Mason Director Drives ‘After Ashley’ This Weekend

By Connect Mason Reporter Kenneth Trotman

The highly acclaimed After Ashley, a Gina Gionfriddo play, premiers at GMU this weekend with Mason’s Jessica Billings as director. The dark comedy pokes fun at our emerging society’s lack of moral integrity in pursuit of personal ambition.

Read our Q&A with Billings.

Before Billings took on the director’s position, she was involved in several Mason productions including: Mephisto, Marat/Sade, Jesus Hopped the A-Train, Phaedra's Love and The Cripple of Inishmaan.

This was Billings' first time sitting in the director’s chair and she hopes that people who see the show this weekend walk away thinking about the play, the characters- and the living people, and the action of what they have just seen. Stemming from the theme of the play, Billings hopes “every audience member walks out of the Theater boycotting the idea of 'perfection' that the media has imposed on society.”

Taking credit for both the pros and cons in the production process, Billings saw great improvement in the actors and the show itself. As Billings put it, “the actors in the production worked their asses off.”

One of these actors included Mary Lechter, a GMU faculty member. While working with her was at first intimidating, Billings admits that she learned invaluable lessons and was blessed to work with such an incredible woman.

Baron Pugh, a GMU student who helped with the show, “is sure to be a crowd pleaser.” He later went on to say, “though this show deals with a heavy topic, the comedy and the realistic situations presented is sure to be an attraction to both college students and parents and adults alike.”

Billings, a theater major at Mason, plans to continue her directing and acting as a career.

“Theater can touch people in a way that television and film could never dream of doing. It is that connection between the life on stage and the life in the audience that is the magic of theater.”