'What I Know, Now': New Play Showcases Inspiring Personal Evolution

From its central themes to its creation, Bay Street Theater’s bonus Mainstage 2024 show What I Know, Now is the embodiment of personal evolution — a willingness to accept new ideas, distressing news and constructive critiques as an opportunity to grow. Bay Street played a key role in its development and is now hosting its world debut from July 15–20.

“This piece has lived in the land of development for two years now … like we were in this incubator process for an incredibly long time,” shares the one-person play’s writer and performer Julia Motyka. “And now it feels almost like opening up my rib cage and offering my heart to people in a very public way because of the nature of the show, how personal it is to me and the themes it explores. … It’s really happening.”

Beginning as an essay, What I Know, Now was an outlet for Motyka to process a personal cancer scare and a string of deaths among her loved ones, forcing her to confront her mortality, faith and fear of the unknown. Under the advisement of her collaborator, John Leonard Thompson, Motyka reworked the powerful essay into a semi-autobiographical one-person play and submitted it to in-progress script reading workshops like Bay Street’s 2023 New Works Festival, where she received valuable audience feedback on what worked well and what could be improved.

“The questions they had about it absolutely influenced the trajectory of the piece,” Motyka says. “There were so many places where people said, ‘Hey, I’d love to know more about X,’ or they were really fascinated by this thread around faith or mental illness, family legacy, numerology, mystical insanity. All those different threads became stronger and more fully woven into the play because of the consistent feedback that I received.”

Ahead of the 2023 New Works Festival, Motyka told Dan’s Papers that the Bay Street reading would include her first attempt at adding musical direction to the piece. Speaking to Dan’s again in 2024, she reveals that the experiment didn’t go as planned, but she learned a great deal from the experience.

“It didn’t go well. No, that’s not fair. It was really interesting and useful, but ultimately we felt that the music was guiding people in how to feel and what to think in a way that the play doesn’t require,” she explains, adding that the final production instead utilizes environmental sounds to support the onstage performance without superseding it. “The play thrives best when it leaves a lot open to interpretation.”

Furthermore, the scaling back of musical direction better emphasizes the script’s central themes. “One of the things that I’ve been really interested in as a writer, and also as a person, is how can we hold the liminal space of not knowing — how can we just sit with the complicated things that are happening without being told that this is what we should feel, this is how we should feel, this is the way we should be responding in this moment — because I think discomfort is a huge part of change, and it’s a huge component in how we grow.”

Beyond the changes made to address audience feedback, What I Know, Now is not the same play it was when Motyka read it at Bay Street in 2023. As its title alludes, the play’s content is based on what its playwright knows, feels and understands right now, and as she told Dan’s last year, “It’s always evolving.”

Expanding on that point in her most recent interview, Motyka says, “It’s an interesting thing when you write about your family and the journey through your heritage and into your future. As I engage with those questions, the very nature of the question changes, as do the relationships involved, which changes my relationship to the histories that I’m examining. There are certain places where my feelings about not just events, but about the interaction of different members of my family, with their various aspects of faith or identity, have evolved along with the play.”

The most painful change of all was the death of her father late last year. “That relationship is one of the central places that the play spins around,” Motyka shares. “So to suddenly have a very powerful and deep grieving process occur in the midst of rewriting the play had an enormous influence on both how I viewed my own mortality, and how I was able to hold the story of that relationship both for my life in very meaningful ways, but also for how the story operates within the play and what it means in the play now that there is an ending that occurs that didn’t occur before.”

In sharing this deeply personal story about her family, faith and grief, Motyka expresses hope that her audience will leave the theater feeling changed on some level, noting that, “I’m really interested in how you get there and not in how I lead you there.”

She explains, “Every journey through life contains within it places of confusion, places of pain, places of legacy, and moments where we have to stand at the precipice of whatever comes next and take a leap toward an unknown future. One of the many things I hope people take from (the play) is to embrace their own path … when you can move toward (the unknown) with open arms and a sense of freedom, no matter what comes, it allows for the life you live to be wholly yours. … But I also think that one of the incredible things about writing for the theater is that each person who sees it will walk away with something different.”

One sentiment that Motyka feels compelled to dispose about What I Know, Now is that the heavy subject matter lends itself to a melancholy “dark and thorny ride,” when in actuality, the play is laced with humor, though not for humor’s sake. It’s “heartbreak turned into comedy, turned into humor,” she clarifies.

“There is depth and dimension, and there is a legacy of sadness that is a part of this play, but in my experience in life and as a writer, the only way to walk through that kind of story is to do so with elements of powerful humor,” Motyka continues. “(The audience) will be uplifted and made to laugh, to smile and to hold their own tender experiences with their families and their histories gently and with an open heart.”

What I Know, Now is scheduled to receive five performances at Bay Street Theater: Monday, July 15 at 8 p.m.; Wednesday, July 17 at 7 p.m.; Thursday, July 14 at 4 p.m.; Friday, July 19 at 8 p.m.; and Saturday, July 20 at 4 p.m. For tickets and more info, call 631-725-9500 or visit baystreet.org.