When Lauren LeBlanc won a children’s literature fellowship from a Long Island university a decade ago, she began looking for an idea for her next young adult novel. She turned to the supernatural, remembering the night her 3-year-old daughter woke her up to report there were golden gumballs floating in the air and a not-so-nice lady making her room go white.
“I knew I wanted to write a ghost story because I have been steeped in that since I was a kid,” says LeBlanc, one of Dallas’ busier stage actors. “I grew up on R.L. Stine, Christopher Pike, Dean Koontz and Stephen King. I thought I’d write something kind of spooky.”
It took her five years to finish the book and another five for it to morph into a musical after fate intervened in the form of fellow Dallas actor Ian Ferguson, a songwriter and musician who suggested the change in mediums. Now The Penumbra is having its first public performances in a free workshop production at the Bath House Cultural Center.
“Ian’s music explores it in a way that I couldn’t have done in prose,” LeBlanc says on a Zoom call from Alabama, where her family and Ferguson’s were vacationing together.
He wrote the lyrics, too, sometimes drawing directly from the book. She wrote the libretto.
“While there weren’t things about it I felt were from my life, I connected because of the kind of storyteller she is,” adds Ferguson, who has written a dozen and a half songs and several pieces of instrumental music for the show. “She develops characters and relationships that I gravitate toward, the way she approaches sorrow and hope and the complex nature of how people rely on each other to get through those things.”
The story operates on three planes of existence.
In a small Pennsylvania town, children begin disappearing. A young girl named Josie with second sight sees what she calls her gumballs. Josie has an older sister and a single mom who runs a psychic shop. The family is unraveling.
The missing children are being held by an evil force in the penumbra -- the word for the outline of a shadow -- an all-white place between what’s real and what’s beyond what we know.
The disappearances are triggered by events from the distant past echoing across generations.
LeBlanc and Ferguson met and became friends in 2019 when she was cast in the title role of his musical The Manufactured Myth of Eveline Flynn, which also has a supernatural bent.
They are both in-demand actors. Most recently, she had one of the starring roles in Xanadu at Theatre Three. For the same company last year, he played one of the main characters in Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812.
When the pandemic hit, LeBlanc dedicated herself to finishing the book she had originally titled The Break in the Moon, now the name of Ferguson’s favorite song from the musical version.
“I gave myself a month and wrote and wrote and wrote,” she recalls. “When everyone was home baking bread and taking long walks with their dogs, I wrote 1,000 words a day until I was done.”
Ferguson, a member of what LeBlanc calls her personal board of directors, read the book in late 2020 or early 2021. He told her he thought it would make an interesting musical. She wondered how that was possible, given that it would need to put the supernatural on stage.
They think they’ve solved that issue, hiring scenic designer Leah Mazur to create practical effects for the show. The audience at the workshop for The Penumbra won’t see them. At this stage, they will be represented by projections. The production will look more like a reading, with the actors in street clothes performing from scripts.
After LeBlanc agreed to collaborate with Ferguson, she began going through the book to figure out which scenes could become songs. He says he liked the challenge of adapting material that on his own he wouldn’t have thought could be turned into music.
They have assembled a top-notch cast and creative team for the workshop, starting with director Sasha Maya Ada. The stars include a number of fixtures on the Dallas theater scene, including Denise Lee, Broadway-experienced Jeremy Landon Hays and Ferguson’s wife, Aubrey, who recently appeared alongside him in the musical Hundred Days at Circle Theatre in Fort Worth.
Born and raised in Houston, LeBlanc has been on stage since she was 5. She was in the musical theater program at Texas State University before what she calls a “quarter-life crisis” led her to switch majors to mass communications. Her master’s is in education, and she has taught.
“None of my pieces of paper say ‘theater.’ I have a degree in hard knocks,” she says with a laugh. Among those are two previous musical projects that got swallowed up by the pandemic and two previous books for young readers that haven't found a publisher.
“It’s not like they're adults who haven’t baked long enough,” she says of the young audience. “They are their own little individual people and have full, interesting, dramatic lives. The Penumbra is a difficult story on a level that children don’t feel patronized or talked down to. It’s just about meeting them where they are. I guess those are my people.”
Besides Xanadu, LeBlanc has recently starred in the musicals Lizzie and Gods and Heroes by Dallas’ Paul Williams. “The facility required as a vocalist allows you to demonstrate emotion in a way that words can’t do by themselves,” she says. “When you see someone singing their guts out, it’s another way to access feeling.”
Despite now having written two musicals and appearing and serving as musical director in others, Ferguson is still reluctant to think of himself as a musicals guy. He was a musician who played in bands first, still does, and became an actor in plays later. Then the twain started meeting.
What’s the appeal?
“Everybody understands this is not really happening. Everybody gets it,” he says. “Singing things you would never say is totally acceptable. And when it works, it works like nothing else.”
Details
Aug 20-21 at 521 E. Lawther Drive. whatisthepenumbra.com. Free.
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