Scripts come together in different ways for me. There are times when I see a climactic moment at the end of a play, and I work backwards. Other times, I’m making random notes, and I start to hear a conversation between two characters. I write it down, and we see where it leads.

But I never saw the end of this play until I wrote it, and the character voices were late to the game too. This one came together with a through-line: the unifying theme of a play that connects the scenes. When I figured out what everyone in this play had in common, I was able to start writing. It’s wandering.

The Wisemen journey from Parthia to Judea; Mary and Joseph flee to Egypt, presumably, not a path they knew well; and even the stars wander. Ancient astronomers, not knowing the difference between a star and a planet, dubbed the planets Wandering Stars because of their erratic movement. Who knew?

Conveniently, the sense of wandering is a universal sentiment (writers are always looking for things like that). Even those of us who’ve stayed in one place our whole lives can feel like we don’t belong or that we’re displaced somehow. That dissonance we all feel is what captured my imagination and led me into this story of figuring out where we belong, and more importantly, who we belong with. — Adam Schnell