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For the past 29 years we have built the highest quality Custom Modular Homes up and down the coast from all of New Jersey’s storied beach front communities, throughout Delaware, Maryland’s Eastern Shore and ringing the Chesapeake Bay. (Pictured top: Austin Highsmith Garces, C.J.Welcome to the Mid Atlantic's leading Modular Home Builder. “This is a play about marriage, and friendship, and pride.” “It’s playing really well for a lot of people who don’t know most of this history at all,” Leight said. After the success of the Victory Theatre run, Leight hopes the next stop for the play will be other prominent regional theaters and, of course, the Main Stem and environs. I had to hope that they knew what they were doing. “They had to hope that I wasn’t going to be prima donna. “To do a play with people you haven’t met – that’s a real exercise in trust,” Leight said. Because it came together during COVID, the partners first met in virtual form. The “Home Front” development experience at Victory Theatre with Gobetti and Ormeny has been satisfying, Leight said.

“Every play I’ve ever done it’s taken me putting together readings and making a lot of calls myself.” “I have been writing plays for years and I still don’t know how you get a play produced,” Leight said. includes 1998’s “Side Man,” which was also a Pulitzer finalist, and such plays as “Glimmer, Glimmer and Shine” and “No Foreigners Beyond This Point.”

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Leight has spent much of the past 20 years working at the lightning speed of television on such series as “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” FX’s “Lights Out” and HBO’s “In Treatment.” But when it comes to writing plays, “I’m a slow cooker,” he said. “I got on the phone for a blind date with Maria and Tom.

One thing led to another, and in the close-knit world of Los Angeles theater, when Gobetti reached out to Highsmith Garces know she was looking for a biracial love story to tackle, the two women wound up with Leight’s work. After that, Leight started giving the play a push on social media. There was another reading in San Diego in 2018. It had a three-week run as “James and Annie” in 2003 at the Ensemble Theater of Cincinnati. Like the lead of “Home Front,” they were squarely disappointed by pernicious racism.Īs the larger “Home Front” arc took shape, Leight began to develop the play in fits and starts and workshops. But he chose to get up every day.”Īs for the central couple, Leight wanted to focus on the experience of Black soldiers who came home from WWII expecting to receive more equal treatment after helping in the fight against fascism. “He could fall into bitterness sometimes. A little snarky and world-weary,” Leight said. “My uncle was a gay, World War II medic who was decorated with the Purple Heart – very much as Edward is in the play. Edward becomes a friend and vital support system for Annie as she adjusts to life in a marriage that still wasn’t legal in numerous U.S. “I knew it wasn’t going to go well for that couple.”Īfter his uncle died in 2001, Leight decided to revisit the story and incorporate the character of Edward, a gay, wounded WWII veteran who lives in the same Lower East Side building. But that grounding of truth was also the reason he didn’t pick up the idea for years. As an adult, he learned details of what had happened to the couple over time that stayed with him. Leight knew the love story of James and Annie had dramatic potential because it was based on a real-life couple he remembered from his childhood on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

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