The Pact — Commissioned by and first performed at Yellow Taxi Productions of Nashua, New Hampshire, in April 2009, The Pact is an adaptation of the Jodi Picoult novel.

It won the best original playwright (professional) award at the 2009 New Hampshire Theater Awards and is under consideration for production by the Manhattan Theatre Club. 

When a teenaged girl is found shot in a small New Hampshire town, her boyfriend is arrested for her murder. But did the boy next door really kill his best friend and first love, or was this a suicide pact gone wrong? Family and town secrets are spilled over the course of the trial as the question of what one would do for love is examined.

Directed by Suzanne Delle and sponsored by the Ella Anderson Trust, the Dramatists Guild Fund, and the McIninch Foundation.

Take a moment here to read the beginning of the play, see the original cast, and of course let me know if you'd care to put together a production of The Pact yourself!

Click here to download an excerpt of The Pact.

From the program:

When Suzanne Delle first approached me about bringing Jodi Picoult’s wonderful novel to the stage, I was delighted to say yes. Then I spent four months reading, studying, and analyzing the book, without the vaguest clue as to how to take such a rich, layered story and present it to a live audience in under two hours.

And of course I didn’t, because a play and a novel are two different entities.

What I did do was finally look through the book and ask myself, “where is the drama?” Because that’s the real question. On my walks around Provincetown, I frequently pass a house where Eugene O’Neill once lived; and the historic plaque on the wall reads “dramatist.” It doesn’t say writer; it doesn’t even say playwright. It says dramatist. And that’s the real task, I think, when one is writing for the stage: to find the drama in a story, and then communicate that drama to the audience, make it real for them.

There are a lot of ways this story could be told; I chose the thread that holds it together, the courtroom drama, which is where facts and statistics and sometimes—sometimes—the truth are revealed. And I do see the end of the trial as the end of Chris’ dramatic arc for at least this part of his story: his understanding of what had happened between him and Emily freed him to finally grow up and get on with his life. So that was in my mind the best possible vehicle to use in tying together the various pieces of the story.

When Jodi Picoult read the script for the play, she commented that it reminded her of Our Town; and I suppose that there is a little of that in it: the reality is that we all experience the same events differently, and hearing how others interpret those events may help us understand others as well. At least that’s my hope.