By Grace Maliska, Vice President of Seekonk Theatre Booster Club
For Seekonk High School senior Juliana Centracchio, history has always meant more than a textbook. She sees the past as something relatable and uses the stage to make history, as told through story, feel relevant for others.
Centracchio is a young playwright and director who has spent the past several years turning historical events into original theater. Now, she is taking on a painful past with her newest production, Dead in Ohio.
The play follows a U.S. family in the 1970s as the Vietnam War increasingly enters daily life. Molly, a college student fascinated by the changing political landscape, finds her relationships with friends and family strained by the growing conflict. When the next Vietnam draft is announced and her brother Danny is at risk, the family is forced to confront their own feelings about the war and the very real possibility that differences could tear them apart.
“There are a lot of parallels to the current climate of the United States,” said Juliana. “To be honest, when I started thinking of what my next play would be about, the Vietnam War was the first thing that came to my mind,” she said.
Centracchio points to the college protests of the Vietnam era and contemporary campus protests as examples of how some of the same tensions and emotions can emerge decades apart. Although the events portrayed in the play happened roughly 60 years ago, Centracchio believes audiences can still recognize the anger, uncertainty, controversy, and interpersonal tensions experienced by the characters. That connection is at the heart of what she hopes Dead in Ohio accomplishes.
“I think it’s important to show people the repetition of history so that they understand what kind of world we are living in,” she said.
Making history feel personal
Despite its serious subject matter, Dead in Ohio isn’t intended to feel like a history lesson.
Centracchio describes the production as a drama, but she deliberately incorporated lighter moments, particularly within the family. A mother might make an observation about how strange modern technology is, only to be met with an eye roll from her children. It’s a small moment, but that is exactly the point. Those everyday interactions are just as important to her as the larger historical events surrounding the characters.
“I want people to see themselves,” she said. “I want them to relate. I want them to understand.”
That humanizing element of the characters has become something of a hallmark for Centracchio’s work. Rather than simply recreating historical events, she uses them as a backdrop for stories about people: their relationships, disagreements, fears, and hopes.
The history provides the circumstances, but the characters provide the emotional connection and the stage amplifies the personhood for others to experience.
From first draft to finished production
Creating those characters is one of Centracchio’s favorite parts of being a playwright. Once she has developed her characters and figured out the plot, she can sit down and write for hours.
“The easiest part is just sitting down and writing the first draft,” she said.
The harder part comes afterward. That’s because Juliana is not only the playwright, but also a director, involved in the entire creative process for the theater production. She not only creates the story, but also has to determine how that story will ultimately live on stage.
“I will spend hours rereading my words and I will still not think they’re right,” she said. “I will redo a scene multiple times trying to get everything across perfectly.”
That attention to detail reflects what she sees as her responsibility to the audience and past. The dialogue has to sound natural. The characters have to feel like real people. Their reactions have to make sense. And the emotions have to reach the audience without becoming overly theatrical.
“The hardest part, because it’s the most important to me, is really making it feel real,” said Juliana.
It is a demanding process, particularly for a student who is simultaneously finishing her senior year of high school. But it is also the part of theater that Centracchio finds most rewarding.
She wants audiences to leave the theater not simply knowing more about a period of history, but recognizing something familiar in the people they have just watched.
A growing body of original work
Dead in Ohio is the latest piece in Centracchio’s growing body of original material.
Her previous work has explored other moments in history, including the Salem witch trials and the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. She has also taken on the role of director and helped bring young performers together through productions such as Newsies Jr in a summer theater program she ideated, organized, and directed.
Across those projects, a common thread has emerged: Juliana is drawn to stories where history intersects with ordinary people.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, for example, is remembered as a devastating event in U.S. history. But on stage, history becomes individual workers, families, and relationships.
The same is true of Dead in Ohio. The Vietnam War is an enormous and complicated historical subject. Centracchio has instead chosen to explore what happens when that conflict enters one family’s living room. That personal perspective allows the audience to experience history through the people living through it.
What comes next?
For Juliana, Dead in Ohio is another step toward the career she hopes to build. After graduating from Seekonk High School, she plans to attend college to continue studying theater. She also plans to keep writing and directing, particularly original work.
“When I’m older, I would love to continue writing and directing new material and crafting new characters and making actors fall in love with them,” she said.
For now, she is still a high school senior, but she is already doing something many aspiring theater artists spend years trying to do: creating stories of her own and finding ways to bring them from the page to the stage.
With Dead in Ohio, Centracchio is once again looking backward in order to say something about the present. And if her previous work is any indication, she isn’t interested in simply telling audiences what happened. She wants them to feel it.
See Dead in Ohio
Dead in Ohio will be performed at Seekonk High School on:
- Thursday, October 1 at 7 PM
- Friday, October 2 at 7 PM
- Saturday, October 3 at 2 PM
Tickets will be available online here and at the door.
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