Playwright Lucia Del Vecchio’s latest show is about romance between seniors. In trailer parks.

by Beth Ellen . photo by Matt Rose

Don’t be alarmed when you find that Asheville playwright Lucia Del Vecchio has been surfing Match.com.

When she started writing Shangri-la, a quirky comedy about the love lives of retired adults in a Florida trailer park, she wanted a realistic close-up view of senior dating. And then it turned out that she found love after 60 positively fascinating. “There was this one elderly gentleman whose profile stated he liked to go on walks at the mall or K-mart every day, play board games, and sex was not a priority,” says Del Vecchio, who is happily married to the producer and director Chall Gray. “There’s also the one that said, ‘I want to make sweet, delicious love to you.’ It was really graphic.”

Del Vecchio, a 35-year-old Connecticut native with an MFA in playwriting from University of Texas at Austin, says Shangri-la is one of the lightest and most accessible plays she’s penned so far. It runs later this month at The Magnetic Field, a bar/restaurant and performance space that opened late last year in the River Arts District. The Field is owned by Gray, and in its theatre program, Gray and artistic director Steven Samuels are dedicated to debuting original works. So far, that includes three plays that Del Vecchio has either written, directed or performed in.

In Shangri-la, audiences will catch glimpses of one of Del Vecchio’s aunts, who re-entered the dating game after losing her husband to Parkinson’s. “There’s a rivalry between two women, and one thinks the other woman’s clothing is too revealing,” she says. “The woman with the revealing clothing was my aunt. I got her permission to use it.” In probing the world of elderly romance, Del Vecchio hopes to get people chuckling and prove a few points—namely, that young love and aging love are not so different. “They’re just like us, only they’ve been around a lot longer,” she says. “This play will give a perspective on what we have to look forward to.”

Tickets $12/$14. 828-668-2154 or www.themagneticfield.com.