Photography courtesy of Elman Studio.
Anna Pickett didn’t necessarily think she’d end up in theater, let alone playwriting.
Originally from Old Lake Highlands, Pickett recently wrapped up a run of her co-writing project, Spells of the Sea, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C.
She grew up in an artistic family — her mother is an artist and her father is an ardent fan of the stage. While she performed in school plays in her younger years and enjoyed musicals like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, it wasn’t until middle school that she really began thinking about the stage as a future.
“There was a theater troupe that would post whole musicals on YouTube that they created,” Pickett says. “And I got really into that in middle school, and a lot of my friends were really into it, and it kind of inspired me to want to do more theater. So me and my friends took the theater class, and I never really thought I’d be doing theater as a kid, but seeing that, I was like, ‘Oh, this is kind of fun.’”
Pickett eventually applied to Booker T. Washington High School for Performing and Visual Arts. Decidedly afraid of the stage, she says her anxiety “blacked out” her memories of her audition, which apparently went well enough to secure her admission. At Booker T., she immersed herself in all aspects of the theater program.
She took classes in acting, stage management and writing. Her main interest, however, was directing.
“We had a 10-minute play festival, and I submitted a play for that. I was like, ‘Oh, this is cool. I guess I could write. That’s neat.’ I never really thought of myself as a writer,” she says. “I wanted to mostly do directing when I was at Booker T., that was my ideal theater trajectory. There was a directing class I didn’t get into, so it was like, ‘Oh, well, I guess I’ll change gears.’”
Pickett attended the University of Texas at Austin after graduation. This is where she came into her own as a playwright. Interestingly enough, after her first few semesters, she switched her major from theater to education.
Despite the change in direction, her social circle still revolved around the theater. She couldn’t escape. Especially when her roommate, Guinevere “Gwenny” Govea, began writing musicals. Pickett was asked to direct Govea’s podcast musical, Spells of the Sea, as part of the Cohen New Works Festival in 2021. The podcast was a success, winning a B. Iden Payne Award for outstanding original script. Pickett was asked to help adapt the script for the big stage soon after.
“I never really was like, I’m gonna be a writer,” she says. “It just kind of so happened to cycle through where I kind of refound writing. And I was like, ‘wait, I do enjoy writing.’”
The original podcast ran close to two hours long and was not written with the constraints of the stage in mind. Pickett and Govea had to imagine where certain aspects might not work within the boundaries of a stage production, such as determining “maybe there can’t be a whole submarine on stage.”
Photography courtesy of Elman Studio.
She says the collaboration between her and Govea was a natural fit, albeit with some early bumps to smooth out.
“It’s been great. I mean, Gwenny is my best friend, and we were roommates in college, so it just kind of worked out,” Pickett says. “There’s a balance when you’re writing, especially because she’s the original story creator. I always would go to her and be like, ‘Can I do this in the script?’ And she’s like, ‘yes, go for it.’ So it took a second for us to find our footing, but we’ve really gotten into a groove.”
Spells of the Sea follows 15-year old Finley Frankfurter as she searches for a cure for the “Big Bad Sickness,” a terminal disease her father — the Fisher King —has contracted. Accompanied by a grumpy old lighthouse keeper named H.S. Crank, she sets out on an Odyssean quest to find the magical Elixir of Life and save her father. Along the way, the story explores themes of grief, confronting fears, self-belief and embracing emotions.
“One thing we write a lot about is the father-daughter relationship, and Gwenny and I are both very close with our dads,” she says. “Because her dad is sick, and so a lot of it, Gwenny originally wrote because of COVID anxieties with her dad. And so as we’ve been writing it, it’s kind of been like we’ve been writing it about that father-daughter relationship. So there’s a lot of things where I pull it from my real experiences with my dad.”
The show eventually found a stage home for a one month run at the Grandel Theater in St. Louis in 2023. The pair got help in finding a venue from one of their college professors who introduced them to the director of the theater, who was interested in including it during the theater’s 50th season.
Pickett says the St. Louis production has been the most rewarding stage of the process.
“There’s so many pictures of me and Gwenny crying. It was just amazing. Since Gwenny and I were both staying in St. Louis, we had gotten really close to this cast and crew. And so it kind of felt like a nice warm hug while we were doing it, because they took really good care of the show, but once you have it with an audience, it changes the game. Because it’s like, ‘Oh, we’re doing this, whatever. No big deal.’ But then for me, I forget just how big of a deal it is until the people are watching it, and then I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is crazy. There are people that are hearing my work on stage.’”
After the run in St. Louis, the pair took the show to the Kennedy Center in D.C. in 2024. Spells of the Sea ran for eight days, from October 12-20.
At the Kennedy Center, Pickett and Govea were given the opportunity to work with accomplished actors including Grammy Award-nominee Brittany Mack.
“This cast was just amazing,” she says. “They’re so kind to us too, they were just a great cast. I was blown away by them. Every single night that we watched the shows, I cannot believe that they were doing this with us, but it was a real honor to not only be offered this opportunity to be produced at the Kennedy Center, but to work with such amazing people throughout this.”
The pair is currently looking for Spells of the Seas’ next performance venue. She says they are also workshopping ideas for new musical productions — which could address a wider, older audience.
“We’ve really found our stride in working together. So yeah, we definitely plan on making more stuff.”
