The Bloomington Playwrights Project is producing their first Woodward/Newman Drama Award-winning play. Miles Away is a gritty, three-character piece that playwright Christine Whitley says ‘riffs on' the movie The Hustler.
Theatrical Homage To Film
" The Hustler, with Paul Newman as Fast Eddy and George C. Scott as the evil Bert, is one of my favorite movies. I just began to wonder what would happen if the pool player was a woman. That's where Miles Away began. But, it is really pretty different. The woman is in an actual love relation with her older mentor, and the money person is her age."
Miles Away is just Whitley's second full-length play; with the BPP's help both of her productions will have been staged. Her play was selected from among nearly six hundred submissions. The BPP's artistic director Chad Rabinovtiz is directing.
Whitley graduated from the Cincinnati Conservatory's theatre program with plans to be an actor. Though she liked acting, things weren't working out for her in that area. But she still wanted to work in the field and turned to the writing in 2005. "I think that life is sort of looking for your voice and I seem to have found mine in the writing."