Kopit debuts rare collaboration at La Jolla Playhouse





Answer : The idea came to me by accident about five years ago. I was looking at world news on the Internet one day and I came across this article from the London Times about how fairies had caused a bulldozer to shut down. It was about how the residents of a small town in Scotland had stopped a road crew from coming through their village because the crew would've needed to move a big rock. But the townspeople stopped them because they believed fairies lived under the rock. No one had ever seen a fairy, but they believed they were there. It went to court and the construction stopped. The Scottish courts said you only needed to prove the town believes in them, and superstition carried the day.



A : Absolutely not. It's played absolutely straight. These people in this town believe in fairies. That's a given. You have this outsider coming in who can't believe it, and that's partly because he doesn't understand the people's connection to their land. There's magic in their land and a power that's inherent.


A : The central character in our play isn't the businessman, it's his fixer. Every powerful businessman has a fixer to go in and try and make nice with the people. The businessman is not a conciliator, he's a killer. He has a nice man to come in and make the deals for him.


