John Walch's "The Dinosaur Within" Opens at Boston Court

John Walch

This content is sourced from LA Stage Times.

“Dinosaur footprints were stolen in the outback [in Australia],” says John Walch, explaining the genesis of his The Dinosaur Within, opening tonight at the Boston Court.

“It’s an image I carried around for quite some time. What do you do when someone steals your creation myth? Something that’s so fundamental to your understanding of the world. It’s equivalent in other cultures to stealing something like Christ’s footprints. I wanted to bring those questions into a dramatic context.”

He wrote his otherworldly-but-still-in-this-world piece between 1999 and 2002. It won a grant from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, and it was partially developed at LA’s (now defunct) A.S.K. Theater Projects.

Michael Michetti, co-artistic director of the Theatre @ Boston Court (and current Ovation Award nominee), says that “one of our former literary managers had actually seen the play in a previous production in Austin, Texas, knew the playwright and connected us with him and the play. And we fell in love with it at just an in-house reading here at Boston Court. We’ve read other plays of John’s. He’s a wonderful writer and [we] love his work and his voice, so we were very excited to get to do this play.”

Walch briefly explains that the play is “a big story that crosses time and space. It brings Australian Aboriginal and Hollywood mythology together to a place where the Dreamtime and Dream Factory collide.”

Read More: LA Stage Times

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