My name is Megan Siatczynski and I play Mary Read, a real-life pirate who is Anne Bonny’s best friend and moral compass. Mary is quite distrustful of most people and when fights break out, she usually finds and resorts to more intelligent solutions.
I get to use a sword during the show. I don’t have as many fights as some of my other co-stars, but I do get to do quite a bit of fighting. I’ve never done sword fighting before, so it’s a nice spin on what I usually do in theatre. It takes a lot of trust when it comes to sword fighting because your scene partner(s) are helping you create a story while also staying focused on the choreography of the fight. It takes a good amount of thinking for each fight you do.
Bonny Anne Bonny is about the fictional adventures of a real-life pirate, Anne Bonny. Anne, along with her best friend, Mary Read and her husband, Calico Jack Rackham, encounter a series of events from having a bar fight to stealing a ship to saving part of their crew from the gallows. It’s quite a mouthful.
I would have to say my favorite line from the show is “There was a tone.”
A common issue that is still prominent in our culture is that women and girl are considered as not strong, as objects, that they owe something to the world just for being female. This show is a giant back-handed slap to this issue. Anne Bonny and Mary Read were two of the most feared pirates ever. They were so experienced that the two of them could sail a ship by themselves, and trust me, that was not an easy thing to do. The crew in the show is also mostly female and each one of them is absolutely striking and unique in their own way. This play shows that women are so much stronger and smarter than a lot of people perceive them to be.
As the audience drives home, I hope they think about the amazingness of seeing something like this. This isn’t a movie, like Pirates of the Carribean. Every live theatre experience is special and one with pirates and sword fighting and an amazing ship-like set, it’s something you’re probably not gonna encounter again. It’s once in a lifetime.
Besides having a different director (shoutout to Chris Elst), we’ve never really done a play that has very minimal blackouts. But it’s nice to see the show flow together instead of being chopped by blackouts every two scenes. It allows the audience to continue to be engaged even when the scene is changing. In my opinion, blackouts are like brain breaks for the audience and when the next scene begins to happen, the audience doesn’t really get into it until like ten lines in. But again, it’s nice to have a show that doesn’t really stop.
I really hope the audience enjoys this play as much as we had creating it. This character was very different from any other character I’ve played before, and while it was a little bit of a challenge, I had an absolute blast. I’m so excited for people to see this show and laugh and cry with us.
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