Jeany Van Meltebeke Snider

Favorite Moments

• I think the first time I set out to write a Scripture collage... I was overwhelmed as a new mom and I was longing to create, so I hired a friend to come clean my bathrooms while I wrote.  And it just came like water... flowing and flowing, verse up on verse.  One thought led to two or three more and I was thrilled to discover I was in my element.

• Stepping out for Dolly's last entrance in the curtain call after the cast sings, "Well, well... Hell -ooo Dolly" --what a spectacular rush.  All I had to do was come out and receive; the musical is built to do that and it's kind of crazy and kind of wonderful to facilitate that for the audience by letting them adore you.

• Writing The Way of the Wolf became a wonderful tribute to Martin Bell's stories.  Few really understood it, but everyone who spoke to me about it was moved and intrigued at some level, and I thought it was so profound and felt so lucky to get to stage it.

• And finally, getting to direct Unity, 1918.  I really wanted to employ all the cast to help tell the story and allowed myself to explore visual depictions and images of what was going on: a cloth wielded by a dead woman character representing the FLU, a red ball of yarn that got passed from scene to scene and unravelled and bound and contaminated, and a coffin that became a bench that became a church window that became a bunk bed that became a door.  Yeah.  Theatre that engages and tickles the imagination is one thing that theatre does better than film!