted to Bloomington Playwrights Project this year.

“I was actually very humbled to get the award, and surprised,” Adams said.

The play is a tragedy about two young women, lovers Kelly and Tracy, who travel to Colombia to protest an oil company drilling on the sacred land of the Uwa Indians, Adams said. In their travels, Tracy, played by Molly Kruse is attacked, raped and killed by Colombian rebels. Kelly survives.

Kelly, played by Margot Morgan, is sought out a few years later by Tracy’s mother Elizabeth, played by Francesca Sobrer, in hopes of discovering more about Tracy and her sudden death.

“The message is about trying to help people in the world and give of yourself,” Morgan said. “Then there’s the issues of lesbianism ... but really I think the play is about love and about loss, which is a universal theme of the human condition.”

The title of the play was inspired by John Keats’ poem, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” translated to “The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy,” Adams said, because so much of the women’s lives in the story have been without mercy.

There are also historical elements in the play’s inspiration, including one particular story about the Uwa Indians jumping off cliffs to avoid being enslaved by Spanish invaders, Adams said. She was also inspired by Rachel Corrie, a woman who went to the Gaza Strip and died as an activist, Adams said.

But Adams also drew from personal experiences for inspiration. Her roommate died during her junior year in college.

“You never recover from someone dying,” Adams said, “You never get over grief. ... It never leaves you and there’s a part of you that doesn’t want it to. The play kind of explores that.”