Backstage: David Emerson Toney Puts His Heartache Into ‘The Soul Collector'

David Emerson Toney took the lemons-into-lemonade route.

It was tragic events from his Cleveland childhood that inspired Toney to create "The Soul Collector" -- now receiving a world-premiere run at Baltimore's Everyman Theatre (through June 21) -- but the play is a boisterous comedy.

"This play has a real sitcom feel to it, but that's where I got my storytelling from," says Toney, who speaks nostalgically of how old TV shows such as "Bonanza" and "Bewitched" clearly had moral points of view.

"They were adult fables," the actor/playwright says. "They were fables about how you should be living . . . [about] service to ourselves, service to one another."

Toney says his younger sister was sexually abused for a time when they were children. "When anyone is abused like that, it's everybody's responsibility around them," Toney says. "If you come in contact with them, then you are responsible. And if you don't do anything about it, then you get cursed. . . . I think that you lose something, when you see someone in dire straits and you do absolutely nothing -- you are diminished."

In "The Soul Collector," set in 1972 Cleveland, residents of an apartment building discover that one of their neighbors, a young woman named Claire (Erika Rose), has been possessed by two uneasy spirits: one an aging New Yawk talent agent, the other a Japanese girl from Nagasaki. Both spirits are unable to get to the Other Side.

Claire pops out of a big wooden box collected by garbagemen Cedric (Jefferson A. Russell) and Darnell (DeMargio House), a crusty uncle and his naive but spiritually attuned nephew, who bring collectibles home to their cluttered flat. Their landlady (Aakhu TuahNera Freeman) and her husband (Doug Brown) have had experience with the occult, and they get involved, too.

The X-factor in Toney's play is a menacing new tenant named Wisher (Craig Wallace), the Soul Collector of the title, and clearly no heavenly being. The neighbors must release the souls inhabiting Claire before the Collector snatches and keeps them.

Comedy aside, a Soul Collector, says Toney, is "what you become when you eat up other people's dreams, which is what an abuser, anyone who abuses power and eats up people's dreams, becomes . . . a monster."

Source Festival

A financial mover-and-shaker who has a knack for erudite bellicosity; some boys who know just which (American) neighborhood will be terror-bombed so they can go looting; a skeptic who tours the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City and is obsessed with the intensity of the young believers he meets -- those and many other characters will inhabit the stage at Source as part of the Source Festival of new works, beginning June 20.

New York-based playwright Estep Nagy, whose 10-minute play "A Taste of Heaven" was performed at the Source fest last summer, has been tapped for a long one-act this year. (Part of festival Artistic Director Jeremy Skidmore's plan is to bring writers back, to show how their writing evolves.)

Nagy's "Her Love Was Vertigo" profiles a reprobate financial whiz. "I started writing it in 2006, actually, before the meltdown," says Nagy, but "out of the sense that the finance stuff had gotten somewhat out of control." His protagonist, Fox (who'll be played by Delaney Williams), "thinks of himself in ways that make it possible for him to be amoral."