Six years ago, during my first year at Oxford University, I wrote Never Such Rain. At eighteen years old, I had never written a full-length play and had never taken a playwriting class. 

 

What haunted me into writing the play was an encounter the previous summer: where I learnt most intimately about the way trauma and the American Dream work.

 

 

I met Curt. And Curt lived in the deep shadow of a Kentucky city out along Interstate 71 on the outskirts of a small town called La Grange. When a radiator blew up on him one night, Curt was unable to go to the hospital because he didn’t have health insurance. Instead of being able to curb the pain of his third-degree burns with expensive pain medication, Curt took to covering his arm in Neosporn and then wrapping it in duct tape. In those weeks, we watched his arm turn from burn, to blister, to the peeling of deadened skin and terrible scarring. Curt was lucky the burn did not kill him. 

 

Today, Curt has scars from his neck to his mid-stomach on the right side of his body. Curt’s traumatic experience not only made me review my own privilege, it also made me want to unearth this type of story and the reasons for such a predicament.

 

Your gift, however big or small, will enable a workshop production of Never Such Rain, directed by Lily Wolff, to come alive at UT, Austin. Something it has been waiting for for many years. I hope that this play will be an alternative vision to the American Dream and an exploration into the will of two young and desperate people who fight back.

                                                                                                             - Tegan McLeod, Playwright