Imagining Audrey
IMAGINING AUDREY is a supernatural, coming-of-age drama with a strong female protagonist that explores the evolution of the soul through the choices we make and the interplay of destiny. Driven by a need to become her most authentic self and distracted by a yearning for romance with her lifelong soulmate, Audrey lives three incarnations of her life at the same time as part of a cosmic experiment to determine if multiple lives can speed up evolution now that the planet is in peril.
ACCOLADES/AWARDS:
Page Awards, Quarter Finalist (2015)
Stage 32 Semi-finalist (2015)
TONE: Sliding Doors meets Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Logline: An indecisive woman in her mid-twenties has a life-altering experience that causes her life to split into three different versions based on various choices she makes in her twenties. Twelve years later, her three disconnected “selves” collide and must decide which one of them gets the future or all of them will perish.
Overview: As the three versions of Audrey make different decisions and face unique challenges as a result of their various mistakes, the question remains at the whether or not confronting these challenges will evolve her soul proportionately. There’s an underlying ‘Fate Vs. Freewill’ discourse, which reveals the strong pull both energies have on one’s life, which are intimately tied together. Some of the ‘freewill’ choices take her in wild directions, while the ‘fate’ element brings some of the same elements into all three of her lives. For example, all of the Audreys have the same adopted child and the same soulful love for her childhood friend, Hugh. Audrey unknowingly becomes part of a ‘cosmic’ experiment to determine if more that one version of person’s life during that lifetime can yield a greater and faster evolution to the soul. As the three lives and three evolutions play out, it becomes clear that a person can only live one life at a time. There’s only one chance to make those big mistakes, which can lead to big, evolutionary leaps of soul growth.
Synopsis: AUDREY (24) and her best friend, GABBY (25) crash an outrageous costume party at a wealthy penthouse in search of Audrey’s childhood friend and former love interest, HUGH who was rumored to be bartending there. He has just graduated from medical school and is back in town. They She finds him and discovers that he’s engaged to someone else. She has always been indecisive, which he considered a sign that she wasn’t really in love with him. She visits her therapist, decides to try hypnosis, and unknowingly enters a ‘super-conscious’ state, which gives her access to a consciousness on the soul level. In this state, she reveals her previous incarnations and experiences of her soul between lives. During this session, she tells her therapist, KAREN about a cosmic experiment that they signed up for together before being re-incarnated. Though Audrey has no knowledge of it once she’s awake, Karen retains the understanding that her life will split into three directions. Since the earth is decaying rapidly and mankind’s future on the planet is precarious, the experiment involves determining if a person’s soul will evolve faster if that person can experience more than one version of her life during an incarnation. All three versions of Audrey continue to work with Karen who witnesses and counsels Audreys three separate lives. Karen’s life has been marked by sadness after her five-year-old daughter, Juliet and her husband were killed in a car accident many years ago. After that, every other challenge pales in comparison, so she takes this ‘experiment’ in stride.
In one incarnation, Audrey explores her wild side and becomes a concert photographer and a drug addict. She’s still free-spirited and kindhearted and rescues her friends’ child from their drug-dealing clutches, though she still has her own problem and nearly dies from an overdose. In another, she becomes a social activist attorney and falls for her best girlfriend, Gabby. Desperate to have a child and unsuccessful in all her attempts, she convinces Gabby to birth their baby knowing that she’s not in love with Gabby and that Gabby is in love with someone else. In the third incarnation, she marries a wealthy, unfaithful man (penthouse Eurotrash) and becomes an unhappy socialite who’s still determined to make a difference in the world. When he and his supermodel mistress are killed in a car accident, she gets the only child she’ll ever have, theirs.
All three Audreys have wildly different lives, but share some commonality. They’re all avid photographers (the photos play a part in the transitions between lives), all are still in love with Hugh, and each have the same, bi-racial son, thought neither of them gave birth to him. Twelve years later, Karen has a heart attack and all three Audreys collide at her office for their weekly appointments. They’ve each made drastic mistakes and have had some profound changes, so at first they don’t recognize each other. Then, they’re really curious about the others’ lives, determined to use this information to state their individual cases for being awarded the future. They bicker and fight. When they start to physically disappear, they understand that they must collaboratively decide which one of them gets their future or all of them will perish. This is the ultimate moment of reckoning as each Audrey must confront her life, her mistakes, and find her humanity through forgiveness and compassion. They discover Karen’s notes about them and decide to collectively hypnotize themselves to get to their ‘super-conscious’ selves (their souls) for some answers. Using a recording of Karen’s voice, they close their eyers and slip into an altered state.
On the other side of the darkness is a new version of Audrey from another path that none of them took. In this version, she’s married to Hugh and raising their son from his first marriage (same little boy as the other lives). It’s the day of her opening at Gabby’s art gallery for her photography exhibit. She can’t remember anything that happened over the past twelve years. Hugh is freaked out. She has been taking hormones for infertility and he’s afraid they’ve given her Dissociative Amnesia. She gets checked out with a brain MRI (Hippocampus looks fine), then he drives her around to try to trigger memories. They visit places that she went to in other versions of herself and has glimmers of memories from these lifetimes. They finally arrive at the opening of her photography exhibit. The photos are all from her previous lifetimes, as if they’d happened in some form and here’s proof! The photos reverberate with the shared memories that are just out of reach of her consciousness, but have a life of their own.
In the final scene, this Audrey attends Karen’s funeral and has an ‘energy exchange’ with Karen and learns one more truth about the experiment. All along, Audrey has been the incarnation of her daughter, Juliet. Audrey has even more compassion and admiration for Karen because while Audrey did the ‘heavy lifting’ of the three lives, Karen had to carry that profound sadness around with her for a lifetime. The moment ends with an affirmation about life, the one and only life we have to live every time our souls incarnate.
