On the 'Horizon' — Utah playwright explores the disappearance of Everett Ruess

Jerry Rapier loved the script Debora Threedy had written. He thought it was a perfect fit for the Plan-B Company. But before they began to work together, he had a question: Would she want to act in it?

Threedy said no, even though her undergraduate degree was in theater and even though she has acted locally, in various productions.

She said no because "End of the Horizon" is the first full-length play she's ever produced. She wanted to help launch it. And she already had a busy life as a law professor at the University of Utah. So no, she didn't want to act, she told Rapier.

Rapier found her decision wise. He says he may not have wanted to produce the play if the playwright was hoping, also, to be the star. So, they agreed.

And yet, when the play opens Friday, Threedy will be one of the stars. She'll play Stella Ruess.

In real life Stella Ruess was artist and also the mother of an artist and nature-lover, young Everett Ruess. Everett disappeared in the Utah wilderness in 1934, when he was 20 years old. Threedy's play explores the ways in which his family suffered over his loss and tried to understand the way he felt about the Utah wilderness.

The director, Kay Shean, says there is something mystical about the way this production came together, something mystical about the coincidences and the twists of fate that drew everyone, including Threedy, more deeply into the project.

As for Threedy, she felt herself drawn to the mystery of Everett Ruess several decades ago when she moved to Utah from Chicago and began backpacking in the country where Ruess disappeared. She read a biography of Ruess.

Eight or nine years ago, she saw a documentary about Ruess made by Diane Orr. The film triggered her desire to write. She began doing research. She thought about what it must have been like to be Ruess's mother, father, older brother.

And then, over a two-day period in 2001, while staying at the home she owns in Torrey, Threedy sat down and wrote the first draft of a play. Never before or since has Threedy written so easily. She says at one point she looked at her hand, moving across the paper, and realized how automatically and amazingly fast the words were coming.

Threedy knew at the time she was not writing a history. "For me, there were lots of gaps in what was known. I felt at liberty to fill in those gaps, both factually and, more importantly, in the ways the people did the things they did.

"The characters are not the real people," she stresses.